Rob Riley: An Aboriginal Leader's Quest for Justice - Softcover

Quentin Beresford

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0855755024 ISBN 13: 9780855755027

Publisher: Aboriginal Studies Press (AUS), 2006

Synopsis

Widely regarded as one of the great Aboriginal leaders of the modern era, Rob Riley was at the centre of debates that have polarised views on race relations in Australia: national land rights, the treaty, deaths in custody, self-determination, the justice system, native title and the Stolen Generations. He tragically took his own life in 1996, weighed down by the unresolved traumas of his exposure to institutionalisation, segregation and racism, and his sense of betrayal by the Australian political system to deliver justice to Aboriginal people. His death shocked community leaders and ordinary citizens alike. Set against the tumultuous background of racial politics in an unreconciled nation, the book explores Rob''s rise and influence as an Aboriginal activist. Drawing on perspectives from history, politics and psychology, this work explores Rob''s life as a ''moral protester'' and the challenges he confronted in trying to change the destiny of a nation. Rob Riley''s belief that he had failed in this quest raises profound questions about the legacy of past racial policies, the extent of institutionalised racism in Australia and the reluctance of Australia''s politicians to show leadership on race. Much of Riley''s life was a triumph of the human spirit against great adversity, and this legacy remains.

About this title

About the Author

Quentin Beresford is an associate professor of politics and government at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. He is the author of seven books.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rob Riley

An Aboriginal Leader's Quest for Justice

By Quentin Beresford

Aboriginal Studies Press

Copyright © 2006 Quentin Beresford
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85575-502-7

Contents

Illustrations, 
Acknowledgements, 
Abbreviations, 
Publisher's Note, 
Introduction, 
ONE Prisoners of Racism: The History of Rob Riley's Family, 
TWO Bound for Assimilation: A Childhood at Sister Kate's, 
THREE Life at the Margins: Growing up Aboriginal, 
FOUR Apprenticeship: Joining the Aboriginal Legal Service, 
FIVE Noonkanbah: The Struggle for Heritage, 
SIX A Bigger Stage: The National Aboriginal Conference, 
SEVEN Betrayal: The Demise of National Land Rights, 
EIGHT Enemies Within: The End of the National Aboriginal Conference, 
NINE At the Cutting Edge: Political Battles in Canberra, 
TEN War on All Fronts: Return to the Aboriginal Legal Service, 
ELEVEN Mounting Despair: The Final Campaigns, 
Legacy, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Prisoners of Racism: The History of Rob Riley's Family

'I can picture exactly the way it was', Rob's uncle, Sam Dinah, exclaims. Time and desecration have taken their toll on Moore River Settlement; only a few of the original structures survive at the once notorious prison for dispossessed Aborigines. Sam sees past the crumbled foundations and the scattered bits of fallen buildings, and reels off where the bakery, Superintendent's house, dormitory, staff quarters and other sundry parts of the once expansive and crowded Settlement were in the 1940s when he lived there as a small boy along with his mother (Rob's maternal grandmother), sister (Rob's mother) and other siblings.

Set on two imposing sandhills which rise sharply out of an isolated part of Perth's dry but environmentally unique coastal plain, the Settlement today is ghostly quiet. Only the occasional screeches of birds and the breeze rustling the tops of the imposing stands of pine disturb the silence. This is a place where hundreds of Aboriginal people suffered and where their sorrow can be felt to this day. It is where Rob's story begins.

Even before this visit to the Settlement, Sam had given me a raw insight into its lasting impact. From the start of the project, he had been helping me piece together the family's history. One day, when I was in his office at the Aboriginal Legal Service, he unexpectedly asked me: 'Do you want to see my mother's Native Welfare file?' Sam thrust his arm into a huge cardboard box sitting in the corner of his office. After rummaging around in a metre-deep bundle of papers, he pulled out a file, 5 centimetres thick. It was the 'Native Welfare' file belonging to his mother, Anna Dinah (née Miller), a documentation of her life maintained by officers of the Department of Native Affairs. 'Here,' he said, 'have this. I've never read it. It's too painful'.

