CONSTITUTIONAL CON: THE ORIGINS OF THE ULURU STATEMENT & TREATY

01/08/2023

The “Uluru Statement from the Heart”, and the proposed referendum to include an Indigenous advisory body within the constitution and the parliamentary process has been a topic of debate within Australian politics for some time. The Uluru Statement’s origins begun on the 26th of May 2017, at the First Nations National Constitutional Convention.

Fully understanding this issue requires learning about the 1967 referendum, the legislation of the Land Rights and Native Title Acts, the Mabo decision, the Barunga Statement and the role of resistance by Indigenous people internationally. This series of articles seeks to explain these pivotal events in the fight for national liberation culminating in the Uluru Statement, to provide a short history of the movement through their lens. Unfortunately, this series cannot cover every important moment in the Indigenous struggle.

Note: the Uluru Statement from The Heart will be referred to as the “Uluru Statement” or “the Statement” within the series.

THE WAVE HILL WALK OFF AND THE 1967 REFERENDUM

Source: Museums VictoriaPhotographer: Jon Augier, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In 1953, the government of the Northern Territory (NT) ruled that all Indigenous people within the Territory were to be made wards of the state. In 1959, the Wards Employment Regulations stated the conditions of work as well as the amount that Indigenous workers were to be paid, either in rations or wages. Indigenous people were paid up to 50 per cent what non-Indigenous workers in the same occupations earned – while some NT companies refused to pay them at all.

Many of the Indigenous workers in the NT worked as stockmen on vast cattle stations. In 1965 the North Australian Workers Union, representing the stockmen, applied to the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to remove the references to Indigenous workers in the NT’s pastoral award that allowed the low rates of pay. After intense negotiations, the Arbitration Commission agreed to increase the wages of the Indigenous workers to that of their non-Indigenous co-workers however, the increase would start in three years, rather than immediately.

In protest of the ruling, Indigenous pastoral workers declared a strike in April 1966 at the Newcastle Waters Station. Although the strike was defeated, worker anger led to another Indigenous strike just four months later at the Wave Hill Station. The station was owned by the British multinational meat packing company, the Vestey Brothers, and was located on the lands of the Gurindji people, where many of the workers were from. At the “Wave Hill Walk Off” of August 23rd 1966, an estimated 200 Gurindji people went on strike. The Gurindji people were led by a man named Vincent Lingiari who remarked at the time that, “I bin thinkin’ this bin Gurindji country. We bin here longa time before them Vestey mob.”

As the Gurindji continued their fight, other Indigenous activists protested and organised across the continent. In the year prior to the Gurindji Strike, students from the University of Sydney, inspired by events in the US, enacted their own version of the famous “Freedom Rides”. Led by Indigenous organiser Charlie Perkins, they drove on buses into Moree and Kempsey in Northwest NSW, towns with a high indigenous population. Their aim was to challenge the local laws which barred Indigenous people from entering local swimming pools and bring national and international media attention to the segregation within Australia.

A petition campaign also begun in 1962 led by the Aboriginal Australian Fellowship (AFF) and the Federal Council for Aborigines Advancement (FCAA), and reached 100,000 signatures by the end of the year. The petition may sound familiar. It called for a referendum to change the constitution to improve the living standards of Indigenous people. The organisations lobbied Parliament for years until on the 23rd of February 1967, Prime Minister Harold Holt announced a referendum would occur that year based off the petition. The referendum’s questions were to be the following:

“Do you approve the proposed law for the alteration of the Constitution entitled 'An Act to alter the Constitution so as to omit certain words relating to the people of the Aboriginal race in any state and so that Aboriginals are to be counted in reckoning the population'?”

The referendum is commonly thought to have been held for two purposes. The first was to count Indigenous people in the Australian census and the second, to allow Indigenous people the right to vote in Australian elections. Although it is true that Indigenous people would be included in the census, the referendum did not specifically alter the constitution to provide them the right to vote.

Aside from altering Section 127 of the Constitution, which read “in reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted”, the referendum, and the petition that preceded it,  also sought to amend Section 51 (xxvi) as well, which previously read that the Federal Parliament could make laws in respect to: “The people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws”. The referendum sought to remove the words “other than the aboriginal race in any State” from Section 51(xxvi). Why?

Prior to the referendum, the State governments in Australia dealt with the Indigenous population in their states separately and independent of the Federal government. The petition argued that the State governments’ policies had not been working, that poverty was rife in Aboriginal communities and that equal standards should be applied by the Federal government. Therefore, the aim of the amendment of Section 51, was to allow the Federal government power to legislate specifically on behalf of the Indigenous population, bringing them under its jurisdiction. Essentially, the Holt Government used the wave of protests and support for the Indigenous rights movement for a referendum to grow the power of the Federal government and further the assimilationist policies it was supposedly refuting.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Australia, the fight was not over. The Wave Hill strike was still on and in April 1967, the Gurindji took the struggle to the next level and made the historic move to Daguragu (Wattie Creek), moving their strike camp closer to their people’s sacred sites. After the move to Daguragu, the Gurindji people submitted multiple petitions to the Governor General asking to lease a large section of land around Daguragu.

Much of the support for the strike came from the political “left”, including the student and trade union movements, who were also a major source of support for the Referendum which was held on the 27th of May, a month after the move to Daguragu. With support from both sides of Parliament and no official opposition campaign (sound familiar?), 90 per cent of Australians voted in favour of the constitutional changes.

The decision to support the referendum may seem straight forward and common sense, but the negative effects were felt almost immediately. Because the Federal government now had legislative power over the state governments, state run “missions” and settlements, where Indigenous people were forcibly moved to during colonisation were shut down. Many of these missions were located on the same lands Indigenous people were from. This created another forced relocation of the indigenous population, however this time, to crowded urban centres and away from their traditional homelands. The sudden exodus into major cities resulted in high levels of unemployment and homelessness as well as further entrenched the loss of culture and language. Instead of systematically removing Aboriginal people from their land, the Government could (and should) have handed these missions back to the people who had lived there for tens of thousands of years, and supported these communities to become self-sufficient.

The legal result of the referendum was another battle won in the slow war of attrition against the Indigenous population, and further encroachment over their sovereign rights. The Gurindji people spent years sending petitions to the Governor General and were rejected until, in 1973, under orders from the recently elected Whitlam Government the lease over Wave Hill was surrendered. The land was divided into two leases, between the Vestey Brothers Company, the one which refused to pay wages to the Indigenous workers, and the “Murramulla Gurindji Company”, which was a corporate body which “represented” the traditional owners.

In 1976, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory was passed, once again with bipartisan support, which established four Land Councils. The Central Land Council which was responsible for the Southern half of the NT and the Northern Land Council, which was responsible for the Northern half. The Tiwi Land Council was also established and was responsible for the Bathurst and Melville Islands and the Anindilyakwa Land Council took responsibility for the Groote Eylandt and Bickerton Island.

So much for land rights.