Aborigines, Menzies, Seidler and more

SIR: The review of Keith Windschuttle’s book The Break-Up of Australia (January-February 2017) ahead of the looming referendum takes me back to the 1967 referendum. I was a newly arrived “Pom” and entitled to vote. Knowing very little about the matter, I carefully read the lengthy “Yes” case; I had worked in South Africa and I raised my eyebrows at the power to make apartheid-type laws according to race. The “No” case was significant by its brevity.

Since then I have travelled much of the north of Australia and talked to many older people who lived and worked with Aborigines before and after the 1967 referendum. Many times I heard the comment that the Aborigines are worse off now with regard to family life and jobs than they were before 1967.

If the 1967 “No” case had warned that a 50,000-strong industry of white bureaucrats, lawyers, academics and public sector workers would be formed to spend billions of taxpayer dollars, and whose endeavours to bring Aborigines the benefits of Western civilisation would be a succession of failures (worse health, worse education, worse job prospects, more family breakdown) then how much larger would the “No” vote have been?

With regard to the fears expressed in The Break-Up of Australia I am saddened to say that Keith Windschuttle’s warning is correct. My Australian passport will take me around the world but I am not allowed to drive along a 450-kilometre road that passes through the APY lands “fiefdom”.

Two years ago I became interested in an organisation which helps get more Aboriginal children into university. It had good results, was privately run—but. There was something extra that I could not identify, something that seemed racist. Months later another conversation with a rural lady warned me that some in the Aboriginal industry were working towards a separate state. As The Break-Up of Australia makes clear, the cost of funding that separate state (with its Western tastes) will be horrendous and will be borne by the Australian taxpayer; again it is unlikely to improve the lives of Aborigines.

The livelihood of many Aborigines is a serious concern to Australians, but let us recognise that the great social experiment of the last forty years has been an incredibly expensive failure. Let us also hope that the looming referendum will include someone of the calibre of Keith Windschuttle helping to present the “No” case.

David Huggins
St George, Qld

Sir: I have read with great interest the article in the January-February 2017 edition, based on a speech given in November by Mr Perrottet, the New South Wales Minister for Finance, Services and Property. I am unimpressed by what I regard as an example of those good intentions which are said to pave the road to hell.

May I recapitulate three short excerpts from the article?

We must follow the example of Menzies and communicate authentic conservative policies that will improve the lives of all people …

The rights to life, liberty and property are the foundation upon which everything else is built. Conservatism gives liberty its virtue. Classical liberalism gives us the freedom to be conservative. If we do not stand for these values, we stand for nothing …

Conservative politicians are there to serve and represent, not control and exclude.

This is the same Mr Perrottet who was reported in November as having said the following:

On the tax side of things … we should be open to reform. If you reduce stamp duty and had a broad-based land tax we would encourage the transfer of property, there’s no doubt about that. You have retirees living in these five-bedroom homes by themselves while there are people with three children trying to buy into the property market.

When I compare those remarks with the rhetorical pieties of the published article, I sense my blood pressure spiralling out of control.

I am a retiree. I do not live in a five-bedroom home. I live in a building containing a two-bedroom duplex that is my only place of residence. I own a two-bedroom unit which I lease to an excellent tenant who has been there for some seventeen years. The rental is markedly below a full market rental because I value my tenant and I know that she could never afford a full market rental. The net income from that rental is taxable income in my hands, and at my full marginal rate. Depending upon the periodic adjustments to the relevant threshold, I can find myself paying land tax to Mr Perrottet’s Liberal-National government. I accept, as every property-owning citizen must these days, that these exactions are part of the price that has to be paid to profligate, insatiable and economically incompetent governments for that citizen’s past years of thrift and prudent investment.

That is bad enough. But Mr Perrottet’s disdainful and condescending gibe at retirees takes Liberal populist rhetoric to new heights. How dare Mr Perrottet, or any other political or administrative public functionary, speak in terms apt to demonise retirees who are living in homes, however many bedrooms those homes might have, which, at least in the great majority of cases, those same retirees have worked hard to acquire, while paying their exorbitant taxes, paying down their no-less-burdensome mortgages, and doing their best to be law-abiding and self-sufficient citizens? Or, worse, embrace a policy of so skewing land tax, and on a retiree’s place of residence, as to compel retirees to vacate in favour of some other person(s) whom it happens to suit the political convenience of the government to favour? It takes only commonsense observation to understand that any government which extends land tax to anybody’s principal place of residence, will soon enough extend it to everybody’s place of residence. This is not following “the example of Menzies”. It is, rather, following the example of Marx and Mao.

