Central Land Council

Land Rights News

July 1988

Commissioner Pays Tribute To Strength Of Warumungu Law

On 9 July Aboriginal Land Commissioner Mr Justice Maurice delivered his report on the Warumungu Land Claim to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs.

He recommends 6,400 square kilometres of Warumungu land around Tennant Creek be returned to the traditional owners. In the foreword to the report Justice Maurice pays tribute to the strength and dignity of the Warumungu nation and criticises the Northern Territory Administration for their refusal to recognise the moral strength of Aboriginal Land claims.

One has only to read the accounts and view the photographs and drawings of Spencer and Gillen to realise that in 1901 the Warumungu we're a flourishing nation in the ordinary sense: a large number of people of mainly common descent, language and history, inhabiting a territory bounded by defined limits and forming a society under one government.

They were once reputed to be the most numerous, most intelligent and physically the best tribe in Central Australia. Within a matter of years, the Warumungu had been almost completely dispossessed.

They had fought vigorously to defend their inland State from the white invasion, but their spears and boomerangs were no match for men on horseback carrying firearms. In 1962 the Commonwealth of Australia revoked the second, and last, of their token reserves: a worthless piece of land upon which no person could survive.

When they made this claim in 1978 the Warumungu were landless. Astonishingly, perhaps, much of the Warumungu identify remains, and even today the sense of belonging to land is a powerful influence in the lives of these people of the Barkly Region. Routinely, for example, all Warumungu boys are initiated into the customs and beliefs of their ancestors, most of which are intimately connected with the land.

Through the desultory efforts to put this claim together, there emerged a picture of local group organisation which approximates the findings of the late Emeritus Professor W.E.H. Stanner when, in 1934, he visited the area and talked with Warumungu elders – men who were the grandfathers of living Warumungu claimants, and the influence of whose generation continues; not surprisingly, upon reflection.

In this region, there is a striking correspondence between topography and soil type on the one hand, and patterns of human occupation on the other. The low ranges feed springs and concentrate rainfall into watercourses; better soils hold moisture and support more abundant plant growth and animal life.

The siting of European occupation largely mimics that of the traditional Warumungu. The most precious resource in the region is not cattle or gold but water. In a sense, white Australia has been caught in delicto with the Warmungu. We have taken all their good land; no watercourse remains which does not have some European claim to it.

We have comforted ourselves with myths about what Aboriginal people wanted, what was important to them, what was good for them – all the while taking more and more of their land, shifting them here, shunting them there; until all that was left was desert wasteland and what the Northern Territory government would describe as public purpose lands.

And when, in the struggle for some sort of recognition during the land claim inquiry process, claimants were not always able or willing to recite chapter and verse a rich litany of sites and mythology for these bleak, remaining areas, some were heard to mock them. We nearly got away with it; perhaps another generation or two and the Warumungu would have become so detached from their traditional land base that their spiritual affiliations and much of their oral traditions would have been lost. Had the prophesy of Aboriginal extinction fulfilled itself, we would have been lost.

Had the prophesy of Aboriginal extinction fulfilled itself, we would have been able to sit back confirmed in our earlier judgement of the Aboriginal peoples as unworthy of any claims to cultural survival. There is no place of greater spiritual significance to the Warumungu than Jurnkurakurr, spiritual home of Jalawala (the black-nose python), the Mungamunga women, and Kiliriji (another snake) actors in a sequence of primordial events of continuing significance to the Warumungu people. Yet this very place was the first to be permanently occupied by whites in the region, for this is the site of the Tennant Creek Telegraph Station. It is not difficult to imagine the sanctions Warumungu law would have demanded if this violation of space had been perpetrated by one of their own, less still the outrage that must have been felt when it was entered and occupied by foreigners. Only a century ago we began to imprint our history on the site.

Nothing symbolises the high ascendancy of Western culture and traditions over the Aboriginal more than the fact that in 1987 Jurnkurakurr was acquired by the Northern Territory to preserve as a monument to white settlement in the region; seemingly to the exclusion of those whose history there has an almost timeless dimension. When the main body of evidence in connection with this claim was taken in early 1985, it soon became clear that around Tennant Creek there was land to satisfy everybody's aspirations – except the Warumungu.

Sadly, the Northern Territory has not recognised the moral strength of Aboriginal land claims or, indeed, the fundamental place that belonging to land has in shaping Aboriginal self-identity. Encouragingly, the general population of Tennant Creek has: their support for the claimants' proposals to compromise important parts of the claim – proposals not treated seriously by the Government – marks the town apart from many others where black and white Australians live.

In the resolution of the many issues to which this claim gives rise, the problem for the Warumungu is that they start from a position of near hopeless compromise already. The areas which they are relegated to claiming are not the areas of their choice; on the contrary. Their claims are seen as being opportunistic – which of course they are: they have no alternatives; except to remain landless. (I need hardly say that the niggardly, pastoral land excision policy – for which few qualify – is no alternative). Not unnaturally, expectations have been raised.

First, by the opportunity to make a claim, and later, by the difficult, self-revealing process of backing it up in a public non-Aboriginal forum.

Altogether, pastoralists pay little more than $11,000 per year in rent to occupy most of Warumungu territory. A Government sponsored study of the industry in 1986 found that "property prices generally reflect only the value of the cattle and sometimes the value of improvements, with the residual value of the lease itself at or near zero." Thus, the authors conclude: "The outstanding advantage that Territory producers have is the availability of vast areas of land at virtually no cost." Some properties in Warumungu territory are barely marginal; they support only one or two families. The question of land degradation in semi-arid regions with poor soil types is a serious one.

Yet it is minium stocking requirements imposed by successive government administrations which prevent Aboriginal people leasing back some of the farm. It is unlikely that many hundreds of Warumungu people could not find between them the equivalent cost of renting two or three modest homes in Tennant Creek.

By contrast, this inquiry, with its many scraps and the rather unhappy view of contemporary Warumungu society taken is some of the final submissions – the Northern Territory's included – must have cost several hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of dollars.

If it costs money to break some of the impasses, to restore some dignity to the Warumungu, to return some vestige of what is theirs to them, then there is a strong argument that it should not be individual pastoralists and miners around Tennant Creek, or the townspeople, who should pay: Australia should weigh in, recognising that the country as a whole has profited, and continues to profit, from the dispossession of these people and the use to which we put their lands.

It is not simply a question of rectifying the wrongs of the past, as if the consequences of those wrongs had long ago been worked through: the simple truth is that they have not, yet as a nation we continue to enjoy benefits from them. Nor is it any answer to point to the moneys which may have been wasted on "welfare", for the recipients neither sought the conditions which occasioned this beneficence nor designed the programs which have been so disastrously inefficient.