Big Blue Sky Page 17

  I’d accepted an invitation from Attorney-General Lionel Bowen to serve on the Committee for Individual and Democratic Rights. Commentators had had a field day with the appointment, clearly bemused by the idea that a rock singer could add any value to the exercise. They were still stuck on a clichéd view of rock bands partying hard and destroying their brain cells. I’d said yes—after all why shouldn’t an artist participate in something like this? And it wouldn’t hurt to leave my comfort zone for a while to wade through the thick molasses of constitutional reform—a topic that caused many a law student’s eyes to glaze over. I found out later that Bowen, who happened to be the Member for Kingsford Smith at that time, had grown tired of his teenage sons playing Oils albums late into the night and asked about the band, to be told we were serious types concerned with politics, not girls.

  I was well aware that the mere mention of the word ‘constitution’ put many people to sleep, but it explained a lot about how our political system had evolved: it was the rulebook for governments that laid out what they could and couldn’t do, and I was up for anything that might lead to improvement and updating. Sure, it’s a tall order to change the constitution by referendum, requiring the consent of a majority of people in a majority of states, but this is as it should be. You don’t change the foundation document of a nation on a whim. Although only eight out of forty-four proposed changes have been approved throughout our history, I think Australians have mostly got it right, even when they said no to change—such as refusing the Menzies Liberal government’s plan to outlaw the Communist Party, or the Chifley Labor government’s plan to nationalise the banks.

  In so many aspects, we were still prisoners of the past. Australia had changed in ways no one could have imagined since the British first stepped ashore, but our thinking and our political arrangements were frozen in time. And we were captive to the constitution. It may have been the modern nation’s founding document, outlining the powers and areas of responsibility for federal and state governments, but it had a number of gaps. Some of these were intentional, like leaving Aboriginal people out altogether, a glaring deficiency that was only remedied as late as 1967, although Aboriginal people were still not referenced in the introduction to the constitution, the preamble. Nor did the constitution provide protection for most political freedoms, such as freedom of expression or the right to peaceful assembly (a right that we enjoy de facto, courtesy of the way our democracy works). And nowhere in its 128 sections did it mention the environment.

  The result of this last omission was that decisions about how the land was used were left to each of the states, and as the condition of the environment deteriorated this could lead to a sea of troubles. Australians who lived in the Northern Territory or New South Wales were virtually powerless to stop or influence an environmental decision taken by Queensland, even if it directly affected them. One look at the torturously complicated power-sharing agreements needed to manage our largest river system, the Murray–Darling Basin, shows what has happened; it is a national resource but the task of ensuring its health is made more difficult because of conflicting state interests. The only recourse is to persuade the federal government to use one of its other powers listed in the constitution to overrule a law made by the state government.

  This is what happened in 1983 during the Franklin Dam campaign. There had been a national outcry over plans by the Tasmanian government to build a dam across the Gordon River that would have led to the pristine Gordon-below-Franklin River valley and surrounding forests being flooded. The earth moved (metaphorically at least) when the newly elected federal Labor government of Bob Hawke stepped in to protect the river using its power under the constitution to make laws concerning ‘external affairs’. Australia had signed the World Heritage Convention committing us to protecting areas of universal significance that were nominated by the national government—the region of South West Tasmania was one such area. Using the external affairs power, Hawke made a law to overrule Tasmania. This decision was narrowly supported by the High Court in the appeal that followed.

  While the High Court has tended to support the Commonwealth government when it makes laws for the protection of the environment, due to the lack of a clear head of power there is no end of buck-passing and argument about who is ultimately responsible. It is neither practical nor democratic that a court should decide questions of this kind. In any case, conservative national governments persist in leaving environmental responsibilities to the states. Yet a majority of people, when asked, expect the national government to take this role. A clever country would put the environment in the constitution so the national government could specifically make laws in relation to any environmental matter. After all, the wildlife, the air and the waters of the Australian continent don’t adhere to state boundaries.

  These were the kinds of issues I was keen to work through when I arrived at Admiralty House, somewhat bleary-eyed after my late night in Cessnock, to meet my fellow appointees. Among them, I was looking forward to meeting Donald Horne, whose writings I admired, including the celebrated, if misunderstood, Lucky Country. (‘Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck’—ouch.) Author Tom Keneally, who wrote with an Australian sensibility that had struck a chord with me growing up, would also be there. It turned out that Tom and I were on the same committee and spending time with him was a great mood lifter. Tom has always written like a man possessed. He has an impish sense of humour and an affectionate knowledge of our ways—I learned a lot hanging out with him.

  Along with Sir Rupert Hamer, a former Liberal premier of Victoria, and Maurice Byers, a former Commonwealth solicitor-general, Gough Whitlam was a commissioner. So, like a nervous schoolboy, I sought him out as he stood alone at a table laden high with scones and cakes while people milled about on the verandah outside having morning tea.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Whitlam . . .’ I began.

