In the tranquil countryside of Tasmania, a simmering row is building to an ugly climax.
I get extremely angry about it. I was an Aboriginal and it definitely wasn't fashionable to be
one.
It's just going to cause, well, just so much hatred in the community.
They could be bloodshed. They will be bloodshed, I reckon.
Once schoolchildren were taught that Tasmania's Aborigines were extinct. Now nearly 16,000
Tasmanians say they're indigenous.
If your history doesn't trace back to the five families and it doesn't trace back directly
to the Basterd Islands, we don't exist.
Most of those claiming to be Aboriginal look like white Australians and they're pushing
their case hard.
They're wiping us out as far as our heritage goes. We're being denied who we are. That's
genocide.
It's not credible. There is no historical kind of basis for the numbers that are currently
being claimed.
I mean, how dare they tell us we're not Aboriginal?
At stake is not just people's private identity but millions of dollars of Commonwealth public
funds intended for Aboriginal groups. And not everyone claiming it is black.
What's in it for them?
Money. Money. It's probably trendy too, I suppose, but it's money.
Was there fraud?
Well, yes, there was fraud.
Was there misappropriation of funds?
Indeed there was.
Tonight on Four Corners, who's black, who's not and who's judging?
The poisonous dispute which is splitting Tasmania apart and threatening to spread to the rest
of Australia.
In a dark corner of a library in Hobart, Debbie Oakford is researching her genealogy. It's
part of an ongoing fascination with her ancestry which she traces back to her childhood.
I always had a sense of my own natural ability to be in tune with the land. I used to be
three years old and fall in the creek because I'd be the one that would go and explore with
my brother. But it was when I started asking questions and Mum and Dad probably realised
that it was appropriate to tell me, then they came out and said that I was an Aboriginal
person. I had Aboriginal ancestry.
Debbie Oakford comes from English, Irish and German stock.
Is it more important to you that you're Aboriginal than any of those?
I strongly believe that my identity as an Aboriginal person takes precedence. I think
my German and Irish and English ancestry comes a little bit further down the line.
In common with growing numbers of Tasmanians, she claims a special affinity with the land
which her forebears have inhabited for generations.
Dad used to say, now you kids be careful out there, there's a snake around. And I'd say,
well how do you know that? And he'd obviously say, well I can smell it. And which he still
can and I can now too, smell snakes.
People may discover something that indicates to them that it's possible that they've got
Aboriginal ancestry. Now some people might just put that aside and say, well that's interesting,
but for some other people it's like a conversion. They then convert to being Aboriginal and
along with this comes a lot of notions about spirituality and a special relationship to
the land.
Debbie Oakford traces her family tree back to the 1830s. Like others who are seeking
to prove they're Indigenous, she has a practised, almost obsessive attention to detail.
Debbie what is this book?
This is the original record of the entries of the boys into the Queen's Orphan School.
Her devotion to her genealogy is part of a new phenomenon, the willingness to spend hours
trawling through state archives and parish records if it'll prove the existence of an
Aboriginal ancestor. That ancestor could be eight generations removed.
There's an entry for a Thomas Thompson. He was aged four years of age in 1836. His parents
are unknown but he is entered as a half caste and then he was removed to Flinders Island
in 1847.
And who was Thomas Thompson?
He was an ancestor of mine.
In 1996 Oakford was elected to the Regional Council of ATSIC, the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Commission which hands out funds to Indigenous organisations. But her
claim to be Aboriginal and the claims of ten other ATSIC candidates were challenged in
court. The challenge was backed by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre led by the high profile
activist Michael Mansell. Mansell wants stringent controls on who can vote in Indigenous elections.
If people, white people want to run around and say they're Aborigines or as one person
says they're the keeper of the spirit of the cow pasture meadow tribe then that's entirely
up to them. It's a freedom of speech. But if they want to participate in elections that
are set up for Aboriginal people and only for Aboriginal people then they should be
able to satisfy the criteria that they are in fact Aborigines to participate.
