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Across a bridge of lies

By Julian Linden

10 May 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. An extract from her book follows:

Parliament had gone into recess for the summer break of 1994, and the few remaining people could have fallen asleep in the middle of the corridors without risking being walked on. Ian McLachlan, Liberal MP for the electorate that included Hindmarsh Island, was in South Africa. His Adelaide-based chief of staff, Peter Miller, was on holiday. Meanwhile, in McLachlan's Canberra office, a research assistant had recently been employed and was trying to learn the job more or less on his own. McLachlan frightened him. Miller barely gave him the time of day.

The research assistant appears in this story, does the bidding of others, makes a bad mistake, loses his job and disappears. He declined to be interviewed for this book, but listened to me give an account of events as related by Miller and did not dispute it. He asked not to be named. Let's call him Gordon.

One day over the Christmas break a big parcel was delivered to the office. Gordon saw it had come from Adelaide. He assumed it was from McLachlan's Adelaide office and opened it. Inside were masses of papers to do with Hindmarsh Island. Gordon checked the address label again and realised that it was addressed to Sean McLaughlin, adviser to the Labor minister for Aboriginal affairs, Robert Tickner. It had been delivered to the wrong McLachlan.

Surely this is one of the most amazing coincidences of the entire affair. It seemed so unlikely that many involved never accepted that it was an accident. But I have investigated and am satisfied that it was.

The parcel contained all the documents Tickner's office had sent to the Australian Government Solicitor's Adelaide office for use in the Federal Court case brought by the Chapmans. Tom and Wendy Chapman were developers of a marina on Hindmarsh Island and the developers behind the bridge. They were appealing against Tickner's ban on bridge construction.

When Miller returned to his Adelaide office after his holiday, he gave Gordon some detailed instructions about the documents. Miller remembers: "I told him to photocopy them ... I said to him do it as quietly as possible, then return the documents to the carton and send them back without anything to show who had received them in error."

Miller had no ethical problem with this. "Politics survives on things dropped off the back of trucks," he said to me. When McLachlan rang from South Africa and was told of the documents, he said, "Heavens. Christmas comes early."

When Gordon rang Miller back, he said that he had found some things in an envelope. Miller remembers: "He said he thought they might be the secret women's business. He said he had casually read a bit and skipped through most of it ... There was nothing, he said, on the envelopes to indicate for certain that they were secret."

Miller could hardly believe it. He spoke to McLachlan in South Africa again: "There may be the secret women's business in there." The international phone wires fell silent. Then McLachlan's voice: "You're joking."

Gordon repacked the original documents into a new carton and left them at a deserted mailing station in Parliament House. Then he packed up the copies he had taken and sent them to Miller in Adelaide. There were eight kilograms of documents. Sure enough, somewhere in the middle of all the photocopying was the contents of the envelopes containing the secret women's business.

McLachlan told Miller to get hold of "the solicitor" and take advice on what should be done. The advice was that the secret material should be put in an envelope and sealed. Miller did this, and signed his name across the seal. The envelope wasn't opened again while in McLachlan and Miller's possession.

McLachlan said in his interview with me, "Funnily enough I never even read it. All my friends said I was a fool." His chin was tilted, the expression one of noble innocence affronted. McLachlan sees himself as an honourable man.

But he never asked Miller whether he had read the women's secrets. Miller remembers: "He said to me, 'I am not going to ask you. I will never ask you.' And he never did."

A few weeks into January, boxes containing copies of the documents - minus the secret women's business - began to turn up in strange places. Journalist Colin James received a box at the Adelaide Advertiser. The Chapmans' lawyers also received a box of documents. By now they had been swapping information with Miller for a long time.

McLachlan believed that only one legal system could prevail. Where there was a conflict, Aboriginal culture must give way. On February 15, 1995, Justice Maurice O'Loughlin of the Federal Court delivered his judgement in the Chapmans' attempt to overturn Tickner's ban on the bridge.

O'Loughlin found that Tickner's ban had breached natural justice, partly because of the confidentiality of the women's business. For the bridge opponents, the Ngarrindjeri and the Commonwealth Heritage Act, the decision was a devastating loss. The Federal Opposition called on Tickner to resign.

O'Loughlin's decision did not rest on any question of whether or not "women's business" was true. O'Loughlin said Tickner should have read the secret appendices because they were clearly crucial to his decision. Although the legal system could go some of the way to respecting Aboriginal requirements of secrecy, this was usually done by closing the court or limiting the disclosure. There was no room for total secrecy.

