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Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Launch
‘Trustees on Trial’
Danny
Gilbert
Gilbert & Tobin,
Sydney
Let me acknowledge the
traditional owners of this land, the Gadigal people, part of the Eora
nation.
Thank you to Rosalind Kidd
and ANTaR for asking me to launch Rosalind’s painstaking and powerful
exposition of the injustices measured out to Indigenous Queenslanders who,
as Rosalind says, were
“… individuals forcibly
co‑opted into the financial regime but largely excluded from its
proceeds …”
The publication of this book
is timely and important for two reasons.
Firstly and most obviously,
because the issues the book addresses remain unresolved and under
consideration not only in Queensland but here in New South Wales with the
Aboriginal Trust Fund Scheme still yet to do its work, and at the
Commonwealth level, with the Senate Legal and Constitutional Reference
Committee inquiry into stolen wages.
“Trustees on Trial”
roars with the injustices inflicted on Indigenous people through the
withholding of their wages. Dr Kidd painstakingly documents the
Queensland government’s policies and actions demonstrating the dereliction
of duty and the many failures of the government to protect the interests
of Indigenous Queenslanders. Hopefully her book will encourage those
with the responsibility for resolution of this substantially unfinished
business to move promptly and with generosity to properly compensate those
who have suffered.
A very interesting and
perhaps more contentious aspect of “Trustees on Trial” is to be
found in the title itself. Dr Kidd devotes a good part of this
book to the proposition that the Government of Queensland placed itself in
the position of trustee or fiduciary in control of the lives of Indigenous
people with all the usual obligations of fiduciary, to act in the best
interests of the persons concerned ie., the Indigenous people of
Queensland. I quote from page 68:
“The power of the Government
and the machinery of its protection regime was truly extraordinary, both
in scope and intensity. It controlled child‑parent and marital
relationships, the place and conditions of living, the type of labour and
earnings from it, and the availability and security of private
savings. Until 1972, every Aboriginal Queenslander was vulnerable to
the extinction of his or her rights and freedom as individuals in the
general community and as workers and wage earners. They were truly
at the mercy of the Government in the exercise of its discretionary
powers.”
Dr Kidd gives us example
after example of monies wrongfully withheld, misplaced and misappropriated
by officialdom under the Protection Acts. She makes the argument
that because these monies were controlled by the Government of Queensland,
the Government was under a fiduciary duty to protect the interests of
Indigenous people acknowledging as she does that no such duty has yet
found its way into law in Australia. This is unlike the position in
Canada and the United States where, as she says, the duty has gained some
judicial favour.
At page 53 Dr Kidd
raises a central question:
“Was there a power – perhaps
extraordinary – to extinguish, destroy or impair Aboriginal interests and
how was it exercised? Were people at the mercy of such a
discretionary power? Did people surrender their interests, with or
without confidence, in expectation of a benefit in so doing? Was
there a particular undertaking by the Government, officiously assumed or
otherwise, to act on behalf of the Aboriginal people, or a reasonable
belief that it would do so? Did the Queensland Government’s
legislative and executive history regarding controls over Aboriginal lives
embody an expectation not to harm their interests?”
From any reasonable moral
perspective it must be the case that Aboriginal people are entitled to
insist that the Government’s proper role was to act in their best
interests. However, looking at the history of what occurred over 100
years, unwittingly or otherwise, the interests of Aboriginal people were,
in fact, harmed and harmed very considerably.
As Dr Kidd says at
page 103:
“Whatever its knowledge, the
Government had a duty ‘to act in harmony’ with its position as fiduciary
on all matters pertaining to Aboriginal interests … this it patently
failed to do.”
That said, I think it is
impossibly difficult even in these more enlightened times for Government
to discharge the responsibility of fiduciary. Wherever Government
attempts to take control of the lives of its citizens, failure is almost
always inevitable and with damaging ramifications over long periods.
Government’s self‑appointed role as “fiduciary” or “protector” in the
period up until the late 1960s resulted in manifest injustice through
callous policy and neglect. Government’s subsequent role as
“fiduciary” or “protector” of Aboriginal interests has also failed.
By this I mean the paternalism and welfare of the past 40 years
which has seen Indigenous people trapped in generational and disempowering
dependency with the devastating consequences we are all aware of.
Noel Pearson and other Indigenous leaders have, on so many occasions,
spoken of the destruction and despair of passive welfare.
I said the publication
of this book is important and timely for two reasons. The second is
that it coincides with the re‑kindling of the so‑called history wars
sparked by the Prime Minister’s speech at the Quadrant dinner last
week. What he had to say was this:
“Of the causes that Quadrant
has taken up that are close to my heart, none is more important than the
role it has played as counterforce to the black armband view of Australian
history.”
A problem I have with
what the Prime Minister said is that there are at least parts of this
counterforce which either seeks to minimise, or has the effect of
minimising, the suffering of Indigenous people in their historical
relationship with white Australia. It must be said again and again
that the injustices meted out to these, our fellow Australians, were of
monumental proportion.
Only in the last few days
Pope Benedict has called on Australians to, “… accept historical
truths” and that, “… commitment to truth opens the way to
lasting reconciliation through the healing process of asking for
forgiveness and granting forgiveness – two indispensable elements for
peace”.
Dr Kidd’s book is a
powerful reminder of these truths. At page 56 she quotes from
an 1899 report to the Queensland Parliament by a Government appointed
Protector, Dr Walter Roth:
“ ‘ Blacks are forcibly
hunted from their water supplies and hunting grounds’, yet Aboriginal
‘laws of trespass’ prevented tribes from moving into neighbouring
areas. In 1900 he again complained that graziers taking up cheap
rental land illegally expelled local tribes from ‘each block of new
country’. ‘They race their horses on to the blacks, cut them right
and left with their stockwhips, break their spears, and take their
[Government‑supplied] tomahawks from them’. He warned the Government
that ‘… all blacks would be hunted into the sea unless large
sanctuaries were provided in the north.”
I must say in fairness
to the Prime Minister that he himself has recognised the injustice of what
occurred and at a speech he gave in May last year at a Reconciliation
Australia function in Canberra he made the point, “… that the
treatment of indigenous Australia represents the most blemished chapter in
the history of this country”.
The full history of what
actually happened in the lives of Indigenous Australians needs to be told
if we as a nation are ever to properly understand the historical
relationship between Indigenous Australians and the white majority.
Dr Kidd’s book joins that group of highly informative research texts
exposing the record of what actually happened on the ground to Indigenous
people and in this instance, it was the sustained misappropriation and
misuse of moneys earned by and belonging to Indigenous people.
Dr Kidd has been tirelessly
devoted to the issue of recovering the stolen wages since 1994. Her
research has contributed to various cases before the Courts and her
campaign efforts have pressured the Queensland government to make the
offers referred to in the book, the processes around which and the quantum
of which she rightly criticises. Dr Kidd has exposed yet another
failure of contemporary Australia to fully understand and come to grips
with past injustices on terms acceptable to Indigenous people.
I congratulate
Dr Kidd, and I have much pleasure in launching “Trustees on
Trial” here in Sydney.
10 October
2006
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