On 12th October, 1960, Mr. Nikita Khrushchev considered how to take down a peg or two the Australian Prime Minister (Mr. Menzies--not then a Knight of the Thistle), and at the same time advance the cause of the Soviet Union. He spoke on the "Declaration on the granting of independence to colonial countries and people" and said this . . .

      "the population in a number of colonies, as, for example, in the Congo, has diminished almost two-fold. Everyone knows in what way the Aboriginal population of Australia was exterminated. Mr. Menzies, who spoke here, should not forget this. The same happened in the United States of America; the aboriginal Indian population was exterminated here, the remaining few Indians have been driven into reservations."

      Khrushchev evaluated the Australian Aborigines as important in his bid for the thinking of the world. It is certain that ultimately the Afro-Asians will judge us on our policy towards them. This is an important reason, but is not the major reason why we should care deeply about them. We need to be concerned to treat every human being as a royal soul.

      On 8th December, 1960, the Australian Prime Minister replied to a question of mine by saying:--

      "This is the only reference made by Mr. Khrushchev in the Fifteenth Session of the General Assembly to Australian Aborigines. Mr. Khrushchev also made a somewhat similar reference at a Press Conference luncheon on 7th October, 1960.

      "These statements were made after my main speech in the General Assembly (5th October, 1960) and passed almost without notice among delegations in New York. I and others regarded them as fantastic accusations by a person and a State clearly on the defensive, and I did not believe it necessary or desirable to take any special notice of them."

      I think it doubtful that the attack "passed unnoticed" in Afro-Asian delegations. The Australian Delegation to the commonwealth Parliamentary Association Conference in Nigeria at Lagos in September-October, 1962, encountered a firm conviction in the minds of television and newspaper reporters that the Aborigines had been wiped out. They were quite adamant in the belief that the last of them had died in 1945. The speech which follows was made in the hope that Australians will not brush off criticism of our policy, but make it beyond criticism.

SELF-GOVERNMENT AND ITS EFFECT

      The great mid-nineteenth century explorer of Australia, Thomas Mitchell, at the conclusion of his longest journey of exploration, nearly 120 years ago, wrote:--

      "It would ill-become me to disparage the character of the Aborigines, for one of that unfortunate race has been my guide, companion, counsellor and friend in this Journey of Destiny. Yuranigh was of the most determined courage and resolution. His intelligence, his judgment, rendered him so necessary to me that he was ever at my elbow, whether on foot or horseback. Confidence in him was never misplaced."¹

      Somewhere about that period of time, in the middle of the last century, there had been a turn for the better in racial relations. The first Australian cricket team ever to tour England consisted entirely of Aborigines. The year was 1868. It would be impossible to gather together a team of first-class Aboriginal cricketers today. The team's existence, selected from a much larger group of players in a number of States, reveals the existence of higher degree of social acceptance of Aborigines on the farms and stations than exists today. It is a shock to realise that the first Australians to tread the sacred sward at Lords were Aboriginal Australians, and their opponents were the Gentlemen of England. The team won 14 matches, lost 14 and 19 were drawn.

      It appears to me that, as self-government advanced in the Australian colonies, the status of the Aborigine declined. Successive Secretaries of State for Colonies were always remonstrating with the Governors of the Australian Colonies to the effect that Aborigines were subjects of the Queen, as much as were white people, and that, as British subjects, they must be given the full protection of the law. All colonial history everywhere is full of the conflict on native questions of the white man on the spot with the Government at home. The settler tends to feel the Government at home to be impractical, theoretical and ignorant of the native. The truth is, that, for most of the time, the settler did not know the native at all. All he knew was what he wanted land where tribes might be; labour, which most natives might provide; protection of his flocks and herds from native spearing; and, in any final clash, police or military protection.

LAND

      For one problem the Government in the United Kingdom was entirely responsible originally, although we have been responsible for the last 100 years. This was the problem of land.

      When the sovereignty of George III and George IV was proclaimed over Eastern and Western Australia all land was appropriated by the Crown.

