The Bark Petitions — how Yolngu tradition changed democracy

ABC. This podcast contains audio advertising. To hear it without ads, head to the ABC Listen app now. Marble television's vision quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like mortal jeopardy. Now streaming Home Yard is in plus. Now at Croger, your points add up to more ways to save every trip. Use them your way to take dollars off groceries at checkout or save at the pump. You can even save up to $35 on your next fill-up. Same points, more choices. And with low prices on fresh quality food, plus digital and personalized offers tailored to how you shop. Your dollar goes further. Redeem your points online or in the app. Croger, fresh for everyone, restrictions apply, seaside or store for details. ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners, please be aware. This conversation includes the name of someone who has died. Today, it's a story from the early 1960s that you probably haven't heard about. It's the story of a struggle played out in one of the most remote parts of Australia. A struggle that ended in a defeat for the local people, but in the long run turned out to be a great victory. Professor Claire Wright is here, Claire's an historian based at Latrobe University in Melbourne. And for years, Claire's been writing about the evolution of democracy in Australia. In 2010, Claire and her family were invited to live in North East Arnhem land in the Northern Territory, on the lands of the Angle people. This was where one of the great, formative moments of Australian democracy had unfolded in the year 1963. Claire wasn't there to find this story, but it found her anyway. 1963 was the year when the federal government granted a lease to an international consortium to establish a massive bauxite mine in that area. To make it happen, the government had to carve away a large portion of the land that had been set aside as an Aboriginal reserve. The government never bothered to inform the locals or consult with them. So it came as a shock to see prospectors pegging out the ground and setting up facilities on their land. This was the beginning of what Claire calls a four-way contest between the people, the government, the mining company, and the Methodist church that ran the Aboriginal mission there. The Angle people never thought of themselves as wards of the states camping on Crown land. They saw themselves as a people living in their own kind of sovereign state. And so they sent a petition framed in beautiful bark paintings to the Parliament, insisting that they be consulted and compensated for any such intrusion on their land. And as Claire wrote, became immersed in this story, she realized that the bark petitions were like a stone that was thrown at a great big edifice of untruth in Australia. That eventually brought the whole thing down. Claire's book is called Nakhudarak, the bark petitions, how the people of Jakarta changed the course of Australian democracy. I like Claire. Hey Richard, how are you going? Fine thank you, Nakhudarak, what does that mean and how are you given that title? I was sitting in the front of a car with my doorway, which is the kinship term that I use for the man whose name I'm allowed to use. I have the family's permission to use his name, talking about the book, although he passed away two years ago, Galari in a pingu. I was with him in the car driving to the funeral of his second wife. And we've been working on this history of the bark petitions for a few years together already. And I said to him, "Do a na yong o yaku for bark petitions." He looked at me and he said, "Nakhudarak." "Nakhud is the word for the bark that the petitions were pasted to and framed the four copies that were sent to Parliament." "Nakhudarak" means the word or a message or an outcome of the collaborative decision making process. And I realised how important it is not only to think from the perspective of all of the players in a story, but also to try to think through their language. Because Daarak is not the same thing as a petition. And that was, in a sense, the stone that cracked the edifice of everything that I had previously believed to be true about the story that I was telling. So what were you and your family to that part of the world in the first place in 2010? It wasn't my work at all. It wasn't my work as an historian. That took me there. It was my then husband's work as a furniture maker. And he was actually invited by Gullaro to come up to his community at Guñangara, which is about 20 kilometres northwest of the mining town of Nuland Boy in North East Arnhem Land. To see whether he could make furniture out of the Gede Katri, they were starting a timber milling business on the community as a form of economic self-sustainability. So we were invited up as a family to come and live on community as Damien set up a studio and furniture making business for the community. We had three kids at the time. They were in prep grade five and year seven. And it was a life-changing moment for all of us coming from Melbourne and packing up. And we were in the middle of June. We had this whole climactic change as well as this community change. And really, it was also the first time in a couple of decades that I had been just a mum and a partner instead of being a breadwinner and a historian. I remember the first time I went to northern Australia. I'd flown there from Melbourne and it was like going into a world where the saturation, the colour saturation, on the television had been turned up to not just 11 but about 15. It kind of hurt my eyes. There was so much intense colour. And it's just sensually overwhelming. So I like that for you. What kind of pictures do you have in your head of that world? It's interesting because the first thing I would say to that is it's not a picture but a smell that confronts me. It's the smell of fire. It's the smell of the Garekatri's burning. It's the blanket of humidity that is laced with fire. And the smell of the Gukku, the honey that is starting to ripen in the trees. And that all starts to wrap around you like a cloak. There's a sensuality to that experience that makes you go, yeah, not in Melbourne anymore. And then yes, the sights start to hit you. It's the zero blue of the Arifuracy. It is the intensity of the blue of the sky. That's dry season or rondar, the yongal term for it that I'm describing there. But if you touch down at Gov Airport in December, then what you feel is that you walk into this absolute wall of humidity that is build up season. 