Treaty: Why has it taken so long?

DECADES after the Barunga Statement was made, NT political and indigenous leaders have agreed to work together towards a treaty. But why has it taken 30 years?

Prime minister Bob Hawke receives the Barunga Statement during the 1988 festival Pictures: CLIVE HYDE

ABORIGINAL affairs minister Gerry Hand warned the crowd to keep clear as Bob Hawke took aim.

The prime minister’s target was a straw-stuffed kangaroo.

His spear missed the mark and stuck impotently into the ground.

Getting the prime minister, his offsider and their respective wives to Barunga, 80km south east of Katherine, took months of planning.

Now a Labor Senator for Western Australia, Patrick Dodson was then the director of the Central Land Council and one of the architects of what is now known as the Barunga Statement, the log of claims presented to Hawke in June 1988.

Dodson’s job was to ensure the wording of the petition was easily understood by the memberships of the Central and Northern land councils and had the approval of their leaders.

In getting the prime minister to Barunga, the land councils were aided by the election to parliament the previous year of former CLC policy officer Warren Snowdon.

Lobbying by Dodson and others had formed a good relationship with Hand, and in Hawke they found a prime minister willing to listen to their concerns.

There was a feeling they were on the cusp of something historic.

Uluru had been handed back to its traditional owners just three years before. Behind the scenes, preparations were underway to do the same with Nitmiluk National Park.

Internationally, the first delegations of indigenous people from around the world were travelling to the United Nations in the very early stages of the development of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Mabo had yet to obliterate the fiction of terra nullius, but the Land Rights Act had set the course for its destruction.

Dodson recalls an “electric atmosphere” at Barunga.

Between the musical performances and the games of footy and softball, Aboriginal leaders, presided over by Wenten Rubuntja and NLC chairman Galarrwuy Yunupingu, met with Hawke and Hand to agree on the path to treaty.

Addressing the crowd after that meeting, Hawke said it wasn’t until a treaty was in place that “we will have an Australia within which the Aboriginal and the non-Aboriginal Australia will be able to live together truly in peace and in dignity”.

People were ecstatic, Dodson recalls, to hear those words from a prime minister, along with a promise a treaty would be reached by the end of that term of parliament. It was a promise they expected Hawke to keep.

“It was a very fertile period in the thinking of people’s minds and we all had high aspirations that we could achieve this,” Dodson says.

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IF Dodson and others were optimistic, Yunupingu was more circumspect.

Bob Hawke receives the Barunga statement during the 1988 festival

A towering figure in NT politics and culture for decades, he foreshadowed the long wait to come in his speech immediately after Hawke.

The presentation to the prime minister of the petition itself, bordered by paintings on bark by saltwater and desert people, was a “surprise”, Yunupingu told the crowd.

It would “remind not only Bob Hawke, but the next one after him and the next one after him” for the next century to keep the interests of Aboriginal people at the front of their minds, he said.

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THE afterglow didn’t last long. By the time those returning home after the festival got as far as Katherine, then-opposition leader John Howard’s voice was on the radio, vowing to tear up any treaty.

To reach a treaty with citizens of one’s own country would be a “step into the dark”, Howard warned. He likened it to South African apartheid, then still six years away from ending.

Howard claimed in the press an “overwhelming majority” of Liberal and National members shared his view.

Within that overwhelming majority was the NT government of the day, led by Steve Hatton.

The CLP chief minister said treaty should be “of concern to all Australians” and would expose the country to a “minefield of international laws with enormous financial implications”.

Writing in the NT News, Aboriginal mining consultant Bob Liddle, who would go on to be endorsed and then disendorsed as the CLP candidate for the NT, said the treaty proposition was “inherently divisive and undoubtedly would cause more problems than it would solve”.

The ferocity of the opposition surprised Dodson.

“We knew none of this would ever be easy, but I think the reality of the politics of it soon dawned on us when Bob went back to Canberra,” he says.

Prime minister Bob Hawke throwing a spear at Barunga in 1988

On the first day of debate in the new Parliament House, two months after Barunga and the first sitting day since Hawke accepted the bark petition from Yunupingu and Rubuntja, Hawke and Hand set about keeping Aboriginal recognition live in people’s minds.

Hawke gave notice of a motion to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as Australia’s first inhabitants.

Hand tabled a list of 102 names, dates and causes of death of Aboriginal men and women who had died in custody since 1980.

Back in the NT, Yunupingu worked at winning over white Australians to his cause.