      The original presumption was therefore that all land was Crown land, and all later land titles in Australia derive from these original proclamations, by grant, or by sale, or by lease. No aboriginal right of possession to any part of the continent or to any part of

Tasmania was ever recognised. Even on what are today called Aboriginal reserves, the Aboriginal is an occupant of Crown land, and this land may be granted or leased to anybody else without any legal redress being available to Aborigines (examples being excisions of land from reserves at Yirrkala and Weipa).

      The Aborigines never had the advantage of being regarded as in a state of war against the European settlers, unlike the Maoris of New Zealand, and unlike the Red Indians of North America. No Aboriginal nation was ever recognised. In New Zealand the Crown entered into a Treaty with the Maoris--the Treaty of Waitangi. It recognised Maori land rights. It was treated as a scrap of paper, but in some cases it was brought into force by the New Zealand Labour Government in 1935, which made certain payments and land grants to Maoris in compensation for the non-observance of Waitangi. Anyway, a Treaty existed as a legal agreement, which could be invoked.

      In the last few weeks Red Indians in Florida have received $42,000,000 compensation--a payment based on a proclamation of King George III in 1763 recognising Red Indian land rights in Canada, Florida and West Florida.²

      Australia is unique in recognising no right to any land anywhere based on prior occupation. Even South Africa's apartheid policy presupposes Bantu land ownership.

      The Aboriginal political and legal structure was always, and is now, baffling to Europeans. There was no equivalent of the Red Indian chief with whom Europeans could negotiate. There were no great bands of warriors which would bring to Europeans the consciousness that they were dealing with a nation. There were no wealthy people. Europeans thought of land as a defined area, surveyed and turned into a saleable commodity.

      No idea of possession of land appeared to exist in the original Aboriginal occupancy. No Government attempted to make a treaty on the subject of land. Only Batman did--and his treaty was something of a fraud.

      The Aborigine was not a cultivator, and the boundaries of cultivation produced by economic dependence on the soil did not exist. To the Aborigines the possession of land was a dream-time phenomenon. He did possess land, he was intimately bound to it, but the tie was,. spiritual and religious. If we substitute "dream-time heroes" for "the Lord," then the Aborigine was nearer to the idea "the earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof" than the European.

      European occupiers at all times took the view that as the Aborigine was a nomad he might just as well move on and hunt somewhere else. The spiritual association of a tribe with local land was something only anthropologists might find out by prolonged study. Farmers and squatters were not anthropologists.

      This lack of security in the right to occupancy of any place on earth is the greatest cause of disturbance to many Aborigines, until final dispossession makes a rootless, impoverished, dependent and landless proletariat, always negotiating with government and employer from a position of weakness. That an attachment to the land is deeply felt was discernible in every word of evidence we heard at Yirrkala when the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Grievances of the Aborigines of Yirrkala went to hear what Aborigines who had petitioned Parliament had to say.

      In the pre-European times, intertribal barriers had been strict and inter-tribal contact relatively slight because of confinement of tribes to tribal land. There were definite boundaries. In thousands of years no invasions imposed unity on Aboriginal tribes. Their divisions were

numerous. Today we have records of 600 languages, not 600 dialects, but 600 distinctive surviving languages among Aborigines.

HEALTH

      If these divisions did not help them in the face of Europeans, the divisions did help Aborigines in the face of disease. Until tribal barriers broke down epidemics were confined.

      An article on leprosy among the full-blooded Aborigines of the Northern Territory in The Medical Journal of Australia for 26th April, 1952, points out that leprosy did not exist in the Northern Territory until Chinese labourers were brought in, without medical examination, by the South Australian Government between 1874 and 1888, and even then it did not spread:--

      "This was the natural result of the strict inter-tribal barriers which existed, each tribe being self-contained, remaining within its own hunting grounds and allowing of no intercourse with its neighbouring tribes. The breaking down of these barriers, first by the establishment of the Goulburn Island and Oenpelli missions, near the original endemic area, and later by that of other missions, townships and cattle stations, resulted in the gradual spread of leprosy."³

      The existence of tribal land barriers, then, had in the past been one element of the survival of the aboriginal race, without resources, in a difficult environment.