99% humidity and saturation of the air. And then it is sheets of grey clouds. These huge puffy clouds that form towers into the air. Occasionally there'll be a lightning streak that will break the sky open. But really it's just this heaviness weighing down and everybody is just waiting for rain, waiting for it to break. So I can't separate the sights, as you say, from the smells and the sound of thunder and the sounds every night at dusk of the birds just going completely nuts in the trees. And sometimes now actually in Melbourne, I've made little recordings on my iPhone. I just play them to myself sometimes in my apartment in Melbourne to put me right back there on country. So you weren't looking for this story. You'd been writing about Australian democracy. All this time it was kind of like the focus of your work and you go to Northeastern Ireland. And this story walks right up to you and says hello to you. It does. When we went there, I just finished the first draft of the book that became the forgotten rebels of Eureka. And I went up there and I thought, well, we'll just live up there and I'll just make sure these kids go to school happily and settle them in. And the story found me. I knew about the bark petitions sort of like probably a lot of Australians would say. I didn't even know about the thing in myself as a student of Australian history. I think I've walked past them in Parliament House. I didn't know about that. Look, you're not alone there. And there are politicians who walk past them every day in Parliament House. The two petitions that are on display there in the public gallery. And they don't know what they are either. So, you know, my ignorance was profound. So I was really starting from scratch. And it was years into having been adopted into community, which is because if you're going to be around for a while and you all can see that that you're not what they would call a plastic. bag, a white person who blows into town, flaps around, makes a lot of noise, and then blows out on the next wind. Once they see that that's not what you're there for, then you basically need to be culturally adopted so that there is somewhere to put you. So, Galeroy's fourth wife adopted me, Valerie Ganemba, she became my yuppah, and it means that anywhere I go in Northeast Ireland and I say, "I'm Valerie Ganemba." Yuppah, anybody that I speak to knows what my kinship relationship with them now is, and we were sitting one day at somebody else's funeral. I was sitting with Valerie on the ground, cross-legged, Galeroy's feet, and he looked down at me and he said, "Gale, what do you do?" And what he meant was, what do I do aside from drive kids to school in the swimming pool and take old 80s to Woolies and cook the dinner and sweep the floors, which is essentially what he saw me doing? And I said, "Do I am an historian?" And he went, "Hmm, you tell stories, so do I." And it was the start of him really saying that there was a use for me, and this is the story that he wanted to have told. And having the story of the bark petitions told from a yongal point of view was something that not only Galeroy, but it turned out a lot of people wanted to engage with me in. The yongal people of that area are people quite unto themselves, and I think it's more or less common knowledge these days, that they had been trading with Macassan sailors from what is now a Malaysian Indonesia for centuries before Europeans came to Australia. That had been going on for a very long time. I mean, trying to see cucumbers from the local people there, there was trade and exchange. What kind of a mark did those centuries of trade and exchange with the Macassan sailors leave on the yongal people of Northeastern America? These centuries of trade with the Macassans had led yongal people to believe that their laws could be respected by outside foreign traders. They had been engaging in international foreign trade diplomacy for centuries so that when people came onto their land, they would ask for permission to do so, they would get consent, and then they would be compensated for any resources that were taken from their land. And the Macassans and the yongal traded like this for centuries. So they would come for tripping and they would leave knives or tobacco or cloth or jewelry. And bits of language too. And bits of language too, so in particular from Rupiah. So many Australians who go to Bali every year will be familiar with Rupiahs and the yongal word for money is Rupiah and smoking and Macassan pipes. So yes, there was material trade, but there was also an understanding on behalf of the yongal that all of their governance structures and their laws would be respected and understood. And why wouldn't they be? These were two sovereign powers trading with each other. And these were the same laws that yongal clans had to engage in if they wanted to go onto each other's lands. So some people might have sweet yams growing and other people might have ochre. And you would trade in those, but they were all very well established rules that regulated these trade. And so the yongal people knew that on a domestic sense and they knew it on an international sense as well. And this becomes very important background for what happens in 1963. So Captain Cook arrives, plants a union jack in Far North Queensland, 1788, the first fleet arrives, the first European settlement in Australia, and bit by bit more and more of the Australian continent has taken up by pastoralists. What happened when the pastoralists eventually started to encroach on the land of Arnhem land as they started to come into that