For people like Ngarrindjeri elder Connie Roberts, telling secrets was a desecration. Given the choice between telling and watching a site destroyed, she would probably choose the latter.

Tickner was devastated. He told the media that the decision swept away the right of Aboriginal people to protect their beliefs: "I have always believed that spiritual beliefs of Aboriginal people should be accorded no lesser respect than the spiritual belief of non-Aboriginal Australians." Within days, he lodged an appeal against O'Loughlin's decision to the full court. The phrase "secret women's business" had begun to enter the popular lexicon. Later it was even used to advertise chocolate biscuits.

In Adelaide the main reaction to Tickner's appeal was disgust. Legal costs over the bridge were already estimated to be in the millions. The issues at stake - the clash of cultures, whether the two could ever exist side by side, and what the claims of the past should be on the present - were getting lost in the mess.

Buoyed by the Federal Court's vindication of his views, McLachlan decided to use the secret envelopes in Parliament. On March 6, 1995, he strode to the House of Representative's dispatch box with a brown envelope and said: "Will you explain why you allowed these photocopies of those secret letters to be sent around Australia like flotsam in a wreck, in unregistered parcels, the copies of the letters in an unsealed envelope, addressed to a white Australian male by the name of McLaughlin?"

Miller had a clear view of Tickner's reaction. He remembers: "He went absolutely white. I was sure in that moment that his staff had never told him about the box arriving marked 'opened in error'. They must have been just terrified of the implications."

There is a hackneyed phrase the press gallery uses to describe this sort of event in Canberra: blood in the water. Tickner's blood was in the water.

McLachlan threw the sealed envelope on the table. He remembers: "I thought I would amuse myself and make Tickner look like a clot."

Tickner and his staff began to investigate what had gone wrong. Sean McLaughlin told Tickner that when the box had arrived there had been no indication that it had been opened before.

His staff member, Susan Kee, told him that the secret women's business had been in a sealed envelope clearly marked "Confidential - for women's eyes only". There was no sign that it had been tampered with.

Meanwhile, McLachlan was a star. In radio and television interviews he was telling everyone what Gordon had told Miller, and Miller had told him: that the secret women's business had been in an unsealed envelope with no marking on the outside.

Someone else was trying to ring McLachlan's office. She tried many times before she got through. It was Doreen Kartinyeri, senior Ngarrindjeri woman and the most prominent proponent of secret women's business, who had heard the news on radio. Her friend Sandra Saunders remembers Kartinyeri's reaction. "She clutched her stomach and doubled up. She said, 'Oh, my grannies. Oh, my aunties. What have I done?"' Kartinyeri says she nearly passed out.

When Kartinyeri's call came through, Miller put her on loudspeaker so McLachlan could listen. "Her language was absolutely unbelievable ... We just looked at each other."

Kartinyeri faxed McLachlan straight after the telephone conversation demanding the return of the documents to Kee. She told him that if he read them, "This will cause injury and death to Ngarrindjeri women." McLachlan replied, telling her that the documents had been in a sealed envelope since he had learnt of their existence. After tabling them, the shadow minister, Chris Gallus, had stayed with the envelope. McLachlan promised to return the documents to Kartinyeri "as soon as you decide".

Three days after McLachlan's king hit, Tickner hit back. With him in the chamber he had the envelope in which the secret material had been contained. Contrary to what McLachlan had told the media, it was clearly marked as confidential, and for women's eyes only. Tickner held up the envelope. "If the letters were in an unmarked and unsealed envelope and were not read, how were they identified?" he asked McLachlan.

It was McLachlan's turn to go pale. Miller, watching from the sidelines, felt the blood drain from his own face.

Miller and McLachlan met Gordon. Miller remembers: "I said to [Gordon], 'What we are going to ask you now is very important. You have to tell us the truth. Was the envelope like this?' And [Gordon] said, 'Yes, I think it was.' Ian said, '[Gordon], I think you've just ruined me.' Gordon replied, 'Well, it was a long time ago."'

They went back to McLachlan's office. McLachlan was grey-faced, hardly able to stand. He turned to Miller. "Gordon has to go," he said. The research assistant was packed off to his home town and told to lie low, which he has done ever since. Meanwhile, McLachlan went to the office of the party leader, John Howard, and offered his resignation from the frontbench. It was an extraordinarily bitter blow. McLachlan had been talked of as a potential prime minister. He also saw himself as a gentleman politician, and a man of honour. He had been cut down, as he saw it, by a research assistant's mistake. He saw himself as resigning on a point of principle - that parliamentarians should not deceive the public.

