In a way, it also acknowledges what an incredibly traumatic year 1788 was for Indigenous people. A year non-Indigenous people lately aren’t much fussed to talk about or especially remember.
In reality1788 was the beginning of all the dispossession, sickness and death which “Welcome to Country” comes some way to at least acknowledging. It challenges the three cheers for Australia colonial settlement story of rugged men in Akubra-like hats with whips and a little white woman at home. Well we assume he had a little white woman at home, even though the population statistics show that men far outnumbered women in the early colonial days. Certainly, there is no mention that this strong man’s resolve would ever have weakened and his gaze move over toward the black women in his midst. But that’s another story.
Thinking about 1788 also means not everyone thinks of a property merely having a history of previous good tenants along with proximity to parks and beaches. Private property in Australia also has a start date in which someone with a European background and mindset decided to “improve” the land ready for sale or production. As part of this grizzly process Aboriginal people got cast aside.
Aboriginal people know this and feel a deep sense of loss when they think about the appropriation of their land from 1788 to the present day. The sentiment is captured by Kevin Gilbert in the poem “On the Road to Queanbeyan:”
I look at the open fields and see The space where my people used to be I see the scars of wounded ground I cry as I hear the death call sound Of curlew mourning by.
I myself have felt this same desolation growing up in southern NSW, staring at all that flattened, cleared land with wheat and sheep everywhere. This used to be ours I thought. Of course, it still is, but if I’d decided to camp there I’d be moved on quickly by some farmer overly concerned at the “invasion” of “their” “property”.
Sensible people in Australia understand, at least in part, the hurt caused by the injustice and, in their own way, try to make some form of amends. Thus we have acknowledgment of country, the recognise movement, sea of hands, sorry days, etc. It’s all largely ceremonial (thank god it’s not John Howard’s “practical assimilation reconciliation”) but at least it’s something.
So the revelation of Maitland City Council’s official Welcome to Country policy recently was, to say the least, a bit of a jolt. Probably more like a jackhammer to the head really.
The good councilors at Maitland have decided that it is not enough to acknowledge just the Aboriginal traditional owners of the Maitland region in acknowledging country.
No, the official Maitland Welcome to Country acknowledges the early settlers as well.
According to Maitalnd’s official policy an appropriate Acknowledgment of Country would go like this:
I would like to acknowledge the Wonnarua people who are the traditional custodians of the land. I would also like to pay respect to their people both past and present and extend that respect to other Aboriginal Australians who are present. I also acknowledge the colonial heritage of Maitland and recognise the contribution of the early settlers in laying the foundations of this great and historic city.
In other words, Maitland have included the very people who did the dispossessing, killing, raping and banishing in the very thing (Acknowledgment of country) which is meant to aid reconciliation of these wrongs.
After picking my jaw up off the floor, I checked the Maitland website for the procedure around how this policy was able to become in any way ‘official’. A bit of poking around led to the agenda and minutes at the council meeting that night.
The draft of the policy itself, which includes all the settler stuff, was authored by a council worker named Calee Smith. She could not be contacted for the purposes of this article because she was on leave. As far as I could ascertain she is not an Indigenous person.
The “Responsible Officer” for the policy draft at Maitalnd City is Graeme Tolhurst who is the Executive Manager of Corporate Services. I spoke with Mr Tolhurst and he told me that as part of the policy formulation process he had gone to talk to people at Mindaribba LALC in 2012. As far as he could remember they gave their consent to the policy draft.
How could that be? Consent for the colonials, the land thieves? I asked him if the draft as presented to Mindaribba included the wording about the settlers. Mr Tolhurst said he could not remember. He did add, however, that policy can be amended on the floor of council without notice, on-the-fly. So perhaps Clr Fairweather, who moved the motion, or Clr Wethered who seconded it, did the amending.
Mr Tolhurst was quite defensive about the council’s position. When I asked him about why Maitland, of all the local councils in Australia, had decided to deviate so widely from not just their own stated guidelines for the policy but the reconciliation path the whole of Australian society is currently following he replied “council is the democratic representative for the will of the people of Maitland”.
The person I spoke to at Mindaribba, whose father is involved in performing Welcome to country said that they found out about this about a month ago and were “challenging it”. She described the whole situation as “very stressful.” When asked about her attitude to colonial settler recognition in the policy she said “isn’t that what Australia day is for?”
Notwithstanding the distress of the local Koori people at Mindaribba especially and all other Aboriginal people in the area, it seems to me this is yet another example of how the “representative government” model in Australia repeatedly fails Aboriginal people in Australia.
If it is to be assumed that the policy was researched, drafted and forwarded to council in the standard form as proscribed by the Office of local Government in NSW, Reconciliation Australia and accepted pretty much everywhere else in Australia then perhaps the policy was changed on the floor of council because a few of the councilors got their back up about the wording. Maybe it smacked of “political correctness gone mad” to them.
The problem, though, is that since the arrival of the Europeans Maitland wants to solemnly recognise, indeed is a cultural extension for the will of, the needs and desires of Aboriginal people have been an afterthought. Their cultural values are an afterthought, their history is an afterthought.
Who do the councilors of Maitland represent? In assessing the responses of all levels of government in Australia to the needs of Aboriginal people one must refer back to Governor Davey’s proclomation of 1816.
In panel two the red coats go out of their way to meet Aboriginal people as equals. As Penelope Edmonds points out the central vignette of the proclamation is the meeting of the Governor (in ceremonial headdress) with an Aboriginal negotiator (in ceremonial headdress). In this instance this supposed meeting appropriates an agreement, understanding or even treaty. I’m not sure that in Tasmania around 1830 any Aboriginal person was actually aware of treaty being hammered out but the consequence of this meeting becomes apparent in the final 2 panels where the red coats sit as the sole authority to law and take it upon themselves to mete out ultimate European justice to both black and white alike.
So the problem we have, both in Governor Davey’s proclamation in Tasmania of 1829 and the Welcome to Country policy of Maitland City Council in 2012, some 186 years later, is that a discriminatory policy, disempowering, dispossessive and cruel, has been implimented without the consent of the local sovereign Aboriginal people.
In both cases the policy has been instituted through implied agreement the local Aboriginal people. Agreement which is actually fictitious. But that didn’t stop the red coats in both Tasmania and Maitland. Nope, it’s the democratic will of a government no Aboriginal person has ever consented to.
Australia will never quit appropriating Aboriginal land, culture, language, law, cuisine, legend, children, sport, music, art, etc. So what has happened at Maitland should come as no shock. There is only one future to free Aboriginal people and, indeed, the Australian nation itself. That is self-determination. The sure right of Aboriginal people from the start of time until the end.
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