[54] By 1980, Weipa was the “world’s largest single mining shipping centre for bauxite”,[55] and in that year Comalco posted a record profit of $75 million after tax. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia's Far North, in the state of Queensland, feel a strong identification with "country" - an intense attachment to birthplace and yearning for yearly sojourns to home countries. Despite having received such substantial public funds to bankroll its operations, Queensland Alumina Ltd, the international corporation which was to operate the Gladstone smelter, paid no income tax at all in the first eight years of its operation. [13] This practice of cultural assimilation was enthusiastically taken up by the missionaries. While each community in the NPA has its own history, all are strongly influenced by both their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritages. [135] Determined to prevent any precedent for Aboriginal land ownership, Bjelke-Petersen simply had the area upon which the property sat on the Archer River re-gazetted as a national park in 1982 to stymie the transfer of land. It lies on Albatross Bay at the estuaries of the Hey, Embley, and Mission rivers, facing the Gulf of Carpentaria. Queensland historian Ross Fitzgerald documented the huge scale of the subsidies; the Nicklin government reimbursed Comalco “three to four million dollars for the construction of the harbour, channel and wharves” at Weipa. Aboriginal wages were stolen and strictly controlled by the Chief Protector, used for deployment in mission expenditure or, as was often the case, other state development projects. [2], In November 2014, Western Australian Liberal premier Colin Barnett announced his intention to close down over 150 remote Aboriginal communities. The school opened on 29 January 1974 and caters for students from pre-prep to year 7. [52] Not only this, but in the 1970s Comalco admitted that under the agreement with the government it would pay no more than cost price for electricity for use in its future smelting processes. [65] However, because the children stolen from their families were from all over Queensland,[66] it had become the dwelling place of many different Indigenous peoples. Annual Reports Kubin (Moa) Local history for the Kubin community of Moa Island in the Torres Strait. For more information, read our full report. [20] The Office of Native Affairs was administered as a veritable fiefdom by its directors until the 1980s, when the position was abolished. [83] Roberts 1975a, p9. Food shortages prevailed and had been exacerbated by government rationing and heightened food prices during World War II. [45] Cousins and Niewyenheusen 1984, p15. Roberts, J.P. (ed) 1975a, Mapoon Book 1: The Mapoon Story by the Mapoon People, International Development Action. Its paternalistic attitude towards the mission residents and the purpose of their Comalco claim was expressed clearly in a letter from the Australian Presbyterian Board of Missions (APBM), which had replaced the earlier AFMC, to the Weipa missionary in 1963: The financial help from Comalco has never been intended as a gift to the people but as a gift for the people. [5] “Colin Barnett links closure of remote Aboriginal communities to child abuse,” The Guardian, 20 March 2015. Contrary to what Cape York horror stories will tell you, there are fuel stations and roadhouses stocking both petrol and diesel along the way (in fact, the longest distance between bowsers is 140km). The Queensland government saw its own state’s development as dependent on diversifying an economy that had been previously heavily dependent on agricultural production. [129] Predictably, Fraser capitulated in favour of preserving a working relationship with the Queensland government, failing to use his capacity to make the Queensland Reserves Act retroactive and override the state law. Outside the small terminal, Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags flap languidly in the heat. From the 1950s, the discovery on Cape York of huge deposits of bauxite, the ore from which aluminium is produced, spurred a chain of dispossessions; thousands and thousands of miles of Aboriginal land was stolen and ravaged in the service of profit. [78], With a new government plan in place to move Mapoon residents to another state-administered reserve at Bamaga or “Hidden Valley” on the northernmost tip of Cape York,[79] and with community unrest growing and increasingly public, the state pursued even tougher means to quell resistance. The government had laid the basis for a mining explosion, and the brutal dispossession of the Mapoon people showed its determination to obliterate Aboriginal claims to land. Next morning the D.N.A ship took us to Bamaga.”[88] In a written account for the Mapoon Books, Jimmy elaborated: Next day was Saturday, 16th November, 1963. These people came to the Australian mainland from the north when Earth was experiencing much lower temperatures, causing substantial drops in sea levels. In 1946, with an aluminium smelter in the works for Tasmania, where a new hydro-electric plant would provide a cheap source of power for a very energy intensive industry, the government set up the Australian Aluminium Production Commission (AAPC) to execute this plan. However, it was Comalco that was the genuine beneficiary of the deal. O’Lincoln, Tom 2012 [1993], Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era, Interventions. The northernmost mission, Mapoon, located 170 kilometres south-west of the tip of the Cape York Peninsula and 900 kilometres north-west of Cairns, was the first of the missions to be established in 1891. Queensland Legislative Assembly, 28 November 1957, Parliamentary debates (Hansard), Queensland Government Printer. Frankland, Kathy 1994, “A Brief History of Government Administration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Queensland,” Queensland State Archives and Department of Family Services and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs, http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/__data/ assets/pdf_file/0008/93734/Admin_History_Aboriginal_and_Torres_ In her 1997 book, The Way We Civilise, written on the basis of access to thousands of previously closed departmental records and a complete reading of church proceedings, Kidd contends that there “is no doubt that the church saw the vast mining project as a ticket out of poverty and dependency. at the time of European invasion, the region consisted of forty-three tribal nations, each with its own language and traditional Together with Umbuygamu (Ogilvie 1994, Sommer 1998, Verstraete 2017) and Rimanggudinhma (Godman 1993), Lamalama forms the Lamalamic subgroup of Paman languages (Laycock 1969, Rigsby 1997, Verstraete 2018), themselves a subgroup of Pama-Nyungan (Hale 1964, … Restoration Island (or Ma’alpiku Island in the Kuuku Ya’u language of the Aboriginal Traditional Owners) is a high continental island composed of solid granite enclosing rounded masses of porphyry, or … [99] Such ministerial proclamations laden with “concern” for the development prospects of Queensland’s Indigenous population were just a smokescreen for the viciously racist policy at the heart of the government’s agenda. The community lost no time in registering their opposition to the Act and the deception undertaken by the Bjelke-Petersen government. She said, “Maybe a wife goes up to hospital on Thursday Island to have a baby, but she isn’t allowed to return…they have to go to Hidden Valley. The Director would be overseen by the Queensland minister of Home Affairs, but took on all of the immense power over mission residents formerly held by the Chief Protector under the 1897 Act. [113] North-East Branch of the Communist Party of Australia 1976, p4. Kidd states that this tour became the basis for numerous MPs to make press statements expressing their “concern” for the Mapoon residents and calling for “an official inquiry and a government takeover because ‘Gulf missions were not doing anything for the money the Government granted them’.”[74] Yet this feigned concern did not halt a further government funding cut six months later which “reduced the food allowance to five pence per day, insufficient even to meet the official basic ration scale”. This work will require capital much greater than the usual State resources… We as a government would be prepared to do all in our power within our limits to assist investors.[41]. [63] Eventually it was conceded by the church and the Director of Native Affairs that they would not be able to convince the Weipa residents to move, and 159 of them remained at Jessica Point. 1980, The Impact of the Weipa Bauxite Mine on the Queensland Economy, Comalco Limited. [69] Undeniably, the mission’s future had been in question before the Comalco lease had been concluded and the Queensland government always publicly denied that the eventual closure of the mission in 1964 had anything to do with mining interests on Mapoon land. The development of Queensland bauxite mining is a particularly clear example of this. RAATSICC Strategic Plan 2020-2023 builds on the long history of delivering services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families within the Cape & Gulf communities with a renewed focus to make a genuine difference in the lives of children, families and communities. © 2021, TravelOnline Australia Pty Ltd.ABN: 70 100 929 799. Don’t let it go… Where do the shares go to? [128] It also had the effect of preventing the new local councils from acquiring direct title to any land comprising former missions’ areas and gave the state exclusive access to mining and mineral rights. In 2012, after a decade of court deliberations and appeals, the High Court finally recognised native title rights for the Wik people over 4,500 square kilometres of land and waterways in Cape York. Orders were given to us to roll up our swags and to take everything down to the beach… We sat all day until after five before all families were given orders to go on board the Gelam… You can see the harbour of Mapoon was covered with millions of birds…the Government boat Gelam was sailing under the shadow of birds. Another resident, Jack Callope, told Nation magazine in 1962, “The mission has been hammering people to get their exemption and leave… When we asked the missionaries who will take over our land, they do not reply… When I said I did not want to leave Mapoon because I was born there and my father lived there before me, I was told ‘You have no say now. We recognise that success in this area depends on innovation and learning from real world experience. [123], Meanwhile at Aurukun the community continued its protest, soliciting support from trade unions with the Cairns branch of the Seaman’s Union declaring they would black ban Tipperary,[124] and sending a delegation of community elders on a national speaking tour. Cape York Indigenous people have much in common and are bound by shared history. 