      I am not speaking specifically of the de-tribalised people of Victoria and New South Wales so much as of the full-blooded Aborigines of Queensland, and the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia, when I say that an acknowledged right to land is the thing they desire above everything else. In our view their use of land is defective. But in evidence given the Committee by missionaries, and far more clearly in the evidence given by Aborigines themselves, land was deeply valued as a place of hunting (including coastal land for fishing), as a source of artifacts and as a place of what one missionary called "spiritual refreshment."⁴ Religion, history and corroborees all revolved around features of the land and the game on it.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY

      One central Australian tribe, when initiating its young men, required them to memorise a saga of 1,000 verses which set out everything about the land, its formation, its water supply, where game was to be found, the edible plants, the origin and purpose of everything at the time of creation, and the history of some of the heroes of the tribe. The economics which enabled the tribe to survive, the geography which assisted hunting, the history which gave meaning to relationships, and the religion which explained origins, were all taught in this way at once.

      Such an intimate spiritual association with the land was missed by the invading Europeans who would possibly have respected land in cultivation, as, indeed, has been the case in New Guinea. The Aborigine lived out his philosophy. His philosophy was transcendent--that is to say, it was pre-occupied with spiritual explanations of the origins and meanings of things, taught in word, verse, song, dance and ceremonial. To most Europeans this spiritual situation did not exist. Where they began to know of it, it all appeared contemptible and absurd. Queensland appointed an ethnograph, Roth, at the turn of the century, but the appointment was not repeated, and other States did not copy it. Until the Commonwealth established the Australian Institute of Aboriginal studies in 1962 there was no direct Government interest in Aboriginal life, languages, religion, ceremonial or

thinking. It took us 174 years to consider officially that there might be anything precious and worth recording about the thinking of the original inhabitants of this continent, apart from the brief sponsoring of Roth's work. No State Government has attempted to record Aboriginal languages or ritual.

      There is no justice or sensitivity in any policy in relation to Aborigines which refuses to give them any security anywhere in land, this central factor in their life. Some suggestions on this will be made later.

ASSIMILATION

      The official policy of all Australian Governments is now "assimilation." The House of Representatives Select Committee on Aboriginal Voting Rights tended to avoid the word, and sometimes used the word "integration" instead. This was because too many different meanings were given to the word by too many of the 300-odd witnesses the Committee heard. Mr. Paul Hasluck, for nearly 12 years Minister for Territories, is the author of the policy and so it is well that we should give it his meanings. I quote him:--

      "Assimilation is an inexact label. Historically it means a rejection of the old idea of protection and caring for the Aborigines as a special class . . . A policy of assimilation means that, if it is successful, the person of Aboriginal origin will be the same as any other person in the eyes of the law, will go to the same schools, do the same jobs at the same wages, live in the same sort of houses, lead the same sort of life, and join in the same recreations and observances as the rest of the Australian community. While we accept that assimilation is the goal, we do not think of assimilation as suppression. I am conscious that the term may be deteriorating into a jargon, and some Australians are now starting to use the term integration as though it had some special value."⁵

      This policy sounds all right, but unfortunately it can be interpreted and is often being interpreted to deprive the Aborigines of special assistance and a special status adapted to their needs. What is more alarming is that all State and Commonwealth Ministers dealing with Aborigines in a joint statement issued from Darwin last year have given it an interpretation which appears to me to mean depriving the Aborigine of something while not adding anything.

      Although every foreigner sympathetic to this country, every British observer or BBC camera, team, can only form the final impression that Aborigines in this country are grossly under-privileged, the Ministers said this:--

      "The Conference noted with satisfaction the considerable progress made since 1961 in the removal of restrictive legislation applying only to Aborigines and the announced intention of the several governments to make further changes of this kind. It recognises the need for retaining, in the interests of Aborigines, some legislation which confers privileges or benefits on them, although the objective of all governments is to provide assistance or protection to all Australians without distinction of race."⁶

      [It would have been useful to know what legislation was considered restrictive and what beneficial.]

