Western Australia’s Noongar land deal not in the best interests of Aboriginals
It will be a mistake for Noongars and taxpayers to let this deal go through and allow the argument that all future claims have been extinguished.
If the deal goes through, future Noongars will have courts telling them that their ancestors signed their rights away
LAND DEAL FAILS IMPORTANT TESTS Lateral Love Australia Doubts surround the State Government’s native title deal, say Len Collard and Gerry Georgatos. 16072013 Doubts surround the State Government’s native title deal, say Len Collard and Gerry Georgatos. Much has been made of the State Government’s billion-dollar-plus offer to the Noongar people via the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council.
But is it a genuine native title offer or a politicised move to coerce a proposition that native title rights have been settled for all those considered Noongars and that all future rights are extinguished?
Noongar is a generic term and not representative of all the different cultural clans across Perth and southern WA — others include Whadjuk, Yuet, Mineng, Koreng, Ballardong, Bibbelmun and so on.
Legally, these Aboriginal clans and families will maintain connection to country that are exclusive domains and do not overlap one another. Continue reading
Legal case drags on, as Aboriginals fight for their land, against radioactive trash dump
Court date marks eight-year NT nuke fight http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/court-date-marks-eight-year-nt-nuke-fight/story-fni0xqi4-1226679665473 16 July 13 FOR Dianne Stokes, it was fitting that the eight-year anniversary of a fight to stop a Northern Territory nuclear dump was marked by a brief and frustrating court appearance.
Ms Stokes, an elder with the Yapa Yapa people, is one of the traditional land owners taking action to stop the federal government dump proposal, which is earmarked for Muckaty Station. She was present on Monday when the Federal Court heard a delay in an anthropologist’s report may push back a 2014 trial date.
Ms Stokes says the traditional land owners’ complaints to the government had for years fallen on deaf ears. “It’s been a long struggle, many years of struggling to say we didn’t want the waste to come to our land when no one is listening,” she said outside court in Melbourne.
But she said new Resources Minister Gary Gray had agreed to visit the site and meet community members – a move she welcomes. “We’re going to try to hassle him until he comes down,” Ms Stokes said. “It’s a spiritual country, it’s a cultural land and it’s a very strong belief we have in that county.”
The waste dump was originally planned to be built in South Australia, but in the face of local opposition the federal government sought to relocate it to the NT. A site at Muckaty Station, about 110km north of Tennant Creek, was flagged as a possible site.
Australian Conservation Foundation spokesman Dave Sweeney said Mr Gray’s visit was a step forward in the conflict, but that it signalled a “change in tone, not necessarily a change in policy”.
Mr Gray declined to comment.
The parties will return to the Federal Court for another directions hearing in August.
The primary documents in Australian Aboriginals’ fight to keep their land
50 YEARS ON, YIRRKALA CELEBRATES BARK PETITIONS THAT SPARKED INDIGENOUS LAND RIGHTS MOVEMENT Yahoo 7 News, 11 July 13, The remote community of Yirrkala in East Arnhem Land is celebrating 50 years since the signing of the historic bark
petitions that paved the way for the Indigenous land rights movement……… Local NAIDOC week coordinator Rosealee Pearson says what
the leaders achieved at a time before Indigenous Australians were even counted on the national census cannot be overstated.
“It’s pretty astounding that a group of people who weren’t even counted as human beings decided to do that,” she said.
“It’s because of them and the fight they fought that I exist as a person.”
The ochre-framed bark petitions were adorned with the clan designs of all that was threatened by mining – from the snakes to the sand dunes. They were first traditional documents to be recognised by the Australian Parliament.
Ms Pearson says the combination of traditional and modern forms of communication helped bridge a gap between the two cultures at the time. The petitions were created in 1963 to protest against the Federal Government’s removal of 300 square kilometres of land from the Arnhem Land reserve so that bauxite found there could be mined…… Despite not achieving the constitutional change sought, the petitions were the spark which lit the flame for the eventual recognition of Indigenous rights in Commonwealth law.
Less than five years later, a referendum was held and the Australian
Constitution amended to count Indigenous Australians in the national census.
Less than a decade after that, the Northern Territory Aboriginal Land Rights
Act was passed…….
http://au.news.yahoo.com/latest/a/-/article/17938240/50-years-on-yirrkala-celebrates-bark-petitions-that-sparked-indigenous-land-rights-movement/
Mining companies in control of Aboriginal land; the battle for land rights continues
“This time it is [for the] economic side of the land rights, [for] the money that comes into the hands of the Aboriginal people through their own country and not to the mining company or contractors,” he said. “We want to develop our country and we want to develop our own soil.”….
