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Aboriginal protest of Nazis marked

By Henry Benjamin

15 December 2002 -- An Australian Holocaust museum is dedicating a plaque to commemorate a protest staged by Aborigines against the mistreatment of Jews in prewar Nazi Germany.

The plaque, which was slated to be dedicated this week at the Melbourne Jewish Holocaust Museum, commemorates a resolution that an Aboriginal delegation attempted to present to the German consul general in Melbourne in 1938.

The delegation, headed by William Cooper, brought with them a resolution condemning the persecution of both Jews and Christians in Nazi Germany, but the German consul, D.W. Drechsler, refused them access to the building.

The story of the protest was published in two Melbourne newspapers at the time but slipped into obscurity.

Then, in 1999, Jonathan Morris, executive director of the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Center, learned about the protest from Gary Foley, an Aboriginal activist who had studied the Holocaust at Melbourne University.

Once the museum's board learned about the event, it decided to erect the plaque.

The plaque will also acknowledge that the museum, founded in 1984, is built on land which is traditionally owned by the Kulin people, an Aboriginal group.

It is believed that the protest was one of the first Australian public protests in support of German Jews.

Today, Melbourne's 50,000-member Jewish community includes about 8,000 Holocaust survivors.

Wayne Atkinson, a great-nephew of William Cooper and a lecturer in Indigenous Studies at Melbourne University, said he was surprised to learn that his relative's activism extended to Jews.

Atkinson added, ``The recognition by the Jewish community of the work of Uncle William and the Aboriginal movement is a wonderful gesture.''

Source:Cleveland Jewish News

Holocaust Museum honours Aborigines

Peter Kohn

To the stirring sounds of a didgeridoo, more than 300 members of the Jewish community, including Holocaust survivors and their families, joined key representatives of Aboriginal communities, and local, state and federal politicians at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre on Sunday for the dedication of two plaques honouring the Aboriginal community.

One plaque, placed inside the museum, commemorates the little-known 1938 protest by Aborigines against the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany; the other, located at the entrance to the building, acknowledges it is on Kulin land.

Referring to a December 1938 resolution which the Australian Aborigines' League (AAL) took to the doors of the German Consulate in Melbourne in the wake of Kristallnacht, Holocaust Centre president Shmuel Rosenkranz said: "The world was silent - except here on this island continent of barely seven million people, a group, an ancient people, took action. We salute them because we, as an ancient people, appreciate their action."

In a passionate address that sparked a standing ovation, retired Federal Court judge Justice Marcus Einfeld took the audience through the decades following World War II and the Holocaust, touching on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Cold War, the New World Order of the 1990s and the scourge of global terrorism - all of these undermining the lofty ideals of the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights which sought "the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world" after the annihilation of millions during the war.

"The proud tradition of support for human rights and dignity in this country casts upon us a great responsibility. As the largest developed democracy in our region, indeed the sixth oldest democracy in the world, Australia not only has an obligation to speak out and act against persecution in other countries, we have an obligation to prevent and remedy human rights abuses on our own soil."

He slammed the architects of the Stolen Generations and those who now seek to excuse those actions as "well meaning if misguided".

Drawing loud applause across the hall, he said he makes no apologies for his views. "If they represent what some have been pleased to call a 'black armband view of history', I for one wear it as a mark of sorrow and a commitment to reconciliation. Rather a black armband than a white blindfold to shut out the truth."

Turning to the present-day situation, Justice Einfeld said Aborigines face rates of unemployment, disease and imprisonment many times those of white Australians.

"The continuing sufferings of indigenous Australians are undoubtedly our greatest and most long-standing shame - and the deprivations endured by the children are the very worst aspect of that shame."

Justice Einfeld said Australian society's attitudes today was "a mix of the good, the bad and the positively ugly" and declared: "Together with our appalling treatment of asylum-seekers seeking rescue and refuge from persecution, terror and worse, the continuing neglect of Aboriginal aspirations and our continued denial to them of anything approaching dignity, decency and respect, respresents a challenge to our generation that we have no right at all to avoid or fudge."

