Inequality:
local
injustices, invisibility, blindness and their legacies
Richie Howitt
Department
of Human Geography
Macquarie
University NSW 2109
paper
presented to
Local
Government Community Services Association NSW State Conference
November
2002
Please
contact the author before quoting or further circulating
I would like to open my presentation today by acknowledging the traditional Dharug owners of the land that the University is built upon, and the privilege of speaking on their traditional country.
A little over ten years
ago the Australian High Court transformed Australia’s moral and cultural
landscape by giving judicial recognition of the property rights of Indigenous
Australians and their systems of governance in the Mabo decision.
In the following decade
Australians grappled with how to respond equitably to this momentous decision.
We’ve also grappled for a decade with the idea of reconciliation, and a shift
to greater recognition of Indigenous cultures as a foundation in many
communities. Although some in the local government sector were quick to
recognise the significance of the Mabo decision, and eager to embrace
the reconciliation process, others resisted the idea that Native Title and
reconciliation was relevant to local government functions.
In my brief presentation
today, I want to provide a provocative perspective on geographies of
inequality. Specifically I want to argue that many inequalities are the
legacies of past patterns of oppression and privilege around systemic denial of
Indigenous rights, and the local injustices, invisibilities and blindnesses it
produced and reflected.
In large part, we
imagine that inequality is a issue of distributive justice that it is about
socially or geographically uneven distributions of various things such as
housing, employment, opportunity, facilities, services and so on. Indeed, we
can map inequality within and between local government areas and produce
powerful images of areas of privilege and areas of disadvantage. We can plot
the social, ethnic, age- and gender-related elements of inequality. Sophisticated
Geographical Information Systems in all local government offices provide
clearer and more accurate representations the landscapes of inequality, and we
can become increasingly sophisticated in targeting access and equity priorities
to reduce the negative impacts of inequality.
Yet, with almost
Biblical certainty, inequality is always with us, and many of the geographical
and social patterns seem to persist too.
So, allow me to briefly
sketch another version of this landscape of inequality, and invite discussion
of how its patterns of privilege and denial have been embedded in the cultural
and institutional landscapes of contemporary Australia. And let me
provocatively suggest that the real challenge we face is to re-construct our
systems of governance with Native Title built in!
I want to build up a
picture of the cultural landscape in a series of brief snapshots in some
crucial areas, commencing with the question of land, water, resources and
wealth.
At the time of colonial
acquisition, most Aboriginal people in the imaginary landscape of ‘New South
Wales’ lived in self-governing communities, with relatively undisputed
territorial rights, and benefit of the waters and other resources within their
territories. While the High Court claimed it was unable to explore the question
of Indigenous sovereignty in the Mabo case, it is clear that Indigenous
Australians owned their territories ‘as against the whole world’, and that the
extent of their domain extended ‘from the centre of the earth to the top of the
sky’ as Noel Pearson has so eloquently put it.
In claiming to have
superseded any Indigenous sovereignty, imperial Britain simply usurped the
rights the High Court, and various Australian governments, have now recognised
as Native Title. Indeed, the Court has created Native Title rights as a subset
of the rights that Indigenous legal systems created and controlled, proclaiming
that only those residual rights that remain after those allocated by colonial
and postcolonial governments to settler Australians need to be legally
acknowledged.
But some lands were
‘reserved’ for the benefit of Aboriginal people, and some was even allocated as
property to specific Aboriginal individuals and families. Indeed, in the 19th
Century, Aboriginal farmers in many districts combined newly acquired skills in
agriculture with local environmental knowledge to great effect.
But history records a
range of mechanisms that removed even these remnants of land from Aboriginal
control. Misplaced fences, privatisation, theft, lost titles and occupation
were common practices that dispossessed Aboriginal people throughout NSW well
into the 20th Century.
Similarly, the colonial
government asserted Crown ownership of water, minerals and other resources,
without consideration of the existing rights of Indigenous Australians. Having
imagined the Australian landscape as empty of Indigenous owners and as
underlain by Crown rights, governments have allocated property rights in water,
minerals, forests, land and even animals to private interests. Although such
actions would now be unconstitutional, and would require just terms
compensation, Indigenous Australians have no avenues through which to undo the
damage that was done to their pre-colonial economies and their capacity to
participate in the postcolonial economy. While public debate in Australia has
consistently avoided discussion of ways to revisit past injustices and the
inequalities it entrenched in our communities, there are mechanisms that could
be considered. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, for example, the 1985 amendments to the
Treaty of Waitangi Act allowed investigation of grievances stretching
back to 1840 when the treaty was executed.
