In order to dispel any suggestion that the present analysis is only possible because of recent publications, many texts from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s which provide a similar analysis to the one made here will be cited. That is, the defence cannot be mounted that white Australia did not have the opportunity to come to a just accommodation with indigenous Australians because the continued exploitation of Aboriginal Australians was unknown. One example of this approach is the extract from the Dougie Young (1995) song quoted below which was widely available in the 1960s when it was recorded by Gary Shearston (1965) on a CBS label.

• The first rule in white Australia is that Aborigines can live on the land as long as it is not required by white interests.
• The second rule is that if the land is required by white interests Aborigines are expected to vacate it.
• The third rule is that if Aborigines put up a fight to retain the land then the choice is between extinguishing the Aborigines or more recently extinguishing their property rights.

This article investigates the extent to which these rules still apply in the 1990s. It looks at the impact of such behaviour on both indigenous and non-indigenous people. These rules have, from the beginning of the colonial experience, helped ensure the underdevelopment of areas which Aboriginal people are deemed to control. Aboriginal people are, as a result of such underdevelopment, marginalised (Davies & Young 1996, Jackson 1996, Lane & Chase 1996, Bennett 1957). Indigenous people are, as a part of this process, assigned low status roles thus weakening their capacity to garner mainstream support. But indigenous people in Australia have tenaciously clung to those parts of the continent from which they have not been alienated and have waged a relentless resistance to the colonial process. In the words of Aboriginal song writer Dougie Young:

Until about the time of the Second World War the prevailing orthodoxy was that the natives were primitives incapable of reaching a similar level of civilisation to whites. Aborigines needed to be 'protected', they could be useful as unpaid labour but were probably destined to die out in the face of a superior culture determined to develop Australia (Reynolds 1989 Chs. 1-4). During the 1920s and 30s the allegedly 'liberal' response to the perceived decline of the indigenous population in many parts of the continent was to 'smooth the dying pillow'. The Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, Dr C. Cook, at the initial conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal authorities conference in 1937 declared "If we leave them alone they will die and we shall have no problem" (cited in Bennett 1957, p.13). That is, the eventual extinction of indigenous Australians was believed inevitable and, as it was unavoidable, the humane response was to make their 'passing' as comfortable as possible. It seems to have escaped the notice of such 'liberals' that a policy which accepted the disappearance of an entire race as a result of their dispossession by an allegedly 'superior' culture is genocide. There were Europeans, who took a determined stand along side indigenous people, who attempted to ensure they had shelter and adequate nutrition. Sometimes this was done because the Aborigines were needed as labour and sometimes out of a sense of justice or for other reasons (Reynolds1990).

Even well into the 1950s there were many Australians who believed that Aborigines would 'disappear'. The widespread acceptance of Aboriginal people's eventual demise led Dr. Charles Duguid to warn in an address to the Anti-slavery Society in June 1954: "It can be said quite fairly that if Aboriginal people die out now, it is because we are willing that they should"(cited in Bennett 1957, p.10).

The mechanism of denial which is exemplified in John Howard's refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generations or more generally apparent in white Australia's refusal to acknowledge what it has done to indigenous people, the effect of its actions upon indigenous communities and the present day impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is not dissimilar to the refusal of many German people to adequately acquaint themselves about the excesses of the Nazis during the Second World War. The capacity of those who 'benefit' from others dispossession to rationalise or deny genocidal acts is acknowledged in Tom Paxton's (1964) song:

Aborigines in the 1990s continue to be assigned a low status. In the aftermath of the High Court's Wik Judgement, the Prime Minister's 10 point plan and the one point plan of the Queensland Premier to extinguish native title on pastoral leases, only make political sense if indigenous Australians are conceived of as separate from and of lesser importance than other Australians (Reynolds 1996, Tomlinson 1996). Governments, during the 1950s and 1960s, maintained Aborigines as natives by institutionalising them on segregated reserves 'for their protection'(Elkin 1961, Turnbull, 1974 contra Kelly 1966, Walker 1971, Black Resource Centre Collective 1976, Coombs 1994, Frontier 1997, Kidd 1997). Aboriginal people who resided off reserves and who were not assimilated into white society, were relegated to fringes of country towns (Rowley 1972[a], Malezer 1979, Bropho 1980, Edmunds 1989, Day 1994) and ghettos like Redfern and South Brisbane (Rowley 1972[b], Tomlinson 1974[a], Buchanan 1974). They were assigned a welfare / charity role which encouraged their being pitied as 'victims of their own inadequacies'. In rural areas the women continued to be exploited sexually and the men utilised as seasonal workers. In both city and rural areas they were marginalised. Indigenous issues were perceived by the general public to be of little political importance until the period leading up to the 1967 referendum. Professor Stanner in his 1968 Boyer Lectures described the failure of white Australians to seriously consider the situation confronting indigenous Australians as "The Great Australian Silence". This is the historical background which generates current perceptions of indigenous Australians.

When Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are conceived of as an entity - white Australia uses the term 'Aboriginal race', or the pejorative epithets 'abos, boongs, gins or jackies'. None of the diversity which exists within and between indigenous Australians is appreciated. There is little recognition of the major cultural differences between groups such as:

• the Yolngu of north eastern Arnhemland, the Pintubi of Northern Territory / Western Australian border,
• the Nyungar of the south west of Western Australia,
• the Kooris of New South Wales and Victoria, the Nunga of South Australia, or
• the Murris of southern Queensland

are groupings of diverse clans and tribes. Yet there is one division which urban white Australia recognises, that is between the 'traditional Aborigines who maintain their culture (who lives somewhere in the great outback) and urban blacks who are just drunks and no hopers'. One they might see from the tram the other they know they'll never meet until they retire and go on the big round Australia trip. This assessment of indigenous Australians is a late 20th century distortion of the earlier Rousseauan noble savage / social Darwinism divide.

Certainly many of the original owners of this country see some political advantage in maintaining a common identity as indigenous Australians but the development of such a pan-Aboriginal identity has been a long time in the making. Similar formulations of wider regional identities, even continental identities, have been a driving force in the anti-colonial developments in Africa (Cabral 1973, Fanon 1967) and Asia.

The health of indigenous Australians should shame any citizen (Bennett 1957, Kalokerinos 1974, Moodie 1973, The Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists 1980). The life expectancy of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders is about 15 - 20 years lower than that of their non-indigenous counterparts in Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory: "In most States and Territories, their babies are about 2 - 3 times more likely to be of low birth weight and about 2 - 4 times more likely to die at birth than are babies born to non-Indigenous mothers" (McLennan & Madden 1997 p. 1).

Governments claim to be promoting dramatic solutions, yet Access Economics has shown health expenditure on each indigenous person is lower than that provided for the non-indigenous population, and the level of underspending on indigenous health has stayed remarkably constant over the last 20 years (Kilham 1995). During the 1990s, on Cape York women were dying at a younger age than was the case in 1979 (Fischer 1993).

After viewing a number of Aboriginal settlements in the 1930s

In 1979 the first recommendation of the report of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal Health was that "the highest priority be given and immediate action taken to provide clean and adequate water supplies to all Aboriginal communities." (p. xv). In 1996 an ABS survey estimated that 7% of rural indigenous households did not have running water (McLennan & Madden 1997 p.13). There are still at least 100 Aboriginal communities in remote Australia which do not have access to clean drinking water.

Indigenous Australians die younger and are more frequently sick than non-indigenous Australians essentially because in many places they do not have access to clean running water, decent nutrition (Bennett 1957) and adequate housing with safe sanitation systems. None of these essentials is beyond the capacity of Australian governments to provide. The failure to provide this basic infrastructure, unconscionable as it is, can only be explained within a paradigm of institutional racism. White Australia:

• stole the land,
• introduced stock which depleted traditional nutritional sources (Heppell & Wigley 1981 p. 5, Penny & Moriarty 1976, Frith 1976, Bennett 1957 Chapt. 3),
• destroyed traditional sanitation practices and
• failed to put in place alternative mechanisms (Rowse 1995).

In 1971 the cost of the housing backlog in Aboriginal Australia was estimated by Francis Lovejoy to be $ 3,000 million. In 1972 the Whitlam Government was regarded as overly generous when it announced it would spend $30 million each year for ten years to solve 'the Aboriginal housing problem' (Heppell 1979). This amount would, on its own, hardly keep pace with the increased housing demand from population increase. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have the lowest socioeconomic status of all segments of the Australian community (McLennan & Madden 1997).