Victorian Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Gavin Jennings said: "The erection of these plaques is an important act of friendship and reconciliation between two peoples, each of which have suffered much during their recent history."

Troy Austin, an official with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), symbolically welcomed the audience to Kulin land.

He said he would not compare Aboriginal missions with Nazi concentration camps but spoke of the 1930s as a period when theories of "social Darwinism and the superiority of the white man" were rampant.

He voiced his dismay at last Thursday's High Court decision to reject the Yorta Yorta claims to land rights on the Victorian-NSW border and called for "a national conversation about what we face as indigenous peoples".

Author and human rights activist Arnold Zable said he learned to view the loss of Aboriginal culture and identity through his family's experiences in the Holocaust. Both peoples had suffered attempts at physical and cultural genocide but throughout his schooling "not once did I hear the names of the Wurundjeri, Boonerwrung and Kulin".

"That's an extraordinary omission," he said.

The "massacre maps" he discovered near Treblinka bore a chilling similarity to maps of Aboriginal massacres around Victoria. "When I drive around Melbourne now, I see two cities, the city we've built and to some extent can be proud of, especially our postwar multicultural society, but I also know the ancient maps and boundaries."

Dr Wayne Atkinson, a lecturer in indigenous studies at Melbourne University and grand-nephew of AAL founder Dr William Cooper, described him as a pioneer of indigenous land rights.

While Aborigines have won rights such as citizenship, their struggle for land rights has not advanced much from the 1930s, he said. "There is now a sense of irony that the [High Court] decision takes us back to the days of our political struggle under William Cooper, back to the days of my great-grandparents."

Source: The Australian Jewish News

Bridge-building with the Aboriginal community

EDITORIAL

If there is one man who personifies Australian Jewry's battle on behalf of the Aboriginal people it is the late Ron Castan QC, lead counsel in the landmark Mabo case that led to the historic 1992 High Court decision and the 1993 Native Title Act.

On his untimely death in October 1999, it was Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander Commission chairman Geoff Clark who best summed up Castan's contribution: "I think it would be fair to say that if there had not been a Ron Castan there would not have been a Mabo or a Wik case in the High Court."

But when the Mabo decision was handed down in 1992, Castan - a civil libertarian, jurist and human rights campaigner who had taken up the mantle of Aboriginal reconciliation back in the early 1970s - knew it was the beginning, not the end, of the long road to reconciliation.

Just six months before his death, Castan - in an address at a Forum on Land, Memory and Reconciliation - lamented what anthropologist Professor Bill Stanner called "the great Australian silence".

"[My] determination not to stand by and see the Jewish people downtrodden and persecuted was meaningless if I was standing by and seeing another oppressed people downtrodden and persecuted within my own country."

He blasted the Howard Government and those who accused supporters of Aboriginal reconciliation of adopting a "black armband" view of history, charging that "every non-Aboriginal Australian is a participant in and a victim of the 'cult of disremembering' or 'the great Australian silence'".

Castan implored Australians to say "sorry", to remember, to never forget - a lesson he grew up with in the post-Holocaust Diaspora.

And he went even further, claiming that "the refusal to apologise for dispossession, for massacres, for the theft of children, is the Australian equivalent of the Holocaust deniers - those who say it never really happened".

For Castan, the answer to the Holocaust deniers and those who use terms like a "black armband" is "to write more books, give more talks, fight more native title cases in the courts, tell more stories of the Stolen Generation... so that the cult of disremembering may never take hold again".

It is this, the importance of remembering, the culture of "lest we forget", that was the most significant factor in Sunday's ceremony at the Jewish Holocaust Museum, which acknowledged that the museum stands on land belonging to the Kulin Nation, and honoured the heroic stance taken by the Australian Aborigines' League (AAL) in protesting the Nazis' treatment of the Jews in December 1938.

That act of courage undertaken by William Cooper and the AAL was not just in defiance of the official position of the Australian Government, but the entire Western world.

Consider that just five months prior to the Aborigines' December 1938 protest outside the German Consulate in Melbourne, US President Franklin D Roosevelt gathered delegates from 31 countries to meet in Evian, France, for an international conference to discuss the refugee problem after the Anschluss.

