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New bridge in Australia opens old wounds

by Patrick Barkham

The ferry at Goolwa with Hindmarsh Island in the background

5 March 2001 - The opening of a bridge in south Australia has reignited a 10-year conflict between Aborigines, white Australians and academics, writes Patrick Barkham

A group of 100 Aborigines and their supporters stood in silent protest as several thousand people streamed across a new bridge in south Australia yesterday.

The local Ngarrindjeri people said the official opening of Hindmarsh Island bridge was a giant step back for the reconciliation of black and white Australia. The bitter, 10-year battle of the bridge has belittled Aboriginal spirituality, almost bankrupted developers and ruined the careers of academics and politicians.

The bridge was first mooted back in the late 80s to connect Hindmarsh, a small island at the mouth of the Murray River, 50 miles south of Adelaide, to the Australian mainland. White developers and the owners of a marina stood to make huge profits from it.

A group of Aborigines led protests against the bridge and in 1994 the federal government stepped in and banned its construction for 25 years under a law to protect Aboriginal heritage, declaring that the bridge threatened to desecrate a significant indigenous site. The marina went into receivership.

A group of anthropologists collected crucial evidence to stop the bridge's construction from a group of Ngarrindjeri women who said the bridge violated "secret women's business". Many Aboriginal groups use the terms "men's business" and "women's business" to denote their spiritual activities.

Hindmarsh Island, they argued, was a sacred Aboriginal site and to reveal its secrets would be traumatic and damaging. Robert Tickner, the Labor minister for Aboriginal affairs, respected these wishes and stopped the bridge being built without opening two envelopes of evidence listing the "secret women's business", which were meant to be read by women only.

Then the whispers started. Other Ngarrindjeri men and women said there was no such thing as "secret women's business" on the island. Dissenting anthropologists argued that the Ngarrindjeri were characterised by an absence of such spiritual practices. The Labor foreign minister at the time, Gareth Evans, privately called the secret women's business "bullshit on stilts".

Two years later, a federal court overturned the ban on the bridge. A royal commission ruled that the "secret women's business" at Hindmarsh was a fabrication. In a scathing judgment, the commissioner said Aboriginal women had been encouraged to invent it by sympathetic feminist anthropologists, part of a large, politically correct lobby against the bridge.

One anthropologist in particular, Dr Lindy Warrell, was reported to have said to the Aboriginal women: "It would be nice if there was some women's business." Dr Warrell later claimed she had been misrepresented, but the phrase stuck and one sceptical journalist wrote a book with her comment as his title.

Most of Australia's press heralded the verdict, along with the developers. It was a vindication of transparent and rational western law, they argued, a victory for progress, and a damning indictment of gullible and self-interested academics.

Many anthropologists hit back. The divisions among the Ngarrindjeri over the truth of the "women's business" did not necessarily affect its credibility, they argued, just as in western societies not everyone believes in god and those excluded from secret belief systems may refute their existence.

Australian law, they also pointed out, has often failed to account for the importance of Aborigines' oral traditions in assessing land disputes. One internationally renowned anthropologist, Diane Bell, wrote an award-winning account of the controversy, citing new evidence unavailable to the royal commission who supported the Ngarrindjeri's oral evidence that the island was a sacred site.

But the bridge got built, and the scars from the battle still remain. Doris Kartinyeri, the younger sister of the Ngarrindjeri custodian of the secret women's business, believes her current sickness is some kind of punishment for the exposure of too many of the women's secrets.

Plots of land are now making hefty profits for private developers, thanks to improved access created by the publicly funded bridge (which ballooned in cost to more than $A30m). Hindmarsh's developers, who nearly went bankrupt when construction was delayed, are currently seeking a further windfall by suing the former Aboriginal affairs minister and academics for more than $A20m in damages.

After the ban on the bridge was lifted, one of the developers, Wendy Chapman, said: "Give us back our possessions, give us back control of our destiny and allow us to get on with the development." They got back what they claimed they owned, unlike the group of Ngarrindjeri women.

Source: Guardian Unlimited

related links :

• Across a bridge of lies
  May 10 2003 - In a new book about the Hindmarsh Island bridge affair, Margaret Simons uncovers evidence that black women did not lie, but some white men behaved dishonourably.
• Kumarangk Legal Defence Fund
  The KLDF has been formed in response to civil suits taken out against a number of people and organisations opposed to the building of the Hindmarsh Island bridge near Adelaide, South Australia.

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