Land rights are empty, Yolngu elder tells Rudd on bark petition anniversary Oliver Laughland, guardian.co.uk, 10 July 2013 Galarrwuy Yunupingu throws down gauntlet to PM over ‘economic side of land rights’ at Yirrkala commemoration Fifty years ago the Yolngu people of Yirrkala in remote east Arnhem Land changed history, but to this day respected leaders of the community say not enough is being done for Indigenous land rights.
The Yirrkala bark petitions, signed in 1963 to protest against the federal government’s approval of a bauxite mine on their reserve, were the spark for a land rights movement that engaged much of Indigenous Australiaand resulted in the first formal acknowledgement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in law. Continue reading
Australian Labor and Liberal against Aboriginal Land Rights being enshrined in the Constitution
As far as I can see, corporate Australia will get its way, as usual, with a pretty meaningless and toothless reference to Aborignals in the Australian Constitution
Major parties cool on ‘locking in’ land rights, ABC News 9 July 13 By Melanie Arnost The Federal Government and Opposition have both reacted coolly to a call from the Northern Land Council to have the Aboriginal Land Rights Act enshrined in the Australian constitution.
Land council chairman Wali Wunungmurra, speaking ahead of NAIDOC week’s celebrations of the Yirrkala bark petitions, said last week he wanted the act included in the constitution.
“(To) protect it from people watering it down, tearing it apart,” Mr Wunungmurra said…….The Yirrkala bark petitions were presented to Federal Parliament in 1963.
Mr Wunungmurra was one of 12 signatories to the petitions, which are credited with galvanising the land rights debate across Australia.http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-07-08/cool-reaction-to-calls-for-land-rights-act-to-be-put-in-constit/4805192
Recognition of the Aboriginal law system in Australia
In 1971 Justice Blackburn dismissed the Yolngu claim but importantly did acknowledge for the first time in an Australian higher court the existence of a system of Aboriginal law
The Yirrkala Bark Petitions. How an old typewriter helped change the course of Australian history, Crikey BOB GOSFORD | JUL 07, 2013 “………In a small display case in a dimly lit room in Australia’s Parliament House in Canberra – cheek by jowl with a facsimile of the Magna Carta and Australia’sConstitution – sit three panels of richly painted stringy-bark.
It is significant that these documents, all of which inform contemporary law in this country, can be found within metres of each other. The Magna Cartaand The Australian Constitution are fundamental elements of European law in this country. Few Australians know of the content, importance and continuing relevance of the Magna Carta and our Constitution and even fewer know, let alone realise the significance of, these three small pieces of bark, each with ancestral images wrapped around a sheet of yellowing paper with faint text.
The first two of these petitions were presented to the Commonwealth Parliament 50 years ago in August 1963 and represent the first documents received by that parliament that recognised the existence – but not the primacy – of Aboriginal law and claims to ownership of their ancestral lands.
The petitions were unsuccessful – the first was the subject of an extraordinary technical challenge by then Territories Minister Paul Hasluck – but that did not deter the Yolngu traditional owners, who in December 1968 issued writs in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory against the Nabalco Corporation, which had secured a bauxite mining lease from the Federal Government. In that claim the Yolngu claimed unextinguished communal native title to their lands. Continue reading
Australia’s hidden atomic health and death toll
A powerful manuscript entitled “The Black Mist and its Aftermath — Oral Histories by Lallie Lennon” (2010) was submitted to the South Australian and federal governments as well as to the International Atomic Energy Agency
Now aged in her 80s, Lallie has never had her health issues properly investigated, much less received any compensation. She continues to suffer from the beta burn-related skin condition to this day.
Professor Sir Ernest Titterton, the duplicitous architect of nuclear testing in Australia, typified the official contempt for survivors when he dismissed the Black Mist event as a “scare campaign”.
More recently, the ultra-right wing Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt has repeated this line.
Australian atomic massacre still ignored http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/54394, June 29,
2013 By David T. Rowlands Nearly 60 years have passed since Totem 1, a British nuclear test in the Australian desert, was recklessly conducted in unfavourable meteorological conditions.
Nuclear testing of any sort, even in the most “controlled” of circumstances, is inherently abusive, a crime against the environment and humanity for countless generations to come. Yet the effects of Totem 1 were particularly bad, even by the warped standards of the era.
