Page 3100 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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one's relatives have been buried and where they have gone to. I have a few relatives buried back in a country town. Nobody has tried to move them, as far as I know at the moment, but there is a lot of land and I am sure they will not run out of it.
This is a very serious night and I would not like to miss out on saying something about cemeteries. After all, just about everybody else in the house has. I thought that we may even have heard from Ms Maher, Mr Stefaniak, Mr Moore or Dr Kinloch. That would have been very good, and I think this could be a very wonderful night. We could go on for hours on cemeteries.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (8.47), in reply: I am pleased that the debate on this subject tonight was not too grave. I could not help overhearing an interjection about members of the ALP being very particular about inscriptions in graveyards. Any suggestions that numbers come from there are totally refuted from this side of the chamber.
The debate ranged wide and far tonight. Mr Humphries gave us a homily on privatisation and commercialisation. I was extraordinarily tempted to take a point of order on relevance as he strayed into ACTEW, the Mitchell Health Services Supply Centre and various other government facilities. Never mind. I guess that, as we are looking at cemeteries and graves, we hope that no members of the Assembly need to look at those issues personally for a long time; but political graves are another question and there will be many members of this chamber facing an early political grave after February of next year.
On the substantial matters, I must commend Mr Jensen for his excellent speech and his heartfelt remarks about the need for a place in the local cemetery trust for the local Aboriginal community. I must say that I was not aware that that was an issue. I have had no representations from the community; so I can only assume that the initiative that he was referring to is going smoothly. But I can assure Mr Jensen and the house that it is something that I would be very keen to endorse, and I will ensure that that is progressing well.
Mr Jensen made some wide-ranging and well informed remarks about the way that the original inhabitants of this area have often been forgotten and overlooked. While a lot of work has been done recently, which he referred to, it was only on the sad occasion recently of Professor Manning Clark's passing that I was looking again through his great work. As he himself conceded, if he had written volume 1 of his A History of Australia in more recent years it would have been entirely different, because volume 1 of this history by that great historian - which was written largely in the late 1950s and published in, I think, 1961 or 1963; around that time anyway - contains very little about the history
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