Equal Wages

We might think when The Northern Territory Aboriginal pastoral workers were finally granted equal pay in 1965 that this was only right and just, and long overdue. Unfortunately, in many ways it would only compound the damage whitefellas had already done.

To appreciate how this happened and the damage done, let’s look at

• the changing attitudes of the pastoral workers’ union;
• the laws in place at the time equal pay was granted;
• changes in the government’s attitude to Aboriginals;
• how the equal pay decision was made;
• and what happened afterwards.

The Blackfella’s Eureka

The Blackfella’s Eureka had much the same spirit but was a far more important achievement.

During World War II – which for Australians started in September 1939 – many Aboriginal station-workers worked alongside whitefellas doing wartime type things like building roads, moving supplies and so on. For the first time, there was an awareness by station Aboriginals they could be treated decently, or as equals, and that away from station properties, whitefellas were actually paid regularly and reliably in cash.

Just how a white prospector named Don Mcleod came to be involved in the Blackfella’s Eureka depends on whose version of the story you trust, but the important parts of the story are not in dispute:

Don McLeod, who worked in the Pilbara region, agreed to help Aboriginals act to improve their situation on one condition: They needed to prove to him first that they could organise everybody to work together. Given the size of the area, the distances and differences between Aboriginals, this was a fairly large challenge.

In 1942, three Aboriginal law men escorted Don – for whom it was illegal to talk to more than 2 Aboriginals at a time – to a place called Skull Springs. For more than 6 weeks Aboriginals from around the state; including 23 language groups and 16 interpreters, spoke about their situation and what they might do. McLeod’s involvement seems to have taken the form of providing answers to questions. For example, when asked why Aboriginals could be caught by police and returned to a station if they left without permission, McLeod was horrified to discover how repressive the legislation relating to Aboriginal welfare actually was. 

In 1946, 6,500 sq miles of the Plibara was sheep country

It was agreed that no action would be taken until the end of the war, with the 1^st of May 1946 eventually chosen as the date of the walk off. 

One of the criticisms levelled at the action was that the whole business had been manipulated by white communists. 
McLeod had at some stage been a member of the Communist Party, and it was the Western Australian Communist Party newspaper, The Worker’s Star, which had provided publicity while the WA commercial press had censored reports of the strike, either by saying nothing or being dismissive and negative when it did have something to say. Choosing Mayday – the international day for celebrating communism – confirmed, for many people, the idea that the whole business was a communist plot.

Not only did Eastern newspapers report more fully on the strike, the strike had attracted the support of church and other charitable organisations. More muscle was obtained with the support of 19 Western Australian trades unions, seven federal unions and four Trades and Labour Councils. The Port Hedland wharf workers banned any handling of wool from the sheep stations involved in the dispute.


Despite the widespread obsession amongst some politicians with trying to ban communism, full credit for organising the strike, taking action and seeing it through to the end belongs to no one but the Aboriginal workers themselves.

The resourcefulness with which Aboriginal organisers helped everyone know what day to walk off is impressive: Using scrap paper, they developed ‘calendars’ with big red circles around the date. Although ‘employees’ were confined to stations, there were always itinerant Aboriginals arriving at and leaving stations, so distributing calendars was not too hard.
On some stations, people who could not follow the calendars would just keep asking the white bosses how many days to the first of May.

On the 1^st of May, over 800 pastoral workers from two dozen stations walked off the job. Many white people were shocked – before they become furious – to think Aboriginals would be able to organise something so well.

To survive during the strike, Aboriginals made money by ‘yandying’ (surface mining) for gold and tin, or trading skins and pearl shells. 

Wartime rationing was still in place, and station managers had sent the workers’ food coupons to the police station at Marble Bar. The police tried to bribe workers back by saying they wouldn’t hand over ration coupons, but the workers persisted. McLeod did explain the coupon system to the workers, but they were the ones who went and demanded the coupons be returned.

The strike lasted til 1949, when some of the workers were enticed back to stations by offers of a better rate of pay, though some workers did not go back at all. The strike had been as much about dignity as it had been about money.

Despite whitefella Australia raising union membership and strikes to an art form, this Pilbara strike still has the record for the longest strike in Australia’s history.

Although at one point McLeod had been arrested, as had some of the workers, the strike turned out quite well. One large group of workers were released when each of them had claimed to be the leader, and the Police Officer couldn’t name any individual so he couldn't charge them with any offence. McLeod was released on bail and ended up with a rather large fine.

This was not the first action taken by Aboriginals, but it was the first strike over wages and conditions.

Two encouraging things resulted from the strike:

For the first time, Aboriginals from different clans and language groups had joined together to achieve something, without letting traditional differences influence them.

The workers themselves were able to prove to themselves that they could achieve for themselves.

A movement grew out this experience which is sometimes called the ‘Pindan” movement – pindan being the name of the red, Pilbara sand.

Some of the workers registered a mining company; this venture ultimately failed, but then the group split and two stations were bought, owned and operated by Aboriginals. Some of that land has been handed to the traditional owners.

The whitefella's Eureka

The original “Eureka” – a whitefella rebellion – took place in 1854 on the Victorian Goldfields when diggers [miners] had had enough of unreasonably priced mining licences, and the brutality with which the money for licences was collected. The rebellion, and the Eureka flag raised during the rebellion, came to represent the willingness of Australian people, when treated unjustly, to stand up to authority.

