It was hard to persuade the BBC television crew for the 'Everyman' series
to take him seriously. They looked askance when I sought space for him in
the BBC car - and gave it grudgingly as a favor to me. Nipper Tapagee was
an old man with diseased eyes with well worn clothes and a battered bag. He
had met myself and the television crew when we arrived at the small dusty
airport in Derby in the Kimberleys in the remote North West of Australia.
But how could I convince them that Nipper's presence was a great honour,
that he was a great Elder , the 'Dreamer' of Noonkanbah, who could open
Aboriginal doors for us throughout the region?
He had on my previous visit to the region taken me
on a jolting drive across a dried 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 by the 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.[RTZ - a
British mining company].. 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
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. the lawmakers at all Aboriginal camps. 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, now their life expectancy was that of the
poverty stricken inhabitants of 'third world' countries. 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.
Soon afterwards two white 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. (The story of what did happen when I went to Oombulgurri will
be in my forthcoming book "Glitter and Greed")
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
or , it seems, leasehold, 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.
Back to the Aboriginal Australia Room
To the Front Page of the Web Inquirer ->
<- Click to return to the Library Entrance.