The first detailed academic documentation of police harassment of Aborigines was carried out by Eggleston (1976). Young men are many times more likely to be in remand centres than are their white counterparts. Aboriginal people are 27 times more likely to be in police custody and 11 times more likely to be in prison than other Australians (White & Perrone 1997 pp. 157-8, Wilson 1982). In 1974 the Queensland branch of Amnesty International produced a monograph entitled Institutionalisation: A way of Life in Aboriginal Australia (Tomlinson 1974[b]). Two decades later, on the 17 th. of October 1996, Amnesty International's London Office published a condemnation of Australia's current treatment and inordinate incarceration rates for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

Just how determined white Australia is to maintain the subordination of Aborigines is revealed by the twelve volume Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody published in 1991: it recommended many ways of keeping Aborigines out of custody in order to decrease the number of Black deaths in custody. The most recent follow up report (Office of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner 1996) establishes that Aborigines are being incarcerated at a greater rate now than in the period 1980 -1989 and more Aborigines are dying in custody as a result. "Although Aborigines represent only 1.4 percent of the adult population, they accounted for more than 25 percent of all deaths in police and prison custody during the year to June 1996" (Amnesty International 1997).

Police killings of Aborigines in Australia have a long lineage. Officially sanctioned police punitive raids did not end with the 60 to 100 Aborigines slaughtered in the Coniston massacre in 1928 (Young 1981) but continued in the North of South Australia at least until the early 1940s (Rowley 1972 [b] p. 204). Police and settlers continued to kill and maim small groups of Aborigines in remote Australia until at least the early 1980s (NT News 21/7/80 p.1). In cities, with the notable exception of incidents like the slaughter of David Gundy, the police content themselves with severe bashings of indigenous Australians (ABC TV 1996). The police play an important political role in relation to indigenous Australians; they are the front line of social control, they are the group which selects individuals to be criminalised (Tomlinson 1993), they in large part determine who will be "jailed and killed" (Walker 1971, p.34), they are an essential element in political marginalisation of indigenes.

In recent times many Australian state and territory governments have adopted 'law and order' policies which have impacted disproportionately upon indigenous communities.

The failure to implement many of the Royal Commission into Black deaths in custody recommendations which aim to decrease the number of indigenous people in custody, for example not decriminalising drunkenness, has led to increases in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in jail. Coupled with this have been policies such as 'truth in sentencing' and the imposition of mandatory jail sentences for minor offences such as petty theft ( Land Rights News, Feb 1998 p.13). All of these policies have led to a dramatic increase in the number of indigenous people in custody.

After this preamble there followed a list of 12,000 names of Aboriginal people. Only one fifth of the people of partial Aboriginal descent were exempted from the Ordinance.

Similar arrangements existed over the entire northern half of the continent at this time. Aboriginal workers who were paid had, by law, to pay into bank accounts held by their protectors a fixed percentage of their wages. In Queensland money held in these accounts was transferred to a special Aboriginal welfare account, when this account was eventually wound up in the 1980s there was a $30 million shortfall which the Goss Labor Queensland Government held to be non recoverable, none of the "protectors" have been charged.

This 'leakage of funds from Aborigines bank accounts' was part and parcel of their administration from the earliest days (Kidd 1997 pp. 85-86,132-133, 148, 177-178, 266. Consultancy Bureau 1991, Family Services and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs 1991). Money in this system was supposed to be used for the benefit of indigenous people. In the early 1960s following a series of dysentery epidemics on the reserves of western Cape York the government said it had insufficient funds to upgrade the health clinics on the reserves but did see its way clear to borrow from the Aboriginal Benefit Fund account an amount of $100,000 which it lent to the Redcliffe Hospital Board to build this city hospital (Kidd, 1997, Consultancy Bureau 1991, Tomlinson 1963). The absence of upgraded health facilities at places like Weipa and Mapoon was one of the issues which the Queensland Government used as part of the effort during the period 1959 -1962 to force Mapoon people from their land and thus to facilitate Comalco's bauxite mining. The Government claimed the absence of decent health facilities meant the Mapoon people were endangering their children's health (Kidd 1997 pp. 214-227).

Goot and Rowse remind us that at the 1983 election the Federal Labor Party set out five principles which were to underpin its national land rights policy: these principles included inalienable freehold title, mining vetos or else the power to set conditions, fair royalties, compensation and sacred site protection (1994 p. 1). After 13 years of Labor Administration little progress was made towards implementing such promises. After 2 years of Liberal/National Administration the idea that such principles might underpin the Government's approach to land rights policy is but a receding pipe dream.