      If the Ministers really believe, as this statement implies that they do, that the task before us is to bring the Aborigines from a position of privilege and benefit not enjoyed by the community at large down to a position of equality with the rest of the community, then they have really moved past reasonable discussion.

ALL CHANGES IN LAW NOT BENEFICIAL

      We can now, if we wish, interpret the doctrine of assimilation to ensure that the Aborigines lose everything. We can say to them--"We believe you should be equal to Europeans. Australian citizens of European descent do not have reserves. Therefore Aborigines should not have reserves. Grants of land are not made to Europeans. Therefore we should repeal section 112 of the Land Ordinance of the Northern Territory which permits grants of land up to 160 acres to Aborigines. It is true that in 70 years not one Aborigine has been given a grant of land under this section. Still, this land might be granted and that would not be equality with Europeans who do not get such grants. So, in the name of equality, we repeal it."

      Do not think this is too fanciful an example. In Perth, Western Australia, there were two excellent hostels for Aboriginal children attending technical and secondary schools--one for youths and one for girls. They were closed as being against the doctrine of assimilation. The Aboriginal children should mix. No one asked the Aboriginal parents what they wanted. The children were mixing in schools during the day, anyway, and they had excellent conditions under good influences at night. They liked being with their own kind. Assimilation applied like this becomes a new kind of bossy interference. It is the kind of arrogance which has led to a spirit of resistance among Aborigines so that some Europeans handling them--and we have no right to be handling them as we do--simply despair of Aborigines altogether.

      Colin Simpson, in his book "Adam in Ochre," a keen study of the Australian Aboriginal and Aboriginal policies, has called the attitude of many Aborigines:--

      "A resistance movement against the unthinking oppression of the human spirit by an occupying power that, however benevolent in intentions, says to these people, in effect, 'Our ways shall be yours ways because ours are good and yours are worthless. We are prepared to give you everything we want you to have. If you are prepared to do as we say and do as we do, we shall try to get our people to accept you. We know what is best for you, so it is unnecessary to ask you what you want. You have everything to gain by accepting our plans for you and nothing to lose, because you have nothing that we regard as being of value'."⁷

      "Assimilation" is the opposite of segregation. This is one reason, I suspect, why the term has been adopted. The Australian Government does not want to be accused of apartheid. But at best the term "assimilation" is ambiguous. At worst it is administratively meaningless. It is leading to a complete ignoring of the special needs of the Aboriginal people.

      First let me justify the statement that it is ambiguous. "Assimilation" can mean "being made similar to" or it can mean "absorbed by inter-breeding." Mr. Hasluck means the first--that the Aboriginal will be made culturally similar to the European Australians. But many people, including some welfare officers, mean the second "absorbed by inter-breeding." Some articulate Aborigines call this a form of cultural genocide. Anyway, whatever Mr. Hasluck means, recent changes in Commonwealth and State laws are going to work in the direction of "absorption by inter-breeding," and that on the worst possible terms. [A recent A.C.T.U. declaration says some State laws forbid racial intermarriage. This is not correct.]

      When the Select Committee on Aboriginal Voting Rights was hearing

evidence in 1961 some of the meanings given to "assimilation" became clear. In one town the basic industry was seasonal. Each season an influx of white workers took place. One Aboriginal woman, who had several children, cohabited with all sorts of white men, became drunk and dissolute, and was frequently picked up in the streets paralytic drunk. An intelligent and sensitive magistrate, before whom she appeared on a charge of vagrancy, sentenced her to a term of imprisonment, and prescribed that the term should be served, not in gaol, but on a mission station where her children already were, and with her children, free to move about and care for her children. She was, in effect, sent back to her own people. The magistrate was criticised all over the town by native welfare officers as having "worked against assimilation" in this case. Apparently "assimilation" meant, in their minds, indiscriminate sexual intercourse provided it was inter-racial sexual intercourse.

