The Warburton Ranges Scandal

Following World War II, the Australian and British governments agreed to cooperate for the purposes of testing rockets and atomic bombs in a desert area of South Australia. Some of the Aboriginals in this area were removed before testing began to other parts of South Australia, and some to Western Australia. 

In late 1956 a Western Australian Parliament Select Committee tabled the results of an inquiry into the living conditions on the Aboriginal reserve in the Warburton Ranges. Christmas came and went. 


In January 1957 the Communist Party paper, the Tribune, continued its support of Aboriginals by reporting on the inquiry’s outrageous findings. East coast newspapers picked up the story and, as always, demanded positive action. 

In February, a South Australian newspaper published an equally outraged rebuttal, the journalist claiming the inquiry’s criticisms were grossly exaggerated. Further, the journalist claimed, white settlement had made life easier for the natives. At that stage, Australian television was only six months old, and newspapers were assumed to report whatever people needed to know.

A pamphlet rebutting the rebuttal was then widely distributed.

The inquiry into conditions in the Laverton-Warburton Range Area had been chaired by William Grayden. When the truth of the report was questioned in the press, Grayden returned to the area with cameras, inviting Pastor Doug Nicholls to accompany him. 

The resulting footage became a documentary titled Manslaughter and was shown not only on TV (which would have reached a very limited audience) but in public meetings around Australia.


Pastor Nicholls said "I wish I hadn't seen the pitiable squalor, the sights of my people starving - the most shocking sights I have ever seen. Never, never can I forget."


Just a few months later a petition was launched, demanding a referendum to change the constitution and make the federal government responsible for Aboriginal Affairs. The campaign for a referendum lasted ten years.

Enquiries and Censorship

It would be wrong to think nobody knew how bad conditions were on many of the Aboriginal Missions of Reserves in the first half of the 20th Century. If our governments are good for nothing else, they are world champions in the art of initiating endless inquiries into inconvenient truths - then finding reasons to do nothing. 
The 1890s depression, World War I, the 1929 depression, World War II... were all deemed higher priorities than Aboriginal Welfare.


A convention held in Melbourne in 1929 by organisations who wanted some action on Aboriginal issues resulted in a succession of further inquiries and recommendations. Aboriginal affairs were gradually becoming politicised, Aboriginals would soon become more active themselves and, Heaven help us, some of the whitefellas stirring things up were Communists.

In 1946, the Western Australian born poet Dorothy Hewett went to the Pilbara region to report on a strike by Aboriginal stockmen. Western Australia’s commercial press effectively censored all reports of the strike and the Communist Party’s newspaper was the only one to give the story any coverage at all.

The Campain for a Referendum. Growing up White in a White World

None of this – if you’ll pardon the expression – coloured my opinions of race because I was born into an extremely white world. There simply weren’t any people in my world I could associate, in either a negative or positive way, with what I was reading.
For most of us, these references to race were made in a contextual vacuum.

We did have charity boxes at school with pictures of ‘little black babies’ on them. (Donating pennies to the ‘missions’ meant supporting the efforts of the Catholic Church to spread god’s word, not mission in the sense of Government Policies relating to Aboriginals.)


The first time I consciously remember seeing an Aboriginal - and being aware he was Aboriginal - was at my local pool when, one day, a whole bunch of brown-skinned, blonde-haired kids arrived for a swim. Naturally, every white (or orange speckled) kid at the pool was curious and, naturally, I paddled up to one of these newcomers and asked him if he was a piccaninny: An excellent judge of character, he just looked at me like I was an idiot… so I paddled away again.

I grew up in Victoria, and the state of Queensland was so far away it might have been the moon. A friend of my uncle would sometimes come from Queensland to stay for a week or two and, although I now guess he must have been Aboriginal, at the time I just thought he had a really good tan; I’d been taught at school that Queensland is a very sunny state. Race was never an issue in my world before the 1967 Referendum.

None of the above is to deny the very strong, negative feelings of whitefellas who lived in towns where Aboriginals were fringe-dwellers, or saw customs practised which were, from a white point of view, abhorrent.
Spittle flew from the mouth of a white woman when she raged at me, one day, ‘you didn’t have to grow up with them!’

It was not until non-Anglo Europeans arrived in large numbers after World War II that many of us ever had to question our assumptions about what was 'normal' or 'different', or even how insignificant some of the differences really were. 
Unfortunately, it seems some people [like the 'lady' who spits] don't question their assumptions enough.

The Campain for a Referendum. School

The Victorian State School readers for grades one to eight, used as a literacy text and teaching tool, were virtually unchanged  from the late 1920s the early 1960s. One of the benefits of using the same text year after year was that they could be handed down from sibling to sibling, or continually recycled in other ways. One of the costs was educational stagnation.