  ‘Gough,’ he corrected me.

  ‘I’m Peter Garrett, son of Betty Collin. You stayed with my grandparents in Bowral when you were at Sydney University . . .’ And on I rattled, setting out the pieces that connected me to the great man.

  With one eyebrow raised, Whitlam listened until the explanation finally drew to a close and then, drawing himself up to his full height, he looked at the assembled throng outside before turning back to me and saying, ‘Well, it’s a small world isn’t it, my son?’ Long pause. ‘With the exception of you and I, that is.’ Nice one, Gough.

  I enjoyed spending time with the committee members, all of whom were decent, intelligent, civic-minded people. Along with Keneally, they included Melbourne barrister Ron Castan, part of the legal team who argued the Mabo case, and Rhonda Galbally, the fiery disability advocate who much later represented the community sector during the establishment of the National Disability Insurance Scheme by the Gillard government.

  Nearly twenty years later, John Howard, as prime minister, revived the idea of a new preamble to the constitution and enlisted eminent Australian poet Les Murray to assist. Murray is an astonishing wordsmith—who else would riff on the emu: ‘I think your story is, when you were offered the hand of evolution, you gulped it’?—but in this case ideology ruled. The resulting prose was stilted and embarrassing, a clunky ode to mateship that left everyone cold. Meanwhile, Tom Keneally’s eloquent suggestions for the preamble in our committee’s report are long forgotten, including my favourite line: ‘. . . Australia is a continent of immense extent and unique in the world and demanding as our homeland our respect, devotion and wise management.’

  Among the recommendations that our committee made, many are still relevant today and one in particular stands out as urgent. This concerns the repeal of Section 51 (xxvi) of the constitution, which allows the parliament to make laws with respect to race, although an original reference to ‘the Aboriginal race’ was removed by the 1967 referendum. In its place we recommended enabling the Commonwealth parliament ‘to make laws for the benefit of the Aborigina
l people and the Torres Strait Islander people: and the making of compacts deemed necessary by the Parliament in order to recognise the ownership of Australia prior to the acquisition of sovereignty by the Crown’. (Keneally’s preamble also included the line: ‘. . . Australia is an ancient land previously owned and occupied by Aboriginal peoples who never ceded ownership.’)

  This was a way of addressing the sleeper issue in our history. Despite instructions from London, and notwithstanding the usual practice of negotiating some form of treaty with the country’s inhabitants during the great colonial land rush of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nothing of the sort happened when Australia was claimed by the British. Righting this prejudicial wrong is unfinished business. We also recommended the repeal of Section 25, which, while not in use, provided that electorates could be determined by race. These sections are hangovers from an earlier time when the authors of the constitution specifically intended to discriminate against Aboriginal people and others of different colour.

  But back in the 1980s, the work of the Constitutional Commission was doomed from the start, thanks to the shadow attorney-general, Peter Reith, who mounted a cynical attack on its activities. He argued that accepting our recommendations—which included four-year government terms, extending the right to trial by jury and freedom of religion, providing for just compensation for property acquired by government—would simply result in more power for Canberra.

  It was an argument that found fertile ground, especially in the distant states where the electorate was ever suspicious of politicians from central casting. It didn’t help that neither Prime Minister Hawke nor Treasurer Paul Keating actively campaigned for the changes, despite the Labor government having initiated the commission, and notwithstanding that the changes being proposed were as reasonable as the appointees who recommended them. It is a fact of political life that it’s impossible to succeed in amending the constitution if one of the major parties doesn’t support the proposals, no matter how necessary they might be, as members of the public often take their cue from their preferred party’s position. When the changes were finally put to a referendum in 1988 they were rejected. By then the conversation had ground to a halt, and the effort to update and improve our founding document came to naught.

  Since then the debate about constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been restarted a couple of times, and is now back in the national spotlight. As did his predecessors Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, the prime minister Tony Abbott is supporting change to the constitution, and it could happen in 2017.

  There has been a big grassroots campaign by the Recognise movement and an important report from a joint parliamentary committee, co-chaired by Liberal Ken Wyatt, the first Aboriginal member of the House of Representatives, and Labor senator Nova Peris pushing the issue along. The questions of constitutional recognition of Aboriginal people in the preamble, the removal of the remaining race powers and, potentially, the inclusion of a power to specifically make laws for Indigenous Australians, are again under consideration.

  It’s a no brainer for this whitefella, and I know many people, including those in the blackfella community, who want it to happen. If we are to be faithful to our shared history, then what objection can there be to including the First Peoples in our foundation document? They were here long before the Europeans arrived, and their culture, language and continuing presence should be central to the modern Australian nation.