For more than one week the international delegates paid lip-service to the refugee problem - and then turned their backs, effectively sealing the fate of much of European Jewry.

And yet, just months later, Aboriginal elders living thousands of kilometres away from Nazi-occupied Europe and who did not even enjoy the basic human right to vote for another 29 years, stood up for Jewish rights.

What Cooper and other members of the Aboriginal community did on behalf of the Jewish people was truly heroic and was rightly, albeit belatedly, acknowledged on Sunday. It represents yet another bridge between the two communities, which are bound by a fundamental nexus based on an appreciation of memory, land and of the bitter experience of persecution.

The AAL's protest fell on deaf ears - their deputation was refused entry to the consulate in Melbourne - but our people survived the "Endlosung", the Nazis' Final Solution of the Jewish problem, and the Aboriginal people survived what Castan described as "Australia's own version of genocide".

"Until 1967 the constitution expressly stated that they [the Aborigines] were not to be counted as people when a census was conducted. Mark it well: they were not just 'non-citizens' - they were 'non-people'," Castan said, noting the similarities between the Jewish and Aboriginal experience. In that sense, the Jewish and Aboriginal communities are both descendants of survivors.

AT the unveiling of the plaque on Sunday, Justice Marcus Einfeld acknowledged the inadequacy of a "black armband" view of history, but offered the prime minister and those who refuse to acknowledge the wrongdoings of the past a fitting riposte: "Rather a black armband than a white blindfold to shut out the truth," he said.

For Australia to move forward, the past - the good, the bad and, as Justice Einfeld put it, the "positively ugly" chapters of Australian history - must be acknowledged. Last week's High Court decision to reject the Yorta Yorta's bid for native title is another reminder of the work yet to be done in the reconciliation process.

Castan and other Jews in the legal profession helped the Aborigines overturn the legal fiction of terra nullius, and it is an honour to his legacy that Jews and Aborigines continue to build bridges of reconciliation between our peoples.

Above all, the Holocaust Museum's decision to recognise the Kulin Nation and honour the AAL this week was an important remembrance ceremony that will help consign "the great Australian silence" to the dustbin of history.

Source:The Australian Jewish News

Jews and Aboriginal reconciliation

Peter Kohn and Aviva Bard

An anecdote is told among Australian Jewish barristers that when the Keating Government was preparing its Native Title Act in the early 1990s, an unidentified Aboriginal official asked why there were so many Jewish lawyers involved.

After reflecting on his question, he then offered his own answer: "I guess you don't have to tell Jewish people about human rights."

That may well be the underlying factor at the root of a relationship that has seen Jews actively involved in the reconciliation process.

The chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), Geoff Clark, believes so. Citing various barristers, most notably the late Ron Castan - whose pivotal role as lead counsel for Eddie Mabo led to the historic 1992 High Court decision which granted native title and then to the Keating Government's Native Title Act of 1993 - Clark said the support of Jewish institutions over native title is based on a shared history of persecution.

"That relationship stems back from those early days when Aboriginal people were protesting a range of issues over being dispossessed from their land," he said. "The support system that we've got from Jewish people with their resources has been very helpful."

According to barrister Jack Fajgenbaum, whose friendship with Castan dated back to their days at Melbourne University's Law School and who ended up working with Castan on the Mabo case, the special relationship between Jews and Aborigines is also premised on "a shared understanding", "a sense of lost culture" and "the importance of memory".

Federal Court judge Justice Alan Goldberg, also a close friend of Castan, vividly remembers the early days of the Aboriginal Legal Service set up in Fitzroy in 1972 by a group of barristers including Castan, Professor Louis Waller, Federal Court judge Justice Ron Merkel and former ALP MP Gareth Evans.

In Sydney too, Jewish jurists took up the mantle for the Aboriginal community. The current Chief Justice of the NSW Supreme Court, Jim Spigelman, joined Aboriginal leaders, including Charles Perkins, on the celebrated Freedom Ride in the 1960s through rural areas, drawing attention to the discrimination suffered by Aborigines and highlighting their atrocious living conditions.

