Merry Christmas to Malê Rising readers
Anand Satyanand, Forward Australasia (Auckland: Kiwi, 2009)
… The victory of several indigenous rights activists in the 1940 parliamentary election [1] brought issues of citizenship and land tenure to the forefront of Australasian politics, and also brought a new dimension to the generations-old debate over immigration. It wasn’t only whites who were ambivalent about the growing number of newcomers from southern Europe, the Andes and Indochina: many indigenous people also considered them competitors for jobs and land. In New Zealand, where Maori agricultural workers increasingly competed with immigrants from Peru and Ecuador, there were protests and occasional clashes: similar incidents occurred in New Caledonia where the minority Kanak population felt in danger of losing its traditional economic niches, and in Fiji where the recently-enfranchised Indians were calling for land reform. A significant portion of the indigenous rights movement rallied around the slogan “Australasia First,” calling for a moratorium on immigration until native land and cultural issues were fully addressed.
This would cause some unexpected complications in the campaign to extend citizenship rights to all indigenous people. Given the attitude of Queensland and Western Australia toward Aboriginal citizenship, it was generally accepted that this would require a constitutional amendment transferring control over nationality from the states to the federation. But such a transfer would also mean a uniform, nationwide system for naturalizing immigrants, which many indigenous people opposed. When this was combined with lingering white resistance to centralization, even in the more progressive states, the critical mass for federalizing civil rights wasn’t there.
The failure of the Nationality Amendment of 1947 showed how the immigrant and indigenous rights movements worked against each other. The amendment won a narrow majority of voters nationwide, and passed in Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales. But in addition to failing in Queensland, Western Australia and Fiji as expected, it also lost by 11,000 votes in New Zealand and 2200 in New Caledonia, with heavy opposition from Maori and Kanak voters, who already had citizenship, providing the margin of defeat in those states. This denied the amendment the “dual majority” – a majority of states as well as a majority of voters – that it needed to pass.
The result of the 1947 referendum made some indigenous activists wonder whether they could achieve reform through the political process, and also threatened a split between the Maori and Melanesians on the one hand, and the Australian Aborigines on the other. Ironically, it would be Queensland that showed the way to regroup. With the exception of the Torres Strait Islanders, both Aborigines and Asians were denied citizenship there, and while Andean immigrants were theoretically eligible, many practical obstacles were put in their way and they were shunted into rural ghettos. As early as the 1930s, the Torres Strait-dominated leadership of the indigenous movement had begun to build bridges to the immigrants and the Melanesian contract workers, and in the 1940s, they formed joint labor unions and legal defense funds. Even while they campaigned for the Torres Strait and Cape York to become a separate state, the indigenous activists took part in strikes and protests on behalf of all agricultural workers, and clashes with the Queensland police built a sense of shared struggle.
The Queensland branch of the movement urged similar cooperation nationwide, and some others were willing to listen, including Maori trade unionists who had warmed to the Andeans through a shared campaign for higher agricultural wages. By 1950, a fragile coalition of indigenous activists, immigrants and sympathetic whites had been forged, which attempted to rework the Nationality Amendment in a form acceptable to all parties. When the amendment was reintroduced in 1952, it provided for Aboriginal tribes to receive title to reserve land and thus some protection against economic dislocation, and while naturalization of immigrants would become a federal matter, any change to immigration law would require the approval of a majority of states.
By 1952, the more metropolitan and progressive states were also thoroughly fed up with Queensland’s Imperial-led government. The forms of indirect pressure that had worked on Fiji in the 1930s, such as economic and sporting sanctions and deliberate bureaucratic delays, proved ineffective against Brisbane, and more people were willing to take direct action against what by now was a national embarrassment. This time, the amendment passed in New Caledonia as well as New Ulster and New Munster (New Zealand having split into two states in the meantime), giving it a majority in the six states it needed to pass. Finally, Aborigines everywhere in Australasia had citizenship and civil rights.
This, of course, did not mean the end of social conflict. In Queensland, a quarter of a million Asian, Melanesian and Andean immigrants were naturalized in federal court by 1957, joining 60,000 newly enfranchised Aborigines, but they were still much in the minority, and the majority continued to use the public order laws to repress political and labor protests. State courts often refused to enforce civil rights laws, and the state government sometimes refused to seat minorities who were elected to city and shire office or to provide services to opposition-controlled localities. In Fiji, the three parallel governments for Europeans, Fijians and Indians proved inadequate to tackle issues that affected all three, particularly whether Indian sugar growers should be able to purchase the lands they leased. The Maori wanted more than the scattered reserve title they had received, and there were sharp disputes within the Maori community as to whether the title should be individual or communal. And everywhere, customary hunting, fishing and gathering rights
outside the reserves – recognized by the Northern Territory, Tasmania and South Australia in 1958, but not elsewhere – were increasingly contentious.
