An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia

314 Pages·2009·2.78 MB·english

by  Melinda Hinkson

Edited by
Melinda Hinkson
and Jeremy Beckett
First published in 2008
by Aboriginal Studies Press
© Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett in the collection, 2008
© in individual chapters is held by the contributors, 2008
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Cataloguing-In-Publication data:
Author: Hinkson, Melinda.
Title: An appreciation of difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal
Australia
ISBN: 9780855756604 (pbk.)
ISBN 978 0 85575 685 7 (PDF ebook).
Notes: Includes index.
Subjects: Stanner, W. E. H. (William Edward Hanley), 1905-1981.
Anthropologists — Australia — Biography. Aboriginal Australians
— Social life and customs. Aboriginal Australians — Social
conditions.
Dewey Number: 301.092
Printed in Australia by BPA Print Group Pty Ltd
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are respectfully advised
that this publication contains names and images of deceased persons,
and culturally sensitive material. AIATSIS apologises for any distress
this may cause.
Cover images: (front) WEH Stanner in his room at University
House, Australian National University, c. 1958; (back, L–R) Major
WEH Stanner, 2/1st North Australia Observer Unit, c. 1942, AWM,
PO4393.001; Stanner at a campfire, Fitzmaurice River, c. 1958;
Stanner during fieldwork in the Daly River region, c. 1932.
Foreword
Bill Stanner’s extraordinary career took him from the bureaucracy to the
academy. He had a distinguished career in the British colonial service, and
briefly in the Australian department of external affairs. He reached the rank
of lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army and commanded the North
Australian Observer Unit during World War II. He was a foundation member
of the Department of Anthropology at the Australian National University.
Bill Stanner was also a central figure in the establishment of what would
become the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Studies, an organisation I am proud to currently chair, and was, in fact, the
Institute’s first executive member.
Stanner had been a tireless critic of the treatment of Aboriginal people
since the 1930s, and of the policy of assimilation that dominated the state’s
relationship with Indigenous Australia from the 1940s. A result of the 1967
referendum was the establishment of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, a
key body advising on new government policies in relation to Aboriginal
people. The council rejected the policy of assimilation in favour of proper
recognition of a unique Aboriginal identity, cultural expression, and land
rights. Together with Nugget Coombs and Barrie Dexter as co-members,
Stanner played a unique role in overseeing reform in Aboriginal Affairs.
However, after three decades of bipartisan support for a broad policy
platform of choice that the council promoted, the last 10 years has seen
processes of attrition, combativeness and outright hostility in Indigenous
affairs. During its last term in office, the Howard government was
emboldened to implement its true intentions in Indigenous affairs, having
secured an unexpected majority in both the House of Representatives and
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Foreword
the Senate. Each year from 2004 unveiled a further dismembering of key
institutions of indigenous Australia. In 2004 the government disestablished
the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission; 2005 saw a renewed
attack on the iconic Northern Territory land rights legislation — the high-
water mark in Australia in rights for Indigenous people. In that same year the
then Minister for Indigenous Affairs Amanda Vanstone declared Aboriginal
outstations to be ‘cultural museums’. In 2006 the Aboriginal Land Rights Act
(Northern Territory) was amended, leading to a further weakening of land
councils, and the introduction of Section 19(a) head-leasing of townships as
a mechanism to deliver to Aboriginal people their citizenship entitlements
in return for the voluntary alienation of their land. In 2007, just months
before being voted out of office, the Howard government made its most
controversial act in Indigenous affairs with the declaration of the Northern
Territory ‘national emergency’ intervention. Under the Northern Territory
Emergency Response legislation the protections afforded under the Racial
Discrimination Act (the RDA) to Aboriginal people captured by the new law
were suspended and the government asserted that the steps taken under the
new law were to be characterised as ‘special measures’ for the purposes of
the RDA. For example, the permit system that provided traditional owners
with the authority to control who entered their lands was abolished and the
compulsory acquisition of all prescribed communities, for five years, was
introduced. These and other land-related measures had nothing to do with
the child sexual abuse reported by Anderson and Wild’s Little children are
sacred report, which provided the government’s stated rationale for launching
the intervention, and much to do with pre-conceived ideological positions.
It soon became clear that the overarching philosophical intent in the
intervention was mainstreaming. When visiting Hermannsburg in August
2007 prime minister Howard told residents that whilst respecting the ‘special
place of indigenous people in the history and life of this country, their
future can only be as part of the mainstream of the Australian community’
(Australian, 29 August 2007). A subtext of these debates has been about the
supposed unviability of remote townships and the possibility of voluntary
and involuntary shifting of Aboriginal people to ‘viable’ centres of economic
activity. For the first time since land rights was enshrined in Commonwealth
legislation, we have faced the spectre of Aboriginal people being forced to
leave their land. This is a policy reminiscent of the centralisation prescriptions
of the failed assimilation era.
Stanner would have found this state-driven, top-down policy-making
extraordinarily regressive and destined to fail. His work was exceptionally
important in conveying something about the distinctive nature of Aboriginal
people’s relationship to their country to a wider Australian audience. In 1968
Stanner delivered his Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming, which are still well
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Foreword
recognised today, forty years on. In the lecture titled ‘Confrontation’ (Stanner
1969, p. 44) there is a particularly beautiful passage:
No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between
an Aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’, warm and
suggestive though it may be, does not match the Aboriginal word that
means ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life
source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else. Our term ‘land’ is too spare and
meagre. We can scarcely use it except without economic overtones
unless we happen to be poets.
Stanner was spot on. When Aboriginal people talk about ‘country’
we mean something very different from the conventional European
