(Note. Other material on the struggle of indigenous minorities can be found here.)
I was sitting in the fine red dust of the Australian outback discussing
diamond mining with Aborigines when I learnt that the police had been
ordered in by helicopter to arrest me. Shocked by the news, I did not dream
it then, but this was the start of an adventure that would ensnare me for a
decade in an investigation of the secretive and dangerous diamond
Syndicate; lead me to the White House and the Kennedies, to a sabotaged
mine in Clinton's Arkansas, to diamond shipments to the Nazis and last of
all to child cutters in India and the private diamond townships of southern
Africa that still exclude black wives, to the fraudulent glitter of 47th
Street in Manhatten and to the Dene in the Arctic who fear the loss of
millenia old hunting grounds because common diamonds are sold as rare
emblems of love.
Yet that sunny day in 1979 had seemed impossible to perturb. I was in
Oombulgurri, an Aboriginal settlement in the remote north of Western
Australia, in the rugged desert mountains of the Kimberleys. The air was
still, the only sound the soft hum of flies and the occasional screech of a
parrot. Under the spreading branches of a fat trunked boab tree using the
sandy ground as my easel I had been explaining the techniques of diamond
mining to two Aboriginal elders who sat before me as comfortably solid as
if they grew from earth.
They were the senior Law Makers, the local religious equilivalent to
archbishops but living in poverty. They wanted to know what mining diamonds
would do to their land and environment. They questioned me and listened
carefully and gravely. A mining company had set up a diamond exploration
camp on their land and called it "Mumbo Jumbo" in a seemingly insulting
reference to Aboriginal culture. They had heard the rumours of diamond
finds throughout their tribal lands of the Kimberleys. Prospectors in light
aircraft, helicopters and four wheel drives were pouring into their
previously quiet land of dust blown plains, red rocked hills and deep
gorges where I had a few days earlier walked among a crowd of dark furred
and curious flying foxes hanging upside down from branches and then, at
dusk, watched them spiral out like a host of vampires but only in search of
pungent fruit.
The news of my impending arrest had been brought by the local
schoolteacher from a nearby corrugated tin radio-hut. His message seemed so
over the top, so extraordinary, that I could scarcely believe it. It
seemed my crime was to visit these tribal reserve lands, without a newly
required state government permit that could only be acquired from an office
in the state capital Perth over a thousand miles away. It did not matter
that the community had invited me, nor that a white haired elder had
accompanied myself and a friend, into the Aboriginal reserve nor that the
local police had never arrested anyone for this "crime" before and had to
be ordered into action. Sitting under the boab tree with the elders it
seemed scarcely credible that anyone would see what I was doing as so
dangerous that it justified a raid by helicopter borne police.
Yet this place had not aways been peaceful. A cross erected on a hill
above the settlement bore testimony to Aborigines massacred by a police
party in 1928 within the memory of these elders. After a subsequent period
in compulsory exile in white run institutions, the survivors in 1972 had
returned joyously to Oombulgurri, to their ancestral and sacred land. It
however remained state owned although reserved for Aborigines and they
discovered on their return that in their absence the "Mumbo Jumbo" diamond
prospecting camp had been set up by CRA, a company controlled by RTZ from
London in the UK. The Aborigines could not throw them out, but they
determined to be careful about allowing others in.
The elders sought information from me because I had researched and written
on mining for many years and had worked with Aboriginal communities
elsewhere. I was in the region at the invitation of the Kimberley Land
Council, the representative body for local Aborigines, which had asked me
to provide information on mining to its member communities as they were
being swamped by a tidal wave of white diamond prospectors and miners. The
Oombulgurri community some 6 months before my visit had evicted Stockdale,
a diamond exploration company controlled by De Beers, a company owned by
Oppenheimers of South Africa, perhaps the richest family in the southern
hemisphere, because the community feared for their own and their land's
future if they allowed the mining of sacred ancestral grounds.
In an angry response to Stockdale's exclusion, the premier of Western
Australia, Charles Court, promulgated a new regulation preventing
Aboriginal communities from controlling entry to their reserve lands. This
was to ensure that Aborigines would not be able to block 'progress.' It was
under his new regulation that I and my companion were threatened with
arrest. It soon become clear that we had stumbled into the midst of a quiet
war between De Beers, prospectors, government and the tribes.
