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Commentary :: Civil Liberties & Human Rights : Environment : Indigenous Issues & Reconciliation

Everything is Not Fine and Dandy in Port Augusta

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by Rig
Email: sievx01 (nospam) yahoo.com.au (unverified!)

09 Jun 2005

The Baxter immigration detention centre is an obvious blight on the image of this town, however there is a more deep-seated conflict. This is the intensification of policing operations aimed at the town’s Aboriginal population and the underlying racist sentiment that drives it.

In February of this year a STAR force team was used against Aboriginal people congregating on an area of foreshore. The STAR force team was deployed at the request of the Local Council and police. The Council cited serious public order issues as the reason for this aggressive action, however in the context of Port Augusta’s history of white settlement and Aboriginal dispossession, this seemed like yet another act in a long line of racially motivated abuses by the white land-owning establishment

PORT AUGUSTA

Yuppie infestation at Council designation = manifestation of cancerous, Hansonist racism.

A couple of weeks ago I drove up to Port Augusta, taking with me a Frenchman and a guy from Rockhampton. These two were returning for court appearances resulting from their arrests at the recent Baxter detention centre protests. I too had attended these protests (as I had in 2003), expressing my disgust at a system of governance that coldly and rationally controls bodies and divides our common humanity. I was also playing a part, I suppose, in a cultural challenge to that dominant majoritarian mode of thinking that would have us believe everything is fine and dandy.

In fact everything is not fine and dandy in Port Augusta. The Baxter immigration detention centre is an obvious blight on the image of this town, however I would like to address a more deep-seated conflict. This is the intensification of policing operations aimed at the town’s Aboriginal population and the underlying racist sentiment that drives it.

In February of this year a STAR force team was used against Aboriginal people congregating on an area of foreshore. The STAR force team was deployed at the request of the Local Council and police. The Council cited serious public order issues as the reason for this aggressive action, however in the context of Port Augusta’s history of white settlement and Aboriginal dispossession, this seemed like yet another act in a long line of racially motivated abuses by the white land-owning establishment.

While in Pt Augusta I took the time to meet with Noelene Ryan-Lester, an Adnyamathanha woman and broadcaster on Umeewarra Media and the National Indigenous Radio. Noelene is currently involved with a local anti-racism group called RETORT (Residents Embracing Tolerance Over Racism Together). RETORT has run a series of free BBQs for what Noelene calls the ‘bridge community’, Aboriginal people (many from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara lands) who congregate during the hot summer months on a grassy area of foreshore near the Pt Augusta bridge. This migration has occurred since pre-European invasion and occupation of the lands where Pt Augusta is now situated.

Noelene told me that the foreshore has recently become a lightening rod for racial conflict in the town after the council approved an apartment and marina redevelopment. Coinciding with this privatisation of public space has been an intensification of ‘law and order’ campaigns by the Council, or more specifically, the increased policing of the Aboriginal population. Presumably to the Council large numbers of Aboriginal people holidaying by the seaside do not create a favourable investment climate.

The deployment of the STAR force team was announced at a February meeting called by the SA Police (SAPOL). This meeting included representatives from the Attorney General’s Department, the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement (ALRM), Congress Church, Davenport Community Council, a number of Aboriginal service providers, Port Augusta City Council and local Elders. Attendees were informed in what has been described as ‘a dictatorial tone’ (Marvyn McKenzie in Transcontinental, 16 March 2005) that the STAR force would be ‘targeting people breaching their bail conditions’ and those arrested ‘will be bailed to their home addresses’ (Hansard, 16 Feb 2005). The obvious objection to this move being that many of those arrested live in remote Northern communities, some hundreds of km away, so these bail conditions seem less about guaranteeing court attendance and more about running trouble makers out of town.

This was undoubtedly the objective on the minds of Council attendees when they, in the course of the meeting, allegedly offered free transport to remove offenders (Hansard, 16 Feb 2005), and made provocative remarks such as ‘the STAR force will come through like the Tsunami and clean up the rubbish’.

As a result of this meeting and the subsequent policing operation the ALRM lodged a complaint against the Port Augusta City Council in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission. The ALRM is also calling on all levels of government to ensure that the annual migration of Aboriginal people from the APY lands continues (ABC News Online, 21 March 2005).

RETORT and the Aboriginal community have responded to the racist overtures of the Council by gathering in greater numbers at the foreshore, despite an increasing number of arrests. Amongst those arrested has been a local Minister with the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress for refusing to move on when instructed.

