If Australians do not wish a predictable international race relations disaster in the Northern Territory, they must broker a future in which Aboriginal rights, self-government, and indigenous culture are secure

Jull, Peter

University of Queensland eSpace

 – The Trouble with Northern Territories – Page 1 – 
Published as Jull P, 2000:  ‘The Trouble with Northern Territories’, Arena 
Magazine, No. 46, April-May 2000, pp 22-23. 
 
Draft for Arena Magazine      March 8, 2000 
 
The Trouble with Northern Territories 
by Peter Jull 
 
The trouble with northern territories is that they always want to be something else.  A 
handful of recent settlers or long-time local grandees want to become founding heads 
of some new order, nation-builders, their homes made heritage sites, and themselves 
looking destiny in the eye from the pedestal of a statue outside an overpriced and 
much debated piece of architecture built to house a popular assembly. 
 
Then there are railways.  In Canada we’ve got five railways – yes, five – once 
running, now rusting, into our far north between the Pacific and Atlantic.  The funny 
thing is that all of them are virtually abandoned – not that loss of traffic, freight, or 
ore to carry slows down northern or mid-northern town visionaries.  No, they then 
arm-twist electioneering governments to put on a coach or two in summer to bring in 
tourists and re-invent the hinterland as a theme park.  It’s okay for German and Iowa 
adventurers now, or pensioners from Toronto, Vancouver, Melbourne, or Sydney – 
bears or crocodiles won’t get you, but may appear out the window for a snapshot.  
These ventures rarely last or pay for themselves, either. 
 
But they contain an important truth.  If we can’t have a real frontier, we can have a 
Disney dreamytime one.  I don’t mean the Dreamtime, of course.  One of the affecting 
moments in the world-wide Millennium telecast of December 31-January 1 was when 
some young Inuit in sealskin parkas on bluffs above Nunavut’s new capital, snow and 
ice all around, switched over to Aborigines performing ancient Northern Territory 
spirit lore at Uluru.  The Aboriginal Dreamtime is real, deep, multi-faceted, amazing.  
I don’t know any visitors from North America or Europe who aren’t awed to silence 
by the rock art and ancient stories of the indigenous people, or serious visitors from 
New Zealand or Southern Australia, either.  They know culture when they see it. 
 
No, I mean the theme park kitsch which seems to inspire hinterland city fathers.  For 
instance, it pained me as one correctly labelled ‘child of war dead’ in Ottawa files to 
see the use of brown photos, TV promotions, and virtual ‘celebration’ of the Japanese 
bombing of Darwin to promote Northern Territory tourism in 1992.  One day I found 
my downtown Darwin bank sandbagged, with tellers decked out as frontline nurses, 
accountants with steel helmets and fatigues, and even a machine-gun nest.  Painful 
absurdity, surely. 
 
This compulsion seems in-built.  The best account is Daniel Boorstin’s The 
Americans:  the National Experience where he describes the fierce competition for 
rail link, hotel, university, whatever, to make some bit of land beyond the Mississippi 
a great city.  Sometimes the would-be dads of new Civilization – that’s with a capital 
C and a ‘z’ – had to move on and try several times.  If you have endured the ceaseless 
patter of development politics in Darwin, you’ve heard it all.  Governments nearly 
falling over their hotel ventures, and always the Alice-Darwin railway for distraction 
at election time.  One premier used to argue that other cities in Australia of a million 
 – The Trouble with Northern Territories – Page 2 – 
or more inhabitants had once been the mere size of Darwin.  The white man’s frontier 
isn’t meant to be logical – it’s a gush, a rush. 
 
Not every national resident will be glad to play for an unrepresentative few to play 
cock of the walk in a large territory which demands or denies the rights of the 50,000-
year cultures whose home it is.  Northern ‘governments’, having small tax base, 
largely share out national fiscal transfers.  As a Northwest Territories conflict of 
interest inquiry recently found, it’s amazing what the boys around the cabinet table 
can get up to with someone else’s money, and the habits of entitlement they can begin 
to feel, the sense of rightful ownership.  However, it may be worth it to certain 
rationalist ideologues to keep the place firmly in the hands of a few small business 
people.  It’s not heroic – no Khyber Pass or Khartoum here – but neither is our 
government in Canberra, and conquest is conquest, under whatever guise. 
 
