Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Processes of Discovery
It
seems as a nation we have grown so used to government dishonesty and
injustice that we just shrug our collective shoulders. Our government
imprisons indefinitely women and children known to have committed no
crime, it continues to promote an international invasion whose
justification has proved to be false. But the bulk of the population
don’t seem to care, happily sedated by the scandals of people who earn
millions role-playing for TV and film, or the scandals of the non-people
whose roles they play, or perhaps the latest cricketing crisis about 15
degrees of separation.
There are of course many who are deeply disturbed by the lies and
injustices perpetrated by governments in our names. Our voices might
not reverse this mendacity but we can proclaim a refusal to play along
with the con. We can say, for what it’s worth, not in my name. There
is always a choice, having learned the facts, not to be duped by the
rhetoric.
During the last decade an issue has been slowly emerging out of the
archival depths. The media, with its sophisticated sense of the public
interest, has flicked it a glance and declared it a non-event, nothing
new, old history. Governments, as we shall see, are more than happy
with that classification. The issue – which has ramifications far wider
than it’s financial focus – has become known as the Stolen Wages, a term
that encompasses Aboriginal wages and other entitlements commandeered by
governments during most of the twentieth century. Today I’ve been asked
to speak about my involvement in the fight for Stolen Wages, the
practicalities of research and the implications for action, and how that
might relate to your field in archives and records management.
I
started Uni as a mature-age student intending to feed my appetite for
knowledge. Griffith Uni in Queensland was still young in the mid 1980s
– weren’t we all! – and there were no courses on Australian history or
race relations. But for a number of reasons, mostly centered on my
fascination for the forensic inquiries of French philosopher Michel
Foucault and his theories of power, I chose as my PhD project the
administration of Aboriginal Queenslanders – a topic I knew nothing
about. I wanted to look at the machinery of power – what drove it, what
sustained it, who wrote the manuals, who tinkered with it, how did
modifications impact on older working parts, did the machinery do what
they said it was doing, that sort of thing. I wanted to stand inside
the bureaucracy and write about who did what and why, and measure the
internal workings against the external rhetoric. To do this, of course,
I had to read the records. And so began my ‘other’ life.
The main problem for an outsider in accessing records is that you have
to know what to ask for. And if you’re doing a sweeping investigation
of a new field this includes just about everything. When I finally got
access to restricted government records in February 1991 Queensland
State Archives was in a highly nervous state. One year earlier, in
sensational circumstances, the state archivist had been party to
destruction of official records at the request of the Goss Labor
government, records which apparently were also sought in relation to
legal claims.1
The fall-out was intense, and still festers.
So
the prospect of a PhD student beavering away through dozens of sensitive
files triggered alarm bells. Who would know if there was material I
shouldn’t see? To protect the archivist’s professional integrity,
someone in authority would have to vet every file before I saw it and
his/her costs would not come out of archive’s budget. An additional
difficulty for me was the time constraints on archives’ staff producing
hundreds of files on request and photocopying where required. On the
other hand I had the option of a desk and a photocopier in the
department’s city office. If my requests for particular files were
lodged through the department’s records section, then archives’ staff
had no responsibility over who accessed them in the department’s
offices. We had a solution.
I
started in the city trawling through a mountain of unsorted boxes in a
windowless basement storeroom while I pondered the question of knowing
what to ask for. This fell into my hands before long, albeit in an
outdated and partial version, and I was soon submitting lists for twenty
or so boxes of files, signed off by departmental staff, processed
through their records section, and a few weeks later, trundled down
Charlotte Street on a trolley for off-loading around my rapidly
disappearing desk. I soon had one list at archives and a follow-up list
already processing through the records section, while I attacked what
had just arrived – an effective production line that served me well for
fifteen months.
I
had no idea what I was looking for, so I wanted to read everything: what
happened to children, working women, rural employment, running the
missions, conditions on the settlements, budgeting problems, why federal
health professionals impacted on the state’s monopoly controls while the
anthropologists were frozen out, how effective a well-wielded pencil in
a preliminary report could give just the opposite impression in the
official version, bureaucrats versus ministers, premiers versus prime
ministers, rhetoric versus reality. This was added to reams of research
from church holdings, early archival documents and dozens of secondary
texts. Somewhere in mid-1992, with the bench, desk and floor of my room
buried under mounds of paper, I realised I had to make a start on the
writing.
A
major concern for all researchers is accurate identification of
sources. For me this concern bordered on fear. I followed example and
put my bundles in date order with the latest on top and the file number
written on that. I put coloured card on the front of every bundle and
over several months wrote on that a brief summary of every document in
it. I filed these in boxes in broad categories – employment, each
mission or settlement, health, education, state-church and state-federal
etc – and stacked the boxes chronologically. I never had time – still
haven’t – to do any sort of digital database, although I promise you I
dream of it frequently!