The court case was judged on three federal guidelines. Self identification as an Aboriginal
person, community recognition and family descent all remain contentious. Oakford lost her case
and had to stand down from ATSIC but Justice Merkel's decision that the case against the
other nine couldn't be proved angered Mansell. There is something like 300 odd thousand Aboriginal
people in Australia. If this decision is left to stand then the population of Aborigines
in Australia could climb to two million within twelve months.
All of those who feature in this programme were challenged in court and regard the judgement
as a vindication of their claim to be Aboriginal.
That finding of Justice Merkel's has never ever been appealed or challenged and stands
to this day as far as the Federal Court of Australia is concerned. But then you have
the likes of Michael Mansell who don't want to accept that.
Even Cassandra Pybus says Justice Merkel's ruling didn't help solve the question of Aboriginal
identity.
It was very damaging. I could see that he did not want to make a judgement that would
in any way impact on people who were stolen from their families and could not in fact
identify their ancestry. But at the same time he basically says you can define yourself
as being Aboriginal if you believe it to be true. And I think that has opened the way
to, as I say, anybody can call themselves Aboriginal and get away with it.
In fact during the last 15 years the number of Tasmanians identifying themselves as Aboriginal
has more than doubled to 15,700.
This year a new Indigenous role has been set up. However just 1,300 have applied to join
it. All but 300 have been challenged by others. In a pilot scheme which could be repeated
around Australia a panel has been appointed to consider those challenges. Oakford is one
of those who's having to justify her ancestry.
I don't think there's a lot of people out there that are very comfortable with this
process. They ask the question why that they should have to go through this process to
say who they are.
Tasmania is now the focus for a growing national debate about Indigenous identity.
The arguments are being played out in what is culturally the least Aboriginal state in
the country. It's a highly urbanised community with no remaining Indigenous language or traditional
ceremonies.
There's a problem in Tasmania because what constitutes Tasmanian Aboriginal culture given
that it was pretty well destroyed.
The thorny issue of identity and what now constitutes Aboriginality has its roots in
Tasmania's history. After the European settlers arrived a protracted war of attrition ensued.
The Aborigines fought a fierce guerrilla campaign for their land. Hundreds were killed in the
brutal Black War.
Was one of the clearest cases of genocide that we know of and recognised as such at
the time. There were a handful of Aboriginal people who escaped that process and it is
from them that the current Aboriginal community is descended.
In 1833 an agreement was reached with the Aboriginal fighters already depleted by hunger
and sickness to leave the mainland and be settled on Flinders Island in Bass Strait.
Life manna Lugana was one of those who went. Many now see him as their ancestor.
He was one of the most important Aboriginal leaders in Tasmania. A clever man, a great
warrior. His daughters became the consorts if you like of sealers on the Bass Strait
Islands. So yes, from those daughters a great many people are descended.
The settlement on Flinders Island was a catastrophe. Most of the Aborigines died, struck down
by tuberculosis and other diseases. Manna Lugana died of pneumonia.
In 1847 the survivors were taken back to mainland Tasmania. In 1876 the legendary Traganini died.
She was seen as the last of her race.
There were of course many people who were of Aboriginal descent living on the Bass Strait
Islands and this was known at the time but they were seen as being something different.
They were seen as half-castes. So there was that view that she was the last of the tribe.
Eminent historians have long taken the view that Tasmania's core surviving Aboriginal
community comes from the Bass Strait, islands like Flinders and Cape Baran.
The main group were Tasmanian Aboriginal women with European men but there were also a few
Tasmanian Aborigines and probably some Māoris and other people because the sealing industry
which basically was where this community originally came from was one of those very mixed sea-based
communities that you had all across the Pacific.
Two such women who married European men were Dolly Dalrymple and this woman Fanny Cochrane-Smith.
They were related to the Bass Strait people but came to the mainland and married Europeans
and in both cases had large families. So in a sense those two lines are offshoots of the
Bass Strait communities.
I'm not sure how old I am but that's me there.
A hundred years after the Aborigines were removed from Flinders, Gary Maynard was forcibly
removed from Cape Baran Island and brought back over to northern Tasmania. The memory
is still painfully vivid.