In the wake of the High Court's Wik Judgement the language of confrontation has again assumed centre stage. Pastoralists and miners claimed that the granting of native title would bring economic development in Australia to a halt. On the 23 rd of December 1997, Ian Henderson an economic correspondent for The Australian wrote:

This figure was drawn from Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) compilation of mining companies expectations. But, as Henderson points out:

He supported his assertion by noting the previous day

The absence of an honest assessment of what is actually happening by spokespeople for the mining industry is not accidental. The continuation of the language of confrontation is designed to weaken the bargaining power of the indigenous owners of this land in order that what ever 'contribution' miners are forced to make to indigenous communities, in return for not obstructing mining, is a lesser amount than it would have been had the negotiations taken place on an honest footing and where indigenous people were conceived of as partners in a project.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander struggle for their land has been waged relentlessly for centuries. The Yir Yorant were recorded to have driven off a Dutch expedition from the Western shores of Cape York in 1606 ( Roberts 1981, Sharpe 1952). The High Court's Wik decision was brought by Aboriginal people whose traditional country lies not far from the country then occupied by the Yir Yorant. The indigenous peoples moral claim for reparation was strengthened by the High Court's Wik decision. The Wik people's claim in the High court was upheld because the Queensland Government was seen to have failed to exercise its fiduciary duty in relation to people it was 'protecting'.

An insight into the way 'protection' was interpreted by the Queensland Government is provided by the way it treated the people of Mapoon in the late 1950s and 60s. In 1963 the people of Mapoon were taken by boat from their land by armed police who burnt their houses. They were deposited at Bamaga on the very tip of Cape York or at the Wiepa Mission. Weipa people, a short distance to the South of Mapoon, had their reserve decreased to 124 hectares (Suchet 1996, p.204). What had been Aboriginal reserve lands amounting to nearly 6,000 square kilometres was, in 1957, converted into a mining lease for the transnational alumina company Comalco. That is "93 per cent of land which had been officially reserved since the nineteenth century for the Aborigines of Mapoon, Aurukun and Weipa" (Kidd 1997 p. 204) was alienated. This theft of indigenous land was debated in the Queensland Parliament. Suchet (1996) notes in relation to the resulting Commonwealth Aluminium Corporation Pty. Limited Act 1957: "Nowhere does this Act protects the rights of Aboriginal people (p.204)." Some members on both sides of the Parliament took advantage of a preferential Comalco share offer (Roberts 1981, Roberts assisted by Russell & Parsons 1974, Roberts, Parsons & Russell 1975, Roberts & McLean 1976, Stevens 1981, somewhat less critical accounts are provided by Rogers 1973 and Cousins, D. & Nieuwenhuysensen, J. 1984).

Three hundred kilometres to the west of the Wik people's country a transnational conglomerate's subsidiary (Century Zinc) in 1997 beat into submission the Waanyi people. Murrandoo Yanner, Coordinator of the Carpentaria Land Council, has been convicted twice for unlawful assembly within an eighteen month period. He has faced continual harassment by mining company officials, police and other state government officers. In March 1998 the Supreme Court of Queensland determined that Yanner did not have the right to take crocodile on his tribal country. The supreme Court action was initiated on appeal by the anti-Aboriginal Borbidge Government after a magistrate in1997 had dismissed charges against Yanner for taking the crocodiles (ABCTV 7.30 Report 9/3/98). The Government purports to have taken the action in order to protect wildlife. The effect of the action, which Yanner has announced he will appeal to the High Court, is to remove the right of indigenous people to hunt and gather traditional food. Should the Queensland Government succeed then it will deny Aboriginal Australians living in remote parts of this country access to a major source of nutrition. Numerous studies have shown that communities which utilise traditional food to supplement their diet have better health profiles than those which do not (Health Advancement Standing Committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council 1997).

The Century Zinc company now has the go ahead to mine one of the largest zinc reserves in the world, despite the fears of conservationists and indigenous people about ecological damage to Dugong feeding and breeding areas in the Gulf of Carpentaria. That is the Queensland Government is determined to prevent Aboriginal people taking "protected species" even by traditional means from their traditional land but is prepared to allow a trans-national subsidiary to endanger the breeding and feeding areas of Dugong by letting the Century Zinc dredge channels to assist barges to carry zinc ore to ships waiting off shore.

After the signing, the Queensland Government proudly announced that, as the Aborigines had agreed to allow Century Zinc to mine their land, they could now be provided with the kind of social infrastructure which white Australia takes for granted. The total project is estimated to be worth $9 billion. The mining company offered $60 million as compensation. Of this $30 million is to be controlled by the Queensland Government to develop social infrastructure like schools, community centres, health centres and roads (Yanner 1996). The very essentials which white Australia takes for granted.