And internationally-regarded human rights advocate Justice Marcus Einfeld, who received the United Nations social justice award two months ago, has been outspoken in his advocacy of Aboriginal reconciliation.

On a community level, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) has been active in promoting reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

ECAJ president Jeremy Jones is the current chairman of the Faith Communities for Reconciliation - the largest group representing people from all-known faiths in Australia who work together on Aboriginal reconciliation.

And an ECAJ resolution passed this year calls on Jewish organisations to speak out in favour of reconciliation and to participate in the annual Week of Prayer for Reconciliation and in annual National Reconciliation Week.

Jones points to the fact that any type of racism is "of major concern" to the Jewish community.

The Jewish community has been able to play a major role in reconciliation, he says, because "the relationship between Jews and Aborigines was not one of us missionising, unlike with many of the other Christian groups".

Visiting Sydney in 1997, six Northern and Kimberley Land Council women who were on their way to lobby in Canberra met with Ethnic Communities Council chairperson Tony Pun and ECC anti-racism convenor Josie Lacey to issue a statement of support for native title.

Learning that two of the women were involved in the Stolen Generations, Lacey, who is also honorary secretary of the ECAJ, invited the women to visit the Sydney Jewish Museum. Emotions ran high as Lacey guided the women through the Holocaust section - the visitors crying unashamedly. One of the women remarked that now she understood why the Jewish community stood in the forefront on the issue of human rights for the Aborigines and why we so readily understood their pain.

"We now have an understanding what dispossession and exile have meant for the Jewish people", they said to Lacey.

Mark Leibler credits Castan with opening his eyes to the issue of indigenous land rights and the many features the Jewish and Aboriginal communities have in common. "The fact that I'm on the board of Reconciliation Australia owes a lot to the inspiration of Ron Castan whose attachment to Aboriginal people was emotional, long-standing and deep."

Summing up Castan's contribution after his untimely death in October 1999, Clarke said: "I think it would be fair to say that if there had not been a Ron Castan there would not have been a Mabo or a Wik case in the High Court."

Justice Goldberg, who shared chambers with Castan, told the AJN: "Over a number of years he laid the groundwork to make sure that the case was right to test and that the relevant principles were established.

"Ron's contribution to Aboriginal land rights was quite profound, extending back to his first case on that subject in 1972. He became a passionate supporter for recognition of land rights and put an enormous amount of work into preparation of the Mabo argument. He worked for reconciliation with passion and conviction."

Source: The Australian Jewish News

Rather a black armband than a white blindfold

Marcus Einfeld

This is truly an amazing function. Not only did no-one know or recall until recent research by Andrew Markus and Gary Foley that William Cooper and his Australian Aborigines' League (AAL) had in 1938 protested the treatment of Jews by the German Government and sent a deputation to the German Consul-General in Melbourne, but no-one even now realises how courageous that initiative was.

At that time Aborigines were not even recognised as Australians. At that time, everything an Aborigine did was controlled by government. As the government of the day was not exactly outspoken in defence of the persecuted Jews of Germany - it had effectively refused at the Evian Conference to contribute to their rescue - you can imagine what the authorities thought of a band of Aborigines speaking out of turn at all - let alone confronting the representative of a so-called "friendly" country.

For most of these last 54 years since the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Australia has been one of the leaders in accepting the humanitarian standards it identifies. As a middle power with a respected human rights record, Australia has been looked to and listened to by the international community on human rights issues.

This proud tradition of support for human rights and dignity casts upon us a great responsibility. As the largest developed democracy in our region, indeed the sixth oldest democracy in the world, Australia not only has an obligation to speak out and act against persecution running rampant in other countries, we have an obligation to prevent and remedy human rights abuses on our own soil. And the standards we must observe are those we set for ourselves, not alien credos which we loudly, and rightly, reject.

The driving force for the enthusiastic adoption of a humanitarian approach in Australian terms is the evolution of our nation into a society where laws, employment and human relations reflect decency and honour; where legitimate controversy is fought and resolved with a passion devoid of stereotypes, and of minority, group or racial defamation; where a fair sharing of our country's resources and benefits is open to every sector of the community; and, above all, where decisions of all kinds stem from considerations of merit and true deserts, free from preconceptions, prejudices and prejudgments.

