Sydney Morning Herald
What makes Wave Rock different from thousands of other Aboriginal sites around
NSW - supposedly places of ancient residence, ritual or religious importance
to the original Australians - is that it has no history, and was recorded
by an anthropologist on the say-so of one Aborigine not even from that area.
Harry Creamer, the anthropologist concerned, was working on an ambitious
NPWS project between 1973 and 1987 which recorded for posterity more than
500 previously unmapped Aboriginal sites. Of these he now concedes "a handful"
were registered on the basis of extremely tenuous claims.
He put Wave Rock on the register in 1980 after an Aboriginal assistant from
Griffith drove past it for the first time one afternoon, and concluded from
the shape of the rock that it must have been used as a site for rain-making
ceremonies. This hunch was the only evidence.
Creamer later wrote of two other similar instances of instant history, created,
he believes, "to achieve political or economic returns (such as) land rights
legislation or access to jobs."
In one case an area near Norah Head on the Central Coast "In just a few days
... gained a rich mythology from one enthusiastic local elder which very
nearly prevented a major public works project." These claims were debunked
by some initiated men from the local tribe, and the project proceeded.
In the second, prehistoric sites in a forest on the North Coast proposed
as a possible location for an army base quickly became sacred "for nearby
Kooris who had not actually seen them, but realised their potential value
for the construction of a local Aboriginal identity." The army base was not
built.
What makes these three cases of interest is that they illustrate in microcosm
what can happen when the culture of the Dreamtime comes into conflict with
the needs of a modern economy - and the role of anthropologists in determining
the antiquity and the validity of such claims.
Since Aboriginal land-rights were first recognised in the mid-1970s no important
decision about Australia's future has been able to be taken without taking
into account the views of the country's original occupiers. Great tracts
have been returned to their custodianship.
From the symbolic hand-over of the country's most recognisable geological
feature, Uluru, to the ongoing battle to block development of the Jabiluka
uranium mine, the claims of Aborigines as interpreted by a handful of mostly
non-Aboriginal anthropologists - have had a profound influence on our social
and economic landscape. These anthropologists hold themselves out as scientists
and scholars rather than activists and advocates. The courts rely on them
as independent, impartial experts. Their testimony has played a decisive
role in determining the fate of resource developments worth billions of dollars.
But there is increasing evidence from a series of high-profile inquiries
- including three of arguably the most important disputes to come to arbitration
in recent years - that the experts have been getting it wrong in fundamental
ways. In one, a judge found an Aboriginal claim to be a complete "fabrication".
In another, an anthropologist was taken in by "deliberate lies". In a third,
an "ancient" spirit turned out to have first made its malevolent presence
felt in the 1970s.
These decisions have contributed to a widespread belief, exploited by
anti-land-rights interests, that many more claims are fraudulent and motivated
by financial self-interest. A recent survey by the West Australian Chamber
of Minerals and Energy found that although 57 per cent of people favoured
the protection of Aboriginal sites, 70 per cent thought that less than half
such claims were "genuine or accurate".
"Dissident" anthropologists, mainly in the private sector, accuse those in
the academic mainstream of having been "captured" by Aboriginal groups which
control their access and censor research; of having a "politically correct"
agenda designed to redress past injustices by misrepresenting present evidence;
of creating the impression - says Ron Brunton, a trenchant critic within
the profession - that they are "anti-development zealots with a vested interest
in keeping Aborigines frozen in time".
Next weekend most of Australia's 300-odd professional anthropologists will
meet in Sydney for their annual conference, normally an affair of academic
gentility, feeling somewhat bruised. Distinctly unacademic insults have been
exchanged. Writs have been issued. One eminent and normally eloquent professor
begs me not to quote him. Another prominent anthropologist has her solicitor
return my phone call. Others decline to comment.
Not since Derek Freeman - immortalised in David Williamson's play The
Heretic - claimed two decades ago that the revered American
anthropologist Margaret Mead had been conned by the Samoans into believing
that their culture was based on free love, has there been such an uproar.
Les Hiatt, one of our most distinguished anthropologists, says,"Anthropology
in Australia faces a crisis of credibility. Any young anthropologist who
publicly gives primacy to scientific values risks becoming a pariah without
a job."
ONE would have thought that with the withering 1995 report of the royal
commissioner, retired judge Iris Stevens, the controversy over the "secret
women's business" of Hindmarsh Island in South Australia would have been
allowed to quietly fade into the footnotes of history. But no. Late last
year a 668-page volume thumped down on the desks of book reviewers around
the country, seeking to reignite the debate.
The row, which developed into a cause célèbre for a powerful
coalition of Aboriginal rights groups, and the experts who supported them,
environmentalists, feminists and unionists, began back in 1989 when the South
Australian Government approved the building of a bridge linking Goolwa, 83
kilometres south of Adelaide, to service a marina on Hindmarsh Island in
the brackish waters of the Murray River estuary.
