Maddock, Kenneth --- "Book Review - Aborigines and Uranium and Other Essays" [1984] AboriginalLawB 7; (1984) 1(10) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 12

• Book Review-Aborigines And Uranium And Other Essays

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Book Review -

Aborigines and Uranium and Other Essays

by Colin Tatz, Heinemann

Educational Australia, Richmond, 1982

Reviewed by Kenneth Maddock

Colin Tatz has here brought together six of his papers on Aboriginal affairs. Several have already appeared in other versions.

"Aboriginality as Civilization" is about white perceptions of and labels for Aborigines. The argument is that Aborigines have suffered in the process, even when whites meant well. This essay forms a pair with the third, " Aborigines, Teachers and Racism", which is also about images and stereotypes, though a different audience is addressed.

The second essay, "Aborigines and Human Rights", similarly forms a pair with the fourth, "Aborigines, Law and Race Relations". In the former Tatz looks at violations of the rights of Aborigines and at remedies or solutions; in the latter he looks at what Aborigines may hope to gain through political and legal means, and he recommends "convivial civil law" (I'm a bit mystified by the conviviality part).

Then we come to what for my money are the best pieces in the book (and two of the best Tatz has written) - the concluding essays on "Aborigines and Uranium". This is how the first begins: "If one had to think up a set of irreconcilables one could hardly do better than Aborigines, a national tourist park and uranium mining. In plain words, the nation wants to see and enjoy its natural wonders while making a gift to the world's heritage; it wants, or perhaps needs, to harvest its unexpected crop of hot ore; it needs, at times, to appease its conscience and atone for some dreadful depredations on Aboriginal society. The three elements have come together and they demand integration. Each has powerful advocacy and strong opposition" (p. 118).

The rest of the essay and the one that follows it explore the seemingly endless and constantly shifting permutations of these relationships. The twisting and turning have gone on pretty continuously since Tatz wrote, and the various parties have found themselves in bed with some odd fellows indeed.

I suppose that I should confess my anthropological bias in favouring the last two essays. In them Tatz is writing about Aborigines of the kind I know best (what Ronald Berndt calls the "traditionally oriented") who are living in a region (the Alligator Rivers) that I've known on and off since 1964, though it has always been on the edge of my main area of research. But he is also dealing with hot issues of the day having a tremendous impact on particular people in a particular locality and, as neither we nor anyone else have any relevant experience from which guidelines or forecasts might be made, he is able to express himself with a freshness that is hard to achieve when writing on such worthy but hackneyed subjects as racism, race relations and human rights. It is so easy for commentators on them to lapse into pious platitudes and routine indignation. That may be why "solutions" to these "problems" so often have a big brotherly smell to them.

In the Alligator Rivers region Aborigines and their organizations have much to say about the future. Tatz calls the land councils "rough legal beasts", which captures something of their power and method of operation. Of course, some would see them as sham bodies, and here and there I catch the suggestion that Tatz, too, is inclined to this view (which crops up occasionally in the reports of the Social Impact of Uranium Mining Project, of which he is chairman). To be sure the Northern Land Council has laboured under great pressure. It may seem to have given too much ground. But once we see that great rights bring great responsibilities with them, that Aborigines have conflicting interests and values and that the Alligator Rivers drama is being staged against a backdrop of staggering mineral wealth, the question of land councils and traditional owners can be seen in a different light. Many will envy Territory Aborigines for the real say they have over their land (at least if it is Aboriginal or classifiable as "sacred") - no one else has such an entitlement to be consulted, to speak and to decide what will be done.

No doubt there is some truth in the view that the Alligator Rivers Aborigines - who are not, after all, very numerous - are bothered out of their minds by their responsibilities. Tatz's essays (and the Uranium Mining Project's reports) bring this out well. But what are we then to make of Tatz's demand that Aborigines should be more than park rangers or run-of-the-mill employees of the mining companies - that they should take their place among the managers and directors of big companies in return for allowing mines on their land?

Some final comments:

(i) It is wrong to say that the Kakadu Park was given in Aboriginal title to its traditional owners (p.153). Title to Aboriginal land is held by a land trust for the benefit of all Aborigines with traditional entitlements of any kind to that land - its traditional owners (if any) would be among the beneficiaries, but so would other Aborigines (who might well outnumber the owners). In practice, of course, the traditional owners do seem to call the tune in negotiations with land councils, and the Land Rights Act does put them in a specifically favoured position.

(ii) Tatz has used an epigraph a line from Bernard Malamud: "To make black more than color or culture, and outrage larger than protest or ideology. .."but perhaps outrage is a feeling more suited to a time of hopelessness than a time of rights. And, for many northern and central Aborigines, the "black" in such an expression as "blackfellow law" is, I suggest, insignificant in comparison with "law" (by which they mean something like the anthropological sense of culture).

(iii) Tatz admits that his essays lack "a central theoretical framework or structure" (p.3). Fair enough (though perhaps puzzling in a writer who evidently finds food for thought in Aristotle), but without it some troubling issues are unlikely to be resolved. For example, where do we draw the line between the human rights of Aborigines (i.e. rights they have by virtue of being human) and their special rights. A recent decision on racial discrimination in South Australian land rights legislation affords a nice example of the need to think one's way through such questions. But can it (or will it) be done without degeneration into special pleading? That is a matter of moral or legal theory. In the realm of social theory one may wonder whether Aborigines throughout Australia can realistically be understood as a single people (or civilization), or whether the insistence (which Tatz seems to share) on "identity" or "Aboriginality" is not simply misleading us.

All in all Colin Tatz's book is a good guide to controversy in Aboriginal affairs. Many of his examples will be strange to his readers, or have slipped their minds by now. He is unusual, to say the least, in the tribe of sociologists and political scientists in taking a close and persistent interest in Aborigines and their problems - his preoccupation, which dates back to the 1960s, is matched by very few people, even among anthropologists. Also, if one reads his essays in chronological order, one gets a feeling for the lines along which Aborigines have advanced and Aboriginal problems changed - for advance there has been in spite of the seeming intractability of some of the problems so well documented in Aborigines and Uranium and Other Essays.