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"They
Weren't Allowed In The Gate" --
Address by Barb Flick
Australian
Education Union Annual Federal Conference
January, 2001
Four
months ago Australia was captivated by the gold medal victory of Cathy Freeman
in the Olympics. There was adulation of the sort rarely seen - even for a sports obsessed
country such as this. It was a Melbourne Cup victory with the country coming to a standstill
for the shade under 50 seconds Cathy ran that 400 meters. The
headlines summed it up. "Our Cathy!". And many of us Murris wept.
Her
victory in some wonderful way - was ours too. But
this presumption of ownership by the nation of one of its Indigenous athletes
has certain ironies, of course. It
is only a few decades since for most Aboriginal people this would have been a
legal truism - many of us in those days were regarded as Wards of the State
throughout our lives. We were indeed owned lock, stock and barrel. We were moved around at the whim of missionaries or native welfare
officers: our
houses could be burnt or bulldozed to the ground. And as Cathy Freeman’s family knows only too well, our children could
be taken away. It
is difficult to imagine that an Aboriginal person could achieve such greatness
within living historical memory of such subjugation. That
this greatness was reached in the sporting field says other things of course.
As Colin Tatz has pointed out, Black Gold in the sporting arena is a
tangible and realizable goal for oppressed groups throughout the world, no less
for Indigenous Australians. Opportunity for success in areas such as academic, professional or
business fields is far more restricted. But
Freeman’s success was a triumph in more ways than one. Remember, not only did her will to win have to confront the disadvantages
faced by her people, she was also from an area remote from most Australians -
from north Queensland. She started running there in a school yard in Mackay. I
was reminded of this when I read a submission from South Mackay during the
course of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s National Inquiry
into Rural and Remote Education, of which I was a co-commissioner in New South
Wales. The
details of this particular submission don’t particularly matter. What is important is that this one, from Cathy Freeman’s home town,
along with a couple of hundred other submissions and oral presentations, spelt
out a recurring theme. The
chances for kids in schools in rural and remote areas of Australia - away from
the big smoke -
are dramatically reduced. And
as scores of submissions made clear, for Indigenous children in remote and rural
areas, those opportunities can diminish to the point of non-existence. And,
yes, this happens in a country that prides itself on traditions of the bush.,
and exists on the metaphors of egalitarianism and rugged individualism and
toughness in the face of a harsh land. Well,
so much for egalitarianism. If you want to achieve some degree of opportunity for equality, move to
the big cities. If
anything is true of the last quarter of the last century, it is that it was the
age of Government Inquiry and Report. From the Whitlam era onwards, there seems to have been scores of such
exercises, covering every imaginable area of activity. Education has figured in a large number of such inquiries at state and
federal levels. Until
last year, however, there has not been a specific national focus on education as
an issue of human rights, still less as a human rights issue in rural and remote
areas. The
report of the Rural and Remote Education Inquiry is damning - and I’ll go into
some of its findings in a moment - but there is a sense in which none of it is
new. The
real tragedy in a way, is that it took until the year 1999 to commence such
work. The
other tragedy, as background papers developed for the Inquiry reveal, is that
the inequalities and breaches of human rights to education for people in rural
and remote areas is that, it has been a systemic feature of Australian life for
the best part of a century. For Indigenous people, the education system in Australia has been a
failure since the closure of the first Aboriginal school in 1823 at Parramatta. At
around the time of the release of the Report into Rural and Remote Education
last year, a National Party politician suggested that Aboriginal kids were
hardly worth educating, as formal learning was something that Aboriginal people
didn’t want. I
remember that this was the line run by the Minister for Education in the
Northern Territory when I worked there in 1987. He said that a sewing and welding course would be more useful to the
children than an academic education. Yes,
it has been said often. “Aboriginal people don’t want an education”.
Nothing could be further from the truth - and that truth is that
Aboriginal people have been systematically and deliberately excluded from
education for most of the last two centuries. Let me take you back 60 odd years, to the experience of my family, to
life around Collarenebri in the late 30's. The
Flicks have always been fighters - it’s a family tradition of which I am proud
and which I try to uphold. The fact that my grandfather, Mick Flick, joined up to fight in World War
I as part of that tradition. He enlisted at the age of 16, and from Gallipoli to France he was wounded
4 times, despite the fact that “he was not a respected soldier as the white
man”. But
Pop Flick treated people as he found them and was a popular soldier in the
field. Our
family was fortunate to find one of Pop’s war time friends, Charles Collett,
who we became close to until his death at the age of 101 in 1998. On the battlefields, colour was not an issue at all.