All protests against the development fell on deaf ears until, in 1994, a
story emerged that the area was sacred to women from the local Ngarrindjeri
tribe. One account had it that it was here that they buried "half-caste"
foetuses. Another, of recent origin, held that an aerial map of the estuary
resembled a woman's genitals. The secret "evidence" of this "women's business"
was placed in two sealed envelopes by the anthropologist engaged to assist,
Dr Deane Fergie, a lecturer at Adelaide University.
Shortly afterwards, Robert Tickner, Aboriginal affairs minister in the Keating
Government, intervened to place a 25-year ban on building the bridge, and
the marina company went into receivership. That ban was not overturned until
two years later when the Labor Party was finally persuaded (partly thanks
to former foreign minister Gareth Evans, who privately described the "women's
business" as "bullshit on stilts") not to oppose legislation authorising
the bridge.
SUBSEQUENTLY, the royal commissioner reported that the first suggestion of
"women's business" had come from another anthropologist, Dr Lindy Warrell,
who had approached Aboriginal opponents of the bridge, remarking that, "It
would be nice if there was some women's business." Wrote Stevens drily: "Women's
business emerged within days."
From Sri Lanka, Warrell said that the royal commission had "deconceptualised
what I said and misrepresented me completely". Far from being the instigator
of the story, her involvement in Hindmarsh had cost her her house and destroyed
her career.
Fergie was criticised in the report for having no expertise with the Ngarrindjeri
at the time of her appointment, and not having read the seminal account of
the tribe which specifically notes that they had no "secret women's business".
Some of her evidence was "completely incomprehensible" and she "completely
misunderstood" the geography of the area.
Phillip Clarke, an expert at the South Australian Museum, testified that
when he offered herthe names of other Ngarrindjeri elders and anthropological
researchers, Fergie "said that since none of them had worked within a feminist
anthropological tradition they were not crucial to the issue of ... women's
business".
Stevens comprehensively demolished the case for "women's business" concluding:
"... the women's business emerged in response to a need of the anti-bridge
lobby to provide something of cultural significance to warrant the making
of a declaration by the Federal minister ... It was unknown to the 12 'dissident'
Ngarrindjeri women who gave evidence ... The whole claim of the women's business
from its inception was a fabrication."
Graham Richardson, a powerful Cabinet minister in the Hawke Government, recently
confessed that it passed understanding how governments could have squandered
so much time, money and effort on such a "dodgy" and "spurious" claim. Even
Father Frank Brennan, a lawyer and Jesuit priest who supports Aboriginal
rights, says there are "too many spurious claims".
And there the matter rested, awaiting a Federal Court hearing of a $69 million
damages claim by the marina operators against Tickner, Fergie and others,
until Diane Bell, an expatriate Australian "feminist anthropologist", interrupted
work on a book about "New Age prophets" and flew back to Australia at the
request of lawyers working for the Aborigines. The result of her visit, that
hefty tome*, makes no secret of either Bell's belief that "women's business"
actually exists, nor its author's political commitment. "The damage done
by a Hanson, Herron or Howard will not be eradicated by heavy-handed tactics,"
she writes. "It will take courage, vision and leadership, qualities sadly
lacking in the current parliament and court."
In a lengthy dissertation aimed at debunking the book in May's
Quadrant magazine, Ron Brunton notes wryly that Diane Bell
is the keynote speaker at next weekend's conference, on the subject "From
Warramungu to the Ngarrindjeri: Bad Law and Bad Anthropology?" And Deane
Fergie has recently been appointed to the three-person ethics committee of
the Australian Anthropological Society.
Brunton, a former lecturer at Sydney's Macquarie University, resigned in
1981 and later went into private consultancy because he says he was tired
of the "politicisation of anthropology" and felt marginalised by his more
activist colleagues. As a result, he says, he has been called everything
from "a fascist, a slippery mongrel and a dog" to a tool of the mining companies.
Brunton refers to some of his more politically correct colleagues as "thought
wardens" and says they believe "Aboriginal interests should take precedence
over the interests of the nation as a whole - except when the Aborigines
concerned are committed Christians, supporters of the coalition parties,
or want uranium mining".
"I certainly accept that there were terrible wrongs done to the Aborigines,
and that many of them suffer because of that experience," he says. "But to
encourage them to believe that traditional culture has all the answers, to
construct whole incentives around their victimhood rather than pulling themselves
out of disadvantage through their own efforts, is wrong."
BRUNTON, and other critics of the new anthropological orthodoxy such as Les
Hiatt and the highly respected Kenneth Maddock, emeritus professor of
anthropology at Macquarie, are deeply concerned that some of their colleagues
see their job as "helping" Aborigines rather than seeking truth. "Anything
of a critical or unsympathetic nature is likely to be weeded out," says Maddock.