The micro-geography of
dispossession continues to haunt many communities. The massacres and acts of
violence, the shifted fencelines, the de-gazetted reserves and mission sites,
the lost title certificates, the repossessions arising from punitive credit
arrangements and many other highly local acts of injustice which laid the
foundations for current patterns of wealth, privilege and poverty in our
communities continue to be remembered in oral traditions and the cultural
landscapes they produced.
The provision of ‘land
rights’ by legislation, commencing in the 1970s, has provided a land base for
many Aboriginal people, but it hasn’t produced equality a matter that is seen
as a failure of land rights by many critics. But let us consider the NSW Land
Rights Act of 1983, which provided Aboriginal people in NSW with the
opportunity to claim land that was not required for other purposes including
Travelling Stock Reserves. The patchwork of land open to claim included
decommissioned waste disposal sites, inaccessible land, land cut-off by road
developments and many areas of no value. Inalienable freehold title (intended
to reflect traditional values of land-as-mother) often meant that ownership of
land could not be used to raise finance, and without resources, using the land
for productive economic, social or cultural purposes became difficult. In many
places, exemptions from land taxes or local government rates meant that local
services were unavailable. Indeed, in Western Australia I visited many areas
where local government graders simply turned around at the boundary fence of
Aboriginal reserves, enforcing increased costs in accessing the local service
centre because of the impact of poor roads on vehicle maintenance, fuel
consumption, safety and so on.
The act of dispossession
may have been foundational in pauperising Indigenous Australians, but processes
of exploitation and exclusion have reinforced the patterns.
The experience of
workers in pastoral industries has been well-documented. ‘Employment’
legislation provided for payment in rations generally provisions of sugar,
flour, tea and tobacco. Pastoral stations became convenient locations for
distributions of government provisions and implementation of other policies
aimed at disciplining and controlling Aboriginal people. Despite its
privations, the ‘pastoral era’ has often been remembered as a golden age in
which some Aboriginal people were able to retain some links with their
traditional country, and to supplement slave labour provisions with bush foods,
and, however restricted it might have been, there was a basis for participation
in community processes.
With the 1966 Equal
Wages case, despite retention of ‘slow worker’ clauses that applied only to
Aboriginal workers, it became illegal to deny award wages to Aboriginal
workers. In the pastoral sector, the coincidence of this decision with changes
in technology led to a substantial displacement of Aboriginal people from the
industry and the locations in which the industry operated. In Queensland,
where overtly discriminatory and repressive legislation remained in operation
until the mid-1970s, Aboriginal people were routinely subjected to quite
extraordinary levels of surveillance, control and suppression:
From 1904 all employment, wages and savings (of Aboriginal people) were controlled by the Queensland government under compulsory labour contracts … From 1910 the government took levies from wages of people living (under strict government or mission control) on reserves, and … from 1919 … from those not living on reserves (Langton 2002: 8).
To put it simply, wages
stolen by governments, wages were set at less than minimum levels, and when
federal institutions insisted on equal wages, governments colluded to allow
continued subsidies to industrial occupation of Aboriginal land and ejection of
Aboriginal people from employment in rural industries.
Lack of access to
employment, low wages, loss of wages and the interaction of employment issues
with issues of racism, health, housing and education has denied entire
Aboriginal communities any opportunity to secure capital. While those whom
governments granted their lands and resources to accumulated capital both
economically and socially, Aboriginal people were actively pauperised,
criminalized and ostracised. The social capital generated within the Aboriginal
community was simply not negotiable in the new communities of white and migrant
Australia at least not until Indigenous identity was commodified and
converted into industrial opportunity in tourism and advertising etc. Yet even
then, the extent to which capital became accessible to Aboriginal people was
extremely limited.
Given the domination of
housing by the private market in Australia, this combination of limited land,
limited income and limited prospects inevitably led to a housing crisis among
Indigenous Australians. Without access to private housing, many Aboriginal
groups were forced to rely on government provided housing programs which have
been chronically under-funded for generations. But it is not simply a matter of
poor provision of housing. We need to understand a little more critically how
housing has been used as a mechanism for social control as an active producer
of inequality.