understandings. We might mean homeland or tribal or clan area. But we are
not necessarily referring to a place in a merely geographical sense. Rather,
the word ‘country’ is an abbreviation of all the values, places, resources,
stories and cultural obligations associated with that area. Certainly, to talk
of country is to talk of its resources: the uses to which these might be put,
and their proper distribution. In this sense, to understand country is also to
understand its crucial importance to the customary Indigenous economy
and governance. However, the word best describes the entirety of a people’s
ancestral inheritance. It is Place that gives meaning to creation beliefs. The
stories of creation form the basis of Indigenous law and explain the origins
of the natural world. To speak of country is to speak both of the economic
uses to which it may be put and of a fundamentally spiritual relationship
that links the past to the present, the dead to the living and the human and
non-human worlds. Country is centrally about identity.
Australia’s Indigenous peoples have fought hard to protect and preserve
our countries and our identities since the first white settlements emerged on
the NSW coast in the late 1780s. In the Northern Territory the persistent
struggles of the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land culminated in
the Woodward inquiry whose findings and recommendations formed the
basis of the first legislative regime of land rights based on freehold title
in Australia. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976 was
the first legislation in Australia to establish a land claim process by which
traditional owners could claim various areas of land not through petition but
as their right. Hence, the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal
Deaths in Custody said of Northern Territory land rights that:
The result has been a fundamental shift in the position of Aboriginal
people. Despite many ongoing problems, Aboriginal people now have
an independent economic, political, and symbolic base for action.
They have moved at least in part to a position of negotiation with
the state. The importance of this is demonstrated in the growth of
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Foreword
strong and effective Aboriginal organisations, and the extent to which
Aboriginal people now have to be taken seriously as a significant
group within Northern Territory society.
However, the ‘reforms’ of the Howard government have steadily chipped
away at these historic achievements, hard won over so many years by
Aboriginal people and their supporters.
Stanner predicted that a day would come when Aboriginal people might
want to sell their land. The main message to be drawn from his writings
on Aboriginal policy is that Aboriginal people should be allowed to make
informed and realistic choices about their futures, not have decisions thrust
upon them. The previous government sought to force changed land tenure
arrangements upon traditional owners through the implementation of the
99-year leasing arrangements. I and others have pointed out that these changes
were not required to enable the kinds of housing provision and economic
development opportunities the government sought to encourage.
Paradoxically, as we celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the referendum
in 2007, Indigenous affairs reached a nadir. Where does one go from a
nadir?
There is some cause for optimism that the new Rudd government will
take a more consultative approach. As I write there is much activity, much
reviewing and also considerable uncertainty in the field of Aboriginal affairs.
Since elected in November 2007 the Rudd government has announced it
will endorse the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, it will
establish a new Indigenous representative body, it has launched a review of the
NT intervention, and a review of a key NT Aboriginal statutory authority
the North Land Council. A case sits before the High Court challenging
the Commonwealth’s compulsory acquisition of prescribed areas, possibly
without just compensation.
The outcomes of these various activities are far from assured: Will the
review of the intervention recommend that NT emergency response laws
pass the scrutiny of the RDA? Will the High Court find that the compulsory
acquisition of Aboriginal land to provide public housing and services is
unconstitutional? Will the government continue to support Aboriginal
people who aspire to continue living on their customary estates or will it
endorse the neo-liberal prescriptions of migration and mainstreaming?
Clearly much has changed in the last half century, but there are obvious
parallels between the assimilation policies of the mid-twentieth century
and the neo-liberal prescriptions of the present. Both impose a future
on Aboriginal people that seeks to speak on their behalf as to what best
represents their future prospects. Both have neither mechanism nor room
to hear from Aboriginal people as to what their aspirations might be, and
how they might differ from those of mainstream Australia. This seems a risky
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Foreword
strategy for both remote-living Indigenous people and wider Australia alike.
At the very time when climate change looms as the major threat to the
very foundation of the neo-liberal paradigm, Aboriginal people are being
asked to walk away from activities and ways of life that can contribute
considerably to the maintenance of extremely biodiverse regions as well as
carbon abatement.
When Stanner was concerned with choice his focus was fixed firmly
on Aboriginal benefit, although he did identify the cost to the nation of
continued Indigenous disadvantage. But today the stakes are far higher than
Stanner could possibly have imagined. By allowing remote-living Aboriginal
people who wish to remain on and manage their country the choice to do so,
we can see that their environmental management regimes might have local,
national, and even global benefits. These benefits remain, as yet, unrecognised
and unimagined by the nation. Surely, in this time of great uncertainty, this is
the sort of choice we as a rich nation should be encouraging, for Aboriginal
people as well as for all Australians?
Mick Dodson
August 2008
vii

Contents
Foreword iii
Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Contributors xv
‘Going more than half way to meet them’: On the life and 1
legacy of WEH Stanner Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson
part 1. diverse fields
1. ‘A chance to be of some use to my country’: Stanner 27
during World War II Geoffrey Gray
2. Stanner and Makerere: On the ‘insuperable’ challenges 44
of practical anthropology in post-war East Africa
Melinda Hinkson
3. WEH Stanner and the foundation of the Australian Institute 58
for Aboriginal Studies, 1959–1964 John Mulvaney
4. Stanner: Reluctant bureaucrat Barrie Dexter 76
part 2. in pursuit of transcendent value
5. Frontier encounter: Stanner’s Durmugam Jeremy Beckett 89
6. Journey to the source: In pursuit of Fitzmaurice rock art 102
and the High Culture Melinda Hinkson
7. Stanner’s veil: Transcendence and the limits of scientific 115
inquiry Peter Sutton