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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 2370 ..

MR WILLIAMS-MOZLEY (continuing):

If governments can enact retrospective legislation to prosecute unlawful or illegal acts committed in the past, then why not in this instance? What differentiates those unlawful acts from the terrible civil and criminal wrongs that were perpetrated against us? Why does it take such costly and issue-specific inquiries like the stolen generations inquiry or the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody to bring to the public gaze the continuing circumstance of disadvantage, dislocation and disparity between indigenous and non-indigenous societies? How much longer do we have to wait before our histories and our knowledges are accepted and given an equal place alongside non-indigenous accounts?

While the commonly held view about the intent of assimilation seems to be that what was done was done in the child's best interests, I would like you to think about a view that perhaps ran parallel in the minds of earlier politicians, pastoralists and developers. Since 1788 the concept of terra nullius, or empty land, has been used by Australian courts to exclude the suggestion of Aboriginal prior ownership or occupancy of this land. As early as the 1890s, governments, churches and pastoralists were thinking about what to do with the growing so-called "half-caste" population. In their views, traditional Aboriginal people were to be left to die out naturally; hence the protection era of the early 1900s when governments did what they could "to smooth the dying pillow" of the traditional Aborigine. If traditional Aborigines died out, then the question of land ownership, land use or just compensation would no longer pose a significant problem. But the so-called "half-caste" population was an altogether different proposition. As long as they continued to live with their Aboriginal family, they would have legitimate claims to the family's traditional land.

I would offer the view that the separation of Aboriginal children, first from their family and then from their land, was nothing more and nothing less than a further strategy to attempt to delimit the number or circumstance of Aboriginal people who could at law be considered traditional owners. And, even though the High Court judgment in the Mabo case has now put to rest the legal fiction of terra nullius, Australian common law maintains that Aboriginal claims to land be predicated on being able to show either a traditional or historical connection to land. The same applies to land claimed under State-based land rights legislation or native title legislation. Given that Aboriginal cultures are predicated on affiliation with land, and that land is determined by family kinship arrangements, if family is removed then affiliation to land becomes almost impossible to substantiate. This is the case today for the majority of the many thousands of Aboriginal people forcibly removed under assimilation policies.

Mr Speaker, for the record, I would like to reiterate to this Assembly those facts which are known to me about the forced removal of my family members. My mother's name was Mary Williams. She was born in Alice Springs into the Western Arrernte people of Hermannsburg. She was taken from her family aged 13 years and transported by rail to the Mulgoa Mission at Warragamba, New South Wales - a distance of approximately 2,000 kilometres from her home and country. Her seven younger sisters and two brothers were also taken from Alice Springs when young children. Although they too were placed in institutions, they were, arguably, more fortunate than her in that they remained in the Northern Territory.

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