The next day McLachlan called a press conference and gave a speech announcing his resignation. McLachlan admitted sending a copy of the non-secret parts of the material in the box to the Chapmans. "I have absolutely no conscience about that whatsoever," he said. "I feel that I am helping these people - my constituents - in the case against the Commonwealth and I would do the same again."

McLachlan's political judgement had been spectacularly flawed. He had wanted to make Tickner look like a clot. He had made himself look unprincipled. Yet his decision to resign was one of high principle. He had not seen that in copying the secret documents he was offending not only against Aboriginal beliefs but also against the quite ordinary morality of not opening somebody else's mail.

I asked Miller several times: had he read the secret documents? He finally agreed to go on the record. "Yes, I did read them. I didn't read them all that thoroughly. It was quick. I was aware, well, not of wrongdoing but that some people might think what I was doing was wrong."

And what was in the documents?

"So far as I can remember, nothing more than what is in this." Miller flicked across the table a copy of a manuscript by the early missionary Heinrich Meyer, who had written about the Ngarrindjeri women and their seclusion at the time of menstruation, and about birth practices and infanticide of the sickly and deformed.

Miller said: "I do believe that the women did abort their babies if they were fathered by European men. And that did happen on Hindmarsh Island. But there was nothing else earth-shattering. The whole thing was very underwhelming."

Kartinyeri always believed that a man had read the secret material. She blamed herself. She knew that when she had gone against Roberts to insist the information be revealed, she had taken responsibility for the decision.

I told her that I believed McLaMcLachlan had never read the material in the secret envelopes. "Yes, but somebody did, didn't they? Some man read it. I know it. I just know it. Why do you think I've lost half my guts?"

Doreen Kartinyeri survived the stomach cancer that she believed was due to the violation of secret women's business. The Hindmarsh Island bridge opened in March 2001. This is an edited extract from The Meeting of the Waters: The Hindmarsh Island Affair (Margaret Simons 2003. Hodder Headline Australia).

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Secret Women's Business

Transcript:

Terry Lane: There is now a bridge linking the South Australian town of Goolwa with Hindmarsh Island, and some people think that it impedes the transit of the Seven Sisters from their celestial home to earth and back. It’s taken more than ten years to build the bridge, and in the process, the expression ‘secret women’s business’ has been embedded in our lexicon of joke clichés, millions of dollars have been spent in inquiries, a Royal Commission, a couple of Federal Court cases, lots of litigation, in fact the Hindmarsh Island Bridge costed by the metre, probably is now just about the most expensive bridge in the universe. Both major political parties have supported or have opposed the bridge as seemed in their best interests at the time, swapping sides, opportunistically. The anthropologists at the South Australian Museum and Adelaide University took different sides in the debate and they’ve formed lasting antipathies. Two Federal government Inquiries found that there was Secret women’s business surrounding Hindmarsh Island and that Aboriginal heritage legislation should protect. The Federal Court ruled on the action of the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs who ordered work on the bridge to stop. One Royal Commission found that so-called Secret women’s business was lies and fabrication. (The Royal Commissioner was a woman, in case you’ve forgotten). And litigation is still before the courts as the original proponents of the bridge, developers Tom and Wendy Chapman, seek compensation for a lost fortune and damage to their reputations, and I should point out that they have sued the ABC, so I’ll declare that as a small corporate interest in the story. For a while, everyone wondered what could possibly be in the sealed envelopes that no man is permitted to see, which was considered to be critical to whether the bridge should be given permission to go ahead or not. Well it’s possible to guess what might be in them but I think we’ve reached the point where probably nobody cares. Journalist Margaret Simons has looked into the saga of the Hindmarsh Island bridge, and she’s written of it in her book ‘The Meeting of the Waters’. Margaret, good afternoon.

Margaret Simons: Good afternoon.

Terry Lane: Have you tried to estimate the final cost of the bridge?

Margaret Simons: Well no, I think it’s impossible to estimate really. You’ve detailed all the litigation that there’s been, and of course there is other litigation as well, which the cost hasn’t been borne by the taxpayer, but certainly tens and tens of millions of dollars, it’s really hard to put a figure on it.

