In Thomas Keneally's 1972 post-colonial novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, two white clerks bicker about impending Federation. One, an Englishman, suggests that 'there's no such thing as an Australian', other than in the 'imaginations of some poets and at the editorial desk of The Bulletin'. 'The only true Australians are ... the Aborigines.' 'Jacko', his zealous young companion retorts, is 'an honest bastard, but he's nearly extinct … It's sad, but he had to go.'
The young clerk seems to be of the view, reflected by others elsewhere in the novel, that Federation represents atonement, or at least a chance to draw a line through a history of colonial hardship and Aboriginal slaughter. The novel evokes a treacherous national identity crisis; this is reflected in the person of its half-caste antihero Jimmie, who is so infected by it and so oppressed by the latent racism that it elicits, that he eventually explodes in murderous rage.
More than a century after Federation, Australia has yet to resolve this tension between a romantic notion of what 'Australia' is, and the depravities that were undertaken to attain it. It may be couched in more polite terms, but it rears its head in ham-fisted and fundamentally disrespectful approaches to Indigenous policy, such as recent moves by the Coalition Government that threaten to undercut the spirit of Native Title legislation.
Senior Aboriginal leaders and advocates for Aboriginal rights have raised concerns about a strategy employed by Indigenous Affairs Minister, Country Liberal Party Senator Nigel Scullion. During what Frank Vincent QC describes as a fly-in, fly-out mission, Scullion obtained memorandums of understanding from members of Gunbalanya and Yirrkala townships to negotiate 99-year leases.
East Arnhem elder Dr Djiniyini Gondarra describes this as being part of a 'blitz' designed to encourage other communities around the country hastily to sign similar deals, ostensibly for their own betterment. Gondarra expressed fury about the manoeuvre in The Australian: 'We … do not want further controls put over our society,' he said. 'We want the shameful march of colonisation to end.'
Vincent, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, Alastair Nicholson QC and Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, outspoken elder from Utopia, NT, picked up this theme during a forum in Melbourne recently. It is 'technically correct', said Nicholson, that the 99-year leases don't negate Aboriginal ownership. But they do pit a particularly 'western' notion of ownership against the traditional Aboriginal concept of custodianship, which is at the heart of