part of the world? It was actually the late 19th century. They come across the Gulf of Carpentaria and essentially what happens in what's called the Black Wars in the Northern Territory is that the Blacks win. They are repelled. Their yongal tribes are able to fight them off. They actually retreat and they go away. And so between about the 1880s and the beginning of the missionary era, which is about the 1920s in Arnhem land, again the yongal people just let be. The Christian missionaries arrived as you say in the 1920s. How did they get on once they started showing up in North East Arnhem land? It's a really different missionary history than I think people are used to understanding of. The missionary history that we know from the East Coast is really, missionaries come, they smash culture, they smash language, they separate families, they round up people and put them on. Put the women in the course, it's extinguished the language. All of that, put them onto a central reserves that the people are no longer on their land. And so they're disconnected from land, they're dispossessed of all those cultural traditions as well as their land rights. That's not what happened. That's not what happens. The Methodist overseas mission are really the ones who get most of Arnhem land. They've established the first reserve in Galban Island in 1922. And by time Eccala comes around in 1935, there's already a president set where the missionaries are supportive and encouraging of the yongal people continuing in all of their traditional practices. The thing that is so central to the missionary's purpose in Arnhem land is actually protecting the interests of the yongal people. They protect their language. In fact, all the missionaries themselves have to learn to speak yongal mutter. The missionaries really see themselves as allies of the people. They're not there to civilize. They're not there fishing for souls. Their mission is to practice Christianity in a way that provides good role-modeling, but it isn't that same purpose on the East Coast, which is to assimilate yongal into a white Australian culture. Yongal believe that they have invited the missionaries to be there. So the guests rather than the bosses? And they understand that the missionaries understand that they are the guests of the yongal. So we get to 1931 and the federal government establishes the Arnhem land reserve. Land is set aside for Aboriginal people. What did actually mean for them? Does that mean they own the land or the crown continues to own the land, but it's kind of set aside for them? It's set aside for them. There's no land rights. There's no native title that is granted. Essentially what it is is a protection zone that is designed to keep white people out and to keep yongal away from Darwin as well, because it's the Larrakeer people of Darwin who have already experienced the frontier and are now fringed dwellers and addicted to alcohol and all of the problems that we're seeing on the East Coast existed in Darwin. But this whole massive 80,000 square kilometres of the Arnhem land reserve, now in an era of protectionism, that's government policy of protectionism. The idea is to keep them in there, allow them to do what they want to do, essentially leave them alone. But there's no recognition of native title or land rights. What's their understanding of how they live on this land, the yongal people? Do they have an understanding that they're living by the grace and favour of the federal government? Absolutely not. They understand themselves to be living on their tribal lands which they have been for the past 60,000 years and will forever be the custodians of, that they are of the land, that the yongal just means people and it only is a label that distinguishes them from birds, yon, or from trees, DARPA, or from sea creatures, you know, may up in turtles. There's no hierarchy in that, there's no value system, but they have been put there by the ancestors to look after and guard the land and to speak for the land, which they do via song and dance and painting and that's how they say the land grew a tongue, and that is the yongal people. So this brings us to the year 1963, which is the centre of your book and the story you're telling. The world's in a state of flux in 1963 and the United States, there's the civil rights movement. But what's happening in Australia in 1963? I guess essentially you've got to say it's a Mendy's government, it's the tail end of that long regime, although this is an election year, '63, very pertinent, and Mendy's has a one-seat majority. So it could be the end of that long period, and there are other changes that seem to be coming as well. And I use that advisedly, in the world is back in Dylan Mania, this is the year that he releases blowing in the wind. The times are literally a changing. And you've got Martin Luther King. I don't know if that's the same year, maybe it's the later when he makes that famous speech in Washington. No, that's this year, so he's arrested his jailed and Birmingham. There's the Birmingham riots. But the same time in Australia is kind of on a precipice that the Queen visits and has her first visit in Darwin in March 1963. This is the year that Bob Mendy's makes his famous, I did, but see her passing by speech. So there's this imperial moment, and yet there's a great sense as well that the rest of the world is watching what is going on in this civil rights space. A partite is running strong in South Africa and attracting the attention of the world. And so Australia is on this precipice of change, of global change. And at the same time, this blanket of bauxite is discovered in the Northern Territory. So this is still an era where progress and development is seen as being essential to Australia's growth. We're moving from the sheep's back to the mineral era of Australian wealth and prosperity. So the fact that Northeast Arnhemland now appears to be this rich, economic benefit to the country, no longer a wilderness that can be locked up in the Arnhemland Reserve, that becomes this critical turning