It has taken us too long to right these wages of sin

It’s as significant as the Mabo decision, one of the biggest class action settlements in our legal history with $190 million compensation for wages stolen by earlier Queensland governments and their agents.

Good news for all Australians who aspire to a fair go, but why did it take so long? Fifty-eight years ago, as a young reporter, I wrote a single-column story about an Aboriginal man winning exemption from the Protection Act in the Bundaberg Magistrates Court.

I was stunned that a man who had committed no crime had to plead for the right to keep his hard-earned wages, to own property or to travel freely. It didn’t sound Australian to me. I had no idea that many thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers had to line up at police stations or state government off­ices to receive handouts from their wages at the discretion of so-called “protectors”.

We were supposed to be on the lookout for stories such as this and I naively assumed that my court coverage on page three might be the first step in righting an obvious wrong and exposing injustice in our community. If politicians didn’t act, surely unions would take up the cause of workers not being paid like the rest of us?

Thirteen years later I returned from overseas and joined the ABC. I wasn’t really surprised to discover that indigenous injustice was still alive and flourishing in my home state.

I accompanied a delegation of inquiry with the Whitlam government’s new minister for Aboriginal affairs, Gordon Bryant, and several members of the Canberra press gallery. We visited remote centres and town camps, including Julia Creek, Boulia, Camooweal and Mount Isa. Here we learned that not only were indigenous people still being deprived of their wages, their impounded savings also were being stolen by their state guardians.

A police sergeant had been charged and other officers, including a clerk of the courts, were under investigation. These incidents were being kept quiet but in those days the ABC had a huge network of “official correspondents” in regional Australia and we knew the impending Bryant delegation was creating panic among public servants in the outback.

Bryant believed the theft was widespread. He told us the commonwealth could not dismantle the Queensland act but he was keen to expose the process as being corrupt. Wages being withheld was bad enough but wages being stolen by public servants was scandalous.

The minister had one big card up his sleeve. A federal agency, the Commonwealth Bank, was holding much of the Queensland government’s trust funds for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander wages and Bryant acted immediately to have the bank divest itself of all trust funds linked to the Protection Act. We broke the story nationally on ABC radio that day and, once again, waited for a positive outcome.

Almost a half-century later, in March last year, I spotted an advertisement in our weekly newspaper on the Atherton Tablelands calling for claimants to join the latest stolen indigenous wages class action against the Queensland government. It was being driven by a Townsville indigenous man, Hans Pearson, with the backing of Bottoms Lawyers in Cairns. The term stolen wages sent a shudder through me. If I was unsettled, how must the surviving victims of this crime and their families feel? I was completing a memoir that included my own stolen wages experience as a young bush journo, so I contacted the claimants.

I was the only white face in a large gathering at the public meeting and told the lawyers I had some history in the case. While I no longer had editorial space or TV and radio bulletins at my disposal, I was willing to help promote their cause — particularly when told that about 30 elders had died since the claim was mounted. Fortunately, justice now looks as if it will be served for 10,000 former workers or their descendants in Queensland, and Deputy Premier Jackie Trad has promised to expedite settlement.

In Jamie Walker’s extensive coverage of the class action settlement in The Australian last week, Pearson talks about being shocked when the police sergeant in Innisfail told him in 1963 that he only had £28 in his trust fund as reward for 10 years’ toil. His wife Anna worked out that he was owed £7000, the equivalent of $235,000 in today’s dollars.

I found that incredibly moving. It sums up the tragic history of stolen wages in a few words. Is it any wonder that many indigenous families still find it difficult to trust the whitefellas’ system today?

I hope this settlement also settles the issue of whether the wages were stolen or somehow just lost in the system. To expand on a quote by Mark Twain: some folk may question whether “stolen” wages is the right word — but it will do for me until a better one comes along.

Elliot Hannay is a former editor at the Townsville Bulletin. His memoir The Colt With No Regrets will be published later this year.