It
was in writing the cover cards that I began to get a sense of what had
been going on, with particular focus on the twentieth century. My aim
was to stand inside the material and reveal its full complexity. Taking
time periods of around thirty years, I teased out the mix of concepts,
agencies, agendas, legal possibilities etc which were brought to bear on
Aboriginal lives. The finished thesis ran to just over 700 pages
grounded in over 2000 footnotes and took about eighteen months to write.
I
had uncovered some dynamite material relating to Cabinet discussions in
the 1970s and 1980s. It revealed the government discussed on several
occasions that it was breaking state and federal law in under paying its
Aboriginal employees. Many times I pondered whether or not to include
this material, knowing the thirty-year embargo on documents used in
Cabinet. Yet this evidence was crucial to showing how the government
wilfully cheated the people, damaged the communities and misled the
public since the early 1980s. If I left the stuff out then I was part
of the lie and I would know I had compromised my thesis and myself. So
in it went. It was several months before the department thought to
request a copy of my thesis, a condition of my research access. I took
it in, had a cup of coffee and a chat with the head boffin, went home
and waited for the fallout – which didn’t come.
That summarises the practicalities of research. Now I’d like to look at
some of the implications for action. It is my view that twentieth
century records controlled by variously-titled Aboriginal Affairs
departments are unlike other government archives. They are in a class
of their own. I see three reasons for this. First, the departments had
power of life and death over thousands of people for many decades purely
on the grounds of their race. Second, in some states, Queensland in
particular, the departments operated virtually as closed dictatorships
outside the purview even of accountable co-departments (I’m thinking
here of health, education, housing, policing and justice – all run by
Queensland’s Aboriginal department for much of the century). Third, the
departments jealously guarded the flow of information. Without access
to the records, even today, we know only what they choose to tell us.
We
know the outcome of this century of total control over Aboriginal lives
– we are all shamed by current conditions and statistics. Not only do
official files explain how this came about, but this evidence is, for
thousands of Aboriginal people, the only written record of what was done
to themselves and their families. It gives material context to their
private narratives. And insomuch as particular files chart matters
pertaining to an individual, that evidence charts also official
interventions in their lives, labour and finances. And files which
reveal internal government machinations impacting on people’s lives as
individuals should now be available in the interests of those affected
by them. Yet governments blockade these records forcefully, as you will
see.
The problem for Australian governments today, of course, is that they
like the old story of well-meaning bureaucrats, rescued children,
benevolent institutions, the guiding hand firm but fair. Not only is
this a comforting perspective of national mythology and a gratifying
endorsement of white integrity, but it also boycotts the A word. You
know the one: A for accountability. Times were tough, we all meant
well, and no-one’s to blame for continuing wretchedness.
Governments insinuate present dereliction and despair is some
unfortunate byproduct of a culture clash; whereas the files show it’s a
consequence of carefully crafted and deliberately implemented policies.
Governments imply Aboriginal poverty derives from a failure to engage
robustly in the wider economy; whereas the files show millions of
dollars which belonged to Aboriginal workers and families has never been
accounted for by the departments which controlled private finances for
most of the twentieth century.
The problem of holding key information is that you are immediately
implicated; you have the option to make a difference. Beyond completing
the thesis I had no such worthy intention, but I was drawn into action
by government denials of what I knew to be the truth as evidenced on
their own files. The last eight years have been an alarming lesson in
what governments will do to defend their version of the evidence. Here
I’ll briefly sketch the dynamics.
In
1996 I offered to act as expert witness in a Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission inquiry into claims by seven people from Palm
Island that the Queensland government had under paid their wages as
employees on a reserve community. This longstanding practice the
government knew to be illegal after passage of the federal Racial
Discrimination Act in 1975. As I said earlier, Cabinet had
discussed this several times. Under the protocols of discovery,
plaintiff’s lawyers should be given all relevant documents by the
government for which, from my thesis, it knew every file location. It
seems not one of these crucial documents was provided, although I later
learned the plaintiffs’ solicitor was shown a room full of files and
told he could help himself.
When Crown Law saw the document copies I had produced to substantiate my
Affidavit, they wrote that I could be sued for damages if I submitted
them, although such duress contravened the HREOC Act. A huge
argument developed around Crown Law’s determination to keep key evidence
from the Inquiry, an argument it ultimately lost. I wasn’t sued,
although I was certainly intimidated. And within days of the hearing
Crown Law demanded I hand over every document in my possession on any
matter relating to Aboriginal administration. This I refused to do. I
believed the government would likely withhold vital evidence in future
legal actions; this would pervert the course of justice.