It is hard to
underestimate the power of the home as a marker of social acceptability in
Australia. It is so much more than the ‘Australian dream’. Non-conformity with
the ideal of the family home continues to mark people as ‘different’, even
‘dangerous’ or ‘at risk’ in contemporary Australia. In providing housing for
Aboriginal families, governments quite deliberately sought to transform
Aboriginal social structures into conventional ‘households’ that basic unit
of social conformity that interfaces comfortably with the disciplined economy.
Even when ‘appropriate’ housing design was pursued to better accommodate
Indigenous social structures, the financial imperatives of lowest cost tenders
being accepted meant that services that are best understood as ‘health
hardware’ (plumbing, waste disposal, food preparation areas) were often
installed in unsustainable and inappropriate ways entrenching disadvantage in
the form of dysfunctional, high-maintenance houses that contributed to poor
health, poor social relations and high social attrition within the artificial communities
they constructed.
The cycle of
dispossession, displacement, poverty, poor health and low social capital
reinforced the patterns of inequality across generations.
Prospects for education
providing a pathway out of this entrenched inequality also need to be
understood in historical and social context.
I am in my mid-40s.
Despite my working class background as the son of a union organiser, I have had
privileged access to education. It is salutary to remind you that if I had been
of Aboriginal descent growing up in NSW in the 1950s and 1960s, I could have
been denied access to any public education facilities by a simple vote of a
P&C Association. I went to a local infants school where we had our share of
no shoes, patched clothes, knits and shared diseases of a working class suburb
but no Aboriginal kids. Given the deeply entrenched racist attitudes which
characterised Aboriginal people as dirty, unreliable, untrustworthy, indeed,
generally unworthy, I wonder how many of my Aboriginal peers were blamed for
the health problems of local schools and excluded forced to move on, to
uproot, to destabilise, to overcrowd another relatives home just to access this
most basic of opportunities?
And if I had grown up Aboriginal
in Queensland rather than NSW, what would my prospects have been? Given the
political activism of my family, chances are I would have found myself
arbitrarily exiled with my family to the government run Palm Island, where
‘troublemakers’ (including those who challenged the theft of wages by
government, those who challenged the sexual power of mission and government
administrators, those who spoke Indigenous languages, those who absconded from
violent or exploitative work placements and so on. While I can comfort myself
with the notion that my educational success was built on competing for
merit-based bursaries and scholarships, it was also based on local access to
high quality public education facilities. In remote Queensland communities,
there was no such access even for the most gifted and talented of Aboriginal
children. Indeed, exhibition of gifts and talents by part-Aboriginal children
was a recipe for removal from one’s family.
The psychological impact
of the genocidal stolen generations policies on thousands of Indigenous
families has been glimpsed through the Bringing Them Home report (HREOC
1997), but how many of us have reflected on the local consequences of genocidal
thefts of people from their families? What damage was done to the social fabric
of small communities around Australia?
It is impossible to
quantify the impact of these losses on families, individuals and communities.
The loss of identity, the dysfunctionality that was entrenched over
generations, the loss of talent, the loss of opportunity.
And yet, in the last two
Federal elections, we have seen the resurfacing of a racialised critique that
represents Indigenous Australians as privileged. In denial of the evidence
about inequality, Hansonism and its mainstream derivatives (let it never be
forgotten that Ms Hanson rose to prominence as a candidate for one of the major
parties) assert that recognition of Indigenous rights such as Native Title
threatens the cohesion and well-being of Australian society. There is talk of
divided sovereignty, disloyalty and disaster. The decade of reconciliation has
provided some opportunities in the local government sphere for some of these
notions to be investigated and challenged but there is a strong wellspring of
racism in Australian society.
Although many in Local
Government were slow to respond, Native Title represents a major shift in the
cultural landscape of inequality in Australia. Unlike land rights, Native Title
is not a concession invented by governments and granted to Indigenous people.
However circumscribed it is by legal technicality, Native Title derives from
rights created by Indigenous law. Responding to these rights is not optional,
and they cannot simply be removed by legislative fiat. Local Government cannot
choose to ignore Native Title. These are real rights, with real consequences.
Let me reflect briefly
on negotiations I was involved in South Australia, where we were negotiating at
a whole-of-state scale. One of our concerns was the absence of Aboriginal
people from decision-making and administrative bodies such as the Pastoral
Board. If it is acknowledged that Native Title may co-exist with some pastoral
titles, how does a government justify the exclusion of one class of property
interests in favour of another in representation on the Pastoral Board. But, if
one includes Native Title interests on that body, how is it appropriate to
maintain it as a ‘Pastoral’ Board, when management of the rangelands against
the criteria of a single industry group may not be appropriate for other
interests in the regions involved.