Or, if not censoring, obscuring the truth - a word Brunton says some
anthropologists accompany by wagging two fingers on each hand to indicate
inverted commas, ridiculing the notion of objective reality. Their writings
in learned journals are often full of what Hiatt calls "Orwellian double-think",
resembling the impenetrable deconstructionism of the French philosophers
Jacques Derrida and Jean Beaudrillard.
Professor Grant McCall, president of the Australian Anthropological Society,
has a different take. He says the profession's code of ethics states that
anthropologists' primary obligation is to the people being studied, "except
where this would compromise the member's conscience or commitment to truth".
"It's a matter of good manners," he says. "After all, they have taken you
in, looked after you ..."
Aboriginal anthropology is not the only discipline to be accused of
unprofessionalism. Statisticians working for the Black Deaths in Custody
Royal Commission, according to the criminologist Dr David Biles, were accused
of being "disloyal, misguided and obviously wrong" when their figures showed
that Aborigines were twice as safe in prison as out on bail. Even nuts-and-bolts
archeologists write about "intuitive reconstructions of initial colonisation"
and something called "post-processual archeology".
But it is the anthropologists who have placed whole areas of study beyond
debate. In the '70s, for instance, it was fashionable to talk about the
"genocide" inflicted on the Tasmanian Aborigines, and to describe Truganini
as "the last Tasmanian". That is no longer acceptable since anthropologists
belatedly grasped the implications for Tasmanian Aboriginal land-rights claims.
To some in the academic mainstream, such as Annette Hamilton, professor of
anthropology at Macquarie University, this crisis of credibility "has been
invented, promoted and promulgated by those who generally want to undermine
the credibility of indigenous claims and the legal and anthropological
representation of those claims".
In an e-mail from southern Thailand, Hamilton says, "... where there are
contesting views, different anthropologists are found representing those
of all sides. They are not acting as 'advocates' but as interpreters of the
points of view of a particular group."
If fabricated women's business causing $68 million in damage and delay to
a marina operation in South Australia seems like small beer, consider the
case of Coronation Hill, a rich deposit of gold, platinum and palladium in
the Northern Territory's Kakadu conservation zone. BHP estimated that mining
it would create several hundred jobs, and generate $500 million in export
earnings over the mine's nine-year lifespan.
Money, of course, not land rights, is at the root of many of the most bitterly
fought contests. Mining companies are typically prepared to hand over tens
of millions of dollars - plus all manner of jobs, training, and environment
protection guarantees - to be permitted to mine areas over which Aborigines
have some claim. The division of the spoils has sparked some sordid squabbles.
IN 1994, at the height of the battle over the Century zinc mine on
the Gulf of Carpentaria, the chairman of the local Aboriginal corporation,
Clarence Walden, said, "What have CZL [Century Zinc Ltd], the government,
you name 'em - what have they done for the Aboriginal people? They came and
threw 60 million bucks on the table and said, 'Blacks, fight over it' ...
and divided us, divided us something bad."
Through the faulty filter of memory, most Australians remember Coronation
Hill as a victory for conservationists seeking to protect a national park.
In fact, the Hawke Government's 1991 decision to ban mining was not based
on the threat it would pose to the environment, which a Resources Assessment
Commission inquiry found not to be significant. What stopped Coronation Hill
was opposition by some of the local Jawoyn people, who convinced consultant
anthropologists that the area was occupied by a Dreamtime spirit named Bula,
who would wreak apocalyptic damage if Coronation Hill was disturbed.
There were a number of problems with this proposition, detailed by Ron Brunton
in a 10,000-word critique of the commission's findings. These included the
fact that Bula had never been associated with that particular site until
the late 1970s - and, in fact, uranium mining had taken place on the same
hill in the 1950s and 1960s with no opposition from the Jawoyn and no adverse
reaction from Bula.
Those Jawoyn who supported mining because of the jobs that would be created
were ignored, including Andy Andrews, who was elected chairman of the Jawoyn
Association in 1991. Brunton found that the so-called "sickness area" surrounding
the mine had mysteriously grown to eight times its former size in 30 years.
There were other important inconsistencies which the commission ignored.
However, when Brunton presented his findings he was criticised - in a tearoom
at the Australian National University - not for inaccuracy but for lack of
sympathy with Aboriginal opponents of the mine. "You may well be telling
the truth," he says a fellow anthropologist told him, "but you should not
be telling it."
John Forbes, a reader in law at Queensland University, has written of a Sydney
barrister, engaged to oppose a land claim, ringing around the universities
to find an expert witness. "No-one would be in it," he reportedly said. "They
were worried about their promotion. A couple of them said they would never
ever get a permit to go on any Aboriginal land again and they would be
effectively blackballed in their profession."
