Who is an Aborigine?
There is an official Commonwealth definition, and it involves three requirements. You must have an ancestor who was one of the pre-European inhabitants of Australia, you must identify as an Aborigine, and you have to be recognised as such by the community in which you live.
But self-identification and community recognition are not necessarily straightforward matters. Someone may claim to be an Aborigine in certain situations while denying it in others, and members of a given community might disagree about a person's identity. Called on to decide whether a doubtful case should be included in the investigations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Federal Court ruled that a "non-trivial" degree of descent was the essential prerequisite for a person claiming to be an Aborigine.
But the court also stated that if genuine uncertainties existed about a person's ancestry, community acceptance and the person's own identification could determine the matter. Indeed, when the case of a dead Maori man from Western Australia came before the Royal Commission, some Aboriginal organisations argued that his ancestry was irrelevant, because local Aborigines saw him as one of their own.
The past few years have seen a number of claims that prominent people widely believed to be Aboriginal do not meet the prerequisite of Aboriginal descent. The Aboriginality of the novelist and administrator Eric Willmot, the artist Sakshi Anmatyerre, and the writer Mudrooroo, have all been challenged on these grounds. Sometimes the challenges come from white relatives, in other cases they come from Aboriginal communities.
No doubt there are people who gain a certain amount of spiteful pleasure from these unfortunate cases, which may seem to confirm their views that Aboriginality is being rorted to exploit middle-class guilt and gullibility.
In particular instances these views may well be justified. But such cases also highlight the shameful times in the past when, to escape official discrimination and popular prejudice, many people of Aboriginal descent tried to hide their ancestry -- or else suffered officials who tried to hide it from them. In certain areas a few people, whose skin colour made it impossible to pass as white, redefined themselves as members of less denigrated groups, such as Indians or American blacks, in order to improve their economic and legal position.
In the last week, old accusations about the identity of the writer Dr Roberta Sykes have re-surfaced. A number of Aborigines from Townsville, where Sykes grew up, said that she is the daughter of a white woman and a black American serviceman, and that the media has wrongly presented her as an Aborigine for many years. They challenged the authenticity of her autobiography -- the second volume of which, Snake Dancing, has recently been published -- and maintained that she had not identified or associated with the Aboriginal community in Townsville.
In Snake Dancing, Roberta Sykes recounts a conversation she supposedly had in the early 1970s with "Mum Shirl" Smith, the greatly-admired Wiradjuri woman who devoted much of her life to providing welfare services to Aborigines in Sydney. Mum Shirl had heard that Sykes had been telling people she was not an Aborigine. Sykes explained that this was because she could not prove her identity, as her mother refused to tell her the truth about her origins.
Mum Shirl informed her that such statements were deeply insulting to other Aborigines and that she was choosing not to be an Aborigine. As Sykes tells it, this reprimand made her reflect that perhaps she had been reluctant to identify with the people her mother had often denigrated. In other words, it would have been dishonourable of her not to call herself an Aborigine.
"Mum Shirl" died six months ago, so the story can't be verified. If it is true, perhaps it would be easier to sympathise with Sykes' subsequent suggestions about her Aboriginality. It would have been understandable that a young person with dark skin and a single mother might suspect that she was being misled about her ancestry, and being redefined as a member of a race that was less reviled than Aborigines then were.
But there is something rather distasteful about public debates over people's right to call themselves Aborigines, and speculation about whether they have adopted their identity for opportunistic reasons, or whether they genuinely believe themselves to be Aboriginal.
Such speculation often involves judgements that may be impossible to make without intimate knowledge of a person's life. The people who have this knowledge may also have their own reasons for placing a particular interpretation on events, and attempts to differentiate the truth from the spin are most unlikely to be edifying.
However, there are a number of formal and informal practices of affirmative action and preferential treatment in the arts, academia, public service, and the corporate world for people who can claim an Aboriginal identity. The existence of these practices creates a legitimate public interest in whether people obtaining opportunities and rewards on the basis of such an identity are really entitled to do so.
If Australia was a colour-blind society, where public benefits were allocated according to individual need and ability rather than race or ethnicity, questions about a person's race would not be a public issue. They would be as relevant as the question of whether a person was a Presbyterian or a Baptist -- perhaps very important for the individual concerned and fellow Presbyterians or Baptists, but of little interest to anyone else.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. We have a divisive and anachronistic clause in our constitution which gives the Commonwealth Parliament the power to make special laws for the people of any race, and a Prime Minister who has flatly rejected a referendum to abolish this power.
And we persist with policies which require legal definitions to distinguish Aboriginal Australians from non-Aboriginal Australians, even though around two thirds of all Aboriginal marriages are to non-Aborigines. While this situation continues, we will remain a race-conscious nation, unable to transcend the shame of the past.
ADVERTISEMENT
No comments:
Post a Comment