However, we Australians are today in serious danger of forgetting these goals. Continuing to recall and nominally respect the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and all the other human rights treaties is one thing. It is quite another to ensure that our governments and people actually honour these rights. And as of late our commitment is looking decidedly hollow, and the world is taking notice.

At present, our society represents a mixed bag of the good, the bad and the positively ugly. While we rightly receive international acclaim for, amongst other things, our scientific, technical and sporting triumphs, we also receive criticism for our insidious treatment of asylum-seekers and policies either designed to discriminate between our own citizens or having the effect of doing so.

If we accept the praises, balance and truth require us also to examine and prise open our consciences as we question both the substance and direction of our nation and people today.

Surely our generation has a responsibility to ensure that our nation continues to be a champion of honourable and humanitarian conduct. Yet because we appear as a nation not to be questioning our societal constructs today, we are at best wondering aimlessly, permitting our development to be steered in many directions, not all of them desirable.

Contrary to what some of our leaders claim from time to time, breaches of human rights and decency occur every day in Australia and all of the so-called developed societies. We fall far short of our obligations to children, women especially those in poor circumstances, people with disabilities, refugees, new migrants, senior citizens and others.

We need a little less economic rationalism and a little more rational economics. And judging by our reactions to the recent boat arrivals and shocking events overseas, we are even losing our compassion and tolerance for others different to ourselves. I am a proud, patriotic Australian - but I have been ashamed at some of what we have been up to of late.

There can be no doubt that the continuing sufferings of indigenous Australians are undoubtedly our greatest and most long-standing shame - and the deprivations endured by the children are the very worst aspect of that shame.

Many people in this country speak of everyone having or being given equal rights in our society. This is a glib, albeit seductively expressed, point of view. Equal treatment of people on unequal levels at the outset of the equalisation process merely perpetuates the inequality.

Hence the superficially attractive appeal of "everyone should be treated equally" as from now is in fact a recipe for retaining differences, imbalances and discrepancies because of the commencing inequality.

When used in relation to our indigenous peoples or to new migrants, for example, it is also surreptitious and insidious discrimination if not racism. For whether conscious or unconscious, the consequences for the victims are exactly the same.

The truth is that Australia's indigenous peoples still face gross inequality deeply rooted in history and the prejudiced, intolerant or stubborn attitudes of the white community. Whichever social indicator is looked at, whether it is health, education, justice, employment or housing, indigenous Australians are identified as the most disadvantaged group in the country. This situation represents a manifest and fundamental breach of Australian and international law. What it says about the morality of our nation I leave you to contemplate.

Many wrongs have been committed against our indigenous people and their ancestors during almost 215 years of European civilisation in Australia. As Gary Foley and many others have written with notable erudition, genocide was undoubtedly carried out against them. Not only did they not deserve what they received, it cannot all be laid at the door of the past.

Certainly past generations acted quite appallingly and in a most violent and discriminatory way. The Stolen Children experience was not, as it has been described by some people who should and do know better, "well-meaning if misguided". To my mind, this is just another example of a great Australian cover-up. In any country and every language, kidnapping is a criminal offence. So are rape and assault. Stopping youngsters from ever seeing their parents again may and ought to be criminal. It is certainly gross immorality.

Slave labour in the US was outlawed by Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago. The Australian convict settlement ended about the same time. Yet as late as the 1970s, many stolen children were effectively enslaved to white farmers and were the victims of all those other crimes. Many of these Aborigines are alive today. Many of the white people involved are also still with us. An apology is the least we owe for that wickedness.

But our generation has an even more solid case to answer as well. On this very day, against a national figure of around six-seven per cent, the Aboriginal adult unemployment rate, including indigenous persons who forgo their rights to unemployment benefits to participate in community development employment projects, is 41 per cent, and is expected to rise to 48 per cent by 2006; unemployment among indigenous youths is 18 times worse than their white counterparts; the average income for indigenous adults is some 30 per cent lower than the overall Australian average; and the deaths of Aborigines in official custody are still happening, even increasing, despite a $30 million investigation by a judicial inquiry.

