Dr Ros Kidd
Historian - Consultant - Writer
Black Lives, Government Lies
As
a child I was always curious. I always wanted to know more than people
would tell me. My questions were frequently brushed away with the
words: ‘Curiosity killed the cat’. But of course I was also stubborn
Irish – so I kept asking anyway. And the more I discovered, the more
questions I had. Looking back, I realise the problem: I wanted to make
up my own mind. At school in the 1950s I was terribly disappointed to
realise that the men had already come up with all the answers, the facts
were laid out, and all that was left was to learn them.
It
was only in my 30s, when we had money to buy books and I formed the
habit of reading everything that wasn’t nailed down, that I realised
with great excitement that almost all the ‘facts’ could not only be
interpreted in quite different ways, but that, if you could only think
outside the square of your own intellectual limitations, there were
actually no barriers to presenting completely new possibilities of
knowledge.
That was the task I set myself in 1990 when I chose to investigate
Aboriginal affairs in Queensland for my PhD project. It was an
exhausting and exhilarating three years. And I did hope that the
finished work might be of some practical use to future researchers.
It
was the Palm Island under award wage case in 1996 which forced me to
question myself. Facing threats from the Queensland government if I
gave evidence to the HREOC Inquiry, my choice was to fight for what I
knew to be true, or take up scone-making – for which I patently had no
skills at all. And I will never forget that my husband, who’s every
wish was for a quiet life, told me if I was sure I was right, then I
should go for it.
And this took knowledge into the realm of justice. The key to the Palm
Island wages fight was that the government during the early 1980s knew
it was acting illegally in underpaying its Aboriginal employees; and at
the time of the Inquiry the government knew that I knew this – it was
detailed in my thesis of which they had multiple copies. So in seeking
to close out my evidence, I figured they were seeking to close out the
truth. The myth would then prevail that the government acted
benevolently, paying people according to their skills and within the
laws of the times. And if you hadn’t seen the evidence, you wouldn’t
know any different. The evidence went in; their credibility went out.
Compensation for this illegal exploitation is, I believe, presently
climbing over the $30 million mark.
In
April 2000 I was asked to give a talk on ABC Radio National detailing
what I thought of our prime minister’s stance on the stolen
generations. You know how it goes: ‘why should we apologise for
something that happened a long time ago’; ‘officials meant well at the
time’; ‘Aboriginal children had to be rescued for their own good’… I
was subsequently approached to extend that talk into a book, of which
this is the second edition.
The question I asked myself was: ‘Why, if people were confined in
government care “for their own good”, were they so disastrously worse
off than those making their own way in the wider community?’ And
everything else follows from that: why were people denied sufficient
food, clean water, shelter, medical care? Why were children denied
access to education which was mandatory for all children? Why were
people contracted out to work, and then denied their wages? Why did
officials consistently reject pleas for greater funding at the same time
as they compiled dossiers of malnutrition, preventable illnesses and
early deaths?
And then, of course, you get angry. Why are governments still getting
away with this myth of ‘benevolent protection’? How dare they claim as
an excuse the distance of time when they know damn well the hunger,
sickness and deprivation continued into the 1970s and 1980s, maintained
by their carefully crafted decisions.
And this is the whole point of this knowledge, this book, this
struggle. Surely, as we learn the truth of our past, we should stand up
and demand our governments face it honestly. Surely, as we read the
records of unjust and illegal practices – of which we white people are
ultimately the beneficiaries – we should force our governments to be
accountable to those they have wronged by their deeds of commission and
omission, and also wronged – still today – by their weasel words.
I
urge you to refuse to play the ‘benevolent protector’ game which so
disparages those whose labour and perseverance helped build this
nation. If you swallow and regurgitate what governments feed you, then
you are part of this lie. The records of history are yours; they should
not be suppressed and distorted for point-scoring by temporary
politicians. This failed social experiment is the biggest scandal in
our history; it is the biggest injury to our national psyche. We can
heal it by opening it up to careful examination, by reinstating those
voices and lives, by learning from past experiences and bringing
restitution for past injustices.
So
please – ask your own questions. Make up your own minds. I put this
knowledge in your hands.
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