r
May 15, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - If you want to meet the best Australians, meet Indigenous
men and women who understand this extraordinary country and have fought for the
rights of the world's oldest culture. Theirs is a struggle more selfless, heroic
and enduring than any historical adventure non-Indigenous Australians are
required incessantly to celebrate.
I know this to be true, because I have been reporting from and filming in
Indigenous communities for most of my life. In 1984, I met one of the best
Australians, Kwementyaye Randall.
Kwementyaye Randall was, like so many others, stolen from his mother. He was
seven when he was taken by the “authorities’, and he never saw his mother again
and grew up alone. Indeed, he felt the full force of Australian colonial
brutality and duplicity most of his life; but he fought it and rose above it,
and he never faltered in confronting the injustice imposed on Indigenous people.
I mourn the passing of this old friend, a real hero in a nation that has yet to
find the moral sense to honour those who courageously stand against oppression
within Australia.
When I interviewed Kwementyaye for my film, Utopia, in 2012, in
Mutitjulu in the shadow of the great rock known as Uluru, he was white haired
and a distinguished elder, but he still had the twinkle of the rebel in his
eyes. His ballad “My Brown Skin Baby, They Take ‘Im Away,” is one of the most
moving political songs of our time. He sang it for me when we first met and I
can still feel my thrilling response. Yes, it was a sad song; but it was also
angry and it said there would be a fight until there was justice.
Sitting in the shade outside his house more than 30 years later, he spoke
eloquently about the love and respect for this land that he and Indigenous
people felt. He
was an educator and natural leader who taught people to reclaim the cultural
identity that is Australia’s singular uniqueness.
But mostly, Kwementyaye Randall was still angry and hurt. He described
vividly how the Australian army had invaded his community in 2007 – “they
pitched their tents right over there, without asking: can you believe it: the
Australian army. We were being invaded.”
He was referring to the so-called “intervention” when Prime Minister John
Howard sent the army into dozens of communities in the minerals-rich Northern
Territory, grabbing their land, on the basis of a big lie that Indigenous
“paedophile gangs” were abusing children in “unthinkable numbers”.
Subsequently, the Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory Police and
the leading body of Central Australian child medical specialists investigated
these allegations and found no evidence to support them.
The words “unthinkable numbers” were used by Howard’s minister for Indigenous
Affairs, Mal Brough, on Tony Jones’s Lateline programme on the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation. This was an historic slur on Indigenous Australia, and
it led to untold suffering throughout the Northern Territory as community after
community was humiliated and terrorised by a form of bureaucratic malice.
Self-harm and suicides quadrupled, according to the government’s own monitoring
body; people fell into what its report called “widespread despair”.
The media played a crucial role in this, notably Lateline, which broadcast an
interview with a disguised witness the program called a “youth worker”. In fact,
he was a senior official in the Department of Indigenous Affairs who reported
directly to Brough. His lurid allegations were discredited, yet the ABC never
apologised. Instead, it conducted an enquiry that wondrously cleared itself. I
asked both Tony Jones and reporter Suzanne Smith to account for themselves on
camera – as they demand of others – but they failed even to respond. Even an ABC
functionary refused to be interviewed.
One of the victims of Lateline was Kwementyaye Randall. The program ambushed
him in Melbourne and broadcast the impression that he and other elders in
Mutitjulu had failed in their duty of care to their community. It is difficult
to describe the degree of hurt this caused – in Kwementyaye, in other elders, in
the whole community and right across Indigenous Australia. It was this failure
to apologise, to right a wrong, that devastated one of the best Australians.
On the eve of Kwementyaye Randall’s death, the BBC’s Four Corners broadcast
more of the same – this time patronising distortions about communities in
Western Australia that the redneck Premier Colin Barnett intends to close down,
thus contravening at least three statutes of international law. Amy McQuire
demolished this wretched program in New Matilda and I urge you to
read her piece.
I last saw Kwementyaye Randall in January last year, in pride of place among
other elders who came from all over Australia to join the 4,000-plus crowd in
The Block in Redfern, to watch the premiere of Utopia. We stood
arm-in-arm with Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, another Australian hero. Both were
delighted by the huge non-Indigenous crowd and its source of hope.
But hope is not enough. Kwementyaye Randall felt deeply that until
non-indigenous Australia told the truth about its own rapacious past and stopped
covering this with relentless, duplicitous dispossession of Indigenous
Australians, along with collusive, craven smears in the media, there would be no
justice in this country.
In my film, Utopia, there is a sequence just before the end credits,
over which play the haunting words of Glenn Scuthorpe’s ballad, “No More
Whispering”. As Glenn sings the words, “The smile that won’t be forgotten; can
you never fade away?” there is a fine image of Kwementyaye Randall, whose memory
shall never fade away.