The Council has dressed its foreshore-whitening program in the guise of a ‘say no to anti-social behaviour’ campaign. The City Manager John Stephens and Mayor Joy Baluch going so far as to pose for publicity photos in t-shirts emblazoned with the campaign slogan (see Port Augusta Transcontinental, 30 March 2005). The Council has denied that its campaign is racist claiming they are the victim of ‘intense and sensational coverage of the issue’ by the media. The Council maintains its campaign ‘is not about racism, but about anti-social behaviour including violence, vandalism, street crime and intimidating behaviour’ (Transcontinental, 30 March 2005). The Council claims it does not have the resources to accommodate the increasing influx of people from the APY lands over the summer months but denies that the migration has historically occurred since pre-European invasion. Mayor Joy Baluch explains:

‘This migration is being forced as a result of a lack of services being delivered in the lands on that particular time. And you can’t tell me that when it’s hot up there, it’s cool down here and they migrate down here to the cool waters. They come down here to drink.’ (Living Black, SBS, Series 3: Episode 6, 23 May 2005)

The Council claims that it is now in the process of developing a plan to work with administrators and representatives in the APY lands and Port Augusta to tackle the issues arising from the annual migration. This will include ‘creating a camping area for transient Aborigines, forming partnerships with communities in the far north, and restricting alcohol access’ (ABC News Online, 13 April 2005). While it is unclear what degree of good faith the Council has in these negotiations, it is hard not to be cynical about their motives. The Council seems determined to protect the interests of the foreshore developers, hence one wonders whether the proposed camping ground will be situated out of town, out of sight, out of mind. The motives of the Council may well be to force as many APY people to remain on their lands as possible through some form of ‘mutual responsibility’ agreement. Either way the Council will wield a disproportionate amount of power in negotiations given the virtual destruction of Aboriginal political representation post abolition of ATSIC.

The Council may claim that its campaign is not racist however a number of questionable and culturally offensive actions over the past few years place this claim seriously under doubt:

- In January of 2002 Port Augusta Council and SAPOL were subject to national media coverage for an aggressively enforced youth curfew that disproportionately targeted Aboriginal teenagers (ABC News Online, 11 January 2002).

- In February of the same year the Council faced demands for an apology after it refused to allow the Aboriginal community permission to fly their flag for three hours during NAIDOC week (ABC News Online, 1 February 2005).
- In December of 2002 the Council attempted to enforce a citywide dry zone without any consultation with the Aboriginal community (ABC News Online, 12 December 2002).

- A recently implemented ‘Truancy Patrol’ initiative. Truancy patrol posters were printed for shop owners to place in their stores to alert the children, and their guardians, that police would be called if school-aged youths enter the store unsupervised during school hours. The police then detain the youth and return them to their school or home address. Like the night curfew, this initiative has been disproportionately employed on Aboriginal people.

When discussing the actions of Port Augusta City Council, it is important to note that its policies and actions are not developed in isolation from the community. Joy Baluch has been elected Mayor for 24 years and the Council enjoys popular support from the predominantly white majority.

According to Noelene Ryan Lester there is an underlying racist sentiment within the town that drives the Council’s draconian actions. Some of this sentiment is highly visible, such as racist posters, letters to the Editor of the local newspaper arguing the police are too lenient on ‘some sections of the community’, and claims that the word ‘racism…has been abused and used out of context’ (Transcontinental, 16 March 2005). Some residents of the town, not content with institutionalised modes of racism however, have found much more overtly violent and sinister ways to express their prejudice.

Earlier this year Noelene Ryan-Lester’s niece was violently attacked by two white males in what was clearly a racially motivated assault. The men bashed Noelene’s niece until she was unconscious then tied a noose around her neck and left her near the foreshore. Fortunately the girl survived the Klan-like attack. No arrest and no conviction has yet been made despite very clear descriptions being given to police. Noelene argues that this attack occurred because of racial tensions inflamed by the STAR force operation and the bad example it set for community conflict resolution.

The fact that much of the community and local authorities have effectively turned a blind eye to this attack (and more generally to growing authoritarianism towards the Aboriginal community) does little to demonstrate the white majority in Port Augusta have moved away from the kind of settler society sentiment that condoned genocidal impulses within colonial Australia. There are remarkable parallels between the white majority’s language of ‘cleaning up the rubbish’, forced removals and the denial of Aboriginal history, and the kind of language employed by white colonialists in the 18th and 19th Century. In fact, it is difficult not to situate the tyranny of the majority imposed on Port Augusta’s Aboriginal population today within the historical context of white Australians’ popular support for genocidal acts such as massacres, land clearances or the stolen generations.

On a concluding note I would like to turn back to my opening remarks about the Baxter detention centre and briefly draw some parallels between the policing of borders and the policing of Aboriginal people. The policing of borders for immigration purposes involves the control and management of flows of individuals and populations. This has involved a number of rationalist technologies of control such as classifications of who is a ‘legitimate’ resident, exclusion zones, internment camps and deportations. Embedded within the policing of borders has been a whole range of assumptions about rights to land use and occupation.

What first drew me to Port Augusta was a need to publicly protest the inhumanity of this system. The fences and razor wire of Baxter is the very public and tangible signifier of this inhumanity. At the time I approached Baxter and Australia’s policing of its borders as a historical aberration. In fact these technologies of population control are not an aberration in Australia’s history, but rather the inheritance of it. Aboriginal people, in Noelene’s words ‘have been policed their whole life’. The movements of Aboriginal peoples have been subject to control, internment camps and classifications of legitimacy for any given area. The supposed ‘rationalities’ that drove this policing are the same as those employed in the management of immigration controls.

There is unfinished business in Port Augusta and clearly it is in everyone’s interests to resolve issues of racism in an inclusive and open way that does not rely on brutality by the white land owning establishment or sweeping the problem under the rug. I do not have the answer but I have written this article to put a spotlight on the Council and the police in the hope that the racist nature of their activities will face greater scrutiny from the wider community.

Prepared by James F.

This work is in the public domain.

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