15th of May 1988
NATION’S DISGRACE BURNS WITHIN
By ROBERT HEFNER
“But even while the Queen was here, even while those rituals by the whites were being performed, Aboriginal children were dying from 19th century diseases, from Third World conditions by the lack of having clean drinking water piped into the community. I think that is Australia’s disgrace.
IN A PERFECT world, Kevin Gilbert would be leading the life of an artist, perhaps in as quiet and unassuming a way as Aboriginal artist Michael Tjakamarra Nelson, who designedthe mosaic, Tjurkurpa at Australia’s new Parliament House.
“My nature, my inclination is as an artist,”Gilbert said last week, at the close of four days of Aboriginal activities which coincided with the Royal visit to Canberra and the opening of thenew Parliament House. While he talked, a few people were still milling about the Albert Hal looking at the photographs by nine Aboriginal photographers in the Inside Black Australia exhibition.
He was clearly tired from the events of the previous four days, but his dark eyes shone brightly.”I like peace, I like quiet, I like my campfire,” he said. But life has more closely resembled a raging bushfire than a quiet campfire for Gilbert, an Aboriginal activist and member of the Wiradjuri tribe who, with the Ngunnawal, occupied the Canberra region before European settlement,often gathered at sites in what is now the ACT.
“I write to deliver a message,” he said, “and 1 have forced myself into writing to deliver amessage. I’ve forced myself in front of cameras.I am camera shy in so far as I do not like th epublic image. However, there are things that are necessary.”
Given Gilbert’s artistic nature and his predilection for the political, there is no slight irony in the imbroglio which erupted last week over his comments about the mystical power of the Tjakamarra mosaic. His comments were widely reportedby the media and he was dismissed by some asan eccentric.
For the record, Gilbert and the Aboriginal people have not put a curse on the Tjakamarramosaic. Gilbert the artist, in fact, likes it. “It’s abeautiful piece of work,” he said. “He’s a beautiful man,and he created a beautiful art work that was placedthere. He said that it is symbolic — a special representation — but he never claimed it was sacred.”
Gilbert said the members of the Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal tribes, who consider themselves the sovereign owners of the land in the Canberra region, had asked for anthropologists and genealogists to examine the new Parliament House site in 1979.
This had not been done, and the Aboriginal people had removed all of the artefacts and sacred stones from the area, in essence removing its sacredness.
“That [sacredness] will never return until the Ngunnawal receive their land and there is justice for Aboriginal people,” he said. “When the mosaic was going into the ground a name was asked for it. We the Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal said it’ a ‘no name’ and that was for a reason
. In Aboriginal land we’re all sovereign countries, and in Aboriginal law one man can’t take that which is sacred and just place it in the middle of another man’s country —in ‘the Business’. Now Tjakamarra knew this and that’s why he never claimed sacredness for this.
“That design in stone became a vehicle upon which energies were focused. There’s a creative energy, a spiritual energy — the spirit wind, if you like, or some people would liken it to thespirit of the Holy Ghost — a creative essence.”
This spiritual energy had been placed in the stone by the women from Papunya who haddanced in front of the new Parliament House on Monday morning, and by the large gathering ofChristians there at the weekend.
“These forces are placed in there, making it a judgment stone, a pay-back. That means not a sinister, not an evil thing has been done, but a wholesome thing that will always work against assailants, murderers, thieves, until there is apay-back — or an equalising — of justice. This is our law, this is our culture, and I believe that if you go there you’ll see the mosaic with a different energy.”
Gilbert said that any person who walked there knowing that an injustice had been done, and did nothing about it, was guilty of complicity.
“People must speak and must see that justice is done,” he said. “What I’m saying is that the pay-back stone, the retribution stone to give it aterm — now has a name, and that name hasbeen given to it with spiritual force.
“It is a sacred pay-back stone, like the scales of justice, and there is a presence there of justice —a presence, a personality — and people will realise that personality, people can feel that personality. It’s positive.”
Gilbert said that the pay-back stone could be considered a kind of “pointing the bone”, but that it was not an evil thing. “Pointing the bone has always been put to white people as an evil or a witchcraft thing,” he said. “When you point a bone, for instance, you are able to bring criminals to justice by the use of spiritual forces. So in\a way it is a use of pointing the bone, not in an evil way, but with a law.
