Rights for Aborigines

By Bain Attwood, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2003, 406 pages, paperback, $39.95. Reviewed by David Ritter in the October 2003 issue.

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Bain Attwood is a New Zealand born, Monash University-based historian of cross-cultural relations in Australia whose first book, The Making of the Aborigines, was published in 1989. His latest work, Rights for Aborigines, is a 'representative' if 'not comprehensive' series of historical case studies of campaigns for rights for Aborigines, beginning in late nineteenth century Victoria and ending in 1970s Canberra. In Making, Attwood suggested that pan-'Aboriginal' identity had been 'made' in the course of colonisation and in Rights he argues that campaigns for Indigenous emancipation are also 'inherently historical' in nature (xii). The result is a nuanced history of ideas as well as events, depicting multiple struggles and differing conceptions of 'rights for Aborigines'. Rights, Attwood would agree, are a relationship, and not a thing (xiv and see pp 215-16).

Rights is published in the midst of two complicated and bitter public debates related to the central subject matter of the work. Firstly, a number of Attwood's case studies concern the Yorta Yorta peoples of Victoria and New South Wales: the same group that were told by the Federal Court in December 1998 that their native title had been 'washed away' by the 'tide of history'. The result was upheld on appeal by the High Court of Australia four years later, just as Attwood must have been completing Rights. The Court has attracted significant criticism for its decision and, in a sense, has an implicit detractor in Attwood, who stresses the continuities in Yorta Yorta history (for example, pp 77-80). However, the thesis advanced in Rights is not wholly antithetical to the Court's finding, because in conceding the historical contingency of Aboriginal aspirations to land, Attwood gives tacit succour to the (legal) conclusion that Yorta Yorta society today may not (to use the language of the High Court) be the same 'normative system' as existed at sovereignty (see, for example, pp 239, 248, 249, and 321).

The other public intellectual context in which the reviewed work appears is the 'history war' surrounding Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Sydney, 2002). Attwood admits 'a commitment to addressing the wrongs the colonial past has bequeathed' (xiv) and when the division bell rang, opposed Windschuttle (including as co-editor of Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, Canberra, 2003). However, while Attwood may have entered the lists, Rights is evidence that Windschuttle's many critics do not comprise a monolithic orthodoxy. Windschuttle would no doubt concur with Attwood's suggestion that 'perhaps ... some historians have wanted to turn disparate campaigns for rights for Aborigines into an orderly historical tradition so that it can be enlisted in present-day political struggles for indigenous rights' (xiv): but what they do not share is an imagination for conspiratorial intent.

Attwood is interested in the motivations of the activists he describes and, at times, Rights has the feel of a prosopography. Although both 'black' and 'white' activists are dealt with in Rights, Attwood devotes more attention to the latter and is (perhaps bravely) critical of historians whom he regards as having over-emphasised the autonomy of 'black' activists (xiii). A number of matters raised by the book invite further work. Attwood details the vanguard, but while the activists were agitating, what did the majority do? Similarly, while the book is predicated on a careful study of the documentary record, Aboriginal people's oral traditions about the events in question await future study. The countervailing forces are also beyond the work's ambit but, ultimately, how does one understand a struggle without the opposition? After all, people who opposed 'rights for Aborigines' will have done so for mixed and shifting reasons.

Rights can be criticised for sputtering out at its spatial and temporal perimeters. For example, Attwood bypasses serious treatment of the critical Milirrpum v Nabalco decision in 1971 with the disappointing line: 'In a nutshell, the burden of history had defeated the Yolgnu's historical claim'. (p 306) It is a weak summation that discloses another limitation: 'rights' are generally enshrined by law and to understand their historicity, it is necessary to appreciate, in mechanistic terms, what they entail. It is a synthesis that Attwood achieves splendidly in relation to the 1967 referendum, but it is sometimes lacking elsewhere. Nevertheless, these censures are very much of a tertiary nature, as befits a clever and thoughtful book: the relationship between Indigenous peoples and land is often essentialised, and Attwood has successfully interrogated the axiomatic. Rights for Aborigines is thoroughly welcome: sophisticated and critical, while still sympathetic and aversive to polemic, it is a haven for the reader of thoughtful and equivocal mind during a time of polarising history wars.

Citation

• David Ritter. 'Review: Rights for Aborigines by Bain Attwood' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), October 2003. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• We cannot help but wonder why it has taken the white Australians just on 200 years to recognise us as a race of people'. - Bill Onus, 1967
  
  In recent times the 'Aboriginal rights agenda' has come to be seen as an abysmal failure. Forged in the heady days of the Freedom Ride and the Tent Embassy, this political programme has simply failed to deliver. 'Citizenship rights' and 'land rights' were meant to sweep Aboriginal disadvantage away. Yet, forty years on, most Aboriginal people are as badly off as they ever were.
  
  Why is this so? And who is responsible for this state of affairs? And whay are and what should be the lessons of history?
  
  At a time of heated debate about the history of black-white relations in Australia, and the future direction of Aboriginal policy in this country, comes this ground-breaking account of the struggle for Aboriginal rights in Australia by one of our most respected historians, Bain Attwood.
  
  What has been the relationship between rights and race, the Australian nation and Aboriginality, over the last century and more, Attwood asks? And what does history tell us it could be? In this subtle yet penetrating historical treatment of these vital questions, Bain Attwood enables us to see the rights agenda anew and so imagine a better future for Australia.

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