The mushroom cloud did not behave in the way it was supposed to. Instead of rising uniformly, part of it spread laterally, causing fallout to roll menacingly at ground level over a remote yet still populated corner of South Australia, sowing injury, illness and death in its wake.
The number of casualties is unknown because the secretive and unaccountable nuclear establishment has always declined to investigate the full impact of its own criminal negligence. But it has been suggested by investigators that perhaps 50 short-term Aboriginal fatalities resulted.
In addition to those who died, many others were exposed to harmful levels of radiation. The long-term health effects on these individuals have never been charted — but anecdotal reports of high cancer rates and horrendous birth defects in isolated “downwinder” communities have circulated.
At the time of the tests, it was well known by authorities that communities of Aboriginal people were close by. Yet the official attitude was that the concerns of a “handful of natives” could not be allowed to interfere with the “interests” of the British Commonwealth. Continue reading
Australia’s “Northern Territory Intervention” trashed the reputation of Aboriginals on behalf of mining industries
Government had made it clear that it wished to re-engage itself more directly in the control of community land through leasing options as well as to open up Aboriginal land for development and mining purposes.
The plan was to empty the homelands, and this has not changed. However, it was recognised that achieving this would be politically fraught – it would need to be accomplished in a manner that would not off-side mainstream Australia. Removing Aboriginal people from their land and taking control over their communities would need to be presented in a way that Australians would believe it to be to Aboriginal advantage, whatever the tactics.
So began the campaign to discredit the people and to publicly stigmatise Aboriginal men of the Northern Territory
And even in 2009 when the CEO of the Australian Crime Commission, John Lawler, reported that his investigation had shown there were no organised paedophile rings operating in the NT, no formal apology was ever made to the Aboriginal men and their families who were brutally shamed by the false claims.
Sixth Anniversary of the Northern Territory Intervention – Striking the Wrong Note Lateral Love Australia‘concerned Australians’ Michele Harris, 21 June 13 Aboriginal advocate Olga Havnen, in her Lowitja O’Donoghue oration has asked a critical question. She asks what has been the psychological impact of the Intervention on Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory. It is surprising that so little attention has been given to this critical, yet in some ways tenuous, link before now.
Even before the Intervention began in June 2007, government had long planned a new approach to the ‘management’ of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. It was no longer part of government thinking that self-determination and Aboriginal control over land could be allowed to continue. These were the Whitlam notions of 1975 and they were no longer acceptable.
Early inklings of change occurred in 2004 with the management of grants being transferred from communities to Government’s newly established Indigenous Co-ordination Centres. More ominous were the Amendments of 2006 to the Aboriginal Land Rights Act and the memoranda of agreements that followed. Government had made it clear that it wished to re-engage itself more directly in the control of community land through leasing options as well as to open up Aboriginal land for development and mining purposes. Continue reading
Barbara Shaw speaks out against the Northern Territory Intervention
I have fought the Intervention from day one. We built a massive amount of support from people and organisations right across Australia to try and stop the government from continuing the Intervention for another 10 years through the “Stronger Futures” laws. But they refused to listen to us.
I will keep fighting. Self determination is the key to getting us out of the social problems that we face today. It is the only way to do this. It is just disgusting how much money has been wasted on bureaucrats to control us, or on ineffective non-Aboriginal services that can not engage with our people.
Northern Territory – Opinion Piece, by Barbara Shaw The Stringer June 23rd, 2013 Six years ago my family watched the TV in my living room as John Howard announced he would be sending in the military and taking control of our communities
I have never been more frightened in my life. I locked the gate of my town camp and kept the kids inside for two weeks for fear of them being taken. I worried constantly about my family out bush who didn’t understand what was coming.
They said the Intervention was about stopping children from being abused, that it was going to stop the drinking and domestic violence. But all I have seen is racism and disempowerment of our people. It’s the old assimilation policy back again, to control how we live. The government and many non-Aboriginal NGOs have taken over the assets and responsibilities of our organisations, both in the major town centres and remote communities forcing us to comply with their policies that take no account of Aboriginal culture and our obligations.