Survival depended on the ability of everyone to take care of and watch
out for each other. They learned to recognise the enemy. But at the end of the war, Pop came back to Australia with hopes that
things might improve for Aboriginal people. But
as my father Joe recalled: “He
came back - and of course he never ever got nothing. He never ever got recognised, you know, because he wasn’t even allowed
to join the RSL Club at Collarenebri. He
thought he’d be a member of the RSL Club, but he went and nobody would vote
him in because its all whites, keep it white.” In
a sense, things got worse for Aboriginal people after the Great War, despite
service by many Aboriginal soldiers. Between 1911 and 1927, over 50 percent of Aboriginal reserve land in New
South Wales was resumed, much of it to make way for the Soldier Settlement
schemes. Much
of this reserve land had been successfully and profitably farmed by Aboriginal
people before the war. However, my grandfather Mick Flick, was effectively blocked by the local
land board from gaining land. The Soldier Settlement scheme was not a great success for non-Indigenous
people - but for Aboriginal people it was another round of dispossession. By
1935 Mick and Celia Flick and their 6 children were settled in Collarenebri.
Although joining the RSL was not an option, the Murris of Collie knew
that education was important - and they wanted that for their children. Mick and Celia’s 6 kids and 21 other Aboriginal kids from the town
applied to enrol at the Collarenebri Primary School. Despite
the fact that, according to the local teacher Hugh McLean that there was (and I
quote) “easily room for 20 more children”, they were refused enrolment
because of resistance by the parents of the white kids at the school. McLean asked one of the more broad minded parents about the objections to
the Aboriginal children and was told “there would be an outcry against their
admission”. He
ended up refusing entry to the Aboriginal kids, claiming there was “no
room”. By
1941, it was reported that these parents had threatened “a strike of school
children” if the Aboriginal children of the town were admitted. Mick
and Celia Flick spent much of their time dodging officers of the oppressive
welfare regime, once having to do a midnight bolt with their (then) 3 kids from
Bungunya to avoid them. He was just in time. The next day the rest of his people were removed to Branbull Mission.
It was a constant threat that our people lived under, and the irony was
that one of the reasons a child could be taken from their families was that they
were not giving their kids an education. On another occasion my father and his sister Isabel were sent by Mick to
Toomelah Station to escape being taken by the Protection Board. It angers me that this inhumane treatment caused great pain as families
were split up and children were forcibly separated from their “country” -
their culture and, law being denied them. And
so it was while the black kids of Collarenebri were being excluded from the
local school, my auntie Rose Weatherall Flick used to teach the three R's to the
local kids back then in 1938 under a bough shade at the side of a verandah of
the local priest. It was a job she did, not as a teacher employed by the State, but for a
few bob a week (paid by the parents) and a packet of Craven A cigarettes. As she has told the story to my sister Karen: “Yeah,
well it was nothing to do with the education .....school, you know. Then
they used to kick up a stink about the Murri kids, some of them used to be
cheeky enough to go and have a sticky-beak at the white kids and the community
kicked up about that. (but) they weren’t allowed in the gate, they’d look over the fence and then they started to write letters home
to the parents to keep the kids away.” ‘And
who wrote those letters?’ ‘The
mothers of the kids and the teachers.’ And
this was just a small episode in a long history of exclusion at the hands of the
mothers of the kids and teachers. Even back in 1902, the New South Wales Aborigines Protection Board,
noting a 17% drop in Aboriginal school enrolments said it was...in great measure
due to the objections with which some European parents have to Aboriginal
children attending the same school as their children. Where such objections are raised, and there are sufficient children to
warrant the establishment of a school for the exclusive use of Aborigines, the
Board endeavours to have one established, but as a rule without success. So
no one can tell me that my people were not interested in getting an education
and not being capable of taking that education as it came. My family needed an education as a form of defence - to stop the welfare
authorities from taking us away; and as a form of offence - to take the
knowledge we gained with us in the struggle for our rights. Let's
move forward a generation. Through
the sacrifices made by my parents I was able to get a half decent education and
as it turned out, I ended up as a nurse. I've still got some photographs and news clippings of the time.