point in Australian history. St Borksund, as you say, has been discovered, this huge blanket of it has been discovered in Northeast Arnhemland where the honour people live. How did the local people, the honour people, become aware that their land was being respected? Young people had known since the late 50s that there were these prospectors walking around and they were sticking a hole in the ground here and they sometimes would even employ younger people for a couple of days to dig a hole over there. They didn't realise there was anything other than that little sort of skirmishes going on, until one day they saw a series of survey pegs that had been pegged out across the peanut paddock that was right next to the entrance to the Iterkhala mission. And this looked something different and one man, Dambalapur Munungur, he turned and he said to Ron Croxford, who was the teacher at the school, he said, "You're Najal. Who wants this?" That is really the question that defines the entire next year on the mission station. Who wants this? It's a different idea from people are coming and going to now, maybe people are going to come and stay. Now this brings us to Edgar Wells, the man who was the superintendent of the Methodist Mission in Iterkhala. What kind of a man was Edgar Wells? Edgar Wells, he's a complicated saviour type, as saviours tend to be. He was a man who had a strong sense of mission. He had lived with yongal people running the station, milling in Bifu for ten years. He wanted nothing but the best for them. He was a synchrotist, believing that you could combine Christian religion and yongal spirituality without there being any philosophical or cosmological blip. He had an anthropologist's heart. He had a politician's sense of purpose and mission. When he saw that there was going to be this intrusion into the land, he was the one who first stood up. Why I say he's complicated is because he's very much a hero in this story, but he didn't bring everybody in the mission along with him as well. He had a very strong sense of his own purpose and the role that he needed to play for yongal, but he was a divisive figure within the Methodist Church. He started to raise the alarm. He became very concerned about this, particularly concerned that these people had showed up without telling anyone, without consulting anyone. How did he try and alert the authorities that they were going to have this big problem if they just showed up and didn't ask anyone, didn't consult anyone, and just started digging holes and putting up donors in people's backyards effectively. Edgar Wells sent a telegram. He sent it to politicians. He sent it to civil rights groups down south. He sent it to newspapers. He raised the alarm on the fact that this land had been excised. Something surely the men's his government thought was going to fly under the radar. This tiny little dot on the map in northeast Ireland land that no one had ever heard of, who was going to bother about up there. Now the Minister for Territories is a man called Paul Haslach, who later became Governor-General of Australia. What did he do when he realised that suddenly this thing that he expected to just fly under the radar when he realised suddenly that he'd stirred up a hornet's nest amongst the local people? Well, in some ways it put the government on the back foot right from the beginning, because this secret deal had been done between the men's his government via Haslach, the leader of the Methodist Church in Sydney, Reverend Gribble, and the French mining company. And the fact that it was a back room deal, Haslach very quickly moved into parliamentary mode and made sure that everything from that point was on the record. And what did you say about the local people? What did they have to say about how this would affect them? Paul Haslach did not think that the local people needed to be consulted. He said we have the impromptu of the church. He kept putting it back on the church. We have done everything right because the church who are in charge up there have given us their permission. Now Edgar Wells was the superintendent of the church and he was up in arms about the whole thing. What about the church high right? What about his, his superiors? So it was Reverend Gribble who had signed the paper in this secret back room deal that had given the land away. Reverend Gribble hadn't bothered to tell Superintendent Edgar Wells on the ground that this had happened. There are communications failures left, right and center. And this is why it becomes such a hornet's nest because the young people are grieved because their laws have been transgressed. People are coming onto their land without having asked to come there without having consulted without getting consent. And seemingly are going to start taking away buckets of awe, digging up the ground without giving them anything in return. Now, this isn't just a violation of young law. It's actually a wholesale attack on the foundations of British law, which is that you don't take property from people without compensation. Governments can't seize property without compensation or consultation. That's right at the heart of the whole British legal system. Yes, but if the core British legal system attitude towards Aboriginal land in Australia is that this is tyrannolious, that they don't own the land, that they had acquired the land legally by occupying it, cultivating it. If you believe in 1963 that the local people are not in any way owners, it is not their property, then you don't believe fundamentally you're doing anything wrong. Well, you know, people are going to be required to relocate once this big wedge of land that had been allocated for mining had been established with that mean that have to move from lands in which they'd already settled. The great fear was that the mission would be reestablished somewhere else. It had only been established in 1935, but you know, people had had had like living there. They'd worked well with the missionaries there. They had a steady supply of food. Their children were getting educations