Brian Sully
Waverton, NSW

Sir: The Freedom Bus Ride of 1965 (Michael Connor, “Aboriginal Australia before Pete Seeger”, January-February 2017) was not the “mindless folly of needless contention … making all sorts of demands of people who have not been conscious of having any racial problem”. As Ann Curthoys (Freedom Ride) points out, Aborigines in Bowraville in northern New South Wales were barred from the local cafe, and segregated at the local cinema and the local cemetery. Only one of the two pubs in town let them in, but only to the “dark room”. Many of them lived in Third World conditions on a mission where whites could be arrested by police for entering, even if invited by the mission community. They were sometimes refused enrolment for their children at the local public school. The idea of Aborigines gaining employment in the white community of the 1960s was ludicrous.

Many of the whites in Bowraville and Kempsey were outraged by the Freedom Bus Ride, not because it showed the towns to be racist, but because of the bad publicity. “What’s wrong with our town?” one woman demanded. “The darkies have been allowed to go to the white school for ages.” The problem was that all of a sudden the darkies didn’t know their place any more. They had learnt their place during the nineteenth century.

Twenty years after the Freedom Ride, Phoebe Mumbler, a Gumbayngirr Aunty, told me handed-down stories of the same killings Finney Eldershaw (Australia as it Really Is) and Judith Wright (“Niggers’ Leap”) describe. The Gumbayngirr were initially relegated to an island in the river but when they refused to die out the island was made into a golf course and their mission was moved to beside the rubbish tip at Bowraville. I offered to write Phoebe Mumbler’s stories for the local paper’s history feature in 1984. “We can’t print that, it will just offend people,” the editor said.

White attitudes were also complicated by settlers having availed themselves of what Xavier Herbert crudely called “black velvet”. Many children during the first half of the twentieth century were taken from parents because the children didn’t look black enough. Survivors of the Kinchela Boys’ Home near Kempsey will tearfully tell you what residence there was like.

The racism did not go away. It was no longer overt, but it was implicit. “What’s the good of doing a course? I’m just a boong,” was a common sentiment amongst teenagers. Twenty years after the Freedom Bus Ride, Aboriginal people in the Nambucca Shire still had next to no chance of getting work, many still lived on the mission, and often faced discrimination when seeking such things as rental accommodation. In Kempsey, an entire settlement at Burnt Bridge relied on one tap for all their water requirements. As late as 1995 a cultural group in the Kempsey Shire cancelled a booking for a nationally renowned band when they found out a couple of the members could be described as having Aboriginal heritage. In 1985 I asked white people in both towns what the Freedom Ride meant for them. “They just don’t know their place. After all we’ve done for them,” was a common reply. Aboriginal feelings of injustice and implicit and denied racism still prevail today: just ask anyone from the local Aboriginal community about how they feel concerning the investigation and ongoing legal process concerning the Bowraville murders of 1990 and 1991.

Nor were Pete Seeger’s protest songs the primary impetus for the Freedom Bus Ride. Certainly the news from the United States got students asking themselves, if we were so upset about the inequalities there, why weren’t we doing something about the inequalities here? If any song inspired the Freedom Bus Ride, it was Kath Walker’s “Aboriginal Charter of Rights”: “Must we native Old Australian / In our land rank as alien?”

Modern racial bigotry in places such as Kempsey and Bowraville was never as overtly cruel as in Birmingham, Alabama, but it was there, and until the Freedom Bus Ride it was not discussed. The prevailing public sentiment in those towns was exactly the same as reported in the Sydney Gazette of December 20, 1838, on the two trials and hangings following the Myall Creek murders. The newspaper opined that as a result of the proceedings, settlers wary of government censure would henceforth employ euphemisms such as “kangaroo shooting”, pretending to say one thing, but meaning another.

Jamie Derkenne
Killara, NSW

Sir: The article by Philip Drew, “The Achievement of Harry Seidler” (January-February 2017) has been brought to my attention. I read it with interest.

For the record, Harry did not ever criticise the work of other architects, he considered it unprofessional. Norman Foster was an admired colleague and friend. Although Harry was super-critical of postmodern architecture he did not criticise individual postmodern architects.

Seidler and Murcutt were colleagues and friends. They had great respect for each other and never considered each other rivals.

I consider Harry did respond to place. His buildings were always sensitive to environment, outlook, climate and orientation, his urban skyscrapers always had sun protection, not glass walls!

Seidler never paid for publicity, but only responded to journalists who made contact.

The Rose Seidler house is in Wahroonga, not Killara, and Lin Utzon is not American but Danish.

As for his sexual repression, I was most surprised to read this as I was married to him for almost fifty years!

Penelope Seidler
Milsons Point, NSW