Two steps fonvnrd three steps back: a Wiradjuri Land Rights journey

Abstract

Two steps forward three steps back: a Wiradjuri Land Rights journey by Gaynor Macdonald, 138 pp, LhR Press, Canada Bay, 2004, ISBN 0-9577766-2-4, $24.95 The subtitle of this book is Letters to the Wiradjuri Regional Aboriginal Land Council on its 20th Anniversary 1983 - 2003. Yet for all its defects, the NSW Act established Regional Land Councils, differently structured and more efficient, at least in Wiradjuri country, than the Local Aboriginal Land Councils (too small and inexperienced) and the later State Land Council (too big and bureaucratic). Several aspects of this remarkable book are striking: the powerlessness of Aborigines in the face of the tergiversations of government; the extreme reluctance of Australian parliaments to come to terms with a brutal past while failing to see that certain simple measures can do so much to make amends.

Two steps forward three steps back: a Wiradjuri Land Rights journey by Gaynor Macdonald, 138 pp, LhR Press, Canada Bay, 2004, ISBN 0-9577766-2-4, $24.95

The subtitle of this book is Letters to the Wiradjuri Regional Aboriginal Land Council on its 20th Anniversary 1983 - 2003. Apart from one or two explanatory asides concerning Wiradjuri history and the complexity of the 1983 NSW Land Rights Act, the book is literally just that - letters. There are five of them, each of about 20 pages, each beginning 'Dear Wiradjuri Friends' and each one signed 'Gaynor'. It's a clever technique allowing for interpolations, interviews, extracts from Submissions, facsimile letters and any amount of photographs. Indeed, the whole text, as Macdonald in a sense intended, works well as a family album or scrapbook of reminiscences. Photographs of favoured Wiradjuri people appear many times, and the unfavoured not at all.

Of course, the design is more than a strategy of presentation. Macdonald has worked as a profound friend and adviser of Wiradjuri people since she began her anthropology doctorate in their country in the early 1980s. Apart from a couple of years in Japan she has never stopped working amongst them almost on a weekly basis, writing letters, researching, going to meetings, social occasions, demonstrations, deputations. Her published works, almost all on Wiradjuri themes, include biography and academic discussions of photographs, native title and cultural continuities. So many Indigenous organisations round the country have depended enormously on this type of informed dedication over so many decades. The ideology still prevailing in some circles that Aboriginal history and anthropology should be written only by Aboriginal people could not receive a better rebuff than through this engaging book and its resolute author.

The title is pessimistic, but no more than is necessary. Indeed, sometimes it seems that four or five steps back compared to the one forward would be a fairer ratio. For the 1983 Land Rights Act, bitterly opposed by many as likely to achieve very little, was only passed with the simultaneous retrospective parliamentary acquiescence to hundreds of illegal reserve revocations in the previous eighty years. Yet for all its defects, the NSW Act established Regional Land Councils, differently structured and more efficient, at least in Wiradjuri country, than the Local Aboriginal Land Councils (too small and inexperienced) and the later State Land Council (too big and bureaucratic). Wiradjuri people are tough. So intolerant were the residents of the Aborigines Welfare Board and its managers that Erambie reserve, Cowra, was long regarded as one of the most difficult in the state to manage. By the 1980s the experienced and well-organised Wiradjuri were more than ready to administer their own affairs. And so they did, probably more efficiently than any other Regional Council.

The weakness of all Acts of State is that they can be unmade as easily as they were made. Ideology is as important a factor as any in their unmaking. Greiner, NSW Premier from March 1988, tried to get rid of the five-year old Act altogether. Rebuffed in the Upper House, he tried to establish a trust fund into which all the regional Councils would have to deposit their assets. That failed, but in the major amendment of 1990, all financial functions were removed from the Regional Councils to the NSW Aboriginal Land Council. Regional Councils could no longer hold any land or make purchases. Western lands could be claimed only as perpetual leasehold rather than freehold.

The experiment in regional self-management, then, was so short. Some Wiradjuri would no doubt argue that it simply had not been worth it. But for Macdonald and her friends I think it was, not least for the opportunity for real leadership, brief though it was, but for the sociality, the solidarity, the friendships, the dances, the fun.

Several aspects of this remarkable book are striking: the powerlessness of Aborigines in the face of the tergiversations of government; the extreme reluctance of Australian parliaments to come to terms with a brutal past while failing to see that certain simple measures can do so much to make amends. Most striking of all is the productive, warm and constructive relationship between Macdonald and her Wiradjuri friends. It leaps from every page. Her friends recognise and appreciate her dedication, as she recognises theirs. Yes, it's a partisan account, but magnificently so. I don't think that the letters could have been written in any other way.

Peter Read

National Centre for Indigenous Studies,

Australian National University