Failure to provide the social infrastructure which would promote health, well being and education has been part and parcel of the Queensland governments' approach to Aboriginal areas in the north of the State for the last 40 years (Kidd 1997, Roberts, Russell & Parsons 1974). In recent times a new health clinic has been erected at Napranum but seriously ill people still need to travel the 14 kilometres to the hospital in the 'white' town ship of Weipa.

Still in the Gulf country, but over the Northern Territory Border, Mount Isa Mines (MIM) was in 1993 granted a lease to mine McArthur River lead/zinc deposits, one of the largest such ore bodies in the world. The Commonwealth and Northern Territory Governments had fast tracked the development. The Commonwealth guaranteed to support the Northern Territory legislation. Ciaran O'Faircheallaigh (1995) wrote about the offer, designed to weaken local Aboriginal resistance to the mine going ahead:

The decision to proceed to mine an area controlled by Aboriginal people has many consequences and it may be that assessing the effects of a development, as O'Fairchaellaigh (1996) asserts, are far more complicated than looking just at the impacts of mining. Because issues such as what other benefits accrued to locals, the manner in which negotiations were carried out, protection of sacred sites, respect for indigenous culture and interpersonal relations all play a part. But it is equally true as he acknowledges: the economic status of indigenous people is generally very low, most communities have only one resource extraction project on their land and if they fail to succeed in maximising returns from this resource they will remain poor (O'Fairchaellaigh 1996 p.198). It also needs to be acknowledged that indigenous communities are often highly pressured by governments which don't understand their interests or needs. Governments are essentially responding to much wider constituencies. Indigenous communities are also frequently subjected to intense pressure by corporations whose prime interest is maximising returns to their investors. Governments and corporations often combine to force indigenous communities to accept development on their land (irrespective of indigenous communities best interests) because it is far easier for government and industry to understand and accept each others needs than it is for either of them to understand indigenous perspectives or accept that indigenous perspectives have any utility (Bradbury 1997).

In 1963 I visited Yarrabah, near Cairns, shortly after the Church of England handed control of this mission to the Queensland Government. Housing, whilst basic, was nearly sufficient to house all the people living there. The Aborigines had run a saw mill and built most of the houses. But the mill closed and by the time I returned 15 years later there was a shortage of houses and the houses which were being built were fabricated largely by mainstream contractors. What had been an isolated settlement was being encroached upon by a growing urban sprawl. This erosion of indigenes' capacity to develop their own territory has been repeated in many parts of this country this century. Sometimes it takes the form of protectors stealing money from the personal accounts of indigenes (Kidd 1997). In the Northern Territory in the 1970s and 1980s it often took the form of the manager of the community store defrauding the entire community by overcharging or just absconding with the funds. Sometimes indigenes were displaced from employment, and therefore income, by an influx of European employees. At Maningrida in the mid 1970s this lead to major Aboriginal unrest which resulted in the indigenous community reclaiming their jobs and community control (Gillespie, Cooke & Bond 1977).

There have always been some European Australians driven by a sense of justice, religious beliefs, a desire to have a healthy workforce, paternalism, the need for or love of a sexual partner or for other reasons who have worked with indigenous Australians in an effort to assist them to remain on and/or develop land (Bennett 1957). Some have formed partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in fishing and pastoral ventures. Some of the early mission efforts resulted in incorporation of Aboriginal people into the vital life of the communities on which they lived.

One of the remarkable features of Aboriginal affairs in Australia is that the pictorial records of places as far a field as Hermannsburg (NT), Maclean (NSW), and Lake Tyres (Vic) at the turn of this century shows Aboriginal people well dressed and playing an important part in the life of the community (Reynolds 1989, pp.148 -151 1990, Jackomos and Fowell 1991). By the 1960s many Aborigines in these places had become impoverished. Perhaps the most credible explanation of why many indigenous communities 'lost heart' is portrayed by the documentary Lousy little sixpence (1997). In this documentary the point is made that the New South Wales Aboriginal Welfare Board in the early part of this century removed the right of Aborigines to own and use land on reserves (Goodall 1996, Ch. 11). At Cumeroogunga Reserve Aborigines had been granted land, cleared and ploughed it, only to have the Aboriginal Welfare Board sell it to white farmers (Lousy little sixpence 1997). Events of this nature occurred all over Australia (Goodall 1996, Kidd 1997, Rowley 1972[a],[b],[c], Reynolds 1989).