The HREOC Commission found that the government had acted illegally in
deliberately under paying its Aboriginal workers. Subsequent
compensation to eligible claimants, at $7000 per person (the rate
suggested by the Commissioner), has totalled almost $50 million. Is
this a just outcome? Not in my opinion. First, the government knows
this is a fraction of what is owed; I know it holds written advice
calculating the average wage debt at $13,000, and that’s without holiday
pay, sick pay, superannuation, overtime, penalty rates etc. Second, the
government will not provide all potential claimants with their financial
records so most have no idea of their true entitlement. In that
context, the government’s requirement that claimants must relinquish
their legal rights to full reparations is, in my view, a calculated
deception which perpetuates financial dispossession. It is a deception
grounded in the government’s continuing control of all available
evidence. And the public remains oblivious to the abuse.
This same pattern of concealment and deception underlies the
government’s current offer of $55.6 million to compensate for past
controls of the Stolen Wages. Launched in May 2002, this offer amounts
to $4000 per person for those over 50 years old and $2000 for younger
claimants – for decades of loss. Again the government demands indemnity
against legal actions, again it refuses to supply all potential
claimants with their records, again most claimants thereby cannot make
an informed decision, and again, the government will walk away with
millions of dollars owing to those whose interests it was mandated to
protect. In fact if you happened to die before the May 2002 date, the
government simply keeps your money. Desperate though they are, many
spurned the payout as an insult and a pittance; to date under half the
expected claimants have responded, almost half those assessed are
rejected, and less than $13 million has been paid out.2
Others are considering pro bono offers of legal support to pursue full
redress.
This payout for Stolen Wages does not ‘ease the lasting pain’, as the
premier claims; it is a travesty of justice. Because this financial
management, as I have shown elsewhere, was blighted by incompetent
procedures, negligence, fraudulent dealings, misappropriation by
government, and failure to implement recommended safeguards. The
government knows this; it holds all the incriminating evidence. But the
claimants do not: they could not even know what was happening to their
private savings until the 1970s. Because this evidence is suppressed,
the premier can characterise his offer as ‘generous’ and ‘in the spirit
of reconciliation’, and the largely indifferent media swallows it. Can
you imagine the perpetrators of the HIH or James Hardie scandals
floating such a scheme without any public accounting?
Concealment of the evidence not only poisons our shared history but it
contaminates the course of justice. Concealment underlies government
‘spin’ that record holdings are so fragmentary that we can’t really know
what has happened to the funds; it underlies government assertions that
people are likely to lose legal action against it to recover their
financial entitlements. It is deeply disturbing that governments, whose
unfettered powers sustained negligence and misuse of Aboriginal monies,
still control the documents upon which accountability and justice
depend.
All states and territories, to a greater or lesser extent, took control
of private Aboriginal income and finances during much of the twentieth
century. Recently the New South Wales government, it’s hand forced by
public exposure of information it had no intention of revealing, is also
hiding behind the ‘incompleteness’ of its holdings. It says it will pay
out monies owing, if it can find records to substantiate the
claim. (Yes, Bob Carr has intimated other testimony might also be
considered, but my bet is that Crown Law will veto payments lacking
official validation.) The NSW government, like Queensland, has not made
any public accounting of its dealings on Aboriginal monies. The NSW
government, like Queensland, says records are so patchy it is all but
impossible to chart how much money has gone missing during its decades
as banker. For both governments, then, those incomplete records are
both a defence against full disclosure and the basis for rejecting
claimants. For both governments the mantra of ‘patchy records’ is
intoned to convince the victims and the public that this is as good as
it gets. But is it?
There is no doubt that governments in most states and territories took
control of Aboriginal finances – they set and received wages, ran the
accounts, dictated when and what withdrawals might be made, invested
bulk private monies for interest revenue, intercepted and controlled
endowment, pensions, compensation, inheritances. They fulfilled all the
roles of trustees; in fact they consistently described themselves as
trustees of monies they described as trust funds.
Trustees have very particular duties. They must keep proper accounts,
they must not mix beneficiaries’ funds with their own, they must not
profit from their financial management, to name the most basic. Where
there is a dispute over proper management of another’s finances, the
trustee must provide a full account of all dealings. Where this cannot
be done, where there are gaps in the record, there is no assumption that
the money was properly disbursed. In short, patchy records exemplify
the failure of a trustee to fulfil his legal duties.
In
the United States, for instance, where in 1996 the Blackfeet people of
Montana sued the department of the Interior for missing and mismanaged
private funds, the District Court has determined the department must
account publicly for every cent since it commenced the trust funds in
1887. The department has calculated it might owe US$4 billion to around
half a million claimants, a category that includes every deceased person
whose income was taken under control. This order to provide a full
historical account is currently under appeal.3
Whether or not the fight for justice in Australia is that
straightforward – and certainly governments here are urgently canvassing
legal opinion to avoid being defined as trustees in this sense – the
fact remains that people who suffered under decades of financial
controls are entitled to an independent public accounting based on the
fullest range of evidence. No financial institution with such a
scandalous record would be allowed to deny it. This evidence should not
be manipulated by temporary politicians.
