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Needed: European action on Indigenous Australians' rights

By Wendy Barnaby

"Proper settlement with Indigenous people will not be reached in Australia without international pressure."
- Les Malezer, Director of The Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action (FAIRA).

August 15, 2001 - "There’s more to being an Aborigine than playing the didjeridu and posing in a barren landscape, spear in hand, before a mystical dusk backdrop," laughs Bryan Andy. "For starters, my mob didn’t even have the didjeridu before the invasion!" Andy is one of the contributing authors to a new Lonely Planet guide to Aboriginal Australia & the Torres Strait Islands. The book is the first mainstream travel guide entirely dedicated to the ancestors of the land, and it will do much in Europe to raise awareness of the campaign for Indigenous Australians’ rights.

Cathy Freeman may have inspired domestic and international audiences alike at the Sydney Olympics, but the Australian government under Prime Minister John Howard has not been winning the race to ensure its Indigenous people’s dignity. On most of the indices that measure quality of life, Aborigines still fall below the standards of many third world nations.

During the 12 months beginning July 2000, the Australian government granted 3.54 million visitor visas: hundreds of thousands to young travellers from Europe. According to the Australian Tourist Commission, between 85 and 95% of international visitors to Australia want to experience Aboriginal tourism on subsequent visits; yet few encounter much of it on a typical trip or have little idea of how to do so responsibly.

The new guide – for the first time – will leave them in no doubt about how to approach Aboriginal projects. State by state, the book describes ventures owned or operated by Indigenous people – tours, cultural centres, camping areas, museums, sacred sites, art galleries – explaining their significance and, where necessary, proper behaviour for visitors.

Says coordinating author Sarina Singh, "Lonely Planet wants the tourism dollars to be directed to the appropriate Indigenous organisations. At its best, tourism not only brings income and employment, it also helps to protect the culture, since it allows Aborigines to provide access to their sites and to interpret them".

The guide is only one of several current important developments in Europe that will raise awareness of the campaign for Indigenous Australians’ rights.

A new website is online; a focal point for European activities in the campaign. The work of the European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights (ENIAR), the website contains more than 200 pages of news, action, background papers, events and a bulletin board for comments. www.eniar.org aims not only to raise awareness of Indigenous issues with information, events and news, but also to help Indigenous Australians who are visiting Europe, with contacts and information. Links will be provided to access this information online.

ENIAR’s Paul Canning has designed the website. "The site enables ENIAR’s impact to be greater than our small group of members. Anyone, wherever they are can now easily find out all about us and – more importantly – get directly involved in the issues."

"The site is very interactive. We have a bulletin board and an email list. This allows ENIAR to immediately contact anyone signed up who's interested in our activities.

"We have recently added a new section providing information for Aboriginal people about campaigning in Europe. This sort of content is what the web can – uniquely – provide."

One of the website’s prime discussion topics is whether Britain still has responsibility for Indigenous Australians and, if so, whether it is a legal or a moral one. What could Britain and the British people do? Should there be a British apology?

Many British Members of Parliament think there should be. Forty-nine of them have signed a "Sorry motion", tabled by Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn, apologising to Aboriginal people for past British policies. The motion also calls on the Governments and peoples of Australia to mark the Centenary of Federation by committing themselves to redress the discrimination suffered by Aboriginal people, and to recognise the special status and rights of Aboriginal peoples as the Indigenous peoples of Australia.

Even if the British government shows no sign of apologising, it is moving on another issue. Amid reports that at least 40 British museums are preparing to hand their collections of ancestral remains back to Australian Aborigines and other Indigenous peoples, the government has just set up a working group to consider changing the law to make it easier for some museums to release their collections.

This initiative has come after years of pressure from Aboriginal campaigners. One of them, Lyndon Ormond Parker, was the only Indigenous person to give evidence to the House of Commons Committee whose report recommended that the new working group be set up. "It was quite a good experience," he says, "having gone over the last three years from the stage where museums weren’t answering any correspondence."