Under the auspices of government and mission control of Aboriginal reserves there was insufficient investment in technological or social infrastructure to ensure these areas would become productive. Aborigines were shifted off their land to allow pastoralists to have it. People from many tribes were herded together to suit white Australia's convenience. They were not adequately assisted to develop the land on which they were placed. The areas which white Australia wanted were frequently sold or leased to white farmers, as happened at Mona Mona mission in the 1960s. The residents of Mona Mona were packed off to Seventh Day Adventist Church owned houses on the fringes of Kuranda (Kidd 1997, p. 212).

The administrative skills of most of the people who were sent to manage reserves were not high. Aboriginal initiative was stifled. These reserves were welfarised, many were run like British Poor Law work houses. The food, housing and health provision were inadequate. Disputation was treated as if it was rebellion. Inordinately repressive powers were given to superintendents to jail people, remove people from a reserve and divide families. Anger, frustration, intimidation, depression, alcoholism, and disputation became an everyday feature. The mechanisms of control on Aboriginal reserves shared many common features with the repression carried out in other outposts of Empire by the colonial authorities.

The controlling mentality of typical externally imposed colonial structures is firstly the promotion of the interests of the 'metropolitan' country, secondly ensuring the interests of the expatriate workers and entrepreneurs prevail over the interests of local entrepreneurs and those of the natives. Australians who have not had the experience of living in the more northern or remote parts of this continent during the 1950s, 60s and 70s may not conceive of white / black relations in this continent as resembling a colonial interface. But the language which governments of the day employed to describe their administration of indigenous matters is not dissimilar from that of the British Raj. Until 1966 the Queensland Government used the title of the Department of Native Affairs (Queensland State Archives & FSAIA 1994, p.10). During the 1950s, at the Federal level, the official policy was one of assimilation until 1963when it became integration and then in 1974 during the Whitlam Government became self-determination.

More than any other feature, widespread unemployment and failure to pay award wages to indigenous workers guaranteed their communities remained impoverished and underdeveloped. When indigenous workers got seasonal jobs away from the reserve they had to pay a fixed percentage of their money into the bank accounts held by the protector. Those who worked on the reserve were generally paid a 'training allowance', if they were paid anything other than rations. In 1967, I calculated that many workers on training allowances, in the Top End of the Northern Territory were receiving less each week on training allowance that would a Darwin family living on welfare assistance. Many of these 'trainee' workers were the sole bread winner in their families. Eventually training allowances were replaced by the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP), a Work for the Dole scheme which only applied to indigenes.

Each community was paid on an estimate of how many participants would be attracted to the CDEP in their area. Some communities found that there were more people wanting to work than there were places: as a result it was not uncommon for CDEP workers to receive less than they would have had they been in receipt of unemployment benefit. On other communities people got slightly more than unemployment benefits. Either way when coupled with widespread unemployment it meant that for many communities over 90 per cent of the people, who received any income, survived on social security levels of income. This guaranteed that the possibility of developing economically viable communities was extremely limited. It almost ensures underdevelopment because the communities do not generate sufficient economic activity which could in turn lead to the creation of award rate jobs.

Perhaps an extract from the resolutions of the initial conference of Commonwealth and state Aboriginal authorities held in 1937 might provide an insight into the failure of governments to ensure indigenous Australians were enabled to gain employment in jobs which paid similar award rates to other Australians. The resolution read:

Perhaps the only thing holding back present day administrators from succeeding in finding employment for all Aboriginal people is that they are still searching for those elusive jobs with lucrative remuneration for which indigenous Australians would be in demand and which will not inspire envy from other Australians.

The overwhelming majority of Aboriginal people have, until very recent times:

• consistently been denied the opportunity to own land,
• denied access to award wage labour,
• refused similar social security to other Australians, and
• they have been denied control of indigenous communities.

The indigenous struggle for land, life and liberty has been long and bloody (Murray 1962, Reynolds 1972, Roberts 1981, Rowley 1972[b], Evans, Saunders & Cronin 1975, Robinson & York 1977). Many white Australians believe the indigenous land rights struggle began with the Tent Embassy outside the Federal Parliament in 1972 or the Gurindji struggle at Wattie Creek in 1966 (Hardy 1968). This ignores:

• the 1960s Pitjantjatjara endeavours to retain land in South Australia.
• the Yirrakala petition presented to Federal Parliament by Aborigines on the Gove Peninsular in 1963,
• the on going struggle of the Mapoon people since 1957,
• the resistance of Don McLeod's Mob - the Nomad Mining Company - in Western Australia in the Pilbura 1946 (Rowley 1972[c]),
• the Lake Tyres and Framlingham contests in Victoria in the 1950s (Andrews 1962),
• Ferguson, Cooper and Patten's efforts to obtain a better deal in NSW in the 1930's (Horner 1994),
• the battles waged by the indigenous Tasmanians ( Reynolds 1996, Turnbull 1974), and
• hundreds of similar contests for rights or land in other parts of Australia.

