Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too wish to rise to acknowledge Sorry Day, which was last week. I had the privilege of growing up in northern Victoria surrounded by the physical evidence of the traditional owners in that part of the world, the Dja Dja Wurrung. Unfortunately, there were no people left; just the kitchen middens, the scarred trees, some spearheads and so on. So I have to say that, growing up as a fifth-generation on that property, I was conscious of the original owners but knew nothing about them. I think that is pretty typical of a lot of people in Australia today. While 'sorry business' became part of the Australian lexicon, I believe a lot of people still do not understand and there is a lot of confusion. I also had the privilege of being on the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation for a number of years as we tried to bring forward a document that would encapsulate exactly what Australians needed to know and understand and how we were to be reconciled. That was a very important document and I do not think we refer to it enough today or look back at the words that were crafted at that time. I want to begin by talking about 1788, when the huge fleet of over 2,000 souls arrived in the Port Phillip-Botany Bay area under the guidance of Captain Phillip, an amazing man, who bore with him instructions from the British Admiralty. Those instructions said that he was to deal with the natives, as they were called at the time, in a way that was kind—the actual words were 'kindness and amity'. There was a bit of an undercurrent running through the instructions along the lines that, if they were dealt with kindly, they may be found to be of use to the new colony. Certainly they might be able to supply information which could be of great use in understanding what the resources of this new country were.

But you can imagine the impact the 2,000-plus British convicts, soldiers and a few free settlers had on the very small nation of owners of that country, only numbering several hundred, who very quickly saw their food supplies run down. Fish stocks were very quickly depleted by the use of the colonists' nets. The kangaroos were very quickly driven away. The birds, especially the water birds, were very quickly out of the reach of the traditional owners with their traditional hunting methods. Even access to the Tank Stream, which had been critical to the original owners, was severely restricted. There was no understanding at that first settlement that the Indigenous Australians, the local owners, could not simply fall back a little way towards the Blue Mountains and beyond once it became obvious there was not enough food to share with those hungry mouths, those starving new arrivals.

Then very quickly there was despair when the settlers saw so many of the traditional owners of the area falling sick and dying. There were a lot of early descriptions of the caves full of the dead and dying Aboriginal people with smallpox scars covering their bodies. It is a very sad thing to read those early documents. I spent several years researching these periods and producing a documentary history—which alarmed me because by the time I produced it I had already completed an anthropology degree specialising in traditional Australian culture, but I had not until then learned about how the transition occurred from traditional Australian culture to the time of fringe dwelling, extreme poverty, sickness and despair that is the lot of so many Aboriginal Australians today. I think every Australian, at the time of Sorry Day, should check their own knowledge of our Australian history.

We need to go back and understand that too many of the things that happened to Australia's original owners were the result of policies which were well meaning, were philanthropic in intent at the time, but which had the most dire consequences for the people. I will mention, for example, the protectorate system in Victoria. When the settlers in Victoria were pushing so hard into all of the pasture lands and the water supplies to settle their sheep and their beef cattle, which were protected by the convicts assigned to them, it became a case of frontier war with the local Aboriginal people. This was particularly so in Gippsland, where the forest cover made it very hard for the new settlers to win those skirmishes. They quickly found that, if an Aboriginal person was in heavily timbered country and the pursuers on horseback had to get off their horses, it became an equal fight. Too often the traditional owners won those skirmishes and that eventually led to the protectorate system—but before that, in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, it led to a native police system.

There were royal commissions that looked at the native police, particularly in Queensland in the 1830s, and what they found was that this was a force which was under white leadership, under white officer direction, but which was not to have written instructions. It was to respond to pastoralists who called for protection of their livestock due to depredations, incursions or attacks on that livestock from the local Aboriginal peoples. When someone had a few cattle speared or had a few sheep speared or just had livestock under threat—perhaps there were individuals involved in hand-to-hand combat—then the native police would be called up. They consisted of Aboriginal troopers. Many of those troopers had been in the prisons under charges of assault or even murder. They were put into a uniform and told that if they went out and joined the native police force, they would be free men—they would be given a rifle and a horse and the spoils of their activities would be theirs. They referred to the outcomes of those contacts with the traditional peoples charged with stealing livestock or worse as 'dispersal'. The official title of those activities was 'dispersals', typically carried out at dawn or dusk in the form of raids. According to the documentation at the time, those who survived the dispersals—and I mean that literally—moved themselves to towns or bigger regional centres in an effort to be safer and often to work in the abattoirs or the fishing industry or to get some other job. Those native police were very much a part of the settlement of Australia, but not many people understand why they were formed and how they worked. I have to say that we still need to address the curriculum in Australia to ensure the real Australian history is understood—not to be ashamed of it, not to say it is something that can never be remediated in Australia, but it is important to know the facts about Australian history.