I don't look half as glamorous as Cathy Freeman - but I had done more
than my share of 400 meter
runs to get there. I'd done okay, but I don't remember too many whitefellas saying "our
Barb". I
did the bulk of my nursing at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children at
Camperdown in Sydney and through a circuitous route ended up in the Northern
Territory and beyond, as the director of an Indigenous adult education
institution, and later still - perhaps returning to my craft - as an
administrator of Indigenous health organisations. In the Northern Territory and
Cape York Peninsula. It
was through that journey that I became politicised and realised that the
education I had got - not as a right in those days but through the struggles of
my parents - had been in many ways a hollow achievement. Yes,
I had got my ticket - and my politicisation was now to allow me a chance and a
motivation to work for my people. But the education I had received was - in an absolute sense - a
whitefella education, with very little in it for Aboriginal people. Throughout
my entire childhood, school taught me nothing about my own people. It wasn't just the fact that there was no such thing in those days as
Aboriginal Studies: it was the fact that if Aboriginal people figured at all, they figured as
exotic images of Penny Black stamp "primitivism" and
"nomadism": images largely drawn from places such as the Northern Territory. It
was a reality far different from my family. While the history classes in school was making mention of the Depression,
my father Joe was sneaking around Toomelah Mission listening to the speeches of
Jack Ferguson agitating for Aboriginal rights. While
we were learning about Captain Cook, the Stump Jump Plough and the Gold Rush,
Charlie Perkins was undertaking the Freedom Rides through New South Wales.
The
reality and the history of our family was light years away from what was taught
to us at school. And
the same might be said of my nursing education. I was seen as a bright young thing then - perhaps a credit to my race.
But nothing I learned at nursing school could make me forget, or ignore,
the gross disparities that faced my people. It was a two class health system then, much as it was with schooling, as
my father remembered again: “Back
in Collarenebri you wasn’t allowed to go into the whitefella’s schools.
What a terrible racist town Collarenebri was then! There was a separate part of the hospital for you, a black ward and a
white ward, two different wards. They
had the black one out in the back.” My
Auntie Isabel recalls their cutlery at the hospital was even marked. Engraved, Abo for us. And
my own experience of having to sit behind the ropes that separated us from the
white people at the local picture theatre, and having to wait at the back of the
shop until all the white people were served. It
was through all this that I realised, as had my grandfather Mick and my Auntie
Rose, that education was a fundamental human right that was being denied to my
people. In
many ways, my subsequent involvement, from the Institute of Aboriginal
Development in Alice Springs, through to fighting to provide and support
Aboriginal health worker training in the Northern Territory, Queensland and New
South Wales, is a direct inheritance of the lessons held under the bough shed at
Collarenebri 62 years ago. So,
although it had been a long time coming, the notion of serving on an inquiry
that saw education as a human right, seemed a logical thing to become involved
in. My
interest in remote and rural education had, in a sense, been something I had
grown up with - and certainly something that has become a focus of my life's
work. The
focus of an inquiry which saw access to education in the context of human rights
was important for two main reasons. First,
it saw education as something by right that should be available to all in remote
and rural areas and neither a privilege - as so many powers that be seem to
regard it - nor as something exclusively the preserve of particular groups - as
the mothers of the kids and teachers had seen it back in Collarenebri years ago.
It was an answer - perhaps unwelcome - to those in government who choose
to fund private, city based education at the expense of the public system.
It was also an answer to the One Nation Hanson-ites who believe some of
us have never had it so good. Second,
it measured access to education against international standards of behaviour by
governments, rather than the self defined, self serving definitions delivered by
governments themselves. The
principle international instrument which guided the inquiry was the UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was ratified by Australia in 1990. Article
28.1 sets out the right to education. I
quote: “States
Parties recognize the right of the child to education and with a view to
achieving this right progressively and on the basis of equal opportunity, they
shall, in particular:
In
Article 29.1 this convention also sets out the aims of education: “States
Parties agree that the education of the child shall be directed to:
In
evaluating Australia’s performance with regard to children in rural and remote
areas, the inquiry sought to determine the extent to which education was: -
available -
accessible -
affordable -
acceptable, and -
adaptable. On
the face of it, these seem quite unexceptional and sensible ways to assess an
education system - unless, of course, you are an Australian kid living in rural
and remote Australia. For Aboriginal kids, it seems an impossible dream. Without
going into the considerable detail and recommendations of the report, let’s
just look at one aspect of how our education system is failing kids from rural
and remote Australia - particularly Indigenous children. It is an aspect that draws, by chance, the two major areas of my work:
education and health. The
report found substantial evidence that health in rural and remote Australia was
worse than in the big cities, and in turn that health was worse in the bush than
rural towns. This
applies to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in rural and remote Australia.