1968, Mountains of Ore, Landsdowne Press. [53] In 1961 Comalco expanded its profitability by buying the Commonwealth government’s share of the Bell Bay aluminium smelter in Tasmania to add value to its fledgling mining operations on the Cape. [44] In total, Comalco’s lease stole 93 percent of the land officially reserved for the Aboriginal populations of Mapoon, Aurukun and Weipa. However, it was with the coming to power of the Nicklin Country/Liberal coalition government in 1957 that state economic policy turned sharply towards the growth of mining previously untapped ore, with the aid of foreign capital to speed the pace of development. So in March 1964, three months after the government executed a final order to close the mission, the minister responsible for Aboriginal Affairs told the Telegraph that the mission was shut down not “because of an agreement between the Government and Comalco” but for the provision of better living conditions for its residents.[70]. All mail was read by the authoritarian church-appointed mission superintendent, Filmer, to hinder protest and the deputy of the DNA, Killoran, began issuing transfer orders for mission residents identified as opposition organisers. On the Batavia River, the future site of the Mapoon mission, the Indigenous owners of the land had been massacred for the establishment of the pastoral industry by white settlers, Kennedy and Jardine, in the 1890s. In Cape York (Indigenous Regions), of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people, 75.9% did unpaid domestic work in the week before the Census. In May, months ahead of the subsidy cut, the department had received information that Mapoon had been short of rations for weeks. [26] In this desperate climate, mission mergers for Mornington Island and Mapoon were increasingly discussed at meetings of the Aboriginal and Foreign Missions Committee (AFMC) of the Presbyterian church, and were favoured by the Director of Native Affairs, O’Leary. Coercion, consent and Australian policing. [58] http://napranum.qld.gov.au/community/napranums-history/. The settlers killed 250 of the 300-strong Indigenous population to clear the land at Dingle Creek, and Mapoon mission residents told researchers in the 1960s that their parents had passed stories to them of how Jardine had killed black children by knocking their heads against trees.[9]. The land is not yours anymore’.”[82], The words of the Mapoon people also provide the most compelling evidence of a long-standing plan by the state government to clear Mapoon for mining interests. Another mission resident, Victoria Luff, explained to Jan Roberts how the residents had challenged the police, resisting the removal to the very end: We asked them what they had come for. Local Aboriginal history spans over 40,000 years with many stories and landmark events recorded in the extensive rock art galleries on outcrops and in caves throughout Cape York Peninsula. Fitzgerald, Ross 1984, A History of Queensland: From 1915 to the 1980s, University of Queensland Press. In 1968 Joh Bjelke-Petersen became Premier of Queensland. Church records from 1958 state that the church had sought a sum of £367,000 to be used for “development for an underprivileged people” and the establishment of a “Native Welfare Fund” comprised of royalties from mining undertaken on state or church reserves as well as the safeguarding of pastoral rights for the Weipa mission. Aurukun has a primary school which is operated by Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy (CYAAA) in a unique partnership with Education Queensland. It should be noted that from 1957, the government was increasingly discussing its Aboriginal policy in terms of “assimilation” versus “protection”,[32] consistent with a view to abolishing the reserves and having the residents absorbed into projected future mining towns. In the 1950s, the Indigenous population of Cape York lived largely on the sites of three missions on the west coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria. [85] “Shameful story of Mapoon”, Tribune, 8 April 1964. So it stands as a given that the approval of the Alngith people was never sought in the conclusion of the Comalco deal. If you are still unhappy and your problem has not been solved, you may write directly to the Chairperson of the Land Council, who will investigate the problem, and will reply directly to you with any findings. Its primary concern was to secure the future of its missions and ensure that church administrators had access to the economic benefits of mining development for this purpose. Trengove, Alan 1979, Discovery: Stories of Modern Mineral Exploration, Stockwell Press. They occupied the community airfield, the only way to access Aurukun, and other buildings and facilities. [117] “Church criticises Government,” Courier Mail, 16 December 1975. From their inception, the missions were subject to a “pattern of financial starvation”,[15] with meagre government grants and the Presbyterian church inclined to view their responsibilities as limited to tending the spiritual rather than the material needs of their wards. In May 2017, 160,730 hectares of land adjacent to the Shelburne Bay dune fields were transferred to the Bromley Aboriginal Corporation, which resulted in the creation of two new jointly managed national parks (CYPAL), two new nature refuges and a considerable area of Aboriginal freehold land. Other key achievements of the Cape York Peninsula Tenure Resolution Program include: [22] Cairns Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advancement League 1962, “‘They Have Made Our Rights Wrong’: The Struggle for Mapoon”, 6 November, http://indigenousrights.net.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/383748/f19.pdf. [67] Mapoon Aboriginal Shire Council, http://www.mapoon.com/37.html. [72] That the rations shortage was no product of administrative oversight, but reflected deliberate pressure tactics, was confirmed by the confident announcement made by Henry Noble to fellow ministers in the parliamentary discussions of the 1957-58 state Budget that the Mapoon mission would be wound up within a year.
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