When the protectorates were set up in Victoria, the idea was, again, as the name implies, to give protection to the tribes who remained, but what they in fact did was bring together disparate tribes who spoke different languages and who were traditional tribal enemies. They were brought together and contained in, or confined to, small areas under the control of a person employed by the colonial government. They were not allowed to speak their own languages and their children were required to go to school. There was no employment for anybody. And, because the remnants of the different tribal groups were pushed together onto these protectorates, you can imagine how intertribal warfare accelerated, especially when the traditional tribal enemies obtained guns and used them against each other or when there was even more revenge killing than usual because of all the deaths. So the protectorates, far from giving protection to the remnants of the Aboriginal tribes in Victoria, hastened their demise and certainly destroyed the remnants of their cultures. I have to say that today it is a sad thing when the Aboriginal peoples in my area strive as hard as they do to try and find some parts of language remaining or to capture from their elders some of the last stories about those earlier periods, because very little was documented at the time for them. There were some photos but not much else survived.

We then get to the stage of the stolen children—that was called a miscegenation policy. The idea was to 'rescue' the children of mixed unions. The idea was that, given they had 'white blood', they 'deserved'—as the documents said at the time—an alternative upbringing and, ideally, could then be trained to work as unskilled labourers on pastoral stations or in laundries and so on, filling a much needed part of the workforce that Australia has always had difficulty filling. That might have worked too; but, unfortunately when you look at where the children were placed—so-called orphanages or compounds where they were supposedly to be educated and supported into this new life—again and again you see from the government records and the Hansards of the day, that those programs were underfunded and badly managed, with often the cruellest people left in charge. There were often triumphs too with very kindly souls, some missionaries, who did very good work. But, when you read time and time again the reports, the annual statements and the press releases, and look at the photos and the health reports of the children in places like the Telegraph Station at Alice Springs or in the Darwin compound in the 1940s, it is quite shocking to see what conditions had to be survived and particularly the lack of respect for the people of mixed descent who, at the time, were called names like octoroons, quadroons and half-castes. There were different policies proposed for those different so-called mixes of blood.

Australia has a very complex past in terms of our race relations. As I said a minute ago, often the policies were aimed at a good outcome for all but too often they were based on wrong assumptions about the dying-out of the traditional owners, and the expectation that Darwin was right and so they said, if you were of a darker colour or a so-called full-blooded Aboriginal, you were therefore one of the lowest orders of human evolution. We have come a very long way, to now be standing in parliament once a year and expressing our sorrow and the fact that we are sorry about that past. But I think that is only the beginning and it is not enough. We have to make sure that every government program, whether it is at the local, state or federal level, actually delivers great outcomes for Aboriginal peoples, is delivered in cooperation with those individuals and is in fact always led, as far as possible, by the Indigenous people themselves. After all, they are members of the longest continuous surviving culture on earth. We have to learn from the Aboriginal peoples now about environmental sustainability. We have to learn about how families in good circumstances can be supportive of one another. But we also have to understand the legacy of generations of oppression, poverty, disease and, more recently, alcohol and drug addiction.

One of the things I want to do most in this parliament now is to address foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD. This is not just an Indigenous problem at all, but a lot of our Indigenous communities have great difficulty now with levels of alcohol consumption. Too often we have children being born with FASD, which leaves the child with permanent brain damage and a lifelong limitation on their opportunities and their chances to reach their full human potential. So there is still a lot of work for us to do in this parliament. It is work we must do with bipartisan support I am very pleased to stand up and support this 'Sorry' motion. I want to make sure that all that I do helps in the future, becauset I am an Australian and every Australian has a responsibility to make sure all Australians, of whatever background, have a fair go.

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