Take income management, which I have been on for five and a half years. I ran for parliament in 2010 and outpolled both Labor and Liberal candidates in Central Australian communities. I have represented my people at the United Nations. But the Government says I can’t manage my money. On their own estimations of $6000 to 8000 per person per year administrative cost for income management, the government has spent more than $30,000 dollars just to control my small income. Continue reading
Australian governments manufactured shocking lies about Aboriginal people
THE WAY AHEAD: The new land grab Tracker, BY JEFF MCMULLEN, JUNE 21, 2013“……The Howard Government and the Labor Opposition rushed with obscene haste to pass the Northern Territory Emergency Response Act (2007) because of a manufactured crisis over child sexual abuse. The radicalism of the Intervention was concealed by the government’s media manipulation of the scandalising, shaming issue of sexual abuse.
No matter how much Mick Gooda, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, may protest on national
television programs that the Australian Crimes Commission found no paedophile rings in these remote communities, the extraordinary
collective smearing of Aboriginal parents everywhere disguised the neo-liberal assault aimed at controlling Aboriginal lands.
Canada’s best-selling author, Naomi Klein, wrote in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, how neo-liberal
governments exploit shock therapy in a brazen campaign “of erasing and remaking the world”.
The Intervention exploited a national shock over the state of Aboriginal children to introduce harsh social management of families
and a clamp on Aboriginal organisations that further undermined their control over their destiny……”.http://tracker.org.au/2013/06/the-way-ahead-the-new-land-grab-2/
Nugget Coombs, an economist who understood Aboriginal society
THE WAY AHEAD: The new land grab Tracker, BY JEFF MCMULLEN, JUNE 21, 2013“……..Even in the Labor Party, some like Dr Gary Johns and Aboriginal businessman, Warren Mundine, then National Vice President of the ALP, jeered at what they saw as the old ’Nugget Coombs’ model of communal Aboriginal society and they cheered for private land ownership, arguing that “communal land holding was retarding Aboriginal people.
While neo-liberalism was beginning to shape the views of some prominent Aboriginal operators like Warren Mundine, Noel Pearson and
Marcia Langton, the biggest influence on John Howard’s inner circle of advisers and parts of the bureaucracy in Canberra came from the poison pen of Professor Helen Hughes, a Senior Fellow at the right-wing Centre for Independent Studies,
Hughes painted what I consider a grossly distorted picture of the Aboriginal policy of self-determination by attacking the vision of the
former Reserve Bank head, Nugget Coombs. She derided Coombs for his remote community “experiment that was to give Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders a socialist utopia, leading to the establishment of a separate nation.”
Nugget Coombs had and still has many bitter and twisted ideological opponents, but the truth is he was an establishment economist with a
good grasp of animist attachment to land. He advocated autonomy for remote Aboriginal homelands based on traditional Cultural divisions, the kind of Indigenous control that I have seen bring rapid improvement to the wellbeing of many First Nations societies in the
United States and on the Saami lands of Norway, Finland and Sweden…..
But Helen Hughes and other neo-liberals do not seem to be influenced by history or evidence.
The striking difference between this vision of self-determination and the neo-liberal approach to developing Aboriginal lands is that
neo-liberalism involves dispossessing people of communal lands through dubious promises of payoffs if they sign long leases and chase the great Aussie Dream of a mortgage and “private home ownership”…….http://tracker.org.au/2013/06/the-way-ahead-the-new-land-grab-2/http://tracker.org.au/2013/06/the-way-ahead-the-new-land-grab-2/
Removing Aborigines from Homelands was the purpose of the Northern Territory Intervention
Intervention marks 6 years, as community questions impact http://www.australiantimes.co.uk/news/in-australia/intervention-marks-6-years-as-community-questions-psychological-impact.htm By Paul Bleakley 19 June, 2013 INDIGENOUS leaders have marked the sixth anniversary of the controversial 2007 government intervention in the Northern Territory by questioning the psychological repercussions of regulating the day-to-day management of Aboriginal communities.
Indigenous advocacy group Concerned Australians have published an article alleging that the ultimate aim of the intervention was to “empty the homelands” in the Northern Territory. The article’s writer Michele Harris claims that federal government claims that the intervention was needed to protect Indigenous children were an attempt to make the plan more palatable to the Australian public.
Ms Harris said: “Even before the Intervention began in June 2007, government had long planned a new approach to the ‘management’ of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. It was no longer part of government thinking that self-determination and Aboriginal control over land could be allowed to continue. These were the Whitlam notions of 1975 and they were no longer acceptable.
“The plan was to empty the homelands, and this has not changed. Continue reading
Australian Government assimilates Aboriginal people by deceit and theft
“Now the governments’ efforts through the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NT Intervention) are designed to get the people away from their own Country and to force the people to live amongst the white people so as to be absorbed.