In an opinion piece published in the NT News a week after he handed the petition to Hawke, he appealed to Australians’ sense of fairness while giving them an out from the guilt some felt was being foisted upon them for a crime committed 200 years earlier.

“While I would in no way suggest that today’s Australians are responsible for the sins of the past, I would state strongly that they have a responsibility to do something about today’s injustices which have their basis in the past,” he wrote.

“Australia’s non-Aboriginal citizens have inherited the benefits of genocide, of alienation and theft of land. That is the reality that today’s Australia cannot ignore.”

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IN the end, the push for treaty fizzled out, overtaken by other issues.

Hawke was deposed by his deputy Paul Keating in 1991.

His final act as prime minister was to unveil the statement at Parliament House, where — as Yunupingu predicted — it has served as a reminder to the eight prime ministers who followed Hawke of the unfilled vow made in Barunga.

In 1988, Warren Snowdon was a then-38-year-old rookie MP. He had represented the division of the NT for less than a year.

Thirty years on, that electorate no longer exists, split into two parts — the city and the bush.

Now the longest serving member of Parliament, Snowdon represents Lingiari, covering everything in the Territory bar Darwin and its satellite Palmerston.

“I don’t really know why it failed,” Snowdon says.

“Partly, because there were a whole lot of other issues that started to emerge. Clearly, the definition of a treaty — treaties — that was an area where people needed a great need of exploration and I think it’s worthwhile contemplating at the moment.”

Mabo went some way to righting wrongs, as did the Native Title Act which followed.

But even now, with terra nullius long extinguished, the reluctance to face up to the reality of Australia’s early days continues to hold back reconciliation efforts.

“There’s some fear about the nature of the settlement that people don’t want to face up to,” Dodson says.

“They should face up to it, because it’s not all about a guilt trip, it’s about honesty.”

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THE failure to reach a treaty is a frustration for Apaak Miller, lead singer of Blakbala Mujik and the founder of the Barunga Festival.

In 2006, furious at how progress had stalled, Yunupingu threatened to take back the Barunga Statement from Canberra and hold a funeral for the treaty process.

But Miller says there’s no anger or animosity today.

“We just want to catch up with the rest of the world, to make people work together to help us get this country in line with other parts of the world,” he says.

Fear of what a treaty could mean is as relevant today as it was when Hatton warned it could send the country broke.

“Inevitably (treaty) is still going to happen but we’ve got to let people know a treaty is getting people together and walking together and working together and sharing this beautiful country,” Miller says.

“This is the best country in the world, Australia. We would like everybody to come and join in and be part of it together as a team, as Australia.”

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AUSTRALIA would be a different place had a treaty been reached by 1990, Dodson says.

“I think a lot of the social downsides we see in First Nations people wouldn’t be happening,” he says.

“It’s a terrible thing when people are denied their identity and denied the significance of their rights in a modern democracy, where they are made to be co-dependent on the largesse of the Crown. And then managed to the point of not having any responsibility for their daily lives and then told ‘well you should be more responsible’.”

In 1988, Yunupingu said without a treaty, it was as if Aboriginal people legally did not exist.

That’s true today, Dodson says.

“If you’re living in your own country and people keep telling you you don’t belong here, that eats away at you emotionally and it creates a lot of trauma that is deep inside people’s psyche,” he says.

Whether Australia would be a better place with a treaty is subjective, Snowdon says, but he agrees it would be changed.

“I think we wouldn’t be having an argument about rights. They would be entrenched,” he says.

“People would know what their rights are and everyone would get on with their business.”

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THIS weekend, on the 30th anniversary of the Barunga Statement, they’ve gathered to do it all over again.

Many of the players are still the same, though some have passed on, their names no longer spoken.

On Friday at Barunga, Chief Minister Michael Gunner signed a memorandum of understanding with the NT’s four land councils, committing the parties towards working towards a treaty. It has the conditional support of CLP leader Gary Higgins, who is wary of potential changes it could bring to the education of Aboriginal kids.

Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion didn’t respond in time for inclusion in this story, but he has previously said he hoped the NT treaty process wasn’t being used to “frustrate” progress in other areas.

It’s an inversion of 1988, when the Commonwealth was on board, in face of opposition from the Territory.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten was one of those present to watch Gunner sign the memorandum. A federal election is looming.

Shorten’s office says a Labor government would be open to discussions about a federal treaty.

If Shorten one day walks the halls of Parliament House as prime minister, the Barunga Statement will be there to greet him.

Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander people are warned there may be deceased people pictured