      One would think that if "assimilation" had any intelligent and humane meaning it would mean equal wages with white men, but almost nowhere is this the case. You cannot live similarly to a European on one-sixth of a European wage, or less than one-sixth.

      "Assimilation" is administratively meaningless. How can an administrator say: "Today I did so-and-so to ensure that Aborigines will share the ideals, hopes, convictions and tastes of the general community of the Commonwealth." It is not a concrete, definite or measurable objective which will put the Commonwealth or State administrations under the discipline of seeing that they are attaining defined goals.

NOBODY BELIEVES IN OUR POLICY

      There is too much Parliamentary bluffing and too much soft soaping of the community on the subject. State and Commonwealth ministers get up in their Parliaments and defend their policies, but not one of them believes in his policy. Don't misunderstand me. I am not accusing them of being hypocrites. They are almost invariably men with a far, far higher sense of responsibility towards the Aborigines than the average member of the Australian community. So are welfare officers, who in some communities encounter real hostility and ostracism from some whites because of their role as defenders of Aborigines. The fact is that the Ministers in the Commonwealth and in the States with a large Aboriginal population do not have adequate money to conduct a proper programme in housing, in adult education and trade training, in land purchase and agricultural training, in health, or in water supplies for Aboriginal settlements or for Aboriginal needs. Everyone of them knows that he needs £2,000,000 or £3,000,000 a year more than he is getting, at least in the Northern Territory, Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland. This is what I mean when I say they do not believe in the policy they are pursuing. Not a soul among them believes in the adequacy of the policy. There is no pressure of public opinion for an adequate policy. In Western Australia the Ministers for Native Welfare is also Minister for Education. This is in some respects a happy arrangement. It has enabled the Minister to do a great deal for Aboriginal education. But if you contrast the two portfolios from the point of view of public pressure for a positive policy you will see what I mean. Hundreds of thousands are interested in some degree in educational policy. Their children are involved, or have been involved, or will be involved. Possibly only some hundreds are interested in Aboriginal policy. If the Minister has not enough money it means, in fact, that the resources,

for Aboriginal policy are inadequate. Naturally, all staff and effort are not adequate.

      What the Minister should say publicly is what some of them say privately--"Of course I can't do an adequate job. The Treasury does not allocate the funds because the community is too indifferent to demand that it should."

CHEAP POLICY

      This is the basis of the temptation to alter Aboriginal laws in ways that will cost the treasury nothing. Aborigines have in the past been forbidden to drink [this type of legislation arose because of 19th century experience of the destruction of tribal people by drink and drugs] so the law is altered to permit it. In the past in some States and in the Northern Territory sexual intercourse between white and black outside of marriage has been unlawful, so the law is altered to permit fornication, Aborigines have not been permitted in some places to buy methylated spirits, so the law is altered to make it lawful. Whether it is wise to do these things when their wages are desperately inadequate, when they are not housed, when an infant death rate seven or eight times the European death rate exists, is arguable. What is not in doubt is this. It does not cost the Treasury a farthing to permit Aborigines to drink, fornicate with Europeans or buy methylated spirits, and in Australia we have a press which has been prepared to delude itself from coast to coast that this is a profound and an enlightened new policy.

      I have not seen in the Australian press that in the 1950's the leprosy rate among Aborigines in the Northern Territory was the highest in the world. If you searched The Medical Journal of Australia you could find that fact. It is still one of the highest in the world. I have not seen in the press of Australia what an American Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land reported in 1960, They wrote:--

      "Leprosy is considered to be endemic at all four settlements visited. Its spread is enhanced by the prevailing conditions of non-segregation and general lack of hygiene. At one station leprous children with open sores mingle freely with other children in ill-ventilated, overcrowded dormitories. Such a practice cannot be too strongly condemned."⁸

      Even when the press does report a grave health question affecting Aborigines there does not appear to be any public reaction. A gastroenteritis epidemic swept away Aboriginal babies near Alice Springs recently. If a similar number of European babies had died there would have been an uproar. The Commonwealth contends it treats this as seriously as it would European deaths, but it does not. With European deaths on that scale there would have been an all-out medical and hygienic offensive.

