As Djiniyini Gondarra implies, the Yolngu and other Aboriginal peoples have been given little choice whether or not to interact with white Australia. Using interviews, historical footage, and news reports, Our Generation shows how the gains of the Aboriginal civil rights movement of the 1970s were brutally overturned by the Northern Territory Emergency Response, often known as the “Northern Territory Intervention.”

Under the Intervention, 73 indigenous communities in the Northern Territory were taken over by the Australian army, police, and government officials. Collective control over Aboriginal lands – only handed back to indigenous peoples in 1976 – was revoked, community assets frozen, and indigenous-run social programmes closed down. For individuals ‘income quarantining,’ or compulsory government income management, was imposed.

The Intervention was initially justified with a report, Little Children Are Sacred, which alleges that child abuse was rife in Aboriginal communities. Mal Brough, minister for Family, Community Services & Indigenous Affairs at the start of the Intervention, claimed that "each and every day, children are being abused. We need strong powers so that we are not weighed down by unnecessary red tape and talk-fests.” He claimed that ‘every one’ of the communities targeted had ‘paedophiles’ lurking within it. Prime Minister John Howard launched the Intervention with evocations of “The nightmare of violence, abuse and neglect engulfing remote indigenous settlements... [is] Australia’s own hurricane Katrina – an emergency that demands urgent action, not more consultation.”

There is no doubt that poverty, exclusion, and 250 years of exploitation and oppression have brought serious social issues to Aboriginal communities - including child neglect, domestic violence, and substance abuse. Since British colonisers started to establish themselves in the late 18th century, Aboriginal people have been driven from their lands and excluded from economic and political life. The 1976 Land Rights Act recognised some Aboriginal claims, but Australia remains the only country in the British Commonwealth never to have signed a treaty with its indigenous peoples. Of the 250 indigenous languages that existed at the time of white settlement, fewer than half remain, and the Australian government is cutting back on indigenous-language teaching in schools.

According to many commentators, the Intervention has not addressed the social problems it claims to address. Despite assertions that an ‘emergency’ response was needed to tackle child abuse, rehabilitation programmes for abused children were not put in place. Three major police investigations failed to back up allegations that Aboriginal children are systematically abused in their communities. Cases involving white paedophiles targeting Aboriginal girls, as in the Northern Territory town of Elliot, attracted less attention. Of the recommendations found in Little Children Are Sacred, all but two were ignored. Though the report stresses that any actions had to be preceded by proper consultation with indigenous communities, this was also ignored.

A month into the Intervention, University of Sydney academic Jane Simpson wrote that volunteer doctors had been parachuted into seized communities “with only a mud-map, under the command of a taskforce which has no member professionally trained to work with sexual abuse victims. Without advice from Indigenous doctors or people who know about Indigenous health interventions, sex abuse or Indigenous children. Without paying attention to the advice of Pat Anderson and Rex Wild, the authors of the report,” Little Children Are Sacred.

The Australian Labor Party suggested to Aboriginal leaders that it would revise the policy if it gained power in the 2007 elections. Though Labor leader Kevin Rudd, elected in November 2007, raised hopes when he issued the first proper apology by Australian officialdom for human rights abuses over the previous 250 years, Labor refused to roll back the Intervention. The focus shifted from preventing child abuse to addressing needs such as housing. But, as Our Generation points out, by June 2010 only 11 new houses had been built for Aboriginal residents of seized communities while 56 had been built for non-indigenous workers brought in by the state.

Larissa Behrendt, a law professor at University of Technology, Sydney details in a March 2011 speech how indigenous peoples are systematically sidelined in debates about their futures. Income quarantining, says Behrendt, is just one example of Australian government policies that disenfranchise indigenous Australians.

Quarantining was applied to all welfare recipients in the 73 communities targeted by the Intervention – including people on disability or veterans’ allowances who had no children. As Behrendt points out, this saw older people who had managed their household finances for decades having 50% of their expenditure governed by the state. Since quarantining was introduced, says Behrendt, childhood malnutrition and school truanting – the problems which welfare rationing was supposed to tackle – have both increased.

By contrast, says Behrendt, actions which cost far less money, but which indigenous communities have developed out of their own experiences, are routinely ignored by the federal government. She cites successful local initiatives, including buses that pick up substance abusers and take them to safe drying-out spots, or breakfast and lunch clubs that attract children from the most troubled homes into school. When indigenous people are given genuine autonomy, says Behrendt, they are perfectly able to run their own affairs.

According to the makers of Our Generation, mining has a lot to do with the Northern Territory Intervention. Australia has 23% of the world’s known uranium deposits. With increasing concern over climate-change, many have looked to nuclear power. In March 2011, before the Japanese earthquake raised new fears about nuclear safety, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd toured Arabian Gulf countries touting Australian uranium. The Northern Territory has major deposits of other minerals, including aluminum and coal, many of them on Aboriginal lands. Since the Intervention, the Territory’s government has allocated AU$14.4 million to expanding its mining industry.

As Our Generation points out, the Intervention was brought into effect as a hurried measure six months after indigenous peoples, include the Yolngu, rejected Liberal offers to build houses in return for 99 year leases on tribal lands. Under Labor schemes, communities have been offered homes in exchange for 40 year leases. Thus, the Intervention, has wrested indigenous land from its owners by force and bribed indigenous communities to barter their rights for basic amenities.

Our Generation shows shocking footage of vast opencast mines gouging out the Northern Territory landscape. As environmentalists Dave Sweeney and Mark Wakeham write of one uranium mine in the Kakadu area of the Northern Territory, “Since the discovery of uranium in 1971, the word Jabiluka has meant conflict over resources.” In May 2010, Ranger - a uranium mine in the Kakadu which local indigenous people resisted since the 1970s - released large quantities of radioactive water into ecologically sensitive wetlands. And in late 2010, controversy emerged over attempts by local officials and mining giant Rio Tinto Alcan to sideline independent indigenous voices during negotiations to re-sign leases for the Nabalco bauxite mine.

It is not surprising that, to the Yolngu, the seizures of their land, the bribes to get them to hand over control of more land, and the attempts to shift them from outstations are not about protecting children or building new homes. They are about getting access to mineral wealth and sweeping indigenous people out of the way in order to do so.

About the Author:
Sarah Irving is a freelance writer specializing in social and environmental issues and the Middle East. Her features have been published in the Guardian Online, the New Internationalist, and Electronic Intifada, among others. Sarah is co-author of Gaza: Beneath the Bombs (Pluto, 2010) and her biography of Palestinian fighter Leila Khaled is due for publication in 2011.