It is well known that the mortality rates among indigenous people continue to greatly exceed the rest of the population at all ages in both genders, particularly among infants. But it is not as well acknowledged that indigenous Australians are more likely than the rest of us to be sick from almost every type of disease or condition for which information is available.

Most of them are symptomatic of the poor living environment in which most Aborigines live. The Aborigines concerned have no power themselves to improve those matters.

In terms of education, almost 50 per cent of those aged 15 years and over receive little or no formal education. For almost one third, the Year 10 certificate is the highest educational attainment. Although their participation rate in higher education has risen in recent years, it remains way less than other Australians and their success and retention rates are about 20 per cent lower.

Only a little over 11 per cent of indigenous people are likely to have a post-school educational qualification as opposed to more than 40 per cent for non-indigenous people.

The imprisonment of blacks continues to be far greater than whites everywhere in this country, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics reporting last year that the rate of Aboriginal imprisonment was 15 times greater than for the rest of the population.

Statistics extracted by the Institute of Criminology last year showed that in New South Wales, where Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders represent less than two per cent of the population, they account for a third of the juveniles in detention and a fifth of adult female prisoners.

We continue to deny indigenous people the very equal opportunity to a fair chance in life which we Australians like to call a "fair go" for all. Which is not to say that Australia is not a wonderful country - I would say the best in the world - and that we are not generally a kind and generous people. It is just that we are not as good as we say or think we are. Indeed, while this situation persists, we are engaged in an empty untruthful boast about our allegedly superior standards.

These things should not be happening. The things in the past should not have happened. Together they are human wrongs, not for blame in the crude sense, but for the deepest regret and for a commitment to put them right as a matter of the utmost urgency. It can never be right to be wrong - or to continue a wrong. We certainly do not need to convict ourselves of a past which we did not influence and over which we had absolutely no control.

But future generations will undoubtedly judge us harshly if we do not respond now.

If these matters represent what some have called "a black armband view of history", I for one wear it as a mark of sorrow, and as a commitment to reconciliation. Rather a black armband than a white blindfold to shut out the truth.

Together with our appalling treatment of asylum-seekers seeking refuge and rescue from persecution, terror and worse, the continuing mistreatment and neglect of Aboriginal aspirations and our continuing denial to the people of anything approaching dignity, decency and respect represents a challenge to our generation which we have no right at all to avoid or fudge.

Jews know this treatment better than any and should be helping to lead the building of a national non-racial revival. I am shocked by what I hear from some Jews, even some Holocaust survivors - so ignorant, so forgetful, so disrespectful of human struggle and endeavour. I reject this attitude and call on its proponents to start again.

They and the rest of us have an obligation to educate ourselves, families and friends so that the justice which we never hesitate to demand for ourselves is found for those, especially the children, who suffer today.

There is no more fundamental task for honourable people than to uphold the sanctity of the human condition. We Australians see ourselves normally as honourable people, but we have undoubtedly strayed from our path in this instance and a few others.

It is time for attitudinal change on this issue. We are no longer cherishing the principles we have so enthusiastically promised to uphold for our children and for children all over the world.

Nelson Mandela said on his last visit to Australia just over two years ago: "One of the most difficult things to do is not so much to change society as to change ourselves."

It is up to us to make that change. Our people and our leaders must be made to realise that it takes a stronger nation to admit its errors, and to learn from them, than to pretend that nothing went wrong in the first place. We cannot continue to deny or explain away past appalling treatment of indigenous peoples and ignore their present plight. Nor can we tolerate attitudes towards them which would redefine our country as some type of monoracial or elitist white fortress.

Let us stand as one to reject the inhumanity and loose racism that have driven our policies and attitudes in this area. In its place, let us decide with quiet but unflinching determination to treat those who ask for nothing but their entitlements as Australian citizens in exactly the same way as we would ask, and expect, for ourselves.

This is nothing less than a fight for rediscovery of our nation's soul. We dare not fail. In my opinion, we have not a moment to lose.