Terry Lane: It would have been good to be a lawyer buzzing around this.

Margaret Simons: Yes, the lawyers have done well out of this.

Terry Lane: And how many years of your life have gone into each metre of bridge?

Margaret Simons: Oh, well, too many perhaps. I started doing my research in late 1998 and I began just by reading everything that was already in the public sphere on this. And it’s now about a year since I finished substantial work on the book, so four years; by the time this is over it will have been in my life for five years, and during that time I guess I’ve thought about it, if not every hour, then certainly every day.

Terry Lane: Do you know what was in the sealed envelopes?

Margaret Simons: No, I don’t know precisely what was in the sealed envelopes. I think it’s also clear now that the material that was in the sealed envelopes is probably not as much as is now on the public record. The Ngarrindjerri women, over time, have progressively revealed more and more, and there’s this sort of cultural emergency you might describe it, for them has progressed.

Terry Lane: Well that’s not a bad starting point. Look, what we have to say about this, Margaret, is that this is a story which has gone over years, and who knows, millennia, perhaps, and it has a cast of at least hundreds, so I’ve decided that in order to get some sort of framework for our 20 minutes of conversation, that we should start with the findings of the Royal Commission, which concluded that the secret women’s business was a fabrication, that it was convenient to some people to fabricate it for a variety of reasons. And the Commissioner gave her reasons for arriving at this conclusion, and her first reason was that the local Aborigines didn’t remember that there was secret women’s business until the last possible minute, just before construction of the bridge was about to begin. And the Commissioner concluded that in her eyes, it looks too convenient for the opponents of the bridge, who incidentally were not Aboriginal.

Margaret Simons: Yes, that’s certainly one of the things which seemed to be very suspicious at the time. There had been environmentalists and other who had been opposing the bridge on environmental grounds for quite some time.

Terry Lane: And residents on the island, I think, who didn’t want their tranquillity disturbed.

Margaret Simons: That’s right. And the community of Goolwa and Hindmarsh Island were sharply divided; this is the white community. And then it was quite late in that saga, and after those environmental objections had largely been unsuccessful that the Aboriginal objections emerged. This seemed highly suspicious to the Royal Commission and indeed to many commentators at the time. But in fact I think it’s quite clear that for various reasons, largely State government mishandling, the consultation process leading up to the approval for the bridge, was inadequate. There had actually been indications that there might be Aboriginal objections earlier during the Environmental Impact Statement process. There’d been a recommendation from an anthropologist there should be more consultation with the Ngarrindjerri, and that recommendation was never followed up on.

Terry Lane: But those early objections related to speculative existence of cemeteries, Aboriginal burial places on the island, or middens, or as somebody unflatteringly described them, rubbish dumps.

Margaret Simons: That’s right. That was certainly the publicly stated grounds, but there were also indications that one of the leading Ngarrindjerr men said there shouldn’t be a shovel put in that soil until all Ngarrindjerri had been consulted, and ‘we want the developers to pay for meetings so that we can consult them.’ Now that recommendation that those meetings should happen was never followed up on, largely because the State government simply picked that recommendation up and put it into conditions for the approval, which meant the developers understandably thought that it was something they had to do as the bridge was built, rather than before they started building.

Terry Lane: The Commissioner also was critical of the fact that the story seemed to grow and grow, as time went on, and it was becoming more elaborate and more florid, and she thought this highly unlikely. Why weren’t all of the facts – at least the facts that could safely be revealed to infidels – why were they not revealed at the beginning, why did it just go on getting more and more from a burial ground to a place which was of significance to women who went there to abort the foetuses that were the result of being raped by white men, I mean it really did become quite rococo.

Margaret Simons: That’s right. Now it went on and on, there’s no doubt about that, and I think part of that is that the Ngarrindjerri women were initially not agreed as to how they should handle it. There were all sorts of divisions among the women themselves. Some thought nothing should be revealed, absolutely nothing. Others were arguing that some rules, if you like, of their culture, had to be broken in order to protect the area. And those groups of women are still in disagreement to this very day about how it ought to have been handled. Gradually, more and more came out and there is now substantially more on the public record from the Ngarrindjerri women’s own choice, than there was at the beginning of this affair. And that’s come out through this raft of litigation and inquiry.

Terry Lane: Well the Commissioner seems to have been convinced, I think this is true to say, that the idea of Hindmarsh Island as being something special for the Ngarrindjerri women, came about by chance at a meeting where one man looked up at an aerial photograph of the mouth of the Murray that was pinned to the wall, and he said, ‘Look at that, that looks like women’s reproductive organs.’