We did not wait for the police to arrive, but hired the community's boat to
return to the slaughterhouse town of Wyndham in the eastern Kimberley. I
hoped this would protect my hosts from being harassed by the police for
making us welcome. The mission boat was not much more than a rowing boat
with an outboard motor, smaller than the crocodiles that lazed and
frolicked just up stream from us. But we made it away, through the
tangled mangrove roots, across the shark infested estuary that covered
sediments believed by some to be very rich in diamonds, safely to Wyndham.
The quayside was quiet when we arrived, the dust blown streets deserted
before the on-coming monsoonal storm. We made our way to the home of the
local district nurse where we were staying. We thought that was the end of
the excitement but after dinner the police came around to arrest us. We
were locked in a cell for a few hours and were later fined for our
'offence'. The local Aboriginal-run legal service maintained that our
arrest was a violation of the basic civil right to invite guests to one's
own home.
The Australian Aborigines, unlike the North American Indians, had never
been accorded by the white colonists the respect of treaties. Their lands
had been taken from them as if they were not human. Australian law at that
time was based on the premise that Australia had been, when whites arrived,
'terra nullius', no one's land. Consequently the original Australians had
lost all land rights, received no income from these lands, no mining
royalties. Instead they had been left destitute and homeless. I had been
invited to the Kimberleys because of my work to raise international
awareness of their plight. I had just spent 3 years in Europe raising
support for Aboriginal organisations and helping their voice be heard.
This had included helping organise a land council speaking tour of five
European nations funded by the World Council of Churches and others. I was
now to attend the first meeting of Aboriginal Land Councils from both sides
of the continent to discuss how to gain international support for their
struggle to regain land rights.
In Perth, the capital of the state of Western Australia, before I came up
to the Kimberlies I had met Robert Bropho, a man with an ancient face of
strong brow lines who works passionately to improve the lot of Aboriginal
children as an uncompromising and charasmatic leader of his people. He told
me he decided to work with me because initially I sat silent with him,
striving to communicate without words. He drove me to the Kimberley
meeting from Perth, a long drive over roads that were sometimes no more
than tracks. We slept under the stars, rising at what he called 'piccaniny
dawn'- the first light when the parrots began to 'sing'. We took care in
the latter stages of the drive to avoid bogging in deep 'bull-dust' piles
that lay alongside the desert roads . We talked with the lawmakers at all
Aboriginal camps we passed. They told us they were not against mining as
such, for their people had always mined for tool-stones and clays, but
wanted miners to respect the spirit of the land and Aboriginal ancestral
rights.
The impoverishment they had suffered through loss of land had caused their
health to grievously deteriorate. Instead of living into their 70s, as they
did before whites arrived, they now died at least 10 years earlier. Their
life expectancy was that of the poverty stricken inhabitants of 'third
world' countries. Introduced leprosy was still present in the Kimberlies in
the 1970s. One in four of their elders was blinded by trachoma. An
Aboriginal mother in northern Australia in 1994 was 30 times more likely to
die in childbirth than a white woman. Her child was 3 times more likely to
die in the first year of life than the child of a white Australiani. The
discovery of diamonds on tribal lands should have brought them the income
needed to ameliate living conditions. Instead it further endangered their
survival as a people by depriving them of yet more land and by swamping
them with white settlers.
Before I went to Oombulgurri, I had visited the Aboriginal cattle station
of Noonkanbah across the Kimberley mountains south west of Oombulgurri. To
reach the settlement on the station I travelled a long dirt road across
grassy plains broken by small rocky hills like to the 'Kopjes' of South
Africa. This similarity is no coincidence. Australia was once joined to
South Africa in the ancient continent of Gonwandaland. These hills are the
worn down stumps of ancient volcanoes in both continents. Even the fat boab
trees surrounding them in Australia have relatives in Africa. The forces
that had split Australia and South Africa apart, caused volcanic eruptions
to bring to the surface the carbon crystals known as diamonds. One night an
Aboriginal elder sung me a very ancient song about the eruption of
volcanoes. The State Geological Service in South Australia has established
that Aboriginal legends give the correct sequence of eruptions although
these events happened at least 10,000 years ago!
