Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Launch of ‘Trustees on Trial’: Sydney
Thank you. I would like to thank the Sydney branch of ANTaR National
for organising a launch here for my book, and Gilbert and Tobin for
their generosity in hosting the event. My thanks also to Griffith
University’s Center for Public Culture and Ideas for their generous
support, including a six-month research fellowship and co-sponsoring the
visit by Dr Elouise Cobell to tell us about the US class action to
retrieve missing Indian money. My warm thanks also to the staff at
Aboriginal Studies Press – in particular director Rhonda Black and her
deputy Gabby Lhuede. I have benefited greatly from their imagination
and professionalism, but also from their friendship, honesty and humour
in helping me translate a grand vision into a finished book.
I
am privileged indeed to have Danny Gilbert speak about my book tonight.
In true researcher form I googled his name on the net and printed out
his speech to final year law students in 2004. Like so many of my
documents it now suffers fluoro disease – that’s the one where a nice
clean printed sheet breaks out in a rash of fluoro blotches and the
haphazard stitching of many scribbled notes. Like Danny I am also
convinced that we must tell our history again and again until it becomes
immersed in the fabric of Australian consciousness, as he so eloquently
put it.
As
someone who was, until only 15 years ago, your average ignoramus,
enjoying the benefits of the Lucky Country but blissfully blind to the
terrible cost paid by those largely excluded from its progress, I firmly
believe that we cannot grow as a nation until we acknowledge the
festering truth of our past. I am ashamed that those who supposedly
speak for our nation compound the awful deeds in our past and the
continuing obscenity of disempowerment and marginalisation, by lying
about it now. And I feel incredibly frustrated that they lie so
hypocritically, with such callous opportunism, for such worthless
political gain. How shamefully we are diminished as a nation when our
attorney general, the supposed keeper of law and justice, so cavalierly
stokes the flames of racism by suggesting native title might prevent us
from sunning our bloated white bellies on the beaches of Perth.
It’s that old journalism adage, isn’t it – never let the truth get in
the way of a good story, or, as is so often the case today, don’t let
the truth get in the way of scoring cheap political points. Like
premier Peter Beattie saying how generous he was in giving a maximum of
$4000 to Aboriginal people who had lost possibly decades of their
earnings under government management; indeed he said it was impossible
to say how much workers were owed. In the same year his government
offered $50,000 to 200 under-performing teachers so they could take
retraining. Gives a whole new perspective on ‘generous’ doesn’t it? In
the interim, despite constant approaches by Aboriginal members of the
Stolen Wages Working Group, the government has refused to reconsider its
insulting offer.
For some years now I have focused on the financial aspects of government
management, initially to equate the government’s knowledge of losses by
negligence, fraud and misappropriation, with the consequential poverty
endured by the very people it was mandated to ‘protect’. I thought
perhaps governments could less easily distort the realities of
misappropriating trust funds for their own purposes, of ignoring
countless auditors’ warnings to fix an easily defrauded system, of
watching children sicken and die while they diverted child endowment to
capital works. Surely, I reasoned, any institution which presided
knowingly and deliberately over such an abuse of lives and process,
should be held accountable.
The difficulty, it seems, lies in the massive discretionary powers
enjoyed by governments who controlled Aboriginal lives. So I set out to
understand sufficient national and international law to argue for
accountability in the context of the Queensland evidence. My hope for
Trustees on Trial is that it might offer a strategy to force our
governments to be held accountable in our courts of law, to settle this
sorry saga on just terms which do not cheat people of their rights, not
just for Queensland, but for other states and the Northern Territory
which also indentured people to work, compiled trust accounts from their
earnings, allowed endowment to be misapplied, and never accounted for
their conduct. Due in large part to the efforts of Senator Andrew
Bartlett we now have a Senate Committee of Inquiry which will explore
how these practices impacted nationally.
I
do not make this journey on my own. Many were already fighting for
justice when I lived in ignorance, and the experiences of thousands more
guide me through this vast historical landscape. Some might think the
voices of the past are not heard except in the memories of their
families and friends; but for me the realities of their lives speak from
countless letters and reports. It is this human dimension which is
crucial to understanding this incredible, immense, appalling social
experiment where a handful of men gave themselves the power to control
people’s lives for most of the 20th century – and wielded that power
with such disastrous effect. The past and present voices of those whose
lives were controlled demand that we confront those who still lie about
the past, that we insist the truth be proclaimed, that we force those
who wield the power to be accountable for their words and their actions.
The adults and small children I read about, forced to live and work in
environments of physical and sexual abuses, of starvation rations and
lousy conditions – these sufferers might be any one of us here, in
another time and another place. We are all human, we all feel pain and
shock in enduring such hardships or in learning of them. I believe that
in knowing these things now we can choose either to turn our backs and
walk away, or to link arms and say we will walk together on a journey to
bring truth to our national history.
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