In fact white Australia's perception of their 'history' ignores the reality of the indigenous struggle.

In The Other Side of the Frontier Henry Reynolds (1981) set out another way of viewing the interchange between invader and indigene. Very conveniently the invaders make a distinction between the clash / invasion / dispossession phase and subsequent indigenous unrest designed to keep some control of Aboriginal interests. The indigenous reality is that the land rights struggle has been an integral and unceasing part of Aboriginal existence for the last 400 years. It is a political struggle which at times has had a military component. Sometimes it involves attacks on the instruments of or the invaders themselves. Unfortunately it sometimes takes form in a sense of loss which can lead to acts of self abuse or self destruction. Garrarrwuy Yunupingu in an address to the National Press Club in Canberra in February 1997 summed up the desperation which many indigenous communities feel when he said:

Indigenous people realise they were not all dispossessed by our forebears at some convenient time in the past, say 1770 or 1788. They are aware that many indigenous groups are today being dispossessed by mining companies, governments and pastoralists - Century Zinc mine got its go ahead to mine in 1997. The traditional owners of Jabiluka are opposed to mining but as this article is being written the Federal Government is preparing to give the go ahead to open this uranium mine in Kakadu. In August 1997 Aborigines reached an agreement with miners to open up 44,000 square kilometres of their land in the north of South Australia for mineral exploration (PM 1997). Howard's ten point plan, designed to weaken indigenous rights on pastoral leases, is a 1997/8 phenomenon.

City Aboriginal people are often portrayed in the popular media as drunken no-hopers and their country cousins are presented as living in humpies surrounded by children with snotty noses and flies in their eyes. These stereotypical images have not changed much since the days when whites were preparing to 'smooth the dying pillow'. However in recent years two other images compete for time in the media one is of an articulate, determined but reasonable leadership the other is of angry indigenous protesters clashing with police.

Since the 1960s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have succeeded in raising public consciousness about their struggle more successfully than at any previous time. As a result there have been some significant changes in the way governments have responded to indigenous people and the original owners of this country have won some substantial victories. Prior to the 1960s very few people of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent were paid social security and it was the late 1970s early 1980s before Aboriginal people in many parts of remote Australia got anything like equivalent access to social security entitlements as other Australians (Social Security 1982). The 1967 referendum at which 92% of Australians decided to allow the Commonwealth to make laws in relation to Aborigines (Middleton 1977) was seen at the time as being as important a watershed as was the High Court's Mabo decision in 1992 (Attwood 1996).

For some Aborigines state legislation has been at least as important as actions taken on the national stage. As Charles Rowley put it:

The Commonwealth's Northern Territory Land Rights Act drafted by the Whitlam Government in 1975 amended and then passed by the Fraser Government in 1976 provided Aboriginal people who had maintained close links with their traditional lands the opportunity to reclaim unalienated crown land in the Northern Territory. The South Australian legislation and the NT Land Rights Act have been the vehicle by which Aborigines in these two regions have recovered ownership of considerable areas of land and have consequently been able to start to develop a secure economic future (Crough 1993).

Greg Crough (1993) building on earlier work of Kelly (1966) and Stevens (1974) shows that even where Aboriginal business enterprises prosper in capitalist terms they are rendered invisible to an invader blinded by the need to see the failure of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. The North Australian Research Unit revealed that "there is an 'Aboriginal economy' which contributed at least $428 million to the economy of the Top End of the Northern Territory in 1994-95 ( this is 2.65 times the amount expended by the Northern Territory Government on Aboriginal people." (Land Rights News 1997, p. 6). Despite many examples of indigenous business enterprises gaining financial success -usually in association with their regaining of some or all of their tribal land, there are a disproportionate number of indigenous Australians who are living in poverty.

The experience in the rural and remote parts of the Northern Territory evokes one possible explanation for the widespread poverty of indigenous people over the length and breadth of this country. Perhaps indigenous poverty has been exacerbated by the continuing failure of governments, developers, and many other Australian institutions to come to a determination of indigenous peoples' rights over land which both Aboriginal and non- Aboriginal people would consider just.