The stories and poems I read at school (predominantly British and occasionally Australian) were the same as those my mother had read during the depression. The rare mention of Aboriginals in standard readers was patronising to say the least, and there was no mention of any “current events”.

The supplementary ‘School Paper’ used in the 1960s – the school equivalent of a newspaper – was more current, but similarly patronising. Regular issues provided a promising and sanitised impression of Aboriginal progress, and contentment with reserve or mission life. In short, they contained a lot of what we might now call “propaganda”.

A sample from another of my old school books shows that it was still widely accepted in the early 1960s that ‘full-blood’ Aboriginals would soon disappear from the face of the earth. 

The sample Arithmetic page shown here is from an earlier edition than the one I used at school, as farthings (quarter pennies) were no longer in circulation. Nonetheless, the layout of these books was consistent from one generation to the next. The picture and story of the boys going to a fair is content obviously imported from England. (Australians don’t go to ‘fairs’ – we go to fetes, carnivals or shows.)

The Campain for a Referendum. Clueless

Australia has, until recent times, been quite a backward country.

Few of us knew what was happening to Aboriginals, just as we had no idea what was happening to a lot of whitefella kids. Apart from problems like distance (especially distance from large Aboriginal populations), communication was limited (it was 1968 before we had a telephone in my home), and local television content was not only limited but quite ludicrous.

When I started school in 1959 the curriculum was pretty much the same as it had been 30 years before.

Access to services, by road, in remote or very remote areas

Even in good weather, many outback roads are dangerous, just one of the problems being “bulldust holes” – craters in the road surface which have filled up with dust. Driving into one of these at high speed can completely wreck the front end of a car.

Can You Spot the Bulldust Hole? Once it rains, roads become severely chewed up and impassable, especially while still wet if used by road-trains.

Signs advising whether or not roads are closed can be found everywhere in the outback. Many roads are maintained by mining companies or other private concerns, and the cost of grading them before they can be used again (once they dry out) is quite substantial. Penalties for driving on closed roads are severe.

…Road distance … changes considerably when a road is cut by flooding and travel time can vary considerably with road conditions which in turn can change from season to season or even from day to day…

The following communities in the Northern Territory, for example, had no effective road access due to seasonal flooding for over 100 days in the past year (2000) and their… score is not… a good indicator of their relative remoteness. They are, however, already in the Very Remote Class.”

Community	Population
Nhulunbuy	3695
Yirrkala	521
Oenpelli	741
Maningrida	1328
Milingimbi	941
Ramingining	473
Gapuwiyak	447
Numbulwar	619
Lajamanu	591

(A good way of picturing how remote these places are – in terms of access to services – is to search for them using Google Maps – satellite view.)

To get a good picture of just how much of Australia is remote or very remote, you can use this link:
http://www.doctorconnect.gov.au/internet/otd/Publishing.nsf/Content/locator

If people are genuinely unable to go to the services they need, the services must go to them. This sort of compromise is almost financially and physically impossible. When it comes to health, however, time and distance are important. About 24% of Aboriginals live in what might as well be called the middle of nowhere. Nowhere is a special place where you can actually hear silence.

In remote areas there is little chance of gathering economies of scale, not just for private enterprise but also for governments which must consider:

1.      how much “bang” taxpayers get for their bucks; and (let’s be frank)

2.      how many votes every budget dollar can buy.

A weakness of the five measures of remoteness, acknowledged by the ABS, is that they do not measure

“impediments to ‘accessibility’ such as time/cost of travel and the socio-economic capability of the community to overcome these impediments.”

In other words, if people don’t have access to a working vehicle, they can’t get to important services.

If the problem of delivering services is a thorny one, it became a whole lot pricklier with each successive attempt to solve questions of land rights. Before we get to land rights, however, there are some other topics to tackle: With a clear idea of distance and communication problems, it's time to move on - to the 1967 referendum !

Some of our capital cities are in Woop Woop

The capitals of the Northern Territory and Tasmania, Darwin and Hobart, are not classified as major cities. In fact, on the Remoteness scale above, the busiest parts of the Northern Territory are in category 3: Outer Regional Australia.

 “In any given Remoteness Area there may be rich people, poor people, indigenous and non-indigenous, graziers, manufacturers, town dwellers and rural people.”

Some people who live in the middle of nowhere do live in towns, but still have extremely limited access to services, or opportunities for social interaction.

Although Tasmania is one of the oldest States and reasonably well developed, people who need specialist surgery or cancer treatments must either fly or travel by overnight ferry and car to Melbourne in Victoria.