Sam's periodic visits to the Settlement are emotional occasions. This was his childhood home. His memories are bitter-sweet. Our visit turned up some unexpected reminders of how embedded is his family's history in this place. We toured the dingy prison known as the boob. As Sam read through the names etched into the wall he came across the name 'Dinah', and concluded that his father must have scratched his name into the wall during a period of incarceration for infringing the authority's draconian rules. We moved over to the resource centre set up in recent years for former residents and visitors. Sam rifled through the five thick photograph albums and was struck by an image of himself as a grinning five-year-old. He does not possess photographs from this part of his childhood and did not know this one existed. It was a moment of pleasure for him as he examined all the cheeky-looking faces around him.

Meanwhile, as I flicked through a visitors book, my eye caught an unexpected entry. On 2 September 1990, Rob Riley visited Moore River (by then renamed Mogumber) with his mother. He had come to pay homage to the place that had shaped the destiny of his family. Next to his name, the small space allowed for visitors' comments was left blank.

Sam and I moved to the cemetery. Here, scattered through a large area of scrub, were small, rusting, mass-issue iron crosses with nothing more than RIP inscribed on them. The scene resembled a war-grave site, only without the reverential small white crosses and neat landscaping that marks such symbolic places. For Moore River internees, the final indignity was to be buried in an unmarked grave. These people's bodies had simply been dumped, disposed of haphazardly in the least costly manner and with the least possible respect. Even though the authorities had kept copious files on their lives and had issued many with anglicised names, they were buried nameless in an unfenced grave site. There are many of these small, rusting crosses dotting the bush surrounding the far end of the second sandhill. 'Mum's buried somewhere around here,' Sam said, 'but you'd never know where'.

Of the vast, coercive powers the white authorities had to control the lives of Aboriginal people, the power to remove children from their families was the most feared. And this job usually fell to local police officers. The sight of parents wailing as black police cars sped away down dusty roads carrying traumatised children bound for institutions was common throughout Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the west. While not all Aboriginal children entered institutions by such coercive means, it is most likely Anna Miller did. When taken to Moore River Settlement in 1922 she was a feisty fourteen-year-old with a father who loved her. She was bright, spirited and literate. It is unlikely she would have gone willingly. Force would have been required. But we cannot confirm the manner of her departure, which, in itself, is a chilling testimony to the power exercised by the state over the lives of Aborigines. The book-length file on Anna developed by the Native Welfare Department is silent on the circumstances of her removal; a child could be taken and no-one had to account for their actions.

At the time of her removal, Anna was living with her father, Sam Miller, at Mount Barker. Nothing is known about her mother. Sam, like many male Aborigines in the south-west in the 1920s and 1930s, was an itinerant farm worker. He lived through the dispossession and economic marginalisation which the Noongars of the south-west of Western Australia suffered from the time of settlement in 1829. While maintaining on-going links with their traditional lifestyle for much of the nineteenth century, Noongars had, by the early decades of the twentieth century, been largely reduced to an itinerant rural labour force. Though impoverished, Sam wanted to care for his daughter. In the several letters he wrote to authorities over a number of years, he pleaded for her return, stressing his ability to provide for her.

In the years following Anna's arrival, occasional reports surfaced in the press that Moore River functioned more as a prison or a concentration camp than a 'settlement'. But few objections were raised to the infringement of the basic rights of the people forced to live there or their mistreatment. Not only was suffering inside its boundaries well hidden from view, but prevailing attitudes towards Aborigines did not allow a humanitarian response to their plight. Anna Miller grew into an adult in this austere and isolated world. A loving and maternal person by nature, her confinement sharpened her defiant and tenacious side as she became trapped in the web of racial thinking that kept her a prisoner.