I was taken by the welfare department from the island without notice in October 1959.
I was taken out of the classroom, flown off the island to Launceston and I was placed
with a family in Launceston.
Gary Maynard belongs to one of the handful of families which are almost universally accepted
as having Aboriginal heritage.
The grassroots are called grassroots families as I mentioned. We can all trace our ancestry
back to his daughters. That's my grandfather.
What was his name?
His name was George William Everett Maynard and my grandmother was Florence Clara. She
was formerly a mansel. So you probably understand the sort of interrelationships of all the
families on the island.
These people are all intermarried with one another. They're all related to one another.
They all know who they're descended from. This is a community that's very coherent and
that has been together as a community since the early 19th century.
Who are the Maynard families who are undeniably Aboriginal?
Well, Mansel, Maynard, Everett and one or two others.
One of the tribes that we come from, the Funurong people, when they used to go walk
about inland, they used to go into the estuaries there. They used to make big cages. They
used to build these big traps and they'd get all the shellfish, wheriners, muttonfish,
and they'd put them in those traps and they'd go walk about for how many months and when
they'd come back they had no problem with food because you know what happened? They'd
all mulled the fire down.
Now that looks like a pretty good feed to me.
Gary Maynard's cousins Grant, Doug and Luke also moved away from their first home on Cape
Barren Island.
It was always the thing that my mum and dad were going to do because it was better housing,
electricity, running water, employment, permanent employment for my dad, better education for
us.
We then grew up in this town called Penguin where we were educated and I can honestly
say that we were the first black family Aborigines in the north west coast of Penguin and where
we were educated.
The Maynard brothers knew what it felt like to be different at school.
The first day was all these kids coming out and sort of laughing and going oh look at
the gollywogs, look at the niggers and all this sort of type stuff and it sort of didn't
worry Luke and I because we didn't even know what the words meant but the girl, the young
girl that we was with and she must have been about 13 at the time, she got really upset,
started crying.
And then to have these other kids later on in life, fair skinned kids, saying that they're
Aboriginal.
When I was growing up with them and playing sport with them, they were the same kids who
called them e-bag names.
Youthful experiences like these bonded families and helped politicise their core Aboriginal
community.
They identified with the land rights movement of the 70s and took up radical protest.
I think the state government have got to look at the views of Aboriginal people in relation
to the solutions.
Michael Mansell was the dominant voice of the time.
Meek has been the focal point for the resurrection of Aboriginal people in Tasmania.
He's the one that stood up there, he's the one that's been howled at and picked on.
Michael is the bloke that's actually put the Tasmanian Aboriginal issues on the world map.
Mansell courted the media by pulling stunts like his trip to Libya with his own Aboriginal
passport.
For one of his companions on that trip, Jim Everett, they were heady days.
It was a really exciting time, high adrenaline running time.
We were to ourselves so confident that we were unbeatable and the kinds of things that
we were aiming for were always achievable.
So working right up to the very end of the 80s, we were dragging the government behind
us.
In 1972, Mansell helped set up the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre or TAC.
After a century in which Tasmanians had been taught that the Aborigines died out with Traganini,
the TAC claimed a long list of Indigenous members.
I think to some extent they've shot themselves in the foot by virtue of accepting almost
every Tom, Dick or Harry who walked through the door.
And I believe that the reason for doing that was to get the numbers to be able to apply
for and receive funding from the Commonwealth Government.
The TAC grew and prospered.
With the advent of ATSIC in 1990, it no longer held the stage.
Now it had to compete for funding with an array of other Aboriginal groups.
The Mansell camp saw ATSIC representing white domination.
They get hostile with ATSIC and sometimes very understandably that ATSIC to me sometimes
tries to stand over community organisations and it's like a tug of war sometimes.
The TAC now took a purist line.
It decided some using its services were not Aboriginal after all.
Many people who were accepted by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre and indeed some people had
been employed at the organisation received letters in the mail to say that they were
no longer accepted as being members of the TAC and they had been a part of that organisation
for a number of years.