The Northern Territory is a very postmodern frontier.  Whatever innocents in South-
East Australia may think about rough diamonds, white Darwin is all leafy suburbs, 
fine dining, and wide roads ideal for the next post-cyclone or post-bombing 
evacuation.  Alice Springs is a long boulevard of classy motels and a multi-national 
English dialect spoken by the backpacker young sharing around T-shirts, money-
saving hints, sun lotion, and their gene pool.  It could be Banff, Killarney, or 
Amsterdam.  Cloncurry, Queensland, on the other hand, seemed to me like 
Yellowknife – even the same size – before that tough little mining town built on 
ancient rock, a jump-off spot for every sort of mineral and development fantasy, and 
supply centre for indigenous locals and white prospectors or trappers, became a high-
rise capital with older developers mixing uneasily but profiting from Baby Boom 
officials and newcomers making the place home and a new non-racist society. 
 
The recent furore over Northern Territory ‘justice’, political maturity, political rights, 
and the treatment of Aborigines is impressive.  Australians have recognised that it is a 
national issue and a national problem for national solution.  Nor is it novel.  As 
pointed out in ‘The Northern Territory Future’, Arena Magazine, No. 37 (Oct-Nov 
1998), debate and workable accommodation on the shape, status, and reconciliation 
of indigenous land and sea use and cultural imperatives in such regions are found in 
the political practice of Australia’s best friends abroad. 
 
There is even a good starting-point in the NT for statesmanship.  Neither the white-
dominated NT government nor the Aboriginal peoples accept the existing political 
structure, and many question its legitimacy.  There is wide room for negotiation of 
something new, something appropriate, something in tune with contemporary 
Australian values.  However, the NT governing white élite do not and will not accept 
the legitimacy of Aboriginal occupation, culture, rights to make decisions or shape the 
NT future, let alone share power.  On the contrary, the Aborigines are seen as a 
hindrance – except when performing for tourists – and their lands and seas as a source 
of wealth which should properly belong to the whites.  Whites mouth the pieties of 
majoritarian liberal democracy and what can a weak-kneed prime minister do? 
 
Plenty, in fact, but Howard is not your man.  A wonderful picture of Malcolm Fraser 
as prime minister looking unconvinced over the head of an eager suppliant NT 
premier Everingham is the cover of a fine short book on federal-NT relations.  Even 
his worst enemies agreed that Everingham had brains.  Another premier, Hatton, had 
 – The Trouble with Northern Territories – Page 3 – 
decency and brains, but like the present man – apparently not personally vicious, 
either – the party caucus and party formula brought him into line.  That line is to use 
Aborigines and their despair and disadvantage as an electoral asset. 
 
Living in the NT one found a national Liberal leader who was no racist and had 
moved in urbane academic and international circles come (or sent) north to sit at the 
feet of NT white notables to ‘learn’ about Aboriginal relations.  A Labor premier who 
had promised indigenous reform and delivered little in his state came, too, and with 
less shame.  Later we read in the press and post-election accounts that the 1996 
election saw Howard drawing heavily on NT electoral styles, and now he has made a 
discredited former NT premier the national Liberal party president. 
 
Coriolis effect?  In the northern hemisphere national parties and political leaders make 
sure that their hinterlands don’t disgrace their cause or their country.  Whatever Gro 
Harlem Brundtland did to the bad old Labor barons of North Norway, it worked for 
nearly 20 years, and as soon as she was gone they came out from under their rocks 
and are in full racist rant about Sami rights.  She had also shut down the Sami rights 
debate on the promise of an expert commission to deal fairly.  It did, at first, but its 
charismatic chairman became chief justice and things have fallen apart since.  His was 
the one case which comes to mind where charisma alone worked wonders.  Carsten 
Smith took a fractious large committee of interest group spokespersons, with only two 
or three Sami, and by sheer patience and goodness brought them to accept a national 
constitutional amendment recognising Sami rights and a national Sami-elected 
parliament both to develop and to advise on indigenous policy.  These are in place. 
 
The Swedish Sami parliament had an interesting twist.  The King came to read his 
speech at the 1993 opening, the Queen was outfitted in Sami attire, and then a Sami 
leader read a Statement of Distrust.  Distrust of the Sami affairs minister, distrust of 
the government, etc.  Perhaps the Reconciliation council has considered the idea?  Or 
a Statement of Disgust? 
 