“It’s like saying the spirit wins, it is a force of justice saying to a criminal that a price will be paid and left upon your estate until such time as justice is met. This is what I know will affect the Australian Parliament.”
Gilbert believed that White Australia could never fully repay the debt to Aboriginal people for taking the land and the resources; nor could it ever repay “horrendous crimes against humanity”.
“What it can do is grow in justice,” he said,”and it’s not for me to set the terms. I believe that we as sovereign owners must have a treaty that is recognised and protected under the international covenant of treaties. It must be done with international mediators.
“Aboriginal people must be returned a viable land base, free of white man’s taxes, and White Australia must undertake the task of ending the degradation of land, to do a lot of the re-greening, to look after this land, to start caring for it.
We must protect the land in law, and we can only do that by a treaty. That will make people aware, but also make them responsible in law.”
Gilbert said, both houses of Parliament had already acknowledged that the concept of terra nullius was a lie and that Aboriginal people were indeed the sovereign owners of Australia. “Now that’s good as a first step,” he said, “but once you make those words you also take on the legal consequences. If you find out that a person has been a victim of a crime, or that somebody has taken his property by fraud, there is a remedy — a remedy in law, a remedy in morality, a remedy in integrity. What we are asking as Aboriginal people is that this integrity must come.”
The events of last weekend and the protests during the opening of Parliament House hadpresented to the rest of the world a truer image of where Aboriginal people were in white Australia.
“I believe that the events of the last few days must bring about an attitudinal change,” he said.
I believe the message is out to the world, and.I believe that white Australia is quickly coming to the position where it is being classified alongside white South Africa in its treatment of blacks. I think that’s a good thing, a healthy thing when people throughout the world see the truth of thesituation and say, ‘Come on, it’s time to change it’.”
Gilbert said that the low turnout at both Expo’88 and the opening of Parliament House indicated that people of principle were boycotting these activities. “There will be further sanctions by people of principle at the trade levels,” hesaid.
“We are taking our lobby internationally. We’ll be calling for sanctions against White Australiain export industries such as beef, coke and coal, and steel. Already Australia has lost the level of tourist support by people of principle.
We will try to get our embassies established in other parts of the world, to be recognised in other parts of the world as sovereign Aboriginal people. ,
“There are plans afoot (for the embassies) but I wouldn’t like to say where because we could be pre-empted even from travelling. But moves are afoot and we will always prosecute the cause of .justice, whatever that may take. But we believe in integrity, we believe in justice, we do not believe in random terrorism.” .
He said that until such time that justice was met through a treaty, Australia could not achieve its full potential as a great nation of the world. “We have a great land,” he said; “a great land with Aboriginal people who have provedthe greatness throughout time. Now … greatness among the people who come and live and colonise this land… can only come with justice for all of us. This will be attained in this country, with or without white people growing to a level of integrity.”
In response to the statement by the Opposition spokesman on health, Wilson Tuckey, that the loud Aboriginal protest at the opening of Parliament House had been a disgrace, Gilbert said, “I believe the protest was right When Justice Einfeld went out to Toomelah Mission he looked at the conditions and he wept. He said he had been to Soweto; he had seen the concentration camps in Germany after the Second World War, but that this was his own country.
“I believe that answers [Tuckey) or anyone who says that a call, even if it’s an unruly call, for justice is a disgrace. I think that a nation that supports that kind of view needs to take a careful look at itself.
“After the last 20 years of lip service Aboriginal people still live in refugee camps, still suffer from lack of drinking water, have no medical clinics — these are the very basics of life.
“We’ve heard the pretty words, and to us they mean only that White Australia is still trying to perpetrate an aggrandisement of itself in the eyes of the world. Indeed, it tried to achieve that with the Tjakamarra mosaic. They tried to say. ‘This is what we do, this is how much we respect Aboriginal people.’ .
“But even while the Queen was here, even while those rituals by the whites were being performed, Aboriginal children were dying from 19th century diseases, from Third World conditions by the lack of having clean drinking water piped into the community. I think that is Australia’s disgrace.”
By Robert Heffner,
Canberra Times Sunday Extra, 15 May 1988, p. 7.