Justice Marcus Einfeld is a former justice of the Federal Court of Australia and of the NSW, WA and ACT Supreme Courts. This is an edited extract of his address on Sunday at Melbourne's Jewish Holocaust Museum.

Source: The Australian Jewish News

An Aboriginal Walkabout in Israel

by Mark Schulman

SHALOM MAGAZINE, 2001 Issue No. 2 - This reporter visited a MASHAV graduate in Australia. Mark Schulman, a journalist stationed in Canberra while his wife, Noa Furman, works as First Secretary at the Israel Embassy in Australia's capital, discovered that Lynette Liddle (International Institute, 2000) is implementing what she learned in Israel at the same time that she is doing pioneering work among the Aboriginal people of her nation.

Gundagai, Wagga Wagga, Collingullie, Narrandera. The names of the towns only got stranger and more difficult to pronounce as I drove deeper into the heart of rural New South Wales towards Leeton, a small town of 7,000 some seven hours by car from Sydney, the state's capital.

Leeton is an agriculturally-based community within Australia's Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, a flat and featureless two thousand square kilometer region responsible for producing most of the country's rice, as well as 75% of New South Wale's wine grapes and citrus fruits. It's January, the middle of the summer in the southern hemisphere, and the harvest season is coming to an end. Wheat is being loaded into the silos and farmers are burning off their rice stubble in order to prepare for next season's crop.

It is against this backdrop where I met Lynette Liddle, one of the Israeli Foreign Ministry's Center for International Cooperation's (MASHAV) newest graduates and first Aboriginal woman to receive a training course scholarship.

Lynette, an education officer with the Murrumbidgee College of Agriculture, recently returned from Israel where she completed a course on Women's Empowerment for the Management of Peoples' Organizations at the Histadrut's International Institute in Kfar Saba.

The one-month MASHAV course was designed to enable participants to have a better appreciation of gender issues in the workplace and the community, as well as to advance women in leadership roles in their respective countries.

Being a leader and community role model is certainly not a new concept to Lynette, who was the first Aboriginal women to receive a Bachelors of Science in agriculture from the University of Adelaide in South Australia and a Masters in Science in environmental management and development from the Australian National University in Canberra. "Both these degrees were Australian firsts," Lynette told Shalom Magazine. "I was one of the early pioneers for future Aboriginal science graduates."

Lynette joins a distinguished list of accomplished Australian Aboriginals, which includes Olympic 400m gold-medallist Cathy Freeman and Senator Aden Ridgeway, the second indigenous Australian to be elected to the federal parliament. Senator Ridgeway visited Israel in 1999 as a member of the Australia-Israel Parliamentary Friendship Group delegation.

Others have also visited Israel, including two Aboriginal doctors who have ecently received scholarships from the Australian Friends of the Hebrew University and the Israeli Embassy in Australia to pursue Master's degree in public health at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In addition, a delegation of Aboriginal leaders from the Northern Territory Central Land Council visited Israel in 1999 to explore possibilities of cooperation in the areas of agriculture, aquaculture and regional development.

Although Aboriginal people have been living in Australia for over 50,000 years, as confirmed by their world-famous rock paintings, today, they make up only 2% of the country's current 19 million population. According to the Australian Department for Aboriginal and Torres Straits Affairs, indigenous Australians are much less likely to complete high school than other Australians and are even more less likely to pursue post-school qualification. The statistics, however, are starting to improve a bit. In 1999 some 8,000 indigenous students were attending higher education courses, up from 3,300 in 1988. Females comprised 63% of indigenous higher education students.

Despite growing up on a remote cattle station, near Uluru (Ayer's Rock) in central Australia, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest town and school, getting an education was always top priority.

"My greatest influence was my great-grandmother," Lynette recalled. "Even though she didn't have any formal education, she was the one who told us kids to stay in school and keep studying."

That advice certainly paid off as Lynette and her four siblings moved to Alice Springs for high school, and then on to college where they each pursued separate professional careers. Her twin sister became the first Aboriginal policewoman in Australia and her brother was the first Aboriginal airline pilot for Qantas, Australia's national carrier. Another sister is a journalist and the fourth sister is a teacher.