      You are not going to solve the infant death rate with drinking rights, methylated spirits rights or fornicating rights. However important those "rights" may be, we must recognise they solve nothing. I have the right to drink, to fornicate and to buy methylated spirits. This does not feed or educate my children, house my family, clothe my family, provide employment or solve one problem, physical or spiritual, that I face. Why, therefore, should I join in a fatuous chorus to assert that something marvellous has happened? I know that a community which drinks itself is not in a morally strong position to deny drink to Aborigines. The basic wage in Darwin allows for an expenditure of £2/10/- a week on drink. This would be almost the entire wage of many Aborigines. Am I to hail as a great new policy an entitlement to drink while only 50 out of 5,000 employed in the Northern Territory receive award rates.

      Today, according to articles in The Medical Journal of Australia, the diseases causing most trouble are those connected with a low standard of hygiene and sexual promiscuity, and neither constitutes a health hazard in the nomadic state. Nor does the legislation proposed attack disease and dirt. Drink and fornication, in fact, favour venereal disease.

DISEASE AND MORALITY

      Hygiene is most serious. As Aborigines move into Government settlements or missions and congregate as a stationary population, problems of hygiene are aggravated. If they come in from a free nomadic life with little idea of the use of sanitary facilities and fewer ideas of refuse disposal, knowledge unnecessary in the nomadic state, then a hygienic problem of grave proportions arises. At one settlement in Central Australia infant mortality was recently 208 per thousand, compared with 22 for European infants. In Arnhem Land and in wet areas in the far North, this unhygienic concentration favours the development of hookworm. Hookworm helps spread leprosy and develops anaemia, which lowers resistance for all sorts of diseases. Measles, diphtheria and whooping cough then produce a heavy mortality rate in children and adults.

      Since our people were originally responsible for the importation of leprosy we are morally obliged to mount the medical offensive necessary to eliminate it entirely, at far higher cost than we are prepared to pay now, and with the mobilisation of greater effort.

      Dr. C. E. Cooke, of the Northern Territory Medical Service, points out that the sound health of the Aborigine is plain self-interest for the European. Speaking at a conference on the question, he said:--

      "the cost of the native's education and the initial cost of the facilities for his enjoyment of a higher standard of living must be met. The expense may not be small and it may continue for a longer period than we might wish. However that may be, the cost must be unstintingly borne. This is no charity prompted by a quixotic benevolence, nor by a compassionate impulse to redress past wrongs, real or imaginary. It is an insurance premium."⁹

      A state of racial and legal equality cannot exist without a massive health programme. As leprosy is common among Aborigines in the Northern Territory, who will accept them? Both justly and unjustly they are accused of lack of hygiene, and this creates standards barriers.

      If the races are ever to come together for common purposes, this mutual acceptance is more likely to develop in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Cohabiting rights, let's face it, mean the prostitution of Aboriginal women. When the laws against cohabiting in the Northern Territory are removed it will not mean in practice opportunities for Aboriginal men to cohabit with European women. (I repeat, inter-racial marriage has always been permitted. It will mean opportunities for the riff raff, with no intention of marriage or responsibility, to cohabit with Aboriginal women. It will not favour something or other called "assimilation." It will lower the Aborigines still further in the eyes of Europeans. Mr. Giese, the Director of Welfare, defended the policy in the Legislative Council of the Northern Territory by saying that Aboriginal women will have the same legal protection as European women. [This is an echo of repeated declarations by early Colonial Secretaries that Aborigines had equal legal rights with settlers.] This is nonsense. They do not know how to use the processes of legal redress. If Aboriginal menfolk

are on desperately low wages the tendency of Aboriginal women to prostitute themselves for gain, or the pressure on them to do so, will be increased. This is not an insult. Poverty and prostitution are related phenomena in any society.