In 1999 Michael Mansell, then the Centre's legal manager, wrote an internal memo on applications
for legal aid.
He said there were those whose assertion of Aboriginal descent cannot be substantiated.
He exempted several families, including his own, from proving their ancestry because they
were undisputedly of Aboriginal descent.
I was brought up as a state ward that commenced when I was three months old.
I was taken from my mother as an Aboriginal person.
Mansell's contention that Tasmania's real Aborigines come from a small group of families
is disputed.
John Coleman says his black ancestors missed the tragic migration to Flinders Island and
survived among white Tasmanians.
My mother vanished without trace in 1946.
She comes from the Dover Hastings area.
I was taken from my mother as an Aboriginal person and was made a ward of the state and
that's the way I grew up.
I mean how dare they tell us we're not Aboriginal?
Individual cases like Coleman's are hard to judge.
Six years ago this group formed a new community called Lyaputa or Little River People.
Kay MacPherson is their spokesperson.
According to her, any Aborigine who isn't a Bass Strait Islander can join them.
If your history doesn't trace back to the five families and it doesn't trace back directly
to the Bass Strait Islands, we don't exist.
Some Lyaputa members say they're descended from an entire tribe of Aborigines who lived
undiscovered by settlers during and after the Black War.
They claim their ancestors were Aborigines who eventually walked unheralded from the
Huon forests.
I think it's hard to imagine that it would go unrecorded.
I know there are one or two scraps of evidence.
It is not impossible.
I certainly can't establish that there was no such tribe, but had there been, given the
interest in the Aboriginal question, there would have been many more reports.
People would have gone looking for them.
There's no question about that.
Was there a community of Aborigines there?
There certainly was not.
What happened in the Huon Valley was that there was a track, and it still exists on certain maps,
that went from the Aboriginal settlement here at Oyster Cove through to the Huon, where
the Aboriginal people who were at Oyster Cove were allowed to go hunting.
And they went up there with their dogs and so forth.
And naturally they were seen by people in the Huon.
Let's just address one specific bone of contention, I think, between yourself and Cassandra Pibas,
which is the existence of a hidden, if you like, Aboriginal tribe in the Huon Valley.
Now, she says it just didn't exist.
There's no evidence of that.
What is the evidence?
That's gorgeous.
I think that epitomises her as a historian.
It's very well documented.
It's in the original journals of Judd.
The fact that the Huon Valley was non-enterable until 1852, because you couldn't penetrate
through the bush, in 1853 the Aboriginal people turned up on Judd's farm.
Judd had a relationship with the people there for a number of years.
They weren't a hidden Aboriginal people at all.
Macpherson describes herself as an historical geographer.
She boasts a colourful array of ancestors, a free settler and a convict from the First
Tasmanian fleet, Irish warrior chieftains, even a Catholic archbishop.
She admits she can't prove her Aboriginal ancestry and says family photographs and parish
records which might have provided the hard evidence were burned.
Geographically, where do you trace your own Aboriginal ancestry?
I've never really thought about it.
No, that's wrong.
I can show you on a map, but it's really hard to verbalise.
The area would be through New Norfolk, up through the Midlands, not the Midlands so
much as...
Well, this is going to look really bad on Talina.
It's interesting because it's really hard.
It's New Norfolk area and that goes through to the East Coast, but it also incorporated
part of the Hewan, but I only associate my ancestry with the Derwent Valley, not the
Hewan Valley.
You're a very controversial figure here in Tasmania.
Can you understand your critics being cynical about your claims to being Aboriginal when
you haven't been able to produce the documentary evidence to back it up?
That's their opinion and they're entitled to their opinion, but I know my family history
and when it's all boiled down, they can't trace their family history back either.
If they want to use white people's theories on their Aboriginality, that's fine.
Despite the lack of evidence for her ancestry, Macpherson is widely regarded as one of Tasmania's
foremost Aboriginal commentators.
She's also a self-styled elder of Lyaputa.
John Coleman, Lyaputa's chairman, carried out a smoking ceremony to initiate her, but
his memory of it differs from hers.