  13

  FORTY THOUSAND YEARS

  LIEUTENANT-COLONEL DAVID COLLINS, the founding lieutenant governor of New South Wales, recalled the early days of Australia’s European settlement in his book, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (1798). The following passage stayed with me long after I first read it:

  But strange as it may appear they also have their real estates [my emphasis]. Ben-nil-long, both before he went to England and since his return, often assured me that the island Me-mel (called by us Goat Island) close by Sydney Cove was his own property; that it was his father’s, and that he should give it to By-gone; his particular friend and companion. To this little spot he appeared much attached: and we have often seen him and his wife Ba-rang-a-roo feasting and enjoying themselves on it. He told us of other people who were possessed of this kind of hereditary property, which they retained undisturbed.

  By the mid-1980s, the struggle for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights was approaching a threshold moment.

  The first peoples had lived in Australia for upwards of 40,000 years, a long spell in anyone’s book and a greater span of continuous occupation than any other known culture. It was only a heartbeat ago, but the historical wrong of country stolen, the ‘dispossession’ as it was called, had to be made right—of that I was certain.

  We’d already taken a few steps in support, playing some Rock against Racism shows and hosting the Warumpi Band, a new Aboriginal outfit from the Northern Territory, when they came to Sydney.

  A quick detour a few years earlier to visit and play a stripped-back show in Numbulwar, where Richard Geeves was teaching, had made a real impact on me. It was so utterly different from anywhere we’d been, unlike anything we’d done—it was another country within the borders of a country we thought we knew. The experience had stuck; a tentative connection had been made.

  In late 1985, a lawyer called Phillip Toyne, who worked for the Aboriginal land councils based in Alice Springs, sought a meeting. He wanted to know if we’d be interested in contributing a song to a film under production to commemorate the return of one of Australia’s most notable locations—Ayers Rock, in the centre of Australia—to its original owners, the Anangu people. The return of the rock—Uluru by its Aboriginal name—was the culmination of a hard-fought campaign by traditional owners, who eventually took their appeal over the heads of the local conservative Northern Territory administration and direct to the federal Labor government. They succeeded, and Uluru was to be returned to the traditional owners, who in turn would lease the rock and surrounding lands back to the people of Australia as a national park.

  The film was Uluru: An Anangu Story, and we accepted the request from the elders for some music. It says something about their smarts that people living in one of the most remote parts of the country somehow fixed on having a band from Sydney provide a song; it turned out to do the job better than anyone could have hoped. There were other tunes floating about, but ‘The Dead Heart’ was the obvious choice. When Rob first brought it in we had great bones to work with. Nick Launay happened to be in town, itching to be on the tools, and the song was thrown down quickly at the EMI studios in Castlereagh Street, Sydney.

  It was early 1986 and I’d been stuck at the office all day, deep in conversation with Gary Morris about the next phase of our career—chewing the fat, as Gary liked to describe it—and so was seriously late, running red lights all the way down Broadway to catch up with the session.

  When I walked into the studio the track was cracking, physical, reaching out of the speakers and grabbing me by the throat, with the doubled-up acoustic guitars churning like an eighteen-wheeler, backed in by a crunching snare drum sound.

  I was so proud of what my partners in music could achieve: the platform that had been constructed could have held up the Parthenon, and all that remained was for me to jump in and ad lib across the breakdown and through to the end: ‘the dead heart still lives here’. Jeremy Smith from pub rock warriors Hunters & Collectors—good mates of ours—was an ace French horn player. He’d flown in for the day and blew Jim’s brass lines across the outro in a couple of passes—we were out before the street sweepers had started their rounds.

  We were yet to venture into the desert, a trip that would change our lives and our perspective in ways we couldn’t anticipate. Nor had we recorded Diesel and Dust, the album that detailed the journey and would see us finally break through in other parts of the world. Still, somehow, everything came together on this song, as, partly blindfold
ed, we aimed to deliver for a people and a culture we hardly knew.

  …

  The promise of the Hawke government to ensure land rights for Aboriginal people had been wound back by a cautious prime minister, although ultimately the High Court would find that Aboriginal rights to land did exist—they called it native title—and the Keating government took the huge necessary step and legislated for these rights in the following years.

  Meanwhile, frustrated by the lack of public support for the claims of Aboriginal people and annoyed by his boss’s backflip, Clyde Holding, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, was keen to get the message out.

  When local Aboriginal activist Gary Foley and Gary Morris scoped a possible tour by the Oils with the Warumpi Band across Central Australia and the Top End, the Blackfella/Whitefella tour started to take shape. A plan was quickly hatched: Holding would support the Warumpi Band, we were to cover our own costs, and the ABC would send a crew to film the tour and produce a documentary to be shown on prime-time television. The bands would travel to communities through the remote Western Desert, and then up to the top of the Northern Territory across Arnhem Land, taking gear and personnel to settlements that in some cases had rarely, if ever, seen a white Anglo rock band, and certainly not an enterprise on this scale. The tour aimed to build bridges between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians, and would help us to gain a better understanding of community life. The Warumpi song ‘Blackfella/WhiteFella’, with its call for people to ‘stand up and be counted (because) it doesn’t matter what your colour, as long as you, a true fella’ provided the perfect title.