Pointing the bone: reflections on the passing of ATSIC.(Australia)

ON AUGUST 21, 1968, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague; First Secretary Alexander Dubcek and several of his colleagues were arrested and taken to Moscow to be threatened and humiliated; and the Prague Spring turned overnight into winter again.

In Australia disaffection within the Communist Party at this turn of events caused, amongst other things, the resignation of Phillip Adams from the party, but more generally created the need for a new lodestar from which the Australian pro-communist Left could take its bearings. Two alternatives emerged as vehicles for their political energies and emotions--the environmentalist movement, which they captured with the takeover of the Australian Conservation Foundation in 1972; and the Aboriginal land rights and self-determination movement, which H.C. Coombs energised when he was appointed to the chairmanship of the newly created Council for Aboriginal Affairs, established by Prime Minister John Gorton, in 1968.

Coombs had done a deal with Prime Minister Harold Holt not long before Holt's tragic death in December 1967. The Liberal backbench had long wanted Coombs sacked from the Reserve Bank, and Coombs agreed to resign in return for the positions of the Chairman of the Arts Council and of the Aboriginal Affairs Council, which was to be created following the referendum in 1967 (which gave power to Canberra to legislate for Aborigines throughout the Commonwealth). Coombs had never previously shown any interest in Aboriginal issues.

Twenty-one years after Dubcek's humiliation and subsequent indefinite house arrest, the end of the Soviet empire, and communism as a legitimising ideology, came with a rush. The capacity of a great military and imperial power to sustain its legitimacy and authority on the foundation of an economy which eschewed markets and relied on GOSPLAN for its life and direction, eventually crumbled, at first slowly but then with exponential speed. All of a sudden the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lost all authority.

So it is with the movement for Aboriginal self-determination, which was supposed to finally culminate in an Aboriginal sovereign state carved out of Australian territory. In its first issue for 1988, the bicentennial year, the Communist Party weekly Tribune, then still extant, carried a cover page with a picture of the First Fleet at anchor in Botany Bay. Superimposed over the ships was the Aboriginal land rights flag with the banner headline "Sovereignty in 88". A subsequent manifestation of this ambition was published in a letter to the Age on March 27, 1993, from K.J. Everett, Aboriginal Provisional Government, South Hobart. It was headed "Conciliation out until blacks have own state". It stated, inter alia:

 
  Until we are free, a separate people with our own 
   nation recognised as a state in the United Nations, 
   until the Australian people can agree to that notion 
   and be humble in handing control back to the legal 
   owners of this land, until they can rid themselves 
   of the notion that we must all be Australians, any 
   hope of conciliation is beyond reach of all of us. 

These are but two examples of a persistent campaign stretching over twenty years. A full description would require a major thesis.