FROM IGNORANCE TO UNDERSTANDING:
A PERSPECTIVE ON THE RECONCILIATION JOURNEY

SPEECH BY

EVELYN SCOTT

CHAIRPERSON

COUNCIL FOR ABORIGINAL RECONCILIATION

AT A FORMAL DINNER OF
ST JOHN’S COLLEGE

UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND

TUESDAY 22 AUGUST 2000

Thank you Doctor Mellick, for those kind words of introduction. Reverend Doctor Morgan, students and Old Collegians of
St John’s. I’m delighted that you asked me to talk to you this evening. I’m aware that the college frequently engages in discussions of major public issues at functions such as this. I am therefore very pleased that, by inviting me here, you have recognised the importance of reconciliation as an issue for Australia.

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge that we’re here on the country of the Jagera people, the original owners of this land. I acknowledge the living culture of the Jagera people, and the unique contribution they make to the life of the Brisbane region. I hope tonight to stimulate some discussion among you of just what this reconciliation is all about, and I hope you’ll find in my remarks some support for the assertion that reconciliation may be seen as a progression from ignorance to knowledge and understanding. I believe there are three main things to think about when you approach the issue of reconciliation from that perspective. The first is a set of historical facts that shows us that the need for reconciliation has arisen.

The second is a more recent set of facts that shows us that the Australian people have recognised that the need exists. And the third is to look at how our society has responded to that need – what are we doing about it? You can trace the need for the process right back to 1788, when the British began the long process of colonising the continent we now call Australia. On the 26th of January 1788, the British claimed sovereignty over the whole of mainland Australia. By doing that, they installed – or purported to install – their own Common Law above the traditional laws and customs of all the Aboriginal peoples who occupied the land when they arrived. As the most important part of that claim, they denied the existence of any form of Aboriginal ownership of land – the so-called doctrine of Terra Nullius. That was the original and most basic cause of the need for reconciliation.

The need grew stronger – although few Europeans knew it – as the dispossession and disruption of Indigenous communities spread over the continent in the following 150 years or more. The people were taken from their traditional lands, their children were taken from their mothers, they were punished for using their own laws, cultures and languages. Their physical health was devastated by new diseases brought in with the settlers and convicts from another part of the world. First pastoralists, and later miners, foresters and fishermen, went about their commercial business with no regard for Indigenous sacred places and ordinary land usage. This roughshod approach, by the way, meant that virtually everyone in those industries was incapable of learning valuable land management lessons from the traditional custodians of the land. In time, the need for reconciliation took on another dimension. As the European way of doing things began to dominate, it became possible to see just how badly off Indigenous people were, as measured by the Europeans’ own yardsticks.

The effects of settlement on Indigenous health were, of course, apparent from early times. But we’ve known for decades now that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are easily the most disadvantaged group in our society in terms of housing, education and employment as well. And along with all that, we have the indefensible situation where Indigenous people – children in particular – make contact with the criminal justice system at a level that’s quite simply inexcusable. These injustices, these compounding inequities, made up a real need for something to be done to repair relations between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the wider society. The original rights of Indigenous peoples had been hijacked, yet they were clearly denied their fair share of the ordinary citizenship rights of other Australians under the imported legal and political system. Then along came the realisation of that need. It’s a matter of debate when that started to happen.

Some say the referendum of 1967 was the turning point. In that referendum, more than 90 per cent of Australian voters agreed that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should finally be counted as part of the population. (For the benefit of those of you from beyond these shores, the great conventions which drew up the Australian Constitution in the 1890s did in fact consider this question. They decided not to bother counting Indigenous people, in the confident belief that we would soon die out.) The referendum of 1967 also determined that the Federal Parliament should have power to make laws for Aboriginal people. This was a power previously reserved for State Governments under the Constitution and, regrettably, their exercise of the power had historically produced some of the worst abuses of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s rights.

Within the decade after 1967 some important things happened. The federal Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 offered a range of protections to people of all races within Australia, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Northern Territory land rights law, passed by Federal Parliament in 1976, was a pivotal recognition that Indigenous peoples had been deprived of basic rights, and should have at least some of those rights restored. And we saw the beginnings of federal programs trying to deal with the economic and social disadvantages of Indigenous people that I mentioned a moment ago. That was part of Australia’s realisation of the need for reconciliation – it was the recognition of the desperate plight, in social and economic terms, that many modern-day Indigenous people found themselves. And in that Northern Territory land rights legislation, we saw the beginnings of another recognition that was necessary before reconciliation could really be attempted.