The Minister responsible for Aboriginal welfare in the Northern Territory told the Federal Parliament in 1952:

Not much has changed 40 years later at the Lockhart River Aboriginal Reserve. Lane and Chase (1996) describe the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) lodged, by the company wanting to mine 200 million tonnes of the high grade silica in Shelburne Bay, in the Queensland Mining Warden's Court:"...the EIS denied the Wuthathi people any current interest in the area on the basis that a lack of physical presence in the area constituted a dereliction of interest" (p.175). Many Wuthathi people lived less than 80 kilometres and regularly accessed the area to gather' bush tucker'.

In much the same way as white Australia took indigenous land for farming, pasture, forestry or mining; and took indigenous women for sex; and took indigenous men for their labour (Stevens 1974): white Australia attempted to complete the process of dispossession by taking indigenous children from their communities (National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families 1997).

The Prime Minister refuses to apologise on behalf of the Government for the actions of all Australian Governments during the period of the stolen children's generations because his present Government, he said, was not responsible. Against the recommendations of the Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families (1997 Appendix 9) the Howard Government has steadfastly opposed the paying of compensation to the children or their families. The Government has again done this on the grounds that this Government was not responsible for the taking of the children. Adam Jamrozik (1997) commented that the "Howard Government was not responsible for the Second World War either but it continues to pay War Pensions".

It is a pity that the Prime Minister had not read and understood the article by Hal Wootten written in response to white backlash in the wake of the High Court's Mabo decision:

The real policy question which must drive any substantial reconciliation process is justice in the present rather than guilt in relation to past activities. This prescription is not an endorsement of Pauline Hanson's call for all Australians to be treated equally. Rather it is a demand that we are all treated equitably. Given the great disparity in wealth, income, health, housing, incarceration rates, and age of death of indigenous and white Australians, then to treat both indigenes and invaders equally would not be justice.

situation confronting indigenous communities. A significant proportion of Australians living in cities are coming to question the basis on which rich white Australia has inflicted 'development', read dispossession, upon indigenous Australians.

At the start of this essay I asserted that the rules which have controlled access to Aboriginal land:

will be extinguished.

These rules which underpin black / white relations in relation to land, are becoming more widely challenged by both indigenous and non indigenous Australians. The reason these rules of development have been so resistant to change is that indigenous Australians despite their being granted voting rights in the 1967 Referendum have not been ceded full economic rights because they have not really been accepted fully as citizens in their own land (Reynolds 1996, Tomlinson 1996). When they are used as labour they are often treated not as Australian workers but as if they are 'guest workers' in much the same way as Turks in Germany. In a month or so when the work is over they are shunted back to their camps on the fringes of country towns.

There have been few examples in this country of joint partnerships with the indigenous population. Australia has yet to see the development of a major resource where a corporation agrees to the indigenous community having 50 per cent equity in the project simply because they have provided the land on which the activity takes place. There has been a failure to acknowledge that the only contributions many indigenous communities can make is the labour of their people and their providing the land on which the development takes place. In Australia in the past both the indigenous labour and the land have been intentionally devalued. Companies have not worked to add value to the available labour through effective training nor have they added value to the land through adhering to strict environmental practices and processing of the materials on site. As neither workers nor the land is accorded an appropriate value companies retain greater profit. Because the indigenous population is not defined as part of the Australian situation they are not included in the distribution. Such racism is reinforced for as long as people can get away with it because it funnels the surplus profit extracted from a development to fewer people (shareholders).

The ideologies which drove colonial Australia, whether as protector or exterminator, were directly linked to the extraction or exploitation of a resource. They took: the land, the women, the labour and the children. On the way they assaulted the environment, indigenous culture, the adults and the children. At various times the actions taken by white Australia were explained in terms of the necessities of war, pest removal, self defence, separation, 'protection' of the natives, and then assimilation. All of these explanations amount to the removal of the indigene from the presence of whites. Even assimilation amounts to removal of the indigene and his or her replacement by an Australian with a Black skin. It is as if Australia never signed the United Nations Treaty on Genocide in 1947.

The reality of race relations for many in this country has not fundamentally changed since the invasion. The race war commenced in 1788 continues. Aboriginal academic Lillian Holt (1997) described the present Australian Government's administration of Aboriginal affairs as "designer label dereliction". The pastoralists' spokespersons in the aftermath of the High Court's Wik decision demanded extermination of the remaining property rights of indigenous Australians on pastoral leases. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are not truly regarded as citizens in their own country (Reynolds 1996,Tomlinson 1996,1997). Aborigines still are only allowed to "own" land until white Australian or their transnational friends have found a use for it.

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