Embassy Symposium

POLITICAL

Notes for the Embassy Symposium. ANU 20/22 June 2011

I have been to any number of Conferences.  I have attended the odd Seminar or two.  And I have even been in the audience of one Symposium (strangely enough that was also at ANU) and the subject matter was FREUD AND FEMINISM. That was not very entertaining!  But this is the first time I have been asked to speak at a symposium.  SYMPOSIUM.  The very word itself makes me want to lie down and go to sleep..

But I’ll try to stay awake if you will!

A Symposium.   An academic gathering intended to deeply examine all aspects of the chosen subject!  And we sitting up here on the panel are supposed to be your primary source. Every undergraduates dream…. NO BIBLIOGRAPHY REQUIRED!

But I don’t really know what people want me to say that I haven’t said somewhere else or some time before. If you have seen the film Ningla A-Na  then you don’t need to hear me repeat how I went to the FAACTSI conference in Alice Springs (Easter, 1972) and attended what can only be described as the first National Aboriginal Land Rights  conference and how I pushed my three month baby in a broken stroller through the scalding hot sands of the Todd River (although I was a bit older than most, we all went barefoot in the Flower Power generation). And it was in the Todd river-bed that people said to me;

“We are hungry for Our Land, like a baby is hungry for its mother’s titty. The Land is our mother. We are hungry for Our Land”. 

That is the meaning of  NINGLA A-NA,

You also probably don’t need me to tell again of how, on the day the Embassy first came under attack, I was at work in the Government Printer’s Office.  At about 8.50in the morning a door had been left a few inches ajar and someone was saying quite loudly that the police were waiting for the first issue of the Government Gazette to come off the presses so they could take down the Embassy.  We had been waiting for weeks with this threat hanging over us and I had recently been removed from the Office of Aboriginal Affairs Switchboard because I had been identified as a possible security threat.  I  had written an article on the real estate developers who were trying to take over the Wallaga Lake Aboriginal Reserve for redevelopment for tourism. 

So there I was ideally placed to get the word out that the ordnance prohibiting camping on Crown Land was to be used to shut down the Embassy.  I told the boss I was ill and that was that. I just walked out.  I rang my baby sitter to let her know that someone else would be picking up the baby. I rang a friend and organized for the baby to be picked up. And I rang the house of students and young socialists who flew the Eureka Flag on their front lawn and said the Embassy was about to be attacked. By the time the police arrived there were about thirty people ready to defend the Embassy instead of just the six or seven Koories (Aboriginal people) who would normally have been there. 

Bolstered by about 20 young activist students by ten o’clock we had about thirty defenders at the Aboriginal Embassy when we were attacked by about seventy police and the tent was pulled down for the first time.

That was the day Paul Coe was kicked unconscious by seven policemen and ended up in hospital for three days!

Nine days later and in front of several hundred spectators and supporters about seventy or eighty of us re-established the Embassy tent and linked arms in three rows ready to defend the Embassy again .  This time the police came around from behind the old Parliament House building like a battalion of Nazi storm troopers entering the Warsaw Ghetto.  I was on the side that couldn’t see them coming and the only time I really felt scared was that night when I saw them on TV. Then I started to shake and couldn’t stop. Even when I was on the ground under five or six rows of blue serge legs and shiny boots and was calmly thinking “so this is what it’s like to be trampled to death”. Even that was not as terrible as seeing those rows and rows of police later that night on the TV.

But this story has been told before.  As have many others.

There are four hours of tapes in the Australian Womens’ Register at the National Library that I did a few years ago with Ann-Marie Jordens. There are a further twelve hours of video interviews that I did with Peter Reid (Canberra University) a couple of years ago which focus more on my experiences as an Aboriginal than as a woman.  Thankfully these have been edited down and four or five short sets of clips, each about three or four minutes long, are available and are on show here or are being released on the Internet.

What I haven’t said elsewhere ?  Well I have been asked about the role of the Communist Party in the Embassy or in my actions in standing for the Federal Elections in 1972, which was only a few months after the Embassy.  Frankly I heard a rumour that the CPA may have given some petrol money for the car that came to Canberra with four Koories who established the Embassy after  Prime Minister Billy McMahon had stated on 26 January 1972 that there would be no Land Rights for Aboriginal People. (Sorry, Gordon Briscoe but your dates are out by a year.)   I don’t know about this myself.  I do know that after the Embassy, and after I had stood as an Independent candidate in the December 1972 Federal Elections, there was a very long and nasty campaign to discredit me both politically and personally by denying my Aboriginality and claiming my “identity” was nothing but a political ploy.

It is true that in the early 1960’s I joined the Communist Party of Australia in response to the initially ‘secret war’ in Vietnam.  The fictional “torpedo attack” on an American warship which brought the US officially took place in July 1964, while I was in hospital delivering my fifth child in less than seven years. Obviously I was a bit too busy with domestic duties to be much of a threat to the political system, and although I supported the Moritorium Anti-war movement where I could, my CPA membership lapsed. 

Later when my youngest son sustained serious brain damage and severe epilepsy, it was some of the women from the CPA who offered me the support I needed. My son actually died from the effects of his triple antigen immunizations not long after his 27^th birthday.