The Eureka Flag, designed 1854 by a Canadian

The beginning of the end of a bad beginning

The

·        Invalid and Old Age Pensions Act 1908;

·        Maternity Allowance Act 1912;

·        Child Endowment Act 1941;

·        The Widow’s Pension Act 1942; and the

·        Unemployment and Sickness Benefits Act 1944

all excluded Aboriginals. These exclusions were progressively dismantled between 1959 and 1966 - before the Referendum. Some of the original legislation had excluded Aboriginals who were 'nomadic or primitive'.

In the early 1970s it is estimated about 45% of Aboriginals had no health insurance of any kind, and were (like some other Australians) dependent on the charitable inclinations of doctors.

Medibank (which has since morphed into Medicare) first provided free, universal health cover to Australians in July 1975.

In 1968, the Commonwealth commenced funding Indigenous programs in health, education, housing and employment by subsidising state government programs.

Given the political will, this could have happened a heck of a lot sooner.

The 1967 referendum did not lead to any great change except at census time, but it was a turning point in Australia’s legal history.

In 1972, Labor swept into office with Gough Whitlam at the helm. No lover of state governments, his was to be the first federal government which used the new constitutional wording to actively intervene in Aboriginal Affairs.

The Referendum Results

Of the 44 referendum questions put to voters since federation, only 8 have been approved. The Aboriginal question received the highest Yes vote ever. Ironically enough, the nexus question put to voters at the same time – the original reason for having a referendum in 1967 – ended up on the shelf with all the other losers.

The Yes vote on the Aboriginal question was close to 91%. The No vote was highest in the states with the largest number of Aboriginals, and, in other states, highest in the rural or remote areas where there were large numbers of Aboriginals.

In retrospect, this was not a surprising pattern. In some areas with a high Aboriginal population, there is even today some lingering animosity, and distaste for the squalor and unacceptably anti-social behaviour of some Aboriginal fringe-dwellers.

I can't imagine an Aboriginal committing any crime no white person has ever committed; the problem seems to be one of visibility. From an Aboriginal perspective, visibility is not the problem: Getting drunk in public or engaging in acts of domestic violence is something white people are hypocritical enough to keep private.

Despite the widespread lack of information about Aboriginals, or lack of  power to influence the lot of Aboriginals, there have always been whitefellas fighting alongside Aboriginals for Aboriginal rights. More importantly, when we consider the absolute rubbish we were fed as a part of our education, and the accusations we are an indifferent and racist people, the 91% yes vote is pretty high, really.

Counting Aboriginals in the national census

Another part of the referendum question covered Section 127 (the “census” issue).

When the Constitution was first agreed to, Section 127 said

In reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.

From time to time various governments or other parties had made estimates of the numbers of Aboriginals in one place or another, but there was no nationwide, inclusive census until the 1967 Referendum result changed Section 127.

The census question was not about seeing if the Aboriginal population was in decline, or growing; in many states numbers were already counted by Protectors.

The underlying intention of the clause, in 1901, was to provide a formula for calculating the distribution of funds to the states, and the apportionment of parliamentary seats to the states, based on the size of a state's population.

The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders suggested

“This clause (in Section 127) made ‘the original Australians’ feel they were ‘a race apart in the land of their birth’ and it insulted them by implying they were not worth counting, indeed the national census enumerated the number of sheep and cattle but not the number of Aboriginal people.”

To be fair, it is difficult to imagine how it would have been possible to conduct an accurate census in 1901, given the nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyles of some Aboriginals, and the enormous distances that would need to be covered – at best by horse or camel.

Many Aboriginals were still living as nomads. The last ‘first-contact’ nomads were located in 1964, when a handful of Aboriginals, who were still living a traditional lifestyle, were seen in a rocket test area. They managed to elude whitefellas for quite some time before being coaxed away and out of danger.

The difficulties of counting Aboriginals in 1901 notwithstanding, so many Aboriginal people were on reserves or in missions, or otherwise living in one place, that there is really no excuse for failing to count some Aboriginals in the census.

Laws for the benefit of Aboriginals?

Section 51 of the constitution originally said:

The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:-

The people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.

Effectively, after federation, the states were welcome to continue whatever they had been doing to “protect” Aboriginals in their own state, and the federal government was not welcome to intervene.

This section was not really about Aboriginals, but about solving other “problems” related to keeping Australia white. 
The words “any race” could naturally include Chinese, (Asian) Indians, indentured labourers from the South Sea Islands, “Ghans” or Malays (though not New Zealand’s Maori who, because of the Treaty of Waitangi, were British citizens).

The new federal government agenda included - amongst other things - repatriation of indentured labourers who had been lured to Australia from the Pacific Islands.

One of the 1967 referendum questions asked voters if they wanted to alter the wording of this Section 51, to remove the phrase relating to making special laws for Aboriginals.

Most Australians believed that by deleting this reference to Aboriginals, the federal government was finally ready to step in and take over Aboriginal Affairs from the states.

Yet the federal government had already had power over Aboriginal Affairs in the Northern Territory since 1912 and hadn’t done a great deal for Aboriginals there, so there was no reason to expect any improvement.

Usually, when a referendum is put to the people of Australia, an argument for the proposition and an argument against the proposition are both presented to voters, in writing. In 1967, there wasn’t a No case prepared for the proposed changes with respect to Aboriginals – both sides of the political divide supported the changes.