through the mission school. There was a nurse who was there and they like living there and yet a carler itself was chosen as the mission site because it's a really beautiful place. It's where the freshwater meets the sea. There's a beautiful white stretch of beach. Everything is perfectly placed for a peaceful community and they didn't want to leave it. This is what they started to say. We want this place for our children and our grandchildren. Podcasts, broadcasts, conversations with Richard Fadler. So this international consortium has been granted the Mining List to mine book site in the area. How did the Mining Company people behave once they started showing up in Northeastern Ireland? I reckon you could guess the answer to that question. They behaved like they are in the land, that they were masters of the universe. They behaved like they were in tidal to be there, that they were in tidal to behave as they wanted to towards the younger people. They set up camp very near to the Utacala freshwater lagoon, which was a great fear of the Utacala people that their water was going to be in some way fouled. The Mining personnel started coming onto the mission itself and expecting to be able to use the Telegraph service and the wireless and to get supplies. Now, you know, this is an incredibly remote part of the world. There is a male plane that comes in once a week. Actually in 1963, they get two male services a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays. If you want any supplies, they have to come from Darwin by barge or from Queensland by barge. It takes months and months to bring things. So suddenly, you've got an influx of people who are traipsing around, have no sense of the sacred sites that might be there, chopping stuff up, digging holes, and behaving as if they own the joint. You said they were worried that the miners had set up camp right next to the freshwater lagoon, which was their source of freshwater. They were worried they were going to pollute it with their filament. That's the kind of thing that can make people turn to violent resistance. I mean, that's a life and death issue there. Was that contemplated by the young people? Anybody who has any familiarity with Australian frontier history knows that some of the sites of the worst massacres were around freshwater resources. And that's really a history of the world, isn't it? You could tell the whole story of global conflict about the conflict over freshwater resources. Yes, there was never a sense that there might be violence around it. But the young people were not going to take things lying down. The elders of the community do storm the mining camp at one stage, fully armed with spears, painted in war paint. They are fully prepared to take on Ben Dickinson, who is the mining manager there, to assert their authority over the place, because they feel like they are not being listened to, they're trying to send delicate delegations to him and he's not listening. And so they take a different tack. Now, he's not there when they come and they upturn his whole place and they leave essentially the message of don't mess with us. And so these tensions really are starting to build up over the course of this year. - Were they outright opposed to the mind? - No, it's very important to recognize that the Utacala bark petitions, you'll see nowhere in the wording of them that they don't want the mining to happen. What they don't want to happen is for them to not be consulted. They want a voice. They want their laws to be respected, just as the Macassans had for centuries. They want to be asked permission to come onto their lands and importantly, they want to be compensated for any resources that are taken from them. - This is when two labor parliamentarians Kim Beasley Sr., the dad of the Kim Beasley was the leader of the Labor Party throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, and Gordon Bryant. How were they brought into this story, Clem? - Gordon Bryant was involved with the Federator Council for Aboriginal Advancement and they are one of the organizations that Ed Gwell sent the telegram to. Gordon Bryant had a long interest in Aboriginal affairs as had Kim Beasley. They had both been on the select committee for voting rights that had gone around the country in 1961, looking at the idea of and franchising Aboriginal people, which did happen in 1962. That is the year in which First Nations people first had the right to vote in federal elections. There wasn't compulsory for them to do so, but they could, but the first election that they could vote in wasn't until 1963. Bryant was the Labor member for wills, the seat that Bob Hawke later took, so working class area in Melbourne industrial area. And the Federated Council paid for him and Kim Beasley to go up to Eater Khaled to see what was going on in the ground, and that was an incredibly important move. Let's not just have telegrams going backwards and forwards, but go up there and talk to the people, which is essentially what the young were asking. Gordon Bryant had a good idea of what was going on in that part of the world, but it seemed to be quite a profound and moving moment for Kim Beasley's senior. Tell me why that was. Kim Beasley was familiar with Aboriginal communities. He'd been part of that select committee, but he had this one moment that was, you know, kind of a revelation, maybe even an epiphany, where he was standing in the newly consecrated Methodist church in Eater Khaled that Edgar Wells had built. It had only just opened that month. And Edgar Wells had been very clear that he wanted the young or to contribute to the church. And he had said to Narichan, "Mongolili man and leader, give us something for this church that comes from young or you can do whatever you want." And what they came up with was these two extraordinary panels of painting, one expressing the world view, the cosmology, it's like a encyclopedia of the dual moiety of the young or people. And the other one is the yiddish or moiety of the young or people. And then senior leaders were appointed