Recent Finnish governments and the Swedes have been bemused and baffled by 
indigenous rights reform and the antics of northern non-Sami, but the issues will not 
go away and the United Nations has been brought into the debate.  [E.g., through ILO 
169 interpretations in several Sami land rights cases.]  In Greenland the Danish 
authorities pushed aside divide-and-rule proposals for a fragmented country of 
municipal barons and opted for a sensible coherent national unity which has worked 
well since 1979 under successive all-Inuit governments. 
 
In Washington both Congress and the White House have at various times had to 
clobber or ‘guide’ their more excitable partisans and others in outlying regions, 
especially Alaska.  Alaskan 1950s statehood was all about riches for the white man – 
cloaked as usual in the alleged God-given right to do what one liked while ignoring or 
controlling ‘the natives’.  Washington has clumsily but firmly made sure that 
America’s brutal 19th century frontier history did not simply repeat itself and 
legislated indigenous rights. 
 
In Canada, northern provincehood movements were off and running in the two 
northern territories when Ottawa finally recognised that ‘provincehood’ (like NT 
‘statehood’) meant for whites approximately what ‘land rights’ meant for indigenous 
 – The Trouble with Northern Territories – Page 4 – 
peoples.  It was a basic concept but at its core was the demand of peoples to exercise 
and maintain their cultures on lands and coasts with their basic rights secured, 
including rights to govern themselves and their territory.  This has now been 
negotiated or is nearing completion with somewhat different outcomes in each of the 
Yukon, Northwest Territories (NWT), and Nunavut.  Two territories became three, 
the ‘unity’ of the NWT always more a cartographic fiction than a social or political 
fact until the east became Nunavut.  Indeed, Australian and Canadian boundaries in 
general little reflect indigenous territories and have caused much hardship as a result. 
 
Section 121 of the Australian Constitution requires that federal Parliament create new 
states on appropriate terms and conditions.  The terms appropriate in the year 2000 
are very different from the 1890s fashions dressed up for the 1901 Constitution, but 
the NT government want us all to buy the old model. 
 
The issue of popular vote, whether in mandatory sentencing to lock up blacks or to 
hand the future of the NT to the white majority present on voting day – a population 
which flows in and out ceaselessly while a few clever and not-so-clever local whites 
control the political apparatus for a vast area – is a red herring.  We have courts and 
careful processes rather than lynch mobs.  We have leaders – or we did in times past – 
who interpret, explain, lead debate, and lead by moral example so that the excitable 
demos do not go running off a cliff every time they are exercised about the latest 
crime or rumour or exposé – or spectacular interpretation of biblical prophecy.  Of 
course, the 17th century saw positive and progressive government measures taken 
enthusiastically in expectation of the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, but 
contemporary populism, as a reading of Queensland parliamentary debates or 
countless internet sites reveals, seems more a psychological than political problem. 
 
The Northern Territory is known throughout the world as what it is, an Aboriginal 
region of peoples and cultures with diverse art forms both modern and ancient.  Like 
all sparsely settled regions there is also another population brought in for service 
industry, administration, trade, curiosity, escape, and various good works.  A little 
statesmanship could see an admirable political and constitutional outcome.  I have 
known some of the NT indigenous leaders and their back-up people, and I know they 
have what it takes to achieve political reconciliation – or constitutional reform as it 
may better be called – in which all Australians can take pride.  For 15 years I have 
scrutinised the words and positions of NT governments and the words of the present 
Prime Minister on indigenous matters, and I know that they do not and will not. 
 
If ever there was a time for reasonable persons – whether Liberal, National, Labor, 
Democrat, Green, and even, God help us, Country Liberal Party! – to shape events, it 
is in the matter of the NT.  If Australians do not wish a predictable international race 
relations disaster they must broker a Northern Territory future in which Aboriginal 
rights, self-government, and culture are secure – a future for Aborigines no less than 
theme park politicians who jape, mock, and mow! 
 
*** 
 
Peter Jull is Adjunct Associate Professor, Dept. of Government, University of 
Queensland, and a survivor, negotiator, former official, and observer of First World 
northern territories and their politically legitimate successors. 


The Trouble with Northern Territories

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