The policy shift on ancestral remains has also been brought about by a meeting last year between Prime Ministers John Howard and Tony Blair. Ormond Parker believes that the British Government is falling into line with its Australian and American counterparts, all of whom are in favour of repatriation. "It is political pressure which forced the scientific and museum community in those countries to accept that they no longer had sole rights to decide what should happen to the Indigenous human remains in their countries," he says.

Smoking ceremony Dover beach

For the first time, the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Brisbane in October will also feel political pressure on the subject of Indigenous people’s rights.

Supported with funds from the European Commission, the London-based Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICS) has set up a project on Indigenous people’s rights. Although at least 100 million of the world’s 250 million Indigenous peoples live in Commonwealth countries, there is no Commonwealth commitment to inquiring into or improving their conditions of life. The ICS project aims to build up information about the Commonwealth’s Indigenous citizens and bring home their rights and needs to member states. Among its aims are to encourage Commonwealth governments to apologise to Indigenous peoples for past injustices, and restore to them their lands, autonomy and culture.

The restoration of land rights is being pursued at the World Court in The Hague. August 2001 saw the arrival there of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, which is establishing an international outpost on neutral diplomatic ground. Aboriginal land rights activist and Wiradjuri custodian Isabell Coe is leading the delegation, which plans to take its case for genocide and dispossession to the International Court of Justice.

"We have been to the highest courts in Australia over genocide and our sovereign land rights and there has been no justice," says Coe. "The courts of Australia have said that our sovereignty can only be determined by the British courts or the World Court."

On August 30 the delegation visited the First Secretary of the International Court of Justice, in The Hague, "to raise the question of who can decide Aboriginal Sovereignty if the Australian High Courts cannot?"

This year has seen Australia facing criticism from London-based Amnesty International which, in its annual assessment of Australia, states that the country’s human rights reputation is at an "historic low".

Among Amnesty’s concerns are the Federal government’s failure to recognise past wrongs against Aborigines, its opposition to recommendations for practical reconciliation measures, continued mandatory sentencing and the high rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody. The report expresses particular concern at the government’s review of its commitment to United Nations human rights organizations following criticism of government policies by four separate UN bodies.

One of these is the UN Human Rights Commission (HRC), which noted last year that the Australian government’s mandatory sentencing of juveniles raised "a serious issue of compliance" with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. At the HRC’s March/April 2001 meeting in Geneva, the Commission established a Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights of Indigenous People.

The rapporteur will have a three-year term and will be able to visit countries to which he is invited. In the present climate it may seem unlikely that the Australian government will extend him an invitation. But with information from governments, Indigenous people themselves and their organizations, he will provide another international focal point for publicising the violations of Indigenous Australians’ human rights.

Not all awareness-raising takes place in the high councils of Parliament, academia or the United Nations. Earlier this year, British actor-director Kenneth Branagh waived his usual fee to play a white official who tried to destroy the Aboriginal race in Australia. Branagh plays AO Neville, a functionary with the title Protector of the Aborigines, in Philip Noyce’s film Rabbit-Proof Fence. It is based on the true story of a government initiative to force Aborigines to assimilate with white families, and thus breed them out of existence, during the 1920s and 1930s.

The film follows three Aboriginal girls who are forcibly taken from their mother's home in 1931. They escape and try to find their way home along a rabbit-proof fence. The film's producer, Christine Olsen, says: "The white people in the film are our grandparents. There are no moral judgements – it's a human story. We’re all products of our time, so we shouldn't try to be morally superior."

The Lonely Planet guide to Aboriginal Australia and the Torres Strait Islands can be purchased from Amazon.com. If you buying the book via this or the above link, a portion of the sale price goes to ENIAR.

Wendy Barnaby is a member of the European Network for Indigenous Australian Rights.

Clip from Online Opinion

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