to paint their world, their stories, their sacred symbols. You can read these as mind maps of the area. If you know how to read them, every single thing you might ever need to know about Northeast Ireland land can be read from these two panels. And they stood on either side of the altar in the church. Kim Beasley is standing there looking at them. When he has this moment of recognizing that the letter that had been given to him the day before by a young or man, that essentially was there pleading what they wanted the politicians to hear. He said, "You need to put the words of that onto a petition that has the formal wording of a petition to be accepted by Parliament and you need to stick it onto a bark painting like these ones that reflects something of your world that comes from you and it will be beautiful and it will be like nothing the House of Representatives have ever seen before. It will attract the attention of all Australians and it will cut through." And that is exactly what happens. What you have with this church in Northeast Ireland land is an altar scene of almost Japanese simplicity but flanked with these two beautifully ornate bark paintings. So it's quite overwhelming to look at them. I think it's really quite a. I hadn't realized that this is a really amazing work of architecture or an amazing, such an amazing religious place. Do you think that was part of what moved Kim Beasley when he saw this beautiful Holtapese? Absolutely, and he's a deeply Christian man. He was a member of moral re-armament and he believed that the world could be healed through the peace and unity and the understanding of people in the brotherhood of man. And I have no doubt that he had a religious epiphany in that moment. I've got to tell you a beautiful little story which was that Kim Beasley, Jr. launched my book in Perth and Kim told a story at that launch. He said while he was reading the book in preparation, his wife came across him in the lounge room and she said to him, "Kim, what's wrong?" Because he was weeping and Kim said, "Nothing's wrong. I've just discovered for the first time that it was my father who proposed the idea of putting the petitions on bark." And he's telling this story at the launch and he's crying and he said, "Not for the first time. Did I realize that my father was a better man than me?" And then that just said everybody at the launch off. We were all in tears. His father had never told him, never told the family, had never made it about him in any way. He wanted this to be for the young all but also it was an act of grace and obviously in Kim Beasley's mind, this was an act of God in some ways too. What is said in the bark petitions? What are they demanding asking for? What are they claiming for themselves in the petitions? What are the key points there for them? There are eight points and what they are essentially asking for is saying, "Please do not come to our lands without consulting us and compensating us. Please understand that we want to be here forever, that these are our lands. We were born here, our children were born here, our grandchildren will be born here. We do not want to become like the Larrakeer people in Darwin. We want to look after this place. This is a good place, this is our place. We are here and our words must be heard and our voices must be counted." Under Australian law, they're seen as petitions. They were put to the parliament as a petition. And as you say, that's not how the young who saw these documents wasn't. It wasn't until Galeroy gave me those words, "Nukhudarak," that my entire thinking about what the petitions were turned around, because I realized that they weren't petitions at all. What the young saw themselves as doing was one sovereign nation, speaking to another sovereign nation, the Commonwealth of Australia, who they never felt that they were ruled by. They were not governed by. Young or people lived on the lands of young or people. Young or people believed that sovereignty was never seated. They were entering into a negotiation of agreement-making, essentially of treaty-making, with the Commonwealth government, to see that their laws were abided by. They went a people as a petition implies that were a subservient people who were petitioning up to a higher power who were pleading with them. This was not a request. Young or people in their power were offering the Commonwealth government to enter into agreement-making with them. What did the Minister for Territories Paul Haslok say when this first petition was put to the federal parliament? Obviously, Paul Haslok could read the English bit, but not the Younger mutter bit, and he couldn't read the paintings around the side of them. All he could see was really the 12 names. And he sends a telegram back asking for more information about who these people were. The information he gets the next day. He gets back up in parliament, he says, "This petition, it's not worth a pinch of the proverbial. The people that it's signed by are all young people, and three of them are women. And we know that these Aboriginal communities are patriarchal gerontocracies. We know that their communities run by old men. So the fact that these are young people and women just shows that this is just a front. These petitions aren't really the views of the Younger community. - A front for the. - They're a front for the communists. They're a front for those rabble-raising reds down south, those civil rights groups who want to tear the fabric of Australian society to pieces. - Because the communists are right. - And they're using these poor blackfellers up north as a Trojan horse to bring down the men's East Government. That's what Haslok effectively says. - And what was the reaction from the people when it was put to them that the minister had said that this was all made up and not true? - So word gets back to them and they're incensed. They are insulted. Essentially, they've given the gift of their tribal and cultural knowledge, and their gift has been thrown back in their face. - And why was it signed by young people