Margaret Simons: That’s certainly what the Royal Commission found, but I think one can say with confidence now that that is simply wrong. Even in the evidence before the Royal Commission, one can see that one of the key custodians, Doreen Kartinyeri, had given accounts of secret women’s business before that meeting, weeks before that meeting, to other people. So it’s certainly not the case that it was at that meeting that the secret women’s business was first raised or discussed. And I’ve also got evidence in the book that people were told this was a women’s fertility site five months before that meeting. Plus which, the Royal Commission’s finding on that meeting was based on the evidence of one woman. There were others at the meeting who give sharply different accounts of what occurred there. The Royal Commission chose to accept that one woman’s evidence, I think there are good reasons why that may well have been an error.

Terry Lane: And what were the reasons that the Commissioner chose to accept that woman’s evidence? You paint a pen picture of the difference between the dissenting women and the true believing women. The true believing women didn’t co-operate with the Commission, they sat in the gallery, they hurled abuse, and were very noisy and ill-behaved, and the dissenting women were by contrast, well-behaved, deferential to the Commissioner, and you can understand the Commissioner might like them better than the others.

Margaret Simons: It might be understandable, but then is it fair judicial process? It should also be said that not all of the true believing women, as you call them, went to the Royal Commission. There was a substantial number who simply refused to recognise that the Royal Commission was occurring at all, and were actually quite hostile towards those women who were going along and catcalling from the public gallery, if you like, who thought that they shouldn’t be giving the Royal Commission that much time and attention. Certainly the behaviour of some of those women in the public gallery is why some commentators came to regard the whole mob of them as ratbags, and I think that’s based on not a full knowledge of who the women actually were. Sometimes the most vocal ones were not actually the key people at all.

Terry Lane: Proceeding on, Margaret, through the conclusions of the Royal Commission, the Commission was impressed, one way or the other, by the fact that there was no record of gender-specific secret business in any of the classic anthropological studies of this particular community.

Margaret Simons: That’s certainly how the Royal Commission interpreted it and how their key expert witnesses interpreted it. But quite different readings of that anthropological record are available, and are certainly open. And there’s other material that’s come to light since then which I think quite clearly shows that although Ngarrindjerri society wasn’t as strictly divided on gender lines as some other Aboriginal cultures are, like Central Australian ones for example, there were differences in the knowledge held by men and women, and there’s information on that in the work of Norman Tindale, a very famous Australian anthropologist and even the classic anthropological text which formed part of the evidence before the Royal Commission, is open to several different readings, and the Federal Court has of course now found that it prefers the readings of those anthropologists who say there are areas of specialist knowledge for men and women in Ngarrindjerri culture. Also of course the key independent witnesses before the Royal Commission, both came from the South Australian museum, and one of them has now been found by the Federal Court to have erred in terms of professional objectivity. At the same time as being an independent expert witness before the Royal Commission, he was also helping the lawyers for the so-called dissident women, the women who wanted to knock down secret women’s business, and that’s remained unrevealed until very recently.

Terry Lane: But this could also be said of the anthropologists on the other side; you spend quite a bit of time in the book discussing this issue of advocacy anthropology. It does seem you can pay your money and get your expert.

Margaret Simons: Well certainly many of the people who have said that secret women’s business was rubbish and was a fabrication, have accused - I hate using these terms, left and right wing in this context because they’re really more deceptive than helpful, but just as a short of shorthand - have accused the left wing of employing advocacy anthropology for being a slave to the client, if you like, the client often being Aboriginal groups. But I think the evidence that I uncovered makes it quite clear that the integrity of scholarship on the so-called right was very suspect. In fact I think that’s one of the most alarming things of all, that at the same time as the right wing was attacking the politically correct for not being rigorous enough in their scholarship, in fact they were being fairly ideologically blind to evidence themselves.

Terry Lane: And Margaret, there was another reason for the Royal Commissioner coming to the conclusion that she did, that there couldn’t really be any valid objection to a bridge on spiritual grounds, and that is that there’s already a bridge of sorts there, and it’s been there for most of the 20th century, and that’s the barrage that keeps apart the waters that are supposed to meet there, the salt water of the sea, and the fresh water of the Murray. So how did they discover so long after the event of the building of the barrage that it was an offence to traditional beliefs to have any sort of barrier between the water and the sky.