As the report notes: Education
delivery in isolation from other social services fails to recognise the
inter-relationships between, for example, family poverty, the child’s health
and well-being and his or her education experience and outcomes. As
social services notably health and allied services are withdrawn from rural and
remote areas, the education system struggles on alone attempting to meet the
diverse needs of students. Sounds
familiar? It's
not just banks closures, the closing of railway lines or government departments
in rural areas, but the withdrawal - or in the case of many Indigenous kids -
the non-existence of health and allied services that has a direct impact on
education opportunities and outcomes. And
it's not surprising. Aboriginal kids on many remote communities have been found to experience
deafness as a result of middle ear infections at rates up to 100%. For those kids in classrooms, the consequences are obvious:
they simply cannot hear what is happening. That deafness is in turn a consequence of material poverty and a lack of
access to comprehensive primary health care. And the impact of that ill health results in a vicious cycle of lack of
access to education, employment and further, inter-generational poverty. And
governments? They
seem, on the face of it, about as interested and committed to change as the
School Inspectors of the 1930's, whose response to Aboriginal kids being
excluded from schools such as Collarenebri was to make plans to shunt kids and
parents off to the mission at Brewarrina rather than take on the local white
population. I’ll
make one final point about the inquiry, and that is to do with bilingual
education in Indigenous communities. The report found that there was gross under-resourcing for bilingual
education throughout the nation - despite its obvious benefits in giving
children access to education in rural and remote schools. Indeed resources in the area have been shrinking in many areas.
This has contributed, for obvious reasons to the decline in Indigenous
language usage in many parts of the country. The
decline in Indigenous language usage has occurred in the context of increased
levels of illiteracy in English out bush. For example, a survey carried out in the Katherine region five years ago,
found that illiteracy levels were up to 93% amongst Aboriginal adults in remote
areas of that region. That is, one in 14 Aboriginal people could read and write functionally -
and anecdotal evidence suggests this is getting worse. Not
only does this have obvious impacts on health, and employment and training
opportunities but leads - more tragically - to what has been described as
"a poverty of the imagination": where people lack the resources in both their mother tongue as well as
English to operate in the world. It
was this descent into the "poverty of the imagination" that my Auntie
Rose was resisting over 60 years ago. She and her family had seen the depredations made on the Indigenous
languages of western New South Wales and realised that whatever education that
could be eked from under the bough shelter at Collarenebri would be vital in
dealing with a system that had constantly kicked them in the guts. She realised that the material poverty of her family’s lives could only
be overcome through the power of imagination and the will to fight. So,
has the Inquiry into Rural and Remote Education been worth it? And, if so, what is to be done?
Most importantly, can it contribute to the power of the imagination that
is so desperately needed? In
part, those questions must be answered by you here today as educationalists and
industrial advocates. Many, many of the inquiry’s recommendations directly affect your
interests, and directly affect the ways in which you might act towards meeting
the educational human rights of people in rural and remote Australia. I urge you to read the report - not just as another series of boring
recommendations in another tedious government report - but as a blueprint to
constructive action. I
mentioned earlier that, as kids, we were learning about Captain Cook while the
reality of the anti-colonial struggle of the Freedom Rides surrounded us. As my father Joe recalled it: When
Charlie Perkins got on the rampage for freedom rights, that's when I started to
take notes....I'd do anything to try and get a say in running our lives. And
I can assure you that is exactly what my father, and many others like him did. It
is this reality that I want to leave you with. For all that some historians try and tell us a terra nullius Australia
was "settled": there
are the realities of tens of thousands of Indigenous lives who have experienced
a history - a continuing history - of invasion. No more, no less. For
my grandfather Mick, it was a matter of the spirit of Gallipoli, that John
Howard purports to celebrate, being thrown back in his face with a refusal for
land, and be accepted in the Collarenebri RSL. For
my Auntie Rose, it was an issue of the kids in her charge "not being
allowed through the gate" to an education. For
myself, it is finding, confirmed through this inquiry, that the educational
landscape is still, in many ways and despite the High Court Mabo ruling
"terra nullius" as far as my people are concerned. For
you here today, and in the tomorrows to come, it is a continuing issue - not of
theory, but practice. I call on you to help us open the gates and let the kids in. Thank you. Barbara
Flick.
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Barbara Flick