That is, at least some people began to see the links between past injustice and present disadvantage, and they began to see just how important lands and waters were to the traditional and cultural identity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In the post-referendum period, the rise of organised political groups within Indigenous communities added gradually to the wider society’s awareness of some of the deeper issues. Land Councils were first, followed by groups focussing on material issues like health and housing, and by the 1980s there was a strong emphasis on Indigenous rights, including demands for self-determination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Then in 1991, many of those links between the history of cultural, economic and physical mistreatment and the present pain of social and economic disadvantage, were laid out in detail for the first time. That was when the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody went behind the scenes to look at the causes of the high rate of Aboriginal deaths. The Royal Commission drew many very disturbing conclusions, and a lot of its recommendations are still being addressed today. However, the Federal Government did act quickly on the very last recommendation of the Royal Commission. It was that the nation should attempt a formal process of reconciliation, and that’s where the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation comes into the story. Soon after the Royal Commission reported, Federal Parliament voted unanimously to set up the Council, with a fair spread of Indigenous and non-Indigenous members and a fair spread of people from different walks of life. Now we’re nine years down the track, and my Council has only a few more months before we go out of existence on January the first next year – the Centenary of Federation. So what has the Council, and the nation, actually done so far in its quest for reconciliation?

One of the Council’s problems in its early years was that there were still a lot of Australians who could not see the need for reconciliation. The Deaths in Custody report had alerted many thoughtful Australians to the seriousness of the cultural and economic factors behind the modern status of Indigenous peoples. But much more needed to be done. People had to be told more about their own history. If they knew the full story, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians would be better able to come together – to be reconciled – and forge a united future. This is an area where I think we’ve made a lot of progress, and for a number of reasons, so I want to talk for a couple of minutes about why I think that. Some of the reasons for our improved understanding of Indigenous issues stem from the work of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, others were the initiatives of governments and communities, and others, well, they just happened.

One such "accidental" advance came in 1992, with the High Court’s famous decision in the Mabo case. As you probably know, the court decided in that case that the British were wrong when they made that assumption, back in 1788, that no-one owned the land they were colonising. Indigenous peoples did own the land at the time, and Eddie Mabo and his friends still own their land on Murray Island in the Torres Strait under what the court described as native title. What’s more, similar native title probably still existed in some other parts of Australia where Indigenous peoples could show a continuous cultural association with the land. Of course not many Aboriginal people could do so, because of the long history of forced removal from their homelands, but the judgment certainly made a lot of Australians sit up and take notice. It was a great breakthrough. Among its other ramifications, the judgment was supremely important in telling all Australians that they had an Indigenous heritage; that Indigenous law and culture not only had existed, but still flourished in some communities.

The politics surrounding the Mabo judgment and later legal decisions have threatened to derail the reconciliation process several times. But the High Court’s decision itself stands as a landmark on our journey towards greater understanding and respect between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The other big outside event that helped my Council’s work came in 1997, when the nation heard the full story of what we now know as the "Stolen Generations". Many, many Australians had no idea about the full extent of this practice of taking children from their Indigenous mothers and sending them to institutions. They had no idea that the practice went on for many decades, and they were very saddened when they heard about the terrible effects it had – and continues to have – on the thousands of families that suffered under it. The practice was tragically misguided, but its public exposure in 1997 again, like Mabo and the Royal Commission, forced many Australians to think a little harder about their own history, to reflect on how the last two centuries might look through the eyes of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Recognition of the need for reconciliation was therefore given a boost by the wide dissemination of new information. The knowledge base had grown. Meanwhile, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was doing its bit to actually bring about reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and the wider Australian community. Some of what we’ve done has been up-front and widely publicised. Other things, we had to work for quietly and patiently, helping to build co-operation between other groups who could really get something practical done. I think one of the most important decisions the Council has made was back in 1993, when it decided to set up and support a People’s Movement for Reconciliation.

When people in local communities get together to hear each other’s stories, to understand each other’s cultures, to work through the issues that concern them – then they’re paving the way for real reconciliation in their own backyards. It’s been one of the big jobs of the Council to get this message through to communities all over Australia, and to support local communities when their Indigenous and non-Indigenous people do get together to work out how they can make reconciliation a reality in their communities. From small beginnings in 1993, there are now hundreds of local reconciliation groups all over Australia, quietly creating understanding where there was ignorance, co-operation where there was antagonism and mistrust. This community-based commitment has spread through churches and other faith groups, into workplaces, schools, a diversity of organisations and into our homes. The People’s Movement for Reconciliation is now a powerful force within Australian society. That point was surely demonstrated in the most exhilarating way when the people turned out in such huge numbers for Corroboree 2000. A quarter of a million people in Sydney, 70,000 here in Brisbane, 40,000 in Adelaide, 20,000 or more in Hobart and many more people from towns across our country expressed their support for reconciliation as they crossed bridges together symbolically crushing the gap that has for so long existed between black and white Australians.

