The call could have come from Pauline Hanson. Instead, the demands for an inquiry into people fraudulently saying they are Aborigines so as to get special benefits came from indigenous leaders, such as Senator Aden Ridgeway and ATSIC deputy chairman, Ray Robinson.
The calls were triggered by articles in The Courier-Mail last month about the Appo family, who are Queenslanders of Sri Lankan descent. Although most members of this family are said to have no indigenous ancestry, by claiming to be Aborigines they have received millions of dollars worth of benefits, including concessional housing and business loans, educational grants and preferences, and legal assistance.
Ray Robinson suggested that the Appo family were merely the tip of a very large iceberg, estimating that up to 15 per cent of people who said they were Aborigines had no Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander blood. This makes the apparent unwillingness of Mr Robinson and ATSIC to publicise the problem in the past all the more scandalous. Indeed, less than three years ago ATSIC tried to meet misgivings about people unjustifiably receiving special assistance by releasing a booklet claiming that applicants for benefits such as concessional loans had to "prove their Aboriginality" by meeting strict documentary requirements.
Of course, attacks on the right of particular individuals or families to identify themselves as Aborigines are not uncommon. In recent years media stories have reported allegations that supposed Aboriginal writers and artists such as Bobby Sykes, Mudrooroo, Eric Willmot and Sakshi Anmatyerre have no indigenous ancestors.
Similar claims about other well-known Aborigines circulate in private, with varying degrees of plausibility. Sometimes the perpetrators are other Aborigines; sometimes they are whites with an axe to grind.
A few years ago, for instance, someone hostile to Tasmanian Aboriginal activist Michael Mansell sent me an article called "The Halfcastes of the Furneaux Group" (islands in the Bass Strait), published in an obscure scholarly journal in 1947. The sender drew my attention to a statement that all the Mansell family had descended from the son of a white sealer from Sydney and an American black woman.
But despite my correspondent's belief, this did not show that Mansell is an impostor, as later statements in the article indicated that his family almost certainly has Aboriginal blood through other forebears. And perhaps more importantly, the article itself was evidence that the Mansells were identifying themselves as being of Aboriginal descent long before there were any particular benefits in doing so.
Indeed, by focusing simply on biological descent, the furore over the Appo family has raised only part of a problem that is almost inevitable when a category of people who cannot be unambiguously defined are offered benefits unavailable to others.
Three requirements must be met for someone to qualify as Aboriginal -- as well as having an ancestor who was one of the pre-European inhabitants of Australia, an eligible person must identify as an Aborigine and be recognised as such by his or her community. In practice these requirements -- particularly the latter two -- allow considerable scope for opportunists. Individuals can readily affirm a non-existent or previously denied Aboriginal identity, and some community organisations are pretty lax about their responsibilities regarding recognition.
Until a few decades ago, of course, all the economic and social advantages went to non-Aborigines, and many mixed race people with Aboriginal ancestry escaped onerous restrictions and prejudice by "passing", either as whites, or if their complexion was dark, as Indians or other non-Europeans. But from the 1970s the balance of incentives changed, with a more positive approach to Australia's Aboriginal heritage and the introduction of programs designed to compensate for past mistreatment and end current disadvantage.
This largely explains the substantial growth in the numbers of people identifying themselves as indigenous over the past few decades, a growth which is considerably larger than the natural rate of increase.
In the 25 years from 1971 -- when Aborigines were first officially included in the Census -- to the latest count in 1996, Australia's indigenous population grew from 116,000 to 386,000. In Tasmania, the growth has been extraordinary, increasing from around 670 indigenous people in 1971 to over 15,000 in the same period. As a consequence, Tasmania now has a higher percentage of its population identifying as Aboriginal than any other Australian state.
Given the legal and other burdens that Aborigines previously faced, the motives of those who once "passed" are understandable, though perhaps not praiseworthy. Nevertheless, while they or their descendants may now meet all the official requirements of Aboriginality, their moral right to benefit from special programs designed to overcome Aboriginal disadvantage is another matter.
There is honest disagreement about whether such programs can really achieve their intended goals. But irrespective of one's views on this question, it is hard to see why the benefits should be freely available to people who only affirmed an indigenous identity in recent decades, whether these people where ignorant of their Aboriginal ancestry or whether they deliberately denied it. In most, if not all cases, these recent Aborigines are almost indistinguishable from their non-Aboriginal neighbours, socially, economically and culturally.
I do not know how long those members of the Appo family without any indigenous ancestry have been saying they are Aborigines. I do not condone fraud, but if the Appos were identifying as Aborigines and stood with them during the hard times of the past, they have more of my sympathy than people who denied their Aboriginality until things started to come good in the 1970s and 80s.
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