In the farthest-flung corners of Australasia, the issue was whether to be part of the federation at all. The former French Polynesia, taken by Britain during the Great War, had become Australasian territories during the denouement of the Imperial period, and the Cook Islands were ceded in 1931, but neither felt much affinity to the union. Their small population and, although no one would admit it, the lack of significant European settlement made the prospect of statehood remote, and while both populations (especially the Cook Islanders) had strong cultural links with the Maori, they felt little kinship to the federation’s other peoples. If anything, the influence of revolutionary Islam during the Great War and the Imperial period and the forced labor uprising of 1918-19 [2] inclined the Society Islanders more toward India and Nusantara than toward metropolitan Australia.
Among the Cook Islanders, many of whom had family in New Zealand and who realized that they were too few to form a fully independent nation, sentiment for outright independence was uncommon. Instead, the majority party sought autonomy within the federation, in an arrangement that would enable them to conduct diplomacy with other Pacific islands and represent themselves in the Consistory, and after amicable negotiations, this was granted in 1959. But in Polynesia, a pro-independence party won control of the territorial legislature in the 1958 election, and in 1961, after attempts to reach agreement with Melbourne proved unsuccessful, issued a unilateral declaration of independence.
The Australasian government was caught flat-footed, and its immediate response was to dissolve the Polynesian legislature and send troops to secure the ports and landing strips. The territorial government refused to accept the dissolution and called a general strike. For two weeks, Polynesia was paralyzed, with daily protests in the capital at which members of the culturally-influential Muslim minority chanted Abacarist slogans. There was a sense of incipient violence, made all the more dangerous when several influential members of the Indian parliament argued that India should recognize and protect Polynesian independence.
Ultimately, however, India acted as mediator rather than instigator. The Indian government, which was appalled at the possibility of being dragged into a conflict with Australasia, offered its services as broker, which were accepted by a federal and provincial government that were both looking for a way to climb down. The discussions were contentious at times, but it was agreed that further moves toward independence would be deferred until after the 1963 election, that the government chosen at that election would decide whether to hold a referendum, and that if the voters approved independence, Polynesia would remain connected to Australasia in the same way as the Copperbelt states to Germany or Mali to France. In the event, the pro-independence coalition was returned to power in 1963, and the following year, 57 percent of the voters chose to leave the union. The Republic of Polynesia, as it then was, remained in association with Australasia, with citizens of both having the right to live, work and vote in the other, but it would also rebuild its old ties to France and forge new ones with the All-India Development Union.
In the meantime, the 1960s were becoming to the struggle for land rights and cultural autonomy as the 1930s and 40s were for citizenship. The spark for this would be lit on the other side of the Pacific, among the American and Canadian Natives who seized on their status as treaty signatories to take their case to the international community. The Australian Aborigines had no treaties, but the Maori did, and although the state courts in New Zealand (and since 1949, New Ulster and New Munster) considered the Treaty of Waitangi an effective nullity, it now gave the Maori standing to join the Consistory and to sue in the Court of Arbitration to construe and enforce their rights.
This move was nearly as controversial among the Maori as it was among the indigenous North Americans, especially since it gave added standing to the titular Maori king. But there could be no arguing with results. The two state governments, fearing an adverse decision in the international courts, moved to settle the lawsuit. In 1967, with Melbourne mediating, both states agreed to recognize Waitangi as positive law, to allow Maori claims to a significantly greater area of state land than they were granted in the 1950s, to grant non-exclusive customary rights over traditional hunting and fishing grounds, and to permit broad autonomy in cultural and educational matters. In exchange, the Maori ceded other disputed claims, including the controversial claim to foreshore and seabed zones, and agreed not to take a position adverse to Australasia in any international forum. This would pave the way for the integration of the Maori as equal partners in Australasian society, something already foreshadowed by the fact that nearly half the land granted to the Maori would be individual rather than iwi land, and that the lead Maori negotiator had both British and mestizo Peruvian ancestry.
The Maori Settlement would have no direct impact on the Australian Aborigines, who lacked the leverage provided by Waitangi. But the existence of the settlement, and the steps toward recognition of customary rights in certain Australian states, became a rallying point for the indigenous rights movement. The movement’s leadership became increasingly militant as the 1960s wore on, staging land occupations and blocking the construction of roads and mines. And as the federal government sought to improve its ties with the independent Pacific and Nusantara, settlement of the remaining land issues would become a priority…
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[1] See post 4923.
[2] See posts 2957, 3108 and 3872.