Margaret Simons: Well you say ‘discover’. Those barrages were built back in the 1930s and there was a parliamentary inquiry before they were built. There were dozens of witnesses before that inquiry, a fisherman, farmers, all sorts of people from the local area; not a single Aboriginal witness, which of course is obviously a mark of the times. But in fact there weren’t many forums in which Ngarrindjerri points of view could have been heard at that time, and I think it’s also fair that in recent times Ngarrindjerri culture has been under something of a revival. I think Ngarrindjerri people themselves are more interested in their culture, and in the old stories, than perhaps they were in the early part of the 20th century. But also there’s this whole issue of OK, so the waters don’t meet any more, except on those occasions when the barrages are opened, and so the Royal Commission said ‘well this whole mythology to do with the meeting of the waters doesn’t make sense any more’. I suppose one could look at other religions and say ‘do the dietary restrictions in the Jewish religion or the Muslim religion make sense any more in modern times?’ And you could certainly mount an argument saying ‘not as much sense as they would have once’. But do we then say that people are lying when they say that they have genuine beliefs about those matters? Does the virgin birth make sense? Is somebody who believes in the virgin birth lying?

Terry Lane: You’re asking the wrong person here, I’m a materialist rationalist.

Margaret Simons: You don’t say that somebody who does believe those things is lying.

Terry Lane: Oh no, of course you don’t say they’re lying. But I rather warm to the dissenting women, they were my sort of women. And you should tell us about them. But by and large they seem to be assimilated, they identify themselves as Christian and at least one of them took the position that there’s no point in living in the past, it’s not going to do Aborigines or anybody else any good living in the past. This is the 21st century and in the 21st century we build bridges. And if you’re going to go looking for a justification for building a bridge in Aboriginal mythology, you’re not going to find it, because they didn’t build bridges. So in that sense the dissenting women are the realists in this story.

Margaret Simons: Well I don’t know about that. Many of them are very much Bible-believing Christians.

Terry Lane: Yes, well we’ll overlook that for the time being! They are essentially assimilated.

Margaret Simons: But then so are most of the Ngarrindjerri. I mean it depends on what you mean on assimilation of course, and that’s worth unpicking, but all of the Ngarrindjerri, both the proponent women and the so-called dissident women, to outward eyes, lead largely Western European lives. They live in ordinary houses, they’re not living in tribal situations, they have jobs, they raise families that go to ordinary schools. Depending on what you mean by assimilation I don’t think there’s a great deal of difference in the way that they live their day-to-day lives. And many Ngarrindjerri, probably most, are Christian. But they do tend to hold their Christianity in different ways, and I think one of the dividers between those women who believed in secret women’s business and those who didn’t, was that some hold their Christianity as being consistent with the Dreaming stories, they see the Dreaming stories as a kind of Old Testament, if you like. And others see them as being pagan and wrong and directly counter to their Christianity. And that is one of the things which I think divides the believers from the non-believers.

Terry Lane: Rather than using the analogy that you do of we don’t call Christians, Muslims and Jews liars because they believe something that we don’t believe, in fact that we think is clearly preposterous, what we have to take into consideration here is that secret and untestable beliefs were used to impede trade. Now while we might not think trade is all that important in the total existential scheme of things, nevertheless, to find a better analogy you would have to say ‘would we allow a Federal government Minister, like Robert Tickner, to make a decision on the basis of information that he is not permitted to read from a sealed envelope that had been prepared by Freemasons, who had said, “this material can only be read by another freemason”’. I think we’d think that that was pretty silly.

Margaret Simons: Well of course the Minister has the power to ban a development if he or she, - or this is under the legislation that existed at the time - if he or she finds that it’s of significance to Aboriginal culture in this case, and the development would desecrate the site. They don’t have to decide that way, they simply have the power to decide that way. Now obviously whether or not they do is very much open to debate. And one thing I’d want to make quite clear, I don’t think there’s anything in my book which says this bridge should not be built. Development should stop if Aboriginal beliefs impede it. I think it leaves open the question of how on earth do we handle it, when two cultures clash.

Terry Lane: Absolutely.

Margaret Simons: It’s very complicated, but I think it’s a very bad start to call one side liars.

Terry Lane: No, but I’m talking now specifically about the decision that Robert Tickner made to place a ban on the construction of the bridge on the basis of something that he didn’t know anything about, to wit: the contents of the two sealed envelopes. What did the Federal Court say? When the Federal Court had to pass judgement on whether or not the Minister had behaved properly in this case, what did they say?

