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Separate State responsibility has led to a piecemeal approach to Aboriginal affairs,
and generally to a shameful story of our Aborigines being treated as less than
human…people have too readily looked upon the Aboriginal people as part of the
native fauna.
…
But I’m still worried by the suburban garden. I’m worried by the unthinking
attitude which tends to put Aboriginals along with Australian fauna.
It’s not only the garden statues. It’s the song, ‘Tie me kangaroo down, sport’,
in which the singer goes through a list of the animals possessions of a dying
stockman and reaches the line, “Let me abos [sic] go loose, Bruce, let me abos go
loose; they’re no more use, Bruce, let me abos go loose”….
We won’t get far in raising the status of our Aborigines until we see them as
real people...people of dignity and worth.
And to do that, we need not only enlightened legislation, but enlightened
public attitudes. (1967, p. 8)
Then Prime Minister, William McMahon’s Australian Aborigines: Commonwealth Policy
and Achievements statement, delivered as a public address on the 26 th January, 1972
(Australia Day), outlined a five-point statement of objectives as a “…general directive to
those responsible for the formulation and administration of Commonwealth policies affecting
Aboriginal Australians” (McMahon, 1972, p. 1). The statement significantly favoured
Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory and although acknowledging that
Indigenous Australians live in traditional ways on reserves in Australian states, the actual
policy statement extends Land Rights to Northern Territory Indigenous Australians only. The
Federal Government absolved all of its other responsibilities to the states, leaving it to
individual states to legislate or not (as often the case was), on Land Rights issues. On this
aspect of land rights, the McMahon statement reads:
We decided to create this new form of lease rather than attempt simply to translate
the Aboriginal affinity with the land into some form of legal right under the
Australian system…because we concluded that to do so would introduce a new and
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