My Google alerts did the job this week. A story in the Melbourne Anglican reminded me how far most churches have fallen in understanding their part in saving Aborigines.
The Anglican correspondent praised the Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Anti-Racism Framework to ‘promote justice’ for First Nations and marginalised communities. Participants in the AHRC consultations ‘affirmed that First Nations self-determination, sovereignty and truth-telling should be central to the Framework.’ The only outcome of this nonsense will be more jobs for Aboriginal graduates. Meanwhile, those stuck in remote Australia go Walkabout.
Aboriginal ‘Christian Leader’ Brooke Prentis says, ‘It is important that the strategy was calling for truth-telling.’ Whose truth would that be, Brooke? The contemporary record of the crude and cruel world in which Aboriginal Australians lived? Or, perhaps, the procured memories of those saved from depravity and placed in mission homes?
Anglicans should read Douglas Brown’s Placed in Our Care, the life of Millie Shankelton, a missionary to Aborigines in NSW and the Northern Territory who, for a time, ran the Retta Dixon Home for the Aborigines Inland Mission of Australia. Baptists and other denominations, including Anglican, served in AIM. More than 200 hundred missions – Anglican, Lutheran, Catholic and many more - were established around Australia to protect Aborigines from both marauding men and destitution. As with almost all institutions caring for the vulnerable, there were incidences of abuse, but an easily applied label, such as assimilation, detracts from the excellent work these missionaries did for Aboriginal people.
Many children were saved from lives of misery, even those who later invented stories to suit a new narrative. Lorna Cubillo alleged that she was taken against her will to the Retta Dixon home and was poorly treated. The evidence proved otherwise. Indeed, Cubillo had written a loving letter to Shankelton, who retained friendships with many of her children in care. So much so that former Retta Dixon’s children paid for her body to be flown from Sydney to Darwin and buried in the AIM section of Darwin cemetery. Lorna Cubillo sought to have her child placed at Retta Dixon Home.
Shame on those who sought to blacken the name of missionaries and rewrite history. In this regard, Professor Colin Tatz, whom Shankelton met, deserves a special mention. As a young doctoral student, he reviewed the assimilation policies in the Northern Territory and found no issue with them. However, like many academics in this and allied fields, he sought more salacious grounds to enhance his standing and discovered the concept of genocide: that assimilation was genocide.
This foul lie resides in the halls of the Australian Human Rights Commission. One of the key recommendations of the AHRC ‘framework’ was to implement the findings from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. This is an appallingly ignorant statement. The rate of deaths in custody is lower for Aborigines. How about some Christian charity for non-Aboriginal prisoners?
Ms Prentis said that Aboriginal people are dying of preventable deaths in state-run systems. So are non-Aborigines because many prisoners are in poor health, but they are criminals and are a menace to others, especially women. Should public safety not be a consideration? People die in other institutions, such as hospitals, and at home, but no comparisons are ever made.
Every flurry of Aboriginal deaths in custody produces the same retort – ‘Implement the recommendations!’. They have been decades ago. Those that have not were political statements that had nothing to do with prisons but a great deal to do with Aboriginal careers in the self-determination business.
At its core, self-determination is the demand that politically active people of Aboriginal descent receive monies from taxpayers to distribute among themselves. Self-determination is a game of privileging those saved under assimilation. They should be thankful, not resentful or greedy.
The much-maligned policy of assimilation was no more than an affirmation that Aborigines could be civilised. We know this to be true because of assimilation policies. Despite racism and the arrogant policy of self-determination, most Aborigines live about as well as other Australians. A minority, trapped by the self-indulgence of self-determination, have been locked out of the modern economy and dependent on their elders' grace and favour distributing public monies.
Anglicans, beware: the missionaries were right, and you do a disservice to blacken their work, which, in the context of history, was perfectly reasonable, indeed loving, in a way that present petals will never understand.
Gary Johns is chairman of Close the Gap Research.