and some women instead of the male elders? - Because the Younger people were trying to engage with these white people in Canberra on the terms they thought that would be respected by them, which was giving them their most little gift. to root members. - Right, so they were ambassadors really in a way. - They were, these people were very carefully selected by the elders of the community through the collective decision-making processes, the NARA, which is the yongal word for a parliament. Parliament had resumed in Yerakala in the place where it met behind the mission house that Edgar and Ann Wells lived in. They had selected which people they thought should be their representatives and they got them to sign it, and I know that because I was able to sit with an interview for many hours the last surviving signatory to those petitions. - That's what he told you. - And that's what he told me. - So what did they do then? After they'd had Paul Haslok say that this was the work of communist agitators instead of the honoured people. - They decided that they had to prove that it was their old people who were behind all of this. And so they used this method that they had been using for a little while now to establish the identity of old people who could not write. They were doing it for banking purposes actually, which was to have a thumbprint and a cross across it and then signed by somebody else who was literate to say that this is the mark of this person. And overnight they were able to collect 33 signatories from the oldest and most culturally authoritative men and women in the community. And they sent those back to Parliament. And this is now sometimes known as the thumbprint petitions. The originals are in the archives in the bowels of Parliament House. - And was the second petition accepted by the Parliament this time? - So one of the other petitions that had originally been put was accompanied by the thumbprints. And yes, it was then accepted, it was read and directly off the back of that to select committee into what was called the grievances of the Yetacala people was set up by Kim Beesley straight away. And that means actually that this is the first petition not only to be presented in the Australian language, but also the first position ever put to an Australian Parliament that led directly to a parliamentary inquiry. - One of the sentences that really leapt out of me from you was a moment when Gordon Bryant, the back venture, had been so very helpful in assisting the cause of the young people. He said that they were kind of crashing in the younger people were crashing into some very powerfully set ideals within Australia at the time. These ideals of progress, foreign investment, and assimilation. Does that go some way to explaining the irritation and discomfort you can sort of feel off the comments of people like Paul Haslick and Robert Menzies at the time and dealing with this hornet's nest of trouble they'd stirred up in North East Ireland. Oh, absolutely, the government was like, well, how could you be standing in the way of progress? Can't you clearly see that this is in the national interest to develop these resources, to build a mining town out there, to refine these ores? This is the way that we are going to safely establish our Northern borders. So it's 1963, it's not that long since Darwin was bombed. And these ideas of the precarity of the Northern borders needing to be protected were also invoked, as well as the economic development that was going to be required to fuel this nation through the 20th century. So they just thought it was Aboriginal bloody mindedness and troublemaking by communists in the South? Yes, the idea that it was a few reds under some beds down South and a couple of black fellers that was going to get in the way of this. I mean, you can almost kind of read the disgust that underpins it. It's not just a thorn in the side. It was like superficial nonsense. But then there's this other countervailing old Australian value, which is that you don't just walk into someone's backyard and pitch the tents in there and start digging up the joint without even saying, hello or explaining why you're there or what gives you the right to even do. So that's another very old fashioned idea too. Well, this is one of the metaphors that Ed Gowell's employed to try to get ordinary Australians to understand what was going on. And he said, well, how do you reckon you'd feel if you come home one day and somebody's sitting on your couch and they go, you know what, I like this couch. I'm going to go get a couple of other blokes and we're going to take your couch and we're going to walk it out the front door and see our thanks. And we're building a block of flats in your backyard too. So this petition was accepted by the Parliament and a committee of inquiry was set up and it found very much in the favor of the old people once they went up there. But what came out of it in the end? What came out of it was a set of recommendations that, to put it mildly, were never followed. They were dropped. Mendy's wins the election and the fact that he also wins it in a landslide gives him a mandate effectively to pursue the development strategies and process that he wants and to put all of the recommendations of the Select Committee aside. So yes, the younger people were listened to the transcripts of that Select Committee are absolutely fascinating but their voices ultimately were not heard. One of the recommendations was for there to be a standing committee for the next 10 years while development happened to make sure that the interests of the younger were preserved all the way along. That might have made an actual difference. Nothing was going to stop mining. As I said before, the younger didn't want mining to stop necessarily. But they didn't get consulted. They didn't get properly compensated in any way. They got a handful of pounds to build a couple of houses on the mission. But most importantly, there was no mechanism of oversee ongoing into the future. But it was really like the defeat that wasn't, wasn't