But, I can hear the
whisperers saying; doesn’t the recent decision in Anderson mean there is no
coexistence of Native Title with NSW leases? Doesn’t that make the problem go
away? The doctrine of terra nullius has been reinvented in many ways
since it was finally entrenched in the colonies around 1840 the same time as
the British Crown was signing a treaty of mutual recognition and coexistence in
Aotearoa/New Zealand. We can reduce the issue to a legal technicality, and
continue as if technical extinguishment of Native Title makes the problem go
away, but the issues of inequality, structural racism, poverty, alienation and
division will persist. In many ways the existence of Native Title provides an
opportunity to address these issues in new ways that acknowledge basic rights
such as self-determination.
How many breaches of
‘basic rights’ might one list in the recent experience of Indigenous
Australians in your home communities? It is not just in the reprehensible
circumstances of the Toomelahs and Palm Islands that we can find such breaches.
The challenge is not to find them in the daily practices of society, but to
address them and their causes.
When Noel Pearson has
spoken out about Indigenous Australians’ ‘right to take responsibility’, and
the need to renegotiate relations between government agencies, including local
government, and Indigenous people (eg 2000), he is challenging the culture of
denial, blindness and forgetting that has brought us to where we now are.
Indigenous inequality
can be represented in many ways. It is reflected in statistics about most
elements of social life. Indigenous Australians are poorer, less well, more
unemployed, less educated, more incarcerated and so on. In the communities that
we all return to after conferences such as this, these inequalities have a
geography and a history. They arose in particular circumstances in which unequal
privilege was entrenched into the patterns of Australian society. Starting with
the removal of land from Indigenous domains, and advancing with frontiers of
violence, ignorance and fear, we find mainstream Australia the beneficiary of
systemic abuse of human rights that has been labelled genocidal (HREOC 1997,
Tatz 1999, Reynolds 2001), and which has been responded to in terms of denial
by the dominant political discourses of our times (see eg Manne 2001).
While entrenched
inequality might be a reflection of this history, it is the continued patterns
of invisibility, blindness and denial that allows its reproduction. We need to
consider how these legacies might be challenged.
The idea of the cultural
landscape a concept close to geographers’ hearts has been well-accepted
into the discourses of local government planning. The idea that our social
environments, our lived landscapes, are a complex reflection of the
people-to-people and people-to-place relationships that structure our everyday
lives, and that in a multicultural society, the values, perceptions,
aspirations and contributions of many groups shape those landscapes, is
increasingly understood in terms of planning process. Yet, we remain deeply
prejudiced against opening our ideas of planning and social process to the
challenge of rights, interests and values that pre-date colonisation of
Australia. In the United States, the first postcolonial treaties signed by the
Federal Government were the international treaties with First Nations. It is
recognised (though with uneven consequences it must be acknowledged) that First
Nation rights were not subsumed by the US Constitution. As a consequence, when
BHP operates coal mines on Navajo land in New Mexico, it complies with the requirements
and regulations of the Navajo EPA as well as the state and federal regulations.
In northern Scandinavia, an international Sami Parliament meets regularly to
consider the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples vis a vis the
Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish states. And in Canada, a modern treaty process
is renegotiating the relationship between First Nations and the Canadian and
provincial governments. There are many models for rethinking how we might
respond to the legacies of the legal fiction of terra nullius that so
scared our nation in its birth and adolescence.
Within our own
jurisdictions in local government, education, social services and social
justice, there are many opportunities to reconsider the nature of inequalities
and the legacies of terra nullius to consider, discuss and enact ways that we
may begin the task of rebuilding Australia on the basis of equality and justice
for all.
HREOC (Human Rights &
Equal Opportunity Commission). (1997). Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry
into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from
their Families. Sydney, Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission.
Langton, M. (2002). A
New Deal? Indigenous development and the politics of recovery, Charles
Perkins Memorial Oration, University of Sydney, October 2002.
Manne, R. (2001). “In
Denial: the Stolen Generations and the Right.” Australian Quarterly Essay
1: 1-113.
Pearson, N. (2000). Passive
welfare and the destruction of indigenous society in Australia. Reforming
the Australian Welfare State. P. Saunders. Melbourne, Australian Institute
of Family Studies: 136-155.
Reynolds, H. (2001). An
Indelible Stain? The question of genocide in Australia's history. Ringwood,
Vic, Viking.
Tatz, C. (1999). Genocide
in Australia. Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Studies.