She was initiated as an Aboriginal woman to show her acceptance of herself as an Aboriginal
person.
She never underwent the smoking ceremony as a child.
She decided that she would like to have the smoking ceremony performed and we did so under
those terms.
How did you become an Aboriginal elder?
I was initiated to be an elder because I was too young and I didn't have any grandchildren
and I was initiated because of my knowledge.
Can you be initiated as an elder?
Is that possible?
Not to my knowledge.
I'm not saying that you can't be, but if you can be, I don't know about it.
The reason I ask you this is because when we spoke to Kay Macpherson she told us that
she'd been initiated as an elder, but clearly that wasn't the case.
Definitely not and I don't know how Kay could have said that, I really don't because that's
not the case.
It could never be.
Well, not to my knowledge anyway, I couldn't do that.
I think that Kay is playing with the fairies a bit.
It's embarrassing to us.
Now whether she's Aboriginal or not, I'm not prepared to say because I don't really know,
but she certainly is not acting in a way that represents either our tribal cultural images
or activities or beliefs.
Question marks over Lyaputa haven't stopped them from applying for funding.
Two years ago they asked for over $800,000 for new projects and were turned down.
Kay Macpherson subsists on Abstudy, which she'll lose if she fails to get on the Indigenous
electoral roll.
What will happen if your application is knocked back?
Well, it's going to be knocked back, we all know this.
If people want to identify in a particular way, I think that's entirely up to them and
I don't think it's anyone else's business.
However, when that identity becomes the basis for a claim on the rest of us, that is on
the state or on the taxpayer, we all have to be concerned and that seems to me to be
the difference.
And that's where unfortunately people are asked to prove their identity.
Doug Maynard is bitter about what he sees as the headlong rush to jump on the funding
bandwagon.
My family, my brothers, says we was out of Aboriginal on the North West Coast and now
in Penguin there's a community of 260 Aboriginal descendants, people that we went to school
with, people that I fought against, you know, probably broke a couple of noses, I don't
know, but they're Aborigines now, you know, like descendants I should say, Aboriginal
descendants and they get, you know, they are the ones that are in the jobs, setting up
organisations because of their education, they're the ones doing the policies that affect
my life.
You resent it?
My word I do, my word I do, you know, because what's happening to us is a flow on, it's
happening, it'll go right up the top end, eventually it's happening right around our
country but down here it's like, you know, it's like, I've always said, it's as plain
as the nose on your face.
Tasmania's Aboriginal groups receive six and a half million dollars a year in funding.
One and a half million goes to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre.
The TAC's accounts show substantial amounts of cash in the bank and its assets include
more than a million dollars worth of motor vehicles.
When you're talking about millions of dollars sitting in bank accounts earning interest,
it does raise some queries I think.
While the TAC gets the lion's share of cash, money goes to a plethora of other groups and
salaried officials. John Clark is regional chairman of ATSIC, the body which decides
how much funding each Aboriginal group gets. The Post pays him $78,000 a year.
Clark's ancestry was questioned in the 1997 court case but he says his father told him
he was Aboriginal when he was 21.
What did he tell you?
That we were Aboriginal.
Yeah, that was like, I mean, and my grandmother also informed me over a period of time of
our Aboriginal heritage.
But you've been challenged about that repeatedly, haven't you?
I've been there, done that, bought the T-shirt and wore it out. That's just a fact of life.
That's just part of the politics.
Clark lives on Flinders Island but his father's family came from the Ewen Valley. He heads
up the Flinders Island Aboriginal Association which manages a substantial farm owned by
the Indigenous Land Council.
The generation Clark wants to inherit the farm can be seen belting round this motocross
track. Almost all these kids identify themselves as Aboriginal.
This has been around for years but it sort of hasn't really, it sort of died out after
a while and now it's just coming back in the last couple of months actually and fees getting
behind it and local workshopping.
Here's the Aboriginal community centre.
Now John Clark says that you're part of a community which is an Aboriginal community.
Is that how you see it?
Yeah, I suppose. Yeah, it's like that. My nan was like into that sort of stuff, that
sort of deal and yeah, sort of like all my uncles and aunties and all that, Aboriginal
descent and so I suppose yeah.