Partly, this reaction reflects the way the interests of Aborigines and the
anthropologists studying them have become intertwined. Many anthropologists
depend on lucrative contracts from government-funded Aboriginal organisations,
and agree to restrictions on their work that would be unacceptable in any
other scientific discipline.
Two years ago, Jeff Stead, an anthropologist at the Northern Land Council
in Darwin, keyed in "land disputes" into the council's new computer database.
To his surprise he found that of the 50 files that came up, six were devoted
solely to the invoices of lawyers, and a "major proportion" of the others
was devoted to billing matters, including "substantial" anthropological costs.
In an academic journal earlier this year, Les Hiatt detailed the contractual
conditions imposed on anthropologists by the Pitjantjatjara Women's Council.
In return for allowing access to their land and people, the council insisted
that the researcher "agrees to promote the interests of the Pitjantjatjara
... to observe restrictions on divulging information that might adversely
affect [them], and to submit a thesis only with the prior written consent
of the [council]".
The problem with this approach is that it conflicts with the rules laid down
by the Federal Court - which hears many of these land-rights claims - for
expert witnesses. The court's guidelines explicitly state that an anthropologist,
or any other expert, "... is not an advocate for a party ... [His or her]
paramount duty is to the court."
Late last year, after a marathon 114 days of hearings, Justice Howard Olney,
of the Australian Federal Court, dashed the hopes of Aboriginal activists
by rejecting a claim by descendants of the Yorta Yorta tribe to an enormous
piece of what they declared to be their traditional land, 20,000 square
kilometres of Victoria and NSW, straddling the Murray River and including
the towns of Shepparton and Wangaratta.
But it was not so much the decision which was seen as a setback for the land
rights movement as the biting comments the judge made about the validity
of the claim and the credibility of various expert witnesses.
There was no warrant under the Native Title Act, he said, "for the court
to play the role of social engineer, righting the wrongs of past centuries
and dispensing justice according to contemporary notions of political correctness
rather than the law".
He found that, "in one instance two senior members of the claimants' group
were caught out telling deliberate lies". He said that part of the claim
was "of recent invention and unsupported by credible evidence". Some of the
evidence was embellished, and had been "punctuated by outbursts of righteous
indignation".
Of the experts supposed to sort out the conflicting claims, he said, "the
court has derived little assistance from [their] testimony". And he singled
out an anthropologist, Deborah Rose, for this criticism: "Dr Rose's evidence
suffers from a combination of factors, notably that she had no prior
anthropological experience in the area ... she had not read the ethnographic
literature and had relied on the written witness statements, not all of which
were in evidence and some of which were shown to be inaccurate".
Rose did not return calls seeking her comments, and Diane Bell e-mailed that
she did not want to comment on Ron Brunton's criticisms for fear of being
in contempt of court. Deane Fergie had her solicitor return my telephone
call. He said she would be defending the court case but had no other comment.
Some might say, "So what if Aborigines do it? Everyone else does." The Scots,
for example, are terrible fabricators of their own history, misappropriating
to their misty Dreamtime the invention of golf (actually kolf, a game
originating in Holland), the haggis (originally the French hachis), the bagpipe
(first recorded in ancient Greece), whisky (Irish, uisce beathadh),
and the modern kilt (designed by, whisper it, an Englishman).
Why it matters is that, in 21st-century Australia, what is at stake are not
a few cultural artefacts but the future of the entire country.
Disputed land claims have all but paralysed the process set up to resolve
them, particularly in the resource-rich West. Tanya Heaslip, director of
Aboriginal affairs at the WA Chamber of Minerals and Energy, says, "Aboriginal
interests are forcing companies to remain in negotiation ad nauseam ... There
is no deadlock-breaking mechanism."
According to Heaslip, there is a log-jam of 12,000 often conflicting native
title claims covering 87 per cent of the State. In one dispute, on the North-East
goldfields, there are 33 overlapping Aboriginal claims to the one area of
land. "It is impossible to negotiate," says Heaslip. "We have tribe against
tribe, family against family; in some cases brothers against sisters, mothers
against their own children."
The lack of resolution of the claims has held up major mining projects, and
has, according to WMC Resources corporate affairs manager David Griffiths,
forced companies to slash $100 million a year off their exploration budgets.
A support group has even been formed to help the 50 per cent of geologists
in the State who are said to be out of work as a result.
Ron Brunton says, "We are not talking about motherhood in ancient Rome. There
are important implications for the future economic and social shape of this
country in the work of anthropologists - we need to aim for the highest
professional standards and to guard against fraud."
Unfortunately, Brunton won't be there next weekend to confront his critics.
It would be "a wank and a waste of time", he says.
*Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was, and Will Be, by
Diane Bell (Spinifex Press).
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