it? Because another thing that really jumped out was that you found in Hansard, you have Kim Beesley, senior and Gordon Bryant standing up in the federal parliament in 1963 saying there needs to be a form of native title. Man, that really jumped out at me. 1963, that's being spoken of in the federal parliament. I know, don't you just love Hansard? Yes, native title was being spoken about and democratic rights were being spoken about. And because there were those people who were advocating for those concepts at this point, that doesn't go away. And it's that kind of momentum that carried over from the bark petitions. What form did that momentum take in the years that followed? It took the form of a lot of influential people down South, getting behind the yongal cause and this cause of land rights more generally. Court case, Nabalco versus the Queen, when the yongal actually take the mining company and the federal government to court, they lose that as well in the now famous Justice Blackburn decision where he says, yes, he can see that the yongal people have a connection with the country that goes back to time immemorial, but they have no rights that can be established in British law. And that decision is what then gets overturned in Marbo. So you can see that there is a direct line between the Atacala bark petitions and Marbo and the native title rights that are eventually established and the whole overturning of Taranolius. Yes, that's why I mentioned right at the start that it struck me that bureaucratic bark petitions were like a stone that was thrown at a great big edifice in Australia built on profound untruth that this land was uninhabited or that the people who had had this ongoing connection with the land for tens of thousands of years were of no consequence. And it eventually brought that to the ground. Do you see it like that or do you see it some other way, clear? I do see it like that. I see that these were kind of test case all the way along that are chipping away at that untruth. And it gives you faith in the idea that truth will win out, but it does have to have its advocates and its allies all the way along. The other big huge edifice for me that was overturned by this project. Taranolius wasn't just expression of it was an empty land. There were all sorts of nullification, all sorts of erasers that were happening. And one of those is a governance nullius. One of those is a legal nullius, a language nullius. So all of which is to imply that Aboriginal people did not have governance systems, did not have legal systems. Diplomatic systems. Diplomatic systems, international trade systems. They had incredibly intricate governance structures and legal structures. And that none of those had been extinguished in the Jungles mind. This is the third book you've written in a trilogy of books about the evolution of Australian democracy. You've lived in Australia most of your life, but you're American born. And I think you maybe have that interesting outsiders' view on Australian democracy that kind of can look at our democracy with fresh eyes. The first book was about the rebels of the Eureka stockade. The second was about the suffrage movement in Australia. And now this, what's the story you're trying to tell if you want to connect the dots between these three really different things that happen in Australian history? Yeah, Ballerade 1854, a federation 1901, Yirakala 1963. Each of these big nation-building stories, Eureka is known as the birth of Australian democracy. At the turn of the 20th century, Australia is known as the most democratic country on Earth because it's the first to give women the right to stand for parliament and the right to vote, which is pure political equality with men. In 1963, the Utacala bark petitions, where young people ask for a voice for consultation, these three moments in place and in time can be joined by this idea. We the people, government for the people by the people, but who are the people? Each of these moments asked the governing bodies of the time to expand the notion of who the people were. On the gold fields, it was to include unproperty to men. At the turn of the century, it federation, it was to include white women. And then here in the 1960s, it's to include First Nations people. They can also be tied these stories through what I call the material heritage of Australian democracy. At Eureka, they made a flag, the women, so to flag. That tattered flag that we still have. Go and stand in front of it and, eh, dare you not to be moved by it. As part of the suffrage movement in Australia, Dora Mason-Coats painted this banner that we now call the Trust the Women banner. Trust the women mother as I have done. The banner asks Mother Britannia to do to look at her daughter Australia and the rights that have been won. That banner hangs in Parliament House today and you can go and look at it too. The Utacala bark petitions, these extraordinary objects that are half artworks, half land titles, they're a gift, they're an object, they're a document of title. These, I would say, are the founding documents of Australian democracy. They are the people saying, we are the people, we are here, our voices must be heard, we must be counted. Amen to that. Claire Wright has been such a pleasure in what a fascinating story you've told. Thank you so much. Thanks for giving me the time. Claire Wright is Professor of History and Public Engagement at the Trobe University in Melbourne and she's also chair of the National Museum of Australia. Her book is called Nuckudarag, the bark petitions, how the people of Jakarta change the course of Australian democracy. Today's programme is produced in the lands of the Gadigal Terrible and Jagger of People's producers Alice Moldovan, executive producer Kamal Ruini, I'm Richard Fightler. Thanks for listening. You've been listening to a podcast of conversations with Richard Fightler. For more conversations interviews, please go to the website, abc.net.au/conversations. For more information, please go to the website, abc.net.au/conversations.