I had learnt that CRA, the British RTZ controlled Australian mining
company, had found several small diamonds in the Noonkanbah's kopjes and on
the surrounding plains. It had obtained mining tenements over 30 square
kilometers of Noonkanbah despite the protests of the nearly 300 Aborigines
who lived in shacks around the central station buildings. The state
government had offered to build these Aborigines houses, but only if
government overseers were allowed to bring in alcohol. The community did
not agree for it had banned alcohol. The resulting impass meant these
homes were not built. Noonkanbah was a major centre for Aboriginal
culture. The Kimberley Land Council was created by 1,200 Aborigines
gathered here for a song and dance festival some two years before my visit.
At Noonkanbah, as I would at Oombulgurri, I sat on the sand with the elders
and, using Aboriginal style the sand as my easel, drew mining plans and
showed how diamond-bearing gravels could be eroded from the remnants of
volcanoes . The much revered elder and spiritual leader Nipper Tabigee
became in turn my guide and teacher. He took me on a jolting drive across
a dried section of river bed between dry season pools, where fresh water
crocodiles sometimes lived, to a rocky hill called Djada. He told me his
people once gathered here for ceremonies and asked me to follow as he
climbed it. The hill was small, not the height of a tree. About half way up
he stopped bythe mouth of a cave.
'Look, Jan', he said, 'can you see the bones?' I peered into the cave,
momentarily blinded by the bright light outside. But when my eyes adjusted
I saw long white bones inside. 'These are the bones of my people shot down
by a police party when I was this high'. He indicated his thigh. Then,
without a sign of bitterness, he quietly told me how a diamond exploration
company had recently pegged and claimed the entire hill, entering the cave
and taking the very sacred ceremonial objects stored inside. Some of these
had been destroyed by the prospectors, some were taken to Melbourne and
were later retrieved by Noonkanbah. 4
This was not the only burial ground desecrated on Noonkanbah. Aboriginal
elder, 'Friday' Mullamulla, pointing to the potentially diamond rich
plains around their settlement, had said, 'That is all CRA... they bring
bulldozer about two miles back down that way... They cut all the way around
all dead bodies. All around that place where we have taken the bones of the
old people.' ii
The Aboriginal people of Noonkanbah had sent a petition to the State
Parliament written on bark and in Walmajeri, their language. In translation
it read:
'We are sending this letter to you important people who can speak and who
are now sitting down there talking in the big house.
We, Aboriginal people of Noonkanbah Station, are sending you this letter.
We truthfully beg you important people that you stop these people, namely
CRA and AMAX (who were looking for oil), who are going into our land..
These people have already made the place no good with their bulldozers.
Our sacred places they have made no good.
They mess up our land. They expose our sacred objects. This breaks our
spirit. We lose ourselves as a people. What will we as a people do if these
people continue to make all our land no good?
Today we beg you that you that you truly stop them.' iii
I had many conversations wth elders and others while at Noonkanbah. Their
dilemna was that they had already agreed that CRA could prospect for a
further 3 weeks if it used an Aboriginal guide to ensure no further
trespass upon sacred places. Once consent was given, the elders did not
like to withdraw it. But they now felt they had not been fully informed as
no one had explained to them the likely size of a mine if diamonds were
discovered. It also irked them that CRA would not conceed that traditional
owners of the land had any right to a royality on its diamonds. A spokesman
for the Noonkanbah community, Dicky Skinner, said: 'My law says ... if
CRA's name is written upon the diamond, CRA is allowed to go down and get
him. If CRA's name is not on it, ... it is for tribal peoples.' 5. I
told them I had learnt CRA had found diamonds in 15 extinct volcanoes on
Noonkanbah station.
