I think it was one of the Duracks who said, "if there was exploitation then it was mutual". What we certainly do know is that urban Australia imposed a policy on the bush with the barest consideration of the consequences. The cities would gladly pay for aboriginal welfare through a centralised system of doles etc but could not comprehend a privatised delivery system (with increased supervision) with the same cost to the revenue base that maintained the link with their land that Mabo was later to rely upon.

Both vegetation thickening and broadscale mechanical clearing began in earnest as a result of the loss of manual ringbarking by blackfellas. And we are still paying the cost of both problems.

Spoken by a lawyer, and probaly well.

My memory of the Kimberlies as a young man include.
Aboriginal living on the creek, waterhole in whatever they could put together themselves. A free beef ration, which was distributed by families, sticks of tobacco, black as themselves and specially made for black hands, wish I could remember what it was called? it wasn't nice which they mostly chewed suger and tea, and sometimes a tin of "cockies joy" golden syrup. If they went walkabout it was rarely in colusion with a manager or overseer, they just walked. If found by another manager on a station during the walk it was common practice to give him a note to take to his home station. The man could rarely read and undertook the note return with immediacy. So curtailing the rebel from further wandering. Rations from the station would not be provided, this rarely worried because of the sharing culture that existed.

Land rights? what the hell were they? They were bashed and kicked some had inflicted on them the old ways, tied to trees for hours without water or food. Their cast was recorded, the number of white fellas dicks involved, they were not counted, and stations had little to do with their health. The exception was leprosy, they were shipped by air amublance to the leprosariam in Derby run by the catholic chuch. There was an instance where we shipped the same fella three times, he walked back to the station that number of times, there the average stay was five years.

One ringer I met was charged with the murder of a black house maid, it was said he kicked her to death.
She, he said pushed a white women to the ground, she was pregnant. He was aquitted by the magistrate who travelled every six months. He was lucky to be held in a lockup with no bars and a sergents wife to cook for him meanwhile.

The strike was about wages, wasin it?
fluff

Fluff4, I wasn't defending the old sytem, merely pointing out that the change wasn't implemented in a way that could build on what few positives there were. And to be fair, you would also know that other places did a much better job of looking after their people in an albeit paternalistic manner.

Perseus, your point is taken. There were better places than others, but!
I'm into the funderments of law and history, not the history of police records, court records and other records from which our history is drawn.
Aboriginal history is verbal and valid, as is mine.
The reallity of the strike was the lack of justice not only in law but behavour, and it's outcomes.
The Duraks were kindly people as were individuals all over, but the law when invoked had dire consquences for aboriginals.
fluff4

dear thalia anthony - what a wise and perceptive article, both an intellectual and a good-sense-based recitation of what happened, the realities and consequences. this is a proper antidote to the regressive 'analysis' that has been written of late on this issue of equal pay for indigenous australian station workers.

equal pay for indigenous australians was not inappropriate to demand. it was not a case of 'whitey' imposing 'white' notions onto indigenous people. indigenous australians knew that their work was valuable and that it was being undervalued. just as women around this time knew their (women's wages) were unfair and did not recognise the value of their work, so indigenous australians (women and men) had the same realisation. this makes sense: why should we believe that indigenous australians had no conception of their work's value, when patently that was not so. indigenous australians instructed lawyers to fight the case through the commonwealth conciliation and arbitration commission. they certainly knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it.

what was inappropriate was that station owners, accustomed to getting indigenous labour at below cost, decided they did not want to pay a fair wage for a fair days work. thus, indigenous australians lost their jobs. the rapaciousness of the employers was to blame, the notion that they were entitled to indigenous australian's labour without having to pay fairly for it, and the wish not to acknowledge that they (station owners) were subject to the law (of fair wages) just as other employers were supposed to be covered.

it is a relief to read this piece from thalia anthony.

Jocelyn, your grasp of the situation is tenuous. Station owners did not just "decided they did not want to pay a fair wage for a fair days work. thus, indigenous australians lost their jobs". The entire Beef industry went into a very deep depression in the seventies. They simply could not pay any wages, let alone continue with the work practices that existed under the old system.

It is a fact of history that urban australia was willing to pay unlimited dole but was ideologically incapable of contemplating any sort of program that would ensure that Black fellas had both full pay and maintained association with their lands. And this, at a time when just about every urban job in the country was heavily protected by tariffs and quotas.

You seem to forget that it was the crown that annexed Australia, the crown that declared terra nullus, and the crown that granted title over aboriginal land to settlers. And it is a matter of record that prior to the referendum of 1967 recognising Blackfellas as Australians, the only forms of aboriginal welfare was delivered either by churches or farmers. There was no charity for blackfellas in the cities. In fact, it was standard practice to run them out of town if they were making the place look "untidy".

In other words, the urban community routinely and systematically shifted their social obligations back onto the farming community. And it was lucky for blackfellas that a day with a chipin hoe would always boost a crop by enough to cover the cost of a good feed. Because there were no feeds to be had from the urban community.