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Who is Bennelong? Looking into the Bennelong Society, Eve Vincent draws a portrait of an intellectual sub-culture.

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'Who was Bennelong?' asks the Society named after him. 'Bennelong the Man', according to the Bennelong Society's website, was 'easily the most intelligent and helpful of the Aborigines that had come into Sydney Cove'. Governor Arthur Phillip's kidnapping of Bennelong in late 1789 'may seem a strange way to begin a relationship', but the two men grew close, and in the period between his capture and his 1792 trip to England--despite escaping once and subsequently engineering the spearing of the Governor--Bennelong delighted in affecting the habits and customs of the colonisers. He learnt English and was a valuable diplomat. In short: Bennelong walked in two worlds, and was decisive in convincing the Eora people to 'come in' to the settlement in 1790.

The view of the Society regarding the contemporary position of Aboriginal people is that 'the most wretched Aborigines are those who are least integrated'. Hope lies in a process analogous to this 'coming in'.

Last September I attended the annual Bennelong Society conference, the theme of which was 'leaving remote communities'. The Society arose out of a workshop held in December 2000. This workshop, organised by the Society's current vice-president Peter Howson, Country Party Minister for Aborigines in the MacMahon Government of 1971-1972, was preceded by two other workshops organised by Quadrant in 1999 and 2000, devoted to Aboriginal policy. Howard Government ministers that have addressed the Society in the past include then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Amanda Vanstone, Kevin Andrews and Tony Abbott. The current Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Mal Brough spoke at the 2006 conference dinner.

The octogenarian Howson's enigmatic presence loomed large at the 2006 conference, but it was Society president Gary Johns who ran the show. (Howson addressed the conference dinner but was absent on the day of the conference.) Johns, a minister in the Keating Government, is also associated with free market think-tank Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). At the IPA, Johns drew on public choice theory...

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