Failure to produce available evidence also impacts on a more familiar
battle for justice, the struggle for Aboriginal Australians to attain
title to their land. Here, it seems, the struggle is blighted not so
much be wilful concealment of evidence as by wilful withholding of
resources, although the effect is much the same. For around two
centuries now governments have amassed evidence of Aboriginal presence
and movement, they generated files specific to Aboriginal individuals,
they retain all this evidence, they control access to this evidence,
they vet what will be available to the bodies who ask to sight it on
behalf of claimants. Governments are therefore morally bound to provide
resources sufficient for a full appraisal of this evidence. Anything
less clearly prejudices claimants’ legal rights that judgement of native
title be based on the full range of available facts, rather than on a
minor portion of evidence. This need not be an onerous task. The
provision of all relevant material to claimants within a reasonable time
is restricted only by the preparedness of governments to fund staff
sufficient for the task. Most ‘native title’ funding in fact is soaked
up by the Native Title Tribunal and by government opposition to claims.
In
this increasingly contested field archivists and records managers hold a
critical position, a position inextricably linked with the authorities
which create the files. Archives receive documents which government
departments choose to store with them. Ownership of the documents
remains vested in the government which can reclaim them at will or, as
was the case in Queensland in 1990, order their destruction. Here the
archivist was requested by Cabinet to destroy the documents within 24
hours, a requirement condemned as ‘political pressure’ by the Australian
Society of Archivists in 1997. Subsequent legislation4
appears not to resolve this dilemma. Ownership of the records remains
vested in the department that generated them, and which can demand their
return. Destruction depends either on the authority of the archivist
or under ‘other legal authority, justification or excuse’. This
does not sound like professional independence to me.
And destruction of records is only one of a variety of tactics available
to authorities who want to conceal evidence of their practices. The
records are extraordinarily vulnerable. They are vulnerable to
confiscation by authorities which demand them and may or may not return
them to archives. They are vulnerable to tampering: one crucial file I
accessed in 1990 held hundreds of letters across a 30-year span, it now
is registered as covering only a single insignificant year. Perhaps
this is a data-base glitch; I certainly hope so. Records are also
simply excised from their historical context: the Queensland government
only has to declare a file, a box of files or a truckload of files to be
of interest to Cabinet and they disappear for 30 years during which
time, of course, legal actions can be adjudicated without them. In fact
Queensland’s Information Commissioner was recently highly critical of
government misuse of FOI laws to avoid public scrutiny;5
he has since been removed and not replaced.
This is why I argue that records generated by variously-titled
Aboriginal Affairs departments are in a class of their own. For other
sectors of government – health, prisons – there are a range of
intersecting authorities and departments whose records reveal multiple
perspectives of practices and policies. This is not the case, certainly
for Queensland, for the most momentous – and now contested – years of
Aboriginal controls. Archivists and record managers certainly have a
role to play in preserving this evidence. Is it possible to copy all
relevant files before relinquishing them to departments that reclaim
them? Or at least summarise the material therein? Destruction of files
relating to Aboriginal lives should be a last resort. Even the most
banal – work records, travel schedules, ration vouchers – are all grist
to the mill of researchers such as myself tracing the footprints of
people long gone for native title claims, or footprints of people still
waiting to get their money back.
Whether or not archivists can operate as truly independent gatekeepers
is a moot point. Certainly there needs to be a person or body to stand
between governments and the evidence of their actions, an entity working
closely with archivists but perhaps charged more specifically with
ensuring that all relevant material is available to both
parties in any dispute or litigation over previous government practices.
Better still, with regard to Stolen Wages, governments should fund an
independent accounting of all relevant material. People who still
struggle in poverty and despair because of long-term practices which
deliberately impoverished their elders are entitled to no less. They
are entitled to a re-writing of our national narrative to take account
of their labour on which our development was dependent. They are
entitled to public acknowledgement that wretched community conditions
were pioneered and entrenched by governments fully aware of the dreadful
toll on survival, and were recently handed in that state to Aboriginal
councils. People are entitled to say, in their thousands, here is
evidence to prove that we worked, we earned our pay, but someone else
took our money. This is not a story our governments want us to know,
but I believe governments should no longer control what can be known.
This evidence belongs to us all, it is our heritage, disturbing though
it is. If – when – the evidence is public then justice can be done and
healing can proceed.
I
hope today I’ve given you some sense of why our archival records are so
significant, and so vulnerable, in this field. Please use your powers
and skills to guard their integrity and ensure their availability to all
appropriate individuals and agencies. We must be ever vigilant against
government dishonesty and injustice. We need more people to stand up
and say: not in my name.
4 The
Public Records Act, 2002.
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