This settlement — like several others — was the brainchild of A.O. Neville, the Commissioner of Native Affairs in Western Australia from 1914. The Settlement was originally planned as a small, self- supporting farming settlement of some 10,000 acres, which would also provide education and training for children. However, the poor soils and harsh, bone-dry summers quickly soured Neville's dream of European agriculture. Within a few years Moore River Settlement functioned as a multi-purpose institution for Aboriginal people but mainly housed those rounded up by government under Ministerial warrant.

Anna Miller came to the attention of the authorities under Neville's policy of enforcing a stricter regime of control over the state's 'half-caste' population of children — in the racist language of the first half of the twentieth century. Like most of the Aborigines sent to Moore River, Anna was brought in under the powers of the infamous Aborigines Act 1905 (WA), which, in conferring on the Commissioner of Native Affairs dictatorial powers over Aborigines, marked the beginning of Western Australia's adoption of racism as state policy. The Commissioner was empowered to remove Aboriginal children from their families by virtue of his role as guardian of all Aboriginal children until the age of sixteen. The Act also gave authority to direct, under ministerial warrant, Aboriginal people to any reserve or settlement the Commissioner thought fit.

The Act paved the way for the establishment of reserves to which Aborigines could forcibly be removed. It outlawed 'miscegenation' — procreative sexual union between the races — and banned Aborigines from owning guns. Any Aboriginal camped outside a reserve could be removed at will by the authorities, and Aborigines were not allowed to wander in towns without a permit or to enter prohibited areas — which could be created any time the government deemed it 'necessary'. It was an Act for the subjugation of a group of people because of their race, and ranks among the most oppressive pieces of such legislation anywhere in the Western world during the twentieth century.

The extraordinary set of controls contained within the Act emerged out of the Royal Commission 'On the Condition of the Natives'. Headed by Queenslander Dr E.W. Roth, the Commission was notable for drawing attention to the emergence of the 'half-caste' problem and especially the rising number of such children. Roth foreshadowed the need both for increased powers to deal with them and for government institutions to house them. His ideas were the product of a centuries-old ideology of the inferiority of Indigenous races: views which had been given added impetus from the 1870s by the popular adaptation of Darwin's theories of 'survival of the fittest' to the world's 'primitive' cultures. Thus 'full-blood' Aborigines were widely thought to be a 'dying' race, with public concern fixed on the 'problem' of the rising number of 'half-castes'.

Roth's recommendations were embodied in the Aborigines Act 1905, which was rushed through the state's Legislative Assembly with little more than an hour's debate. However, the Act's vast powers languished for want of an able administrator to give full effect to them. Nearly a decade later such an administrator came forth in the person of A.O. Neville. In 1914, Neville was appointed to the position of Commissioner of Native Affairs, and he quickly demonstrated the zeal, organisational capability and ambition to use the powers granted to him to address the 'Aboriginal problem' in Western Australia.

From the time Anna Miller entered Moore River Settlement, she became subject to Neville's evolving racial vision, firstly of the segregation of the races and later of the biological absorption of the 'half-caste' population into the white community. This controversial plan, which he developed during the 1930s, involved taking full control over the lives of 'half-caste' children. Such planning placed Neville at the forefront of racial thinking in Australia, and ranks him as one of the most articulate spokespersons for 'racial science' in the English-speaking world during its 1930s heyday.

Anna's Native Welfare file is silent about her early life in the Settlement. But the life of the institution is well documented. Three distinct groups lived there. The whites ran the place and lived (and often behaved) like feudal lords. The Aboriginal children and young people lived in the Compound, which comprised rudimentary boys' and girls' dormitories, school building, kitchen and ablution block. Adult Aborigines lived in a decrepit camp of army-built huts some distance down from the Compound. As a teenage girl it is likely that Anna lived in the Compound before moving to the camp.

Possessed of an innately defiant spirit, she was acutely aware of the injustice of her confinement, and she waged a long-term campaign of correspondence with 'Mister Neville' protesting at the denial of her freedom. Her letters — written in a careful hand and expressing her longings and fears — stand today as an intimate testimony to Neville's calculating control over Aboriginal people.