      One of Australia's most notable authorities on native administration, Mr. C. D. Rowley, put it brilliantly this way--

      "A state of social and legal equality is more likely to be promoted by helping Aboriginal groups to strengthen their separate economic and cultural bases as a first step, enabling individual Aborigines to gain security in their own society, so that they may confront white Australians on more equal terms than is now possible . . . So long as Aboriginal groups are obviously depressed, white prejudice and Aboriginal resentment and feelings of deprivation are reinforced."¹⁰

      We cannot justify the breaking down of their group ties. We should use their group ties to enhance their status. The legislation now being hailed tends to shatter group ties while creating no new dignity.

SOME SUGGESTIONS

      Let us adopt definite goals, not a meaningless goal called assimilation. The dignity of the

      Aborigine requires positive policies on these matters:--

(1) Elimination of Disease:

      We should aim totally to eliminate leprosy, tuberculosis, hookworm, yaws, anaemia, and so on, from the Aboriginal community within five years. This is a definite objective. You know, month by month, whether you are succeeding or failing. And you are faced with the discipline, not merely of providing the medical force necessary, but the incidentals of housing and pure water supply and so on.

(2) Public Health:

      We should aim to treat Aboriginal communities, such as that of 1,200 people on Bathurst Island and 600 people at Yirrkala, exactly as we would treat towns of 1,200 or 600 Europeans. They must have pure water supplies and sanitary facilities on the same standard as Europeans. They have not at present.

(3) Infant Mortality:

      We should aim to reduce Aboriginal infant mortality to the European level. Here is an objective which does not lend itself to florid oratory like "assimilation" does. But if babies don't survive they won't be assimilated, segregated, Apartheided or anything else. Infant mortality is regarded by the United Nations as the barometer of housing, hygiene, nutrition and almost all health.

(4) Marriage:

      We should aim to build stable marriage among the Aborigines, not aim to break it down with sloppy cohabiting laws. Stable marriage, whether inter-racial or not, means two parents taking responsibility for children. Cohabiting rights means the Aboriginal woman being left literally to hold the baby. It means insecurity for the child, lack of educational opportunities, often promiscuity for the child when it grows up because it has no model responsible background, no sight of a man taking a mature responsibility for his children, and the vicious circle starts again.

(5) Award Rates:

      Beginning with Aborigines employed by the Commonwealth and the States, full award rates should be paid. The Commonwealth and the States can pay proper wages, but don't often. If stations can't pay proper wages--genuinely can't pay them--then they should be assisted so that they can. We

refused to allow the Queensland sugar industry to proceed on crypto-slavery. Station owners complain that they must pay low wages because they have to support the whole tribe, and that this must be taken into account when assessing real wages.

      Where this is true, of course, it means that the Commonwealth or a State has leased land occupied by a tribe to a pastoralist. It is indefensible to do this, but where this has been done the Commonwealth or State must take full responsibility for the tribe, either by repurchase of the land, or by the assumption of full responsibility for the tribe.

      The terms of leases in the past have simply protected Aboriginal ingress and egress and hunting rights, but today this is not enough.

(6) Direct Commonwealth and State Responsibility:

      Stations and missions should cease to be Commonwealth Government agents. Stations are not adapted for it. Missions have a mandate to preach, to teach, and to heal, but not to consent to the disposal of land to mining companies that Aborigines think is theirs, nor the right to handle age, invalid, widows' pensions and child endowment according to their ideas, nor to be responsible in a makeshift manner for Aboriginal housing. These things are the direct responsibility of the whole Australian community, and social service payments should be paid direct to the Aboriginal entitled to receive them. [This can be a life or death matter to old Aboriginal women.] They are sometimes asked to die by elders, but never when they are pensioners.

(7) Parliamentary Representation:

      In the Northern Territory, and in the States with large Aboriginal populations, Aboriginal representation must be provided in the Parliament. It is against the policy of assimilation to treat Aborigines as a distinct group entitled to distinct representation. This is just another way in which the policy of assimilation is applied wrongly. Queensland is apparently going to break away from the Commonwealth tutelage in this respect. It is providing, I understand, Torres Strait Islanders and Aborigines with members in the State Parliament. The Legislative Council of the Northern Territory should have at least half a dozen Aboriginal members. This is quite vital. Everybody else, myself included at this moment, say what ought to be done about Aborigines. It is high time they were heard from themselves, and Parliament is the place to hear them.