For the past several years, Lynette has been working within the Australian agriculture sector, with a particular focus on Aboriginal issues. As an education officer for the Murrumbidgee College of Agriculture's Aboriginal training program, she works specifically on rural and economic development projects for Aboriginal landholders.

"Here at the College, for the time being, I'm an education officer and do research on Aboriginal issues relevant to New South Wales agriculture, including commenting on submissions, government policy, water reform, native vegetation, and how that affects Aboriginal people and what should be the considerations. I advise and assist them [Aboriginals] in preparing property plans, feasibility studies, land use options and managing rural resources," she added.

Working with the Aboriginal community has been a large part of Lynette's life and career. She has been committed to helping Aboriginals participate in the rural economy so that they can make decisions within their own communities.

Lynette addressed these issues during the course of her program in Israel. As each participant was required to prepare a project designed to benefit members of their organization or community, her project focused on enhancing cooperation between Aboriginal scientists and land managers.

"Herein, I believe, lies the opportunity to empower Aboriginal people in Australia to undertake cooperative activities and to adopt and understand principles that can facilitate more sustainable livelihoods from their complex and diverse agricultural system."

"The project I worked on in Israel was on cooperative enterprises for wildlife management for Australian Aboriginals. Basically, on Aboriginal farming cooperatives to supply and provide the products from wild animal harvesting and management. It included animals like kangaroos, crocodiles, goannas."

Although the course was supposed to be on women's empowerment, it went well beyond its title. "Most of the subjects were taught within the context of gender issues, but the real strength of the program I felt was on economic development," she said. "I learned more in this course than all the years I studied economics," she added.

She also had a chance to learn about Israel and its people, which is another MASHAV goal. Through the wide range of courses the Center offers, it has always been an important vehicle for encouraging cooperation in the fields of agriculture, technology, education and medicine between Israel and developing countries.

In Lynette's course there were participants from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, as well as from Papua New Guinea in the Pacific region, all visiting Israel for the first time.

"I really knew nothing about Israel or the Jewish people before coming," Lynette admitted. "It's not like you see them walking around the desert in central Australia."

Although coming from a world away, there were several similarities that reminded her of home, particularly the aridity of the land and lack of water, as well as the numerous eucalyptus forests found throughout the country. Thousands of eucalyptus trees from Australia were planted in the 1950s by Israel's early pioneers to help drain the malaria-infested Hula Valley swamps and other parts of country.

Despite an intensive schedule of coursework and field trips, Lynette did manage to take some time at the end of the program to experience Israel on her own. She took the opportunity of free time to visit Jerusalem and Yad Vashem, Israel's national museum dedicated to perpetuating the memory of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

"I believe the best way to find out about another's culture is through their art galleries and museums," Lynette said about her experience. "I was shocked to learn about what happened to the Jewish people in Europe during World War II, especially to women and children. But, I was equally amazed how your people emerged from the ashes and this gave me a sense of hope and inspiration."

The Aboriginal people have been fighting with the Australian government to recognize the injustices done to them throughout the years of colonial settlement, particularly the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents in the 1950s in a misguided policy of assimilation. It has only been recently that the government has worked to improve Aboriginal health, education and land rights. Aboriginal leaders, like Lynette, continue to work in their fields with the aim of presenting their unique and indigenous viewpoints and as a means to bring about some form of reconciliation.

Back in Australia, with the lessons she learned from her course in Israel still fresh in her head, Lynette is busy working on new projects and writing up government policy submissions that will affect the future of the local indigenous people.

In fact, she has recently started a new position as manager of cultural and natural resources with the Australian Ministry of Environment in the Uluru Kata-Tjuta National Park in Central Australia. Closer to home, she is now responsible for ensuring the values and concerns of the Anangu people, who jointly manage the park with the Australian government.

As for her future, she isn't thinking that far in advance, but mentions the idea of pursuing a PhD in agricultural policy. If she succeeds, it is sure to be another Aboriginal first.

Source: Israel Ministry for Foreign Affairs

related links :

• The Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre, Melbourne
• Aboriginal Reconciliation: A Jewish 3-point plan

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

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