A.O. Neville has remained an enigma. How could an urbane, serious- minded and, in some ways, compassionate bureaucrat, aware of the historical suffering of Aboriginal people and a keen student of their customs and lifestyle, devise such an audacious plan to wipe them out?

Possessed throughout his life by a love of adventure, the young Auber Octavius Neville arrived in Western Australia from England in March 1897, to join his brother and to search for opportunities in life. The son of a Church of England minister, he imbibed the values of Christianity and Empire, which intertwined into an elitist view that Englishmen had a moral and a civilising duty towards the Empire's 'subject races'.

In Perth, he found a society suited to his outlook and receptive to his ambitions for advancement. At the turn of the century, Australia's most remote city was a class-conscious and conservative colonial outpost, dominated by a ruling clique of 'old' families who 'clung tenaciously to the manners and codes of behaviours of a British society many of them ... had never seen'.

Beginning as a clerk in the Works Department, Neville rose quickly through the ranks, earning a reputation for administrative efficiency. Impeccably mannered and dressed, his characteristic oiled-down hair, parted just to the side of centre, gave him the appearance of the city banker or Treasury official that he might have aspired to become. But fate played its hand. In 1914, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, the knockabout Rufus Underwood, persuaded Neville to take over the troubled Aboriginal Affairs Department. Apprised of his excellent reputation within the tight circle of Western Australian public servants, Underwood wanted Neville to sort out the Department. At forty years of age, Neville embarked on a career that not only consumed him, but guaranteed he would be a contentious figure in his lifetime and afterwards.

Although it was widely regarded as an administrative backwater, Neville's fledgling new Department thrust him into an issue which was quickly emerging as a preoccupation for the aspiring population of Western Australia: what to do about the Indigenous population it had dispossessed and marginalised. Within this population was an especially worrying group: the products of mixed parentage — the much vilified 'half-castes'. Where would they fit in this developing society? Where would their true allegiance lie — with the whites or with their Aboriginal kin? And could such a people be trusted? Surely, contemporaries thought, 'half- castes' must be the product of 'bad elements' in both groups: promiscuous Aboriginal women and white men of bad character who were prepared to flout the taboo on sexual union between the races. These became the issues that consumed Neville.

When Neville interned Anna Miller in Moore River in 1922, his thinking on solving Western Australia's race problem was slowly taking shape. Only months after taking control of the Department, he embarked on his first tour of inspection. In the vast and sparsely populated hinterlands of Western Australia, Neville encountered a derelict and dispossessed Indigenous population. He came into contact with the large number of 'half-caste' children in Aboriginal camps. Such children, he thought, had no future unless he took full charge of his responsibilities for them as their legal guardian under the Act.

The tour shocked him deeply, propelling him on his search for a solution to the problems he witnessed.

His starting point came naturally to someone of his background. The concept of race — the widely perceived existence of superior and inferior peoples — was in its ascendancy in the English-speaking world and Neville was a firm advocate of its importance in the affairs of humankind. In the early 1920s, for example, he claimed that the White Australia policy would 'ultimately achieve success' and that it involved 'an idealism of a very lofty kind'.

While Neville began mulling over the relationship of the concept of race to policy in Aboriginal affairs, Anna Miller came to his attention in the institution he had created. At some point in her early years in the Settlement, she ran away, and when recaptured she had her shoulder-length hair completely shaved off as a punishment.

In 1928 Neville received a request from a Mrs R.G. Thomas of Green Hills for the services of an Aboriginal girl as a domestic, and especially to help look after her two children. On 14 February 1929, Neville wrote to Mrs Thomas advising her that 'there is a half-caste girl who could be sent to your service'. He stipulated that she receive a wage of 10 shillings per week, of which Anna was to receive a quarter 'as pocket money'; the rest to be held in trust by the Department.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Rob Riley by Quentin Beresford. Copyright © 2006 Quentin Beresford. Excerpted by permission of Aboriginal Studies Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Aboriginal Studies Press (AUS)
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0855755024
• ISBN 13: 9780855755027
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 374