...progressing. handover started in the 1970s as an important component of the Whitlam government's new self-determination policy for Australia's Aborigines, a policy driven by H.C. Coombs and continued with enthusiasm under the Fraser government. I was fortunate on my visit on this occasion in being able to contact people long associated with the pastoral industry in the Kimberley, and the Kimberley Land Council, the body responsible for those stations.

What I learned showed, again, just how disastrous the Whitlam-Coombs policies have been. I had, of course, been aware for many years of the total failure which followed the Whitlam handover of Wattie Creek (now called Daguragu) to the Gurindji clan. But my discussions also revealed that the same complete failure has been repeated in thirty cattle stations in the Kimberley and at least ten others in the Northern Territory, as well as in the Pitjantjatjara lands in South Australia.

The inability to manage these cattle stations is well reflected in Richard Allen's diary of his travels in 1997 in the Kimberley (Shimmering Spokes), where he reports a conversation with a school principal:

Not long ago, he says, a Kimberley cattle station, Tirralantji, was bought fully stocked by the government for the Aboriginal people. They were supposed to breed cattle but that never happened. They killed the stock one by one until there were none left, and then they all went back to Derby.

This is how hunter-gatherers have lived for millennia. Their completely rational behaviour in the face of a bizarre and Rousseauvian providence has not only left the Aborigines living in abominable conditions in remote communities, but has resulted in a major reduction in export potential for Australia.

It is time not only to recognise the failure of the Coombsian fantasy, but also to accept the need for a complete policy reversal to help overcome the present situation in remote communities and provide hope for the future of their Aboriginal residents. The Coombsian policy failure illuminates fundamental philosophical and religious differences that are part of the "culture wars"--a phrase widely used in the USA but rarely in Australia.

The absence of that phrase in Australia, and the understanding embodied within it, is unfortunate. It encapsulates the struggle between deeply entrenched ideas and interests, the continuing outcome of which has determined the course of Western civilisation at least since the French Revolution and probably much earlier.

In the days of the Cold War the struggle was readily identifiable and the players easily recognised. On the one hand there were the Cold War warriors, the threat experts, those who placed the struggle against communism at the top of their political agenda. For many of them it was the most important thing in their lives. On the other hand were the communists, the communist sympathisers, and those for whom the passion of the anticommunists was too vulgar to be tolerable. It was easy then to talk about Right and Left. Many who began their political lives on the Left crossed over, becoming champions of the anticommunist cause. Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham are two American examples of such Damascan conversions, whose rejection of communism, and their subsequent contribution to the anticommunist cause, were critical to the ultimate victory of the West over the Soviet Union and its allies at home and abroad.

Today life is much more complicated, and it is noteworthy that the Iraq war has divided people, particularly in the UK, who were staunch allies in the anticommunist cause. So there is a labelling problem here. The terms Right and Left are the usual labels here, but in the US the terms conservative and liberal apply.

In the history of Aboriginal policy in Australia, going back to earliest times, we find the fault line divides the protagonists into inclusionists or assimilationists on the one hand, and separatists or Rousseauvian sentimentalists on the other. Even within the churches, who exercised great influence in Australia in the early decades of settlement, we find both exclusionists, who wished to keep Aborigines away from European society (in order to avoid contamination) and inclusionists, who knew that hunter-gathering as a way of life was doomed with the arrival of the European settlers. Captain Phillip's instructions with respect to the Aborigines were wholly inclusionist.

Anthropologists have usually supported exclusionist doctrines. Baldwin Spencer, arguably...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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