How can Australia build on a century of struggle over Indigenous citizenship?

This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative with the Sydney Democracy Network. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.

The issues and discussions that surrounded Indigenous affairs in the early 20th century reverberate in Australia’s current political climate.

Amid regular press reports of legal injustice, police abuse and ill-treatment, inter-racial violence and unease (particularly in the Northern Territory), demands for royal commissions and periodic concern about the health and wellbeing of communities on the brink, there were appeals for constitutional change even then.

Concerned citizens and Indigenous leaders spoke of the crisis that was Indigenous affairs. The history wars thus obscured a historic fact: there is a deep connection between past and present in Indigenous affairs in Australia.

Expectations

One of the key differences is the expectations between then and now.

Back then, a new century and a new national government injected a sense of possibility and responsibility into the Indigenous space. Now, despite hope, fresh claims of crisis and urgent calls for the relationship between governments and Indigenous people to be reset, there is less of that optimism and even less of that sense of responsibility.

Recent allegations of human rights abuses in juvenile detention in the NT impelled the minister responsible to claim the territory government had learned from past mistakes.

It pays to avow the past. In 1927, a report of the royal commission established to investigate the Onmalmeri massacre in Western Australia found two policemen were responsible for the deaths and subsequent burning of bodies of Aboriginal people.

Not long after, a group of concerned citizens made a request to the responsible minister for a royal commission into the status and condition of Indigenous people thought to be dying as a result of white civilisation. We – white settler-subjects – were the problem.

Two months later, under the terms of the Royal Commission on the Constitution, several citizens demanded constitutional change to enable the nationalisation of Indigenous policy. One said:

We are deeply convinced that the question of the protection of the surviving Aborigines, and the amelioration of their present and future condition is greater and more urgent than is generally realised in Australia.

That was in 1927. One Indigenous rights advocate of these years, William Morley, referred to this being a case of national honour and character:

The humane treatment of the Aborigines would have a reflex action on the national character.

Moves toward activism

In the first 30 or so years of the 20th century, it was not unusual to hear such public consternation and aspiration.

In particular, concerns about police brutality and legal injustice thundered across the interwar years as massacres and incarceration continued. Several cases of police brutality in the north hit the southern press.

Timing had something to do with this: a new century, a new Commonwealth and even a new world order. The League of Nations put the humane treatment of Indigenous peoples on the international agenda for the first time.

As leading advocate Mary Bennett proclaimed:

The point is that exploitation by white races of coloured races is becoming precarious, cannot continue much longer and must be replaced by justice and humanity … we really need the tonic of voluntarily dragging our dark practices into the light of day and asking the co-operation of any international judiciary like the Hague Tribunal. It would make the perpetration of evil-doing by white governments a little awkward, as they are themselves aware.