Is it reasonable that Jim Everett – puralia meenamatta – defies our justice system? The Aboriginal elder refuses to appear before the ‘colonial court’, as he calls it, for trespassing on forestry land on 19 March, aiming to stop native forest logging. A warrant for his arrest has been issued. If he is hauled before a magistrate, he will say that “the court has no jurisdiction, we’re not Australian citizens….we were never asked.” Meenamatta, a plangemairreenner man of Ben Lomond, is the descendant of chief mannalargenna’s daughter wobbety. As such he has the status of a chief, from a line that has never had opportunity for a just treaty.
Colonial experience is central to his view. But first some twentieth century history, a bit dry perhaps – unless you were on the wrong side of it.
According to the legal system which Jim rejects, he was born a British subject and was six when the Australian Citizenship Act 1948 made us all Australians. But it was an inferior citizenship for Aboriginal people. Many social iniquities persisted until the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. Until the 1960s they could not vote in Queensland and Western Australia. Voting equality was not achieved until 1984, with compulsory enrolment for Indigenous people.
Until the 1980s we all remained British subjects who could appeal to the Privy Council. Jim was 44. Today the Union Jack, or “Butcher’s Apron” as some call it, still flies.
Winding back in time, Aborigines born before the Nationality Act 1920 were wards of the state and treated in a similar way to Asian “aliens”.
More damagingly, from federation until the referendum of 1967, Aboriginal affairs were left to the states. State-sponsored violent dispossession, and the deluded intent “to smooth the dying pillow” of the Aborigine, continued well into the 1920s.
Tasmania was an outlier, but also callous, because until the late 1960s it insisted that it had no Aboriginal population, only some “half-castes”. Jim says his family left for Victoria for a decade when he was 4, to escape racism and to improve self-esteem.
By 1900, most Tasmanian Aboriginal families had been removed (or had moved themselves, fleeing racism) to Cape Barren Island where they were effectively segregated from non-aboriginal people. But from the early 1930s, with the new policy of assimilation, child welfare legislation was used to remove Aboriginal children, mainly to the north of the state. Thus the second long period of this island’s stolen generations began, the first having been in the early 1800s.
To get to the nub, why would puralia meenamatta rail against the “colonial court?” Perhaps the answer does lie in the legacy of that period. Governor Phillip was instructed to treat Aborigines as “within the King’s peace” – as Subjects of the King. Without treaties this was doomed, and so in the 1820s and with rich productive lands at stake, the long pendulum of the colonial office swung to a war footing. Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and The Colonies, instructed the governors “to oppose force by force”, which in 1828 Van Diemen’s Land meant martial law and shoot on sight.
The colonial pendulum swung back in 1837 when Lord Glenelg placed Aborigines once again “within H.M.’s Allegiance.” Despite this and other pangs of conscience from “home” (and some genuine concern here – G.A. Robinson thought Aborigines were “legitimate proprietors of the soil”) the dispossession accelerated on mainland Australia, especially after a weary Crown granted colonial self-rule from the 1850s.
Meanwhile, in Tasmania, the Aborigines who were said to not exist were illogically denied voting rights until 1896.
This shocking history illustrates a colonial multiple policy disorder that could not have been designed better if one actually wanted to destroy a civilisation. But more shocking, and demeaning for us all, is that today some Australians even reject the simplest and most honest of processes – truth-telling.
Meenamatta’s words “we were never asked” are politely put. In fact, when paredarerma chief tongerlongeter met George Arthur on 7 January 1832 for peace talks, the normally fastidious governor kept no record. Ten days later the paredarerma were shipped to Flinders Island for a promised short stay that lasted fifteen ghastly years. Mannalargenna was similarly deceived by Robinson.
Despite sympathy and a certain admiration, any so-called agreements were hollow. British Christian might was right, while customary law was abused as a curiosity as late as 1985 when ancestral bones were finally returned and cremated at Oyster Cove. Even then waubedabar, the admired rescuer of two drowning sealers off Bicheno, had to be cremated for a second time twenty years later, when half of her skeleton was found in TMAG’s zoological collection.
Puralia meenamatta says that Aboriginal philosophy is diametrically opposite to that of the western world. Rather than the latter’s focus on extraction of resources and degradation of land, waterways and sea, Tasmanian Aborigines stress “the oneness of all life” and protection of country – the Styx Valley, takayna and other wild places. In the face of many frustrations, Jim has been living this deep health-giving philosophy, “learning to understand”, for well over half a century. It commands respect.
Craig Brown is a retired GP who worked in Aboriginal health in Central Australia in the 1980s and again in the past decade. With thanks to puralia meenamatta.
Resources:
- The books “Tongerlongeter” by Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements, 2022 and “Truth-Telling” by Henry Reynolds, 2021.
- “Pathway to Truth-Telling and Treaty”, Report to Premier Peter Gutwein, by Prof Kate Warner & Prof Tim McCormack, 2021.
https://www.dpac.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0029/162668/Pathway_to_Truth-Telling_and_Treaty_251121.pdf - 3. Aborigines treated as aliens.
https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ALRCRefJl/1999/5.html#:~:text=Under%20the%20Nationality%20Act%201920,Social%20rights. 4.Video recording of speech by puralia meenamatta at “Activism at the Margins” conference, Melbourne, 2019.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrVLkasvb_I&t=2s
