Native title no good for us: top elder
24.05.2008
laws have only divided indigenous families and sparked bitter rivalries while delivering nothing in return, Australian Aboriginal elder of the year Jim Hagan said yesterday.
Mr Hagan, who in 1980 became the first Aborigine to address the UN, threw his support behind Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin's pledge this week to overhaul the 15-year-old Native Title Act.
``I agreed with the sentiments expressed by Jenny Macklin regarding the need to overhaul the Native Title Act, because it plainly is not working for the benefit of Aboriginal people generally,'' he said.
Speaking in Toowoomba, Mr Hagan said that years of representing the Kullilli people in negotiations with the gas and petroleum giant Santos had yielded nothing for his people.
However, the 76-year-old former chairman of the National Aboriginal Conference (a forerunner to ATSIC), did not blame the mining companies for this and other failures, pointing instead to the bodies set up to represent Aboriginal people, saying they were the impediment to progress.
``The notion that Aboriginal people were led to believe, that they would have instant wealth by receiving royalties from mining companies and other users of their land, has been the ruination of families and friendships,'' said the chairman of the Toowoomba Council of Elders and the Kullilli Traditional Owners Committee.
``Communities are not getting benefit from the mining companies at all.
``We have this situation with Santos, who are operating oil and gas drilling outside Eromanga, and the tribes involved -- the Kullilli and Buntemurra -- have been in negotiations for years.
``Santos agreed to pay our people $75,000 a year for five years, but because our representative body in Toowoomba ... said we were in dispute over boundaries, we have received nothing. Santos paid Buntemurra, but not us.
``There was nothing wrong with the negotiations or with Santos -- the problem was with our own rep body, and Kullilli families missed out.
``We ended up in conflict because of that conflict, and the rep body funded only Buntemurra, so we lost out because we could not afford lawyers and so on. And now they're going after me personally, with a white anthropologist they employed saying that I am not a Kullilli man.''
Mr Hagan -- who went to the UN in Geneva over the Noonkamba people's fight against then West Australian premier Charles Court's approval of mining exploration on sacred sites -- said that jealousy was ``one of the worst things'' for Aboriginal people.
He said the payment of royalties to some stronger family clans, with nothing going to those less powerful, had created deep divisions throughout indigenous Australia.
``If Aboriginal people hold a grudge, it stays for life,'' he said.
``I have been chairman of the Kullilli traditional elders and have had disagreements with individuals. These people even wrote letters to Santos and the Native Title Tribunal asking that I be sacked, and this sort of crap.
``It's a sign the almighty dollar turns their minds. Aboriginal people don't have money, and they believe this is a chance to change that.''
Mr Hagan was brought up in far-western Queensland, and his children, including his activist son Stephen, went to school at Cunnamulla.
The Kullilli people lived on the outskirts of Cunnamulla, and had no facilities. ``The local cemetery was between our camp, which was called the Yumba, and the town -- and it had more taps than we had,'' he said. ``The only facilities the local council supplied were three or four taps on a single main of water from the town.
``That is the deprived background from which so many Aboriginal people came -- and native title has not been the catalyst of change we were told it would be.''