Margaret Simons: The Federal Court said he should have read them. And indeed that the developers should also have been able to know enough of their content so they could respond to it, so that the rules of natural justice were met. And so the Federal Court has effectively said that when you have a clash between, if you like, Aboriginal lore and Western law, that Western law has to hold. But of course we have Native Title tribunals and the Federal Court dealing with this sort of clash all the time, and mechanisms have been developed by which the knowledge can be made available to a very restricted number of people, and confidentiality is observed, and that actually works quite a lot of the time. Of course in this case, it all started with the secret women’s business being tabled in parliament and that’s not a great way to build trust.

Terry Lane: No. Finally Margaret, the ABC occupies a curious position in this whole story. The ABC was seen as the media outlet favourable to the true believers and the commercial media was seen as being biased towards the dissenters. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that distinction being made. On the one hand I’m quite happy to say that the commercial media seem to be far too ready to side with the dissenters, but I wouldn’t like to think that the ABC was uncritically on the side of the true believers.

Margaret Simons: Well this comes out of the Adelaide context, of course. It was generally speaking the Adelaide ABC I think which was seen in this way, and it’s part of journalism practice I suppose - and I’m not defending any of the players in this, ABC or otherwise - but certainly significant elements of the commercial media I think were quite demonstrably biased in favour of one point of view. The Ngarrindjerri women, the proponent women, then chose the ABC as their outlet of choice. Now what journalist, given access to a story, access to sources, says ‘no, I don’t want to talk to you’. So to some extent that’s being in the right place at the right time, or whatever, I don’t know. But certainly I think there were cases, there were instances in this when you could accuse nearly all of the journalists involved, of not being prepared to listen to alternative points of view, for being too ready to accept one point of view as being final.

Terry Lane: Yes. Mr and Mrs Chapman seem to have been pretty even-handed in suing media outlets who they felt had damaged their reputation.

Margaret Simons: They’ve been very vigorous in defending their interests, certainly.

Terry Lane: And as we know, their case against the Conservation Council of South Australia I think is now subject to appeal, and if the office bearers of the Conservation Council don’t win, they face very serious financial consequences.

Margaret Simons: That’s right.

Terry Lane: And in fact how have the Chapmans finished up? They’ve been at one stage at least, bankrupted by this whole affair. What’s their position now?

Margaret Simons: Well the, as I understand it, the children of Tom and Wendy Chapman who are the originators, are now running the marina, which I believe is successful. There’ve been property sales and so on going forth. So they’re still there and still running their marina, which is what they originally wanted to do of course.

Terry Lane: And have you driven across the bridge?

Margaret Simons: I have.

Terry Lane: And how did you feel about that?

Margaret Simons: Well I suppose one of the things I’d hoped for this book is that when people drive across that bridge, that little bridge in that little corner of South Australia, that it promotes some reflection, some thought about what’s actually happened there and what it means, not only for Ngarrindjerri culture but for our own, because I actually think that that’s the most significant thing, that we promised independent scholarship, we promised fair judicial process, we delivered something quite different, and I think the implications for being true to our own culture, and the values of the Enlightenment, if you like, are quite profound.

Terry Lane: Well, people can read it and make up their own mind. ‘The Meeting of the Waters: The Hindmarsh Island Affair’, written by Margaret Simons, published by Hodder on Monday of this week.

Margaret, thank you very much.

Margaret Simons: Thanks very much, Terry.

Source: ABC Radio: The National Interest

related links :

• Victors wrote the history in the first battle of our culture wars
  May 9 2003 - The Hindmarsh Island bridge affair was the starting point for the new tide in Aboriginal affairs, particularly the pro-assimilationist approach that has characterised the Howard Government's policy agenda. It was the start of the still-raging "culture wars". I came to think of it as one of those big, even archetypal stories that tell us something about who we are, the way we connect to land, and how we exist in this continent.
• New bridge in Australia opens old wounds
  March 5, 2001 - The Guardian (UK) - The opening of a bridge in south Australia has reignited a 10-year conflict between Aborigines, white Australians and academics, writes Patrick Barkham.
• Hindmarsh Island affair revisited
  ABC PM, Monday, 12 May , 2003 - Streaming media RealAudio,Windows Media

Further information: social justice issues page - includes news index and external links