But back in the 1960’s, on top of everything else my marriage also came to an end and in April 1972 I moved to Canberra.

Obviously ASIO considered me to be a major threat.  My ASIO file is publicly available at the State Library… Well, at least Vol. 1. is there.  I never bothered to read  the whole thing. I think there were still forty seven pages to go or something when I gave up. It was so full of clap-trap.  There was only one person who ever called me Patty in all of the nine years that I lived in Canberra . This was because when we were first introduced he thought my name was Patty Tock instead of Pat Eatock.  By the time he understood his mistake he was so used to calling me Patty and he was so patronizing towards me that nothing would change his misnaming of me.  So much for the secrets of the spy industry

Did you know that ASIO is having a display of some of their work down in Sydney this wee? (June 2011) One of the best entries in my ASIO file was the response they gave to someone’s request for information about the Canberra Branch of the CPA.  It is such a classic!  It starts off by saying that they have no information because they have no one in a position to report on this issue.  However, they continue, IF there is a Branch of the CPA in Canberra, THEN it is possible/probable that such a branch would have 19 or 20 members. It then lists about nine people who might possibly be members of the branch if such a branch exists and state that it is UNABLE TO OFFER ANY OTHER NAMES for the remaining members that it is UNABLE TO CONFIRM as existing!!   Have you ever heard

“As I was walking down the stairs,

  I met a man who wasn’t there. 

  He wasn’t there again today.  

  I wish that man would go away!”

Well enough Clap-trap! What else needs to be said.  What did the Embassy achieve? 

Well, not on its own.   There were three major campaigns effecting basic human rights for Aboriginal people.…

• We had The Freedom Ride in late ‘sixties – on ordinary civil rights.  
• The Referendum (67) seeking  constitutional reforms

                ie. Federal responsibility; and inclusion in the census. 

• And then the Embassy  --seeking recognition of our problems, Soverignty, and International Awareness

                                                    

During the period from the Referendum to the late 1990’s we, the Aboriginal people had gotten free from a system that had previously controlled our whole lives and kept most of us incarcerated in Government run communities (Reserves) or trapped in religious Missions. In Victoria  there are historical  records of the process of religious “conversions” that were based on the stealing the of children and encouraging mothers to follow the kids into religious compounds, where the men were excluded. While the women and kids were taught Christianity and Housekeeping Skills, the men were thought to be an unruly influence and were denigrated as “Myalls” (wild and untrustworthy “bad blacks”.)

Between the Referendum (1967) and the establishment of the Aboriginal Embassy (1972) the number of Reserves in New South Wales was reduced from about 86 to 18, These last few saw the keys to all the community owned buildings (managers’ houses and offices, community halls, training centres, clinics and sporting equipment – if any) handed over to arbitrarily determined “Aboriginal leaders”. But at least we stopped being treated as children. Then after the Embassy the Whitlam Government promised Land Rights and Mabo took action for land rights in the Torres Straits followed by Aboriginal communities across Northern Australia who were given recognition of land claims, granted in perpetuity. Aboriginal people were given welfare entitlements on an individual basis instead of the previously rough ‘guesstimates’ being allocated as lump sum payments to Community managements (either church groups or government administrators) and the homelands movement and “two-way” education were introduced.

As Martin Luther King once said: FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST.

THEN came the Howard government (1996-2007) followed by Rudd and the Gillard versions of Labor morality. It is difficult to determine which side of the current Australian Political divide is the more immoral on both Refugee and Aboriginal issues!

During the past 10 years Aboriginal people have lost EVERYTHING we ever gained during the previous forty years!

The keys are back, even if a few of the administrators may be Aboriginal. Homelands are being destroyed,  People are foced into “Hub Townships” by the denial of all support services; ie health and education, home and utilities maintenances (roads and sewerage) Even the traditional Aboriginal Tribal Councils are disregarded or cease to exist, replaced by mixed race Shire Councils where those station owners, white settlers and townspeople -descendants of those who originally stole and pillaged the land – again dominate the decision making processes that govern the lives of the Aboriginal majority. Read also the recent Amnesty International Report “The Land Holds Us” at  publications@amnesty.org.au

For the full report of the Aboriginal Embassy Symposium (1972) held at the Australian National University (20-23 June 2011) see recordings made by Eleanor Gilbert at <enlightening.productions@gmail.com >  For my personal contributions see the opening session on 20^th and again during the afternoon session on the 21^st June.  You might notice that this latter session was chaired by the very volluble Gary Foley who spoke among other things about my current court case on Racial Villification against the right wing political journalist Andrew Bolt.  That Gary did not mention my name or indicate even that I was in the audience is typical of the ignorant way that some people have attempted to squeeze me out of any active role in Aboriginal politics. Similarly Nicole Watson  delivered a paper at an Aboriginal Law conference in Sydney on 12^th August 2011 and even commented that the Judge was expected to bring down his decision in the near future. As I am the only named litigant in the case of “Pat Eatock verses Andrew Bolt and the Herald and Weekly Times” all other Aboriginals have appeared only as my witnesses. Neither Gary Foley nor Nicole Watson were witnesses and neither Nicole nor Gary were unaware of my interest and active involvement in this case.