Wootten, Hal; Brunton, Ron --- "Letters to the Editor" [1998] IndigLawB 68; (1998) 4(14) Indigenous Law Bulletin 23

Letters to the Editor

From Ron Brunton

Hal Wootten's splenetic review of Betraying the Victims (ILB, June 1998 [1998] ILB 44; 4(12)pg4), presents a highly misleading account of the arguments I presented in my critique of Bringing them Home. I have placed a point-by-point rejoinder to Wootten, as well as to other commentators, on the Institute of Public Affairs' Internet site, www.ipa.org.au, but I would like to discuss one matter here by way of illustration.

An essential component in Bringing them Home's 'genocide' charge was that the removal of Aboriginal children was predominantly intended to facilitate the disintegration of Aboriginal culture. Without this objective, forced removals could still be serious breaches of human rights, but any basis for saying they might be 'genocide' would evaporate.

As one part of my case against the genocide' claim, I noted - as historians such as Russell McGregor have done - that in the late 1930s the major Aboriginal spokesmen in the south embraced assimilationist positions, and that this crucial point had been ignored by Bringing them Home. Wootten tries to argue that I used a 'truncated quotation' from Andrew Markus's Governing Savages in order to falsely suggest that William Ferguson and Jack Patten advocated assimilation or absorption. He therefore claims that I am the one who is guilty of omitting vital information, and not Bringing them Home.

But it is perfectly clear in my critique why I used the 'truncated' quotation rather than the original in Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights, and Wootten's unwillingness to explain the reason is unconscionable. I noted that Markus both introduced and concluded the quotation with the explicit claim that Ferguson and Patten were calling for biological, as well as social, absorption. Furthermore, I stated that the authors of Bringing them Home must have seen Markus's claim, because it occurred on the very page from which they had taken a quotation where Ferguson and Patten accused Australians of wanting to exterminate Aborigines. It was the passage from Markus which I said was ignored, not a passage from Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights as Wootten wrongly leads readers to believe.

In my discussion, I stated unequivocally that Ferguson and Patten were strongly opposed to the forcible removal of Aboriginal children, although no-one would suspect I had made such a statement from Wootten's review. Nevertheless, as the authors of Bringing them Home had clearly treated Markus's book as a reliable source of information, I pointed out that it was incumbent on them to at least acknowledge what Markus had written about absorption, 'even if only to argue against its significance'. If Wootten is really unable to see that Bringing them Home could not simply ignore Markus's remarks in the contexts of the arguments it was making, his assessment of my scholarship - or the scholarship of anyone else - cannot be taken seriously.

Hal Wootten responds:

HREOC's report Bringing them Home used Markus's Governing Savages as a secondary source for some figures and quotations, including one from Ferguson and Patten's manifesto Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights. Ron Brunton's very nasty attack on the Report was permeated with the repeated insinuation that HREOC had dishonestly ignored information in a passage seven sentences later, where Markus again quoted from the manifesto, claiming, in Brunton's words that 'Ferguson and Patten were actually urging' cultural and biological absorption. As I pointed out, both the Report and Brunton were very confused about what was meant by cultural assimilation, but it seemed very damning in the context of the Stolen Children if the manifesto had advocated biological absorption. I showed that it had not done so, and was only made to look as if it had by the misleading abbreviation of the quotation on which Markus and Brunton relied.

Brunton now says that I was wrong in treating his attack as based on the fact that HREOC ignored the misleadingly abbreviated thirteen line quotation from the manifesto; he was only referring to the (still misleading) three line summary or 'claim' with which Markus introduced it. Why then did he reproduce the much lengthier quotation and devote his main discussion to it? His first paragraph after the quotation analysed not Markus's claim but Ferguson and Patten's views. The next paragraph spoke of the 'information' Markus provided, and denounced Bringing them Home for providing 'no hint of such information ... even if only to argue against its significance, perhaps by suggesting that Ferguson and Patten's sentiments might not have been representative.’ The words I have italicised complete the abbreviated quotation in Brunton's letter, and make it clear that 'the information' he accused the Report of ignoring was the extract from the manifesto, not, as he now contends, 'what Markus had written about absorption'. He continued in the next sentence to denounce the failure to acknowledge 'that major - and radical - Aboriginal leaders were publicly arguing for absorption at around the same time that assimilation policies were being formulated' (p 14).

As I demonstrated, Ferguson and Patten were not arguing for biological absorption, and Markus quotes no other Aboriginal leader doing so. Even the strong protagonist of European civilisation, David Unaipon, did not want Aborigines to be absorbed but to 'come up fully developed' as 'a new civilised race' to take their stand among civilised peoples (pp 181-2), and William Cooper, who like Ferguson and Patten advocated equal rights and education, vehemently rejected 'absorption of Aborigines into the white population' (p 185).

For any useful discussion of the genocide accusation, it is necessary to make a clear distinction between on the one hand giving Aborigines access to the equal rights, opportunities and education necessary for any meaningful choices about their future, and on the other hand treating their existence as a problem to be solved by making them disappear into the white community. I criticised both the Report and Brunton's critique for failing to maintain this distinction.