“Now there is the move to have Aboriginal people recognised in the Australian constitution by referendum. There will be no rights granted as a result. Just simple recognition so that the Government can run around the world saying look at us, look how good we are, and Aboriginal people have consented to be governed by us.
“They are doing it by engaging deceitful covert policies. The Government seeks to erase our Aboriginality and make us Australian, and then we will have no connection to our land, or our spirituality.
Anderson: Governments are attempting to steal our original sovereign citizenship and independence by deceit and assimilation by Grant. Michael Anderson said from his home today that research analysis has now shown the real nature of the contemporary Australian Assimilation policies.
“The Policy of Assimilation of the Aboriginal Peoples was first developed by all the Australian States and the Commonwealth Government during the Aboriginal Welfare conference[1] in the same year as the German Final Solution decree was made in 1937 against the Jews.
“During the course of the Canberra meeting, which was designed to develop a solution to ‘The Aboriginal Problem’, the Western Australian Chief Aboriginal Protector (sic), A.O. Neville, concluded that, ‘In 50 years we should forget that there were any Aborigines in this country.’ What this man was proposing was the total annihilation of the Aboriginal race.
“The policy that was agreed upon at this 1937 National Conference was that a policy of assimilation could have the same effect, that is, remove the children from their families, educate and acculturate them into a single Australian community where everyone shall be influenced by the same beliefs, have the same customs as everyone else, by having the Aborigines ‘absorbed’ into the main stream community of the Australian State. Moreover, marrying the Aboriginal ‘half-castes’ into the lower class white Australia would see the disappearance of colour. Absorption into the white community will have been completed.
“The Commonwealth and State Government social engineers have been very clever in covering up the real and hidden agendas that all of the Australian Political Parties have been running for a long time. To understand this, we must revisit some of the evil doings of past Government practices. Continue reading
Nimbin to have Aboriginal Tent Embassy
Aboriginal tent embassy going up at Nimbin Rocks next month, Northern Star Melissa Gulbin 17th Jun 2013 AN Aboriginal tent embassy at Nimbin Rocks will be established next month. It is being set up in solidarity with the West Papua Freedom Flotilla, a convoy of resistance against what the independence movement call the “genocide” of its indigenous population under Indonesian military occupation.
It will be a tight itinerary, but last week it was decided that Nimbin would be added to healing ceremonies taking place from Lake Eyre to West Papua. The official Nimbin ceremonies will take place on Sunday, July 28, but the public are also invited to prepare the day prior.
The indigenous populations have granted each other with Aboriginal passports……. The convoy intends to transport sacred water collected from the mound springs of Arabunna country while following the ancient song lines across Australia in a freedom ride from Lake Eyre.
The convoy aims to reconnect culturally and creatively with Aboriginal communities at Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and now Nimbin.
The people of the Northern Rivers have been invited by Arabunna Aboriginal Elder Uncle Kevin Buzzacott, who believes that following their song lines will reveal a deep connection between the lands which were once joined.”We were one people, we still are one people. We must uphold our cultural connection, the old land is calling us,” he said. To be involved email ruth.forsythe@gmail.com. http://www.northernstar.com.au/news/uniting-to-retrace-past/1909144/
Report on first World Indigenous Network Conference, held in Darwin
“…a worldwide movement of Indigenous Peoples to highlight their strong connections to ancestral territories and waters and ever greater recognition by governments and international community of the importance of these connections”.
Summary of ICCA Consortium participation at World Indigenous Network (WIN) Conference http://iccaconsortium.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/summary-of-icca-consortium-participation-at-world-indigenous-network-win-conference/ June 13, 2013 Darwin, Australia – A small yet strategic group comprising 10 delegates from countries such as Iran, Philippines, Nepal, Pakistan, Taiwan, Zimbabwe and Australia associated with ICCA Consortium participated in the first World Indigenous Network (WIN) Indigenous and Local Communities Land and Sea Mangers’ Conference, May 26-30 in Darwin, Australia.
Darwin is a ‘country’ of Larrakia nation, also known as ‘Saltwater People’ who are aboriginal traditional custodians of all land and waters of the greater Darwin region. Hosting of this conference in the country of Larrakia peoples is symptomatic of respect and recognition of strong connections to land and sea, and the conservation stewardship of aboriginal peoples in the Northern Territory of Australia. Continue reading
1 This month
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
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