No more sit-down money.

IN JULY AND AUGUST this year I returned to the Kimberley--one of the many places for which I had responsibility in earlier years as Minister of Aboriginal Affairs. I was curious to find out how the cattle stations that had been handed over to Aborigines during the last thirty years were progressing. That handover started in the 1970s as an important component of the Whitlam government's new self-determination policy for Australia's Aborigines, a policy driven by H.C. Coombs and continued with enthusiasm under the Fraser government. I was fortunate on my visit on this occasion in being able to contact people long associated with the pastoral industry in the Kimberley, and the Kimberley Land Council, the body responsible for those stations.

What I learned showed, again, just how disastrous the Whitlam-Coombs policies have been. I had, of course, been aware for many years of the total failure which followed the Whitlam handover of Wattie Creek (now called Daguragu) to the Gurindji clan. But my discussions also revealed that the same complete failure has been repeated in thirty cattle stations in the Kimberley and at least ten others in the Northern Territory, as well as in the Pitjantjatjara lands in South Australia.

The inability to manage these cattle stations is well reflected in Richard Allen's diary of his travels in 1997 in the Kimberley (Shimmering Spokes), where he reports a conversation with a school principal:

 
   Not long ago, he says, a Kimberley cattle station, 
   Tirralantji, was bought fully stocked by the 
   government for the Aboriginal people. They were 
   supposed to breed cattle but that never happened. 
   They killed the stock one by one until there were 
   none left, and then they all went back to Derby. 

This is how hunter-gatherers have lived for millennia. Their completely rational behaviour in the face of a bizarre and Rousseauvian providence has not only left the Aborigines living in abominable conditions in remote communities, but has resulted in a major reduction in export potential for Australia.

It is time not only to recognise the failure of the Coombsian fantasy, but also to accept the need for a complete policy reversal to help overcome the present situation in remote communities and provide hope for the future of their Aboriginal residents. The Coombsian policy failure illuminates fundamental philosophical and religious differences that are part of the "culture wars"--a phrase widely used in the USA but rarely in Australia.

The absence of that phrase in Australia, and the understanding embodied within it, is unfortunate. It encapsulates the struggle between deeply entrenched ideas and interests, the continuing outcome of which has determined the course of Western civilisation at least since the French Revolution and probably much earlier.