I was in Townsville just three days ago, when thousands of people came together and displayed their support and commitment to reconciliation. All those people who supported Corroboree 2000 were no doubt making a general statement of commitment. But they also knew in advance what the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was proposing in its Declaration Towards Reconciliation and the associated Roadmap for Reconciliation. The idea of a formal document or documents was an option that Parliament specifically asked the Council to look at back in 1991. We looked at it. We concluded that reconciliation documents could truly uplift and unify the nation, and at the same time lay down an agenda for what still needs to be done to complete the journey to lasting reconciliation. We spent several years talking to the Australian people about what might be in such a document, and many months of hard, careful thought have gone into its form and its wording. When we produced draft documents in June last year, we subjected them to probably the biggest round of public consultation ever attempted in this country.

Guided by a huge amount of feedback from the consultations, we produced the final documents that were formally presented to the nation at Corroboree 2000. The people knew what was in our documents – we deliberately published the text some weeks before the event. They also knew the difficult political climate in which we produced the final documents. Yet they turned out in their hundreds of thousands to support our work as well as the ultimate goal of reconciliation itself. The success of Corroboree 2000 was a triumph for tolerance over racism, for understanding and respect over mistrust. It was also a triumph for knowledge over ignorance. That, I believe, is one of the most significant achievements of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation – and Australian society – in this past decade. I’d like to conclude my remarks with some thoughts about that achievement and the role of education in bringing it about. In 1992, the Council took an opinion poll which suggested that just 42 per cent of Australians thought reconciliation was a significant issue. In research we had done early this year, 81 per cent of the people surveyed believed reconciliation was an important issue for Australia.

We’ve come a long way in eight years! We used that most recent research mainly to back up our consultations on the documents of reconciliation. My council considered it vital that we were aware of what the people of Australia thought, as well as the thoughts of those people who took part in our consultations. There were, frankly, some disappointing aspects of the findings about community awareness and support for what we considered key reconciliation issues. But there were also some very positive results. There was one specific trend in our research data that gives me a lot of encouragement and pleasure. It was the tendency for young people to be noticeably more positive about reconciliation and about issues such as the recognition of Indigenous rights and the special place of Indigenous peoples in the heritage of this country. For example, 57 per cent of the overall population favoured a document of reconciliation. The proportion who favour a document among 18 to 24 year-olds was 72 per cent. That’s a very big difference. And again, a very disappointing 38 per cent of all people recognised the connection between current disadvantage and the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were mistreated in the past. In the 18 to 24 years group, that recognition factor was 51 per cent.

So it went on. It seems that young people are more aware of the real issues involved in reconciliation, and they want it to happen in their own communities as well as in the nation as a whole. This may well have something to do with what young people are learning about Indigenous issues – and Australian history – in schools today. I suggest that people going through our education system today are probably better equipped to understand and deal with the issues involved in reconciliation than any previous generation of Australians. That’s because at long last, our schools have started to offer students some insight into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and culture.

The shared history of the last two centuries is being put into perspective – the perspective of the previous 50,000 years of Indigenous custodianship of this land, and the perspective of Indigenous experience, as well as European experience, of the last two centuries. That’s a great breakthrough in our education system, and its a trend that’s continually being reinforced. About eighteen months ago, for instance, Australia’s two biggest non-government school systems, the Catholic and the Independent schools, both made national commitments that will increase the quantity and quality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies courses, and promote the ideals of reconciliation in their schools. A good number of their member schools were already moving in that positive direction, but there’s no doubt the national commitments will build on those gains.

Similar advances are being made at the tertiary level. All or virtually all of our universities now offer courses in Indigenous studies. They may vary in their scope and depth, but they are there, and undergraduate interest seems great enough to sustain the departments offering them. Some States have included Indigenous cultural awareness and Indigenous issues in their teacher training courses. In some universities, Indigenous studies and Indigenous cultural awareness training are either a mandatory or recommended part of courses for other relevant professions, such as nursing, medicine and the law.

I really find all of this very exciting. I can see a future – a not-too-distant future now – where there’s an ample supply of teachers equipped to teach Indigenous studies and balanced history. I can see the curriculum for Indigenous studies and current Indigenous issues becoming broader and more challenging for students at all levels. I can see an Australia whose citizens generally are aware – and proud – of their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage. It’s a nation that’s genuinely come to terms with the awful parts of past relationships between Indigenous peoples and other Australians. It’s a nation brought together by knowledge, understanding and trust. Knowledge, understanding and trust:– they are basic building blocks for the ultimate success of reconciliation and the creation of a truly just Australian society. I believe we’ll get there, and Australia will be a richer country for our success.

Thank you.