On reflection, the elders decided they could not trust CRA to leave after
prospecting if they found significant numbers of diamonds. It would surely
bring in many more white people. They also noted with alarm that CRA had
notified the government that it was also searching for uranium. It was
time for legal action. Once they had decided to withdraw their consent to
CRA's prospecting, Nipper Tabigee and other elders took me with them to
Derby in an old car with no windscreen. After we arrived, windblown and
dust covered, they told their lawyer to evict CRA and made the following
statement:
'CRA, we have been thinking about you looking on our land. You say you only
look at one part of our station then go away again after three weeks. But
we say, after talking some more between ourselves, we don't want you
because, if you find something up there, you may come more and more onto
our land and we don't want that. Also you didn't tell us you also looking
for uranium - that stuff dangerous for everyone.' 6
Following this, the Kimberley Land Council asked me to stay on as its guest
to visit other communities. Soon afterwards two wite lawyers came up from
Perth to speak to the elders at Noonkanbah about their decision to expel CRA
. I was asked by the community to attend the same meeting. The lawyers
spoke to the community on the benefits that mining could bring, including a
mining township populated by Aborigines and many jobs for Aborigines. They
did not mention that to date few Aborigines had been given responsible jobs
in Australian mines , nor that the common experience of Aborigines living
near mines, especially CRA's many mines, is of dispossession and
powerlessness.
The elders then asked me to repeat what I had previously told them about
the effects of diamond mining. I told them that miners normally scooped out
the heart of a diamond rich extinct volcano by digging a pit at least a
kilometre wide and perhaps 200 metres deep with shafts below this to 800
metres, and that the surrounding plains could be bull-dozed to find
diamonds washed out by monsoonal rains. The discussion then continued in
the Walmjeri language. Nipper Tabigee translated quietly for me. No one
translated for the lawyers. I was then told the community had decided to
maintain their ban on CRA. The lawyers were told to do nothing until they
heard from the community.
The lawyers asked me to meet with them privately in a vast woolshed out of
sight and hearing of the Aborigines, where they furiously questioned what
right I had to give these Aborigines any advice. They angrily reminded me
that I had no official standing with any government body. The lawyers said
they knew I was going on to Oombulgurri and made unspecified threats about
what would happen to me when I got there. But for the life of me, I did not
expect they might persuade the federal and state governments to move
against me.
Some months after I left Noonkanbah, the tribal elders of Noonkanbah once
more directly challenged the State government. They wrote to the government
on June 9th, 1980. 'You assumed we recognize the State Government's
ownership of the land. Instead of this you should have recognized us, the
Elders who hold the law for this country, as the real owners of the land.'
iv
Premier Court replied in the West Australian newspaper:' 'I do not believe
that such radical and unlawful views are really theirs.' He spoke of 'the
extremist agitation began which led the community to make absurd claims
amounting to sovereignty over the crown land they occupy as pastoral
leaseholders.' v Fortunately as the Noonkanbah station was leasehold and
not Aboriginal reserve land, he could not ban them from having visitors.
Shortly after the Premier made this statement, advertisements funded by
the mining industry appeared on television showing a black hand building a
wall across Western Australia accompanied by a voiceover claiming that
Aboriginal land rights would rob other (white) Australians of their
birthright. The Australian Mining Industry Council also warned that
Aboriginal land rights could lead to 'a system of unauthorized totalitarian
control by a minority within particular parts of Australia.' 9 The miners
were at the forefront of the campaign contesting Aboriginal rights to
tribal lands because the Aborigines mainly now lived on barren lands not
wanted by graziers but where mineral rich rocks were exposed for the
taking.
But Charles Court and his government could not see very far into the
future. In 1992 a revolutionary High Court decision in the Mabo case,
supported by six out of the seven judges involved, stated that Aboriginal
'native rights' to crown lands still existed as the British authorities had
presumed to take over Aboriginal lands without making a formal order of
dispossession by right of conquest. Only the lands given away as freehold
by the Crown could not be regained. Aborigines under this ruling
immediately laid claim to vast tracts of unalienated crown land. In 1993,
the new Premier, Richard Court (the son of the Charles Court) vowed to
fight this landmark High Court ruling by all the means available. The
Australian Mining Industry Council, funded by all the major mining
companies, united with him in opposition. Its members feared having to pay
royalties to the tribes and having to protect sacred places. The Kimberley
Land Council became once more locked in legal battle on behalf of the
impoverished people they represented. The war still continues as I write
in 1996.
c96Janine Roberts
i The Australian, 11 February 1995.
ii As told to Steven hawke, unpublished document. 1978.
iii Provided to me in 1979 by the Kimberley Land Council.
iv Document provided by the Kimberley Land Council in 1979.
v West Australian , 8 August 1980
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