(8) Respect for Languages:

      Aborigines are entitled to their own languages. It must not be a deliberate aim of educational policy to destroy their languages, as it now is.

(9) Reserves and Land:

      The present reserves must be kept (indeed, near towns they must be extended), not merely as places of negative protection. They must be bases from which Aborigines can be trained and equipped to cope with modern conditions. It is important that what we still know to be tribal land should be made inviolate as the property of the Aborigines, from whom too much of the rest of the land has been alienated.

(10) Royalties:

      Something more than the present miserable royalty of 6d. per ton needs to be paid on minerals discovered on reserves. In North America, all minerals found on Indian Reserves belong to the Indian tribe.

      In Australia, a royalty is now put into an Aboriginal welfare fund if minerals are found on a reserve, but this has never yet happened.

      When I was on the Select Committee on Yirrkala Aboriginal Grievances, the Department of Territories put out scandalous propaganda, plugged time and again by the A.B.C., to the effect that Aborigines were going to receive £4 million from the development of bauxite, and Australian people generally had held before them the vision of 600 Yirrkala Aborigines rolling around in limousines.

      I protested that the A.B.C.'s manner of presenting the facts amounted to a complete falsehood, and was undermining the Committee's work. [I am not suggesting that the A.B.C. was not acting in good faith. It repeated the official hand out.]

      The head of the Department dealing with mineral affairs in the Territory pointed out that, at 6d. a ton royalty, it would take more than 100 years to extract a quantity to yield £4,000,000. At most the benefit would therefore be £40,000 a year. This would be £2 a head a year of Aborigines of the Northern Territory, even with the present population of 20,000 Aborigines, which is increasing. Moreover, it would probably reduce by a like amount government expenditure. At best this £2 a year would not transform Aboriginal standards.

(11) Housing and Farming:

      The Commonwealth must grant Western Australia, Queensland and South Australia the funds necessary to carry out an adequate policy. It is also vital in certain areas where land alienation has left local Aborigines dispossessed and purposeless that land be bought back and training in farming should begin. This will be expensive, but it is elementary justice. The States will need grants for this. New South Wales and Victoria should participate in this and in housing also, though their problems are not so pressing because the numbers involved are smaller.

(12) Adult Education:

In education, adults should be considered. The Department of Territories is prejudiced against the United Nations, and its prejudice carries over to the rejection of the UNESCO idea of educating whole families. Literacy for adults, domestic science, and trades, are the neglected aspects. The result today is that Aboriginal children are being educated away from their parents and returning to the old environment to drop it all. Western Australia is breaking away from the Commonwealth's bad example and beginning to tackle adult Aboriginal education.

(13) Right to be Themselves:

      The Aborigines' right to be a distinctive community should be acknowledged. They should be free to choose to stay with their group or to move out.

      In the world today colour is a vital issue. This is not why we should consider it vital. We should consider the Aboriginal community vital because Aborigines are people and ipso facto precious. Nobody will give to Australia the excuse of fear, as they may concede it to South Africa. Nobody will believe 11,000,000 of the wealthiest people in the world have not the resources to meet the needs of 70,000 Aborigines. If we continue as we are it is because we are just plain mean, ignorant and indifferent.

      1. Cited, Charles Duguid, No Dying Race; Adelaide, Rigby Limited, 1963, p.127.
      2. ??
      3. A. J. Humphry, Leprosy among full-blooded Aborigines of the Northern Territory, The Medical Journal of Australia, Vol. 1, 1952, pp. 570-573.
      4. Edgar A. Wells, in Minutes of Evidence of the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Grievances of Yirrkala Aborigines, Arnhem Land Reserve; Canberra, Commonwealth Government Printer, 1963.
      5. P. M. C. Hasluck.
      6. ??
      7. Colin Simpson, Adam in Ochre; Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 5th ed. 1962.
      8. ??
      9. C. E. Cooke.
      10. C. D. Rowley.