So do you think you're going to be interested in finding out more about your Aboriginal
ancestry and making that more a part of your life?
Eventually, I wouldn't really see myself like reading books and that but if people want
to say anything or whatever, I'll listen.
Clark says the motocross helps keep the kids disciplined and drug free. He applied for
ATSIC funding to buy bikes but didn't get it. He sees nothing wrong with public funds
being used for this especially as he says these kids are Aboriginal.
I mean it's pretty easy, a $5,000 motorbike is nothing if it stops somebody getting addicted
to heroin or gets into juvenile delinquency or then later on sort of whatever else that
can follow on from drug dependency or so on. I mean that's being reactive not proactive,
being proactive not reactive.
Clark's bid to get on the Indigenous electoral roll has been challenged. If he loses his
right to vote in the ATSIC election, he will also lose his job as ATSIC chairman.
If that's the case, I think that's a very, very sad day for Aboriginal affairs in this
state, not only in this state but for the rest of Australia because it will mean that
local community groups like we've got on Flinders Island, local communities like a separate
community, this is a separate community against the other community, won't be able to identify
who they want to speak for them and who they want to vote for.
Ration scandals in Aboriginal organisations are not new but in Tasmania they're complicated
by personalities caught in the row over authenticity. In 1999 the offices of ITAC, the Indigenous
Tasmanian Aboriginal Corporation, were raided by the police. At the time ITAC owned and
ran 74 rental houses worth $6 million.
They had me signing for thousands of dollars between them like in TVs, building material,
you name it, any household product.
An internal report from ATSIC catalogued a long list of allegations. Theft, fraud, infighting,
significant and ongoing breaches of funding terms and conditions, poor financial management,
misuse of grant funds, there were even death threats.
I'm told to do things that you didn't want to do such as signing checks to dead people.
When you ask questions about it you were told you'd lose your job or your life was threatened.
I was told quite a few times how I was going to be killed.
ITAC is now under new management. It says John Coleman was evicted from one of its properties
for non-payment of rent over two and a half years. Coleman, who was also ITAC's chairman
for two short periods, denies this. He says he was the one who blew the whistle on what
was happening there.
Was there fraud?
Well yes, there was fraud.
Was there misappropriation of funds?
Indeed there was.
Do you know the people responsible?
Yes I do.
Who are they?
I'm not going to say that. We have named them to the police and I have signed the complaint.
No one has been charged despite a lengthy police investigation. But three years ago
another organisation, SACT, the Sports Aboriginal Corporation of Tasmania, lost its ATSIC funding.
The group, set up to run an Aboriginal sports and recreation program, has left a trail of
debts totalling $777,000. It was granted half a million dollars five years ago to buy its
Hobart headquarters.
According to ATSIC, part of the premises had been leased to the Outlaws' bikey gang. Equipment
was also stolen. The management teams of the housing and sports bodies included acknowledged
Aborigines. However, Brian Fisher, who chaired both organisations, is one of those who was
challenged in the 1997 court case.
How much money and all went missing from ITAC?
None.
Because there were allegations that several hundred thousand dollars had gone missing.
It's all rubbish. Police approved otherwise. I was supposed to get 350,000. It's all rubbish.
It doesn't work that way.
What happened to all the equipment at the sports centre?
It was stolen.
Who buy?
Well, I just can't put a finger on that. I know who buy, but I just can't say at the
moment.
In Tasmania, bitterness about who is and isn't Indigenous adds another layer to familiar
controversies about Aboriginal funding.
I think really the government opened the door up to a lot of people who aren't Aboriginal
sneaking in. And now we're having a big problem in that the people who aren't Aboriginal sneaking
into our communities are going to have an impact that is not good for the Aboriginal
community, much less the fact that they shouldn't be there anyway.
Last month the federal government named an Aboriginal panel from Tasmania to consider
challenges to voters hoping to join the ATSIC role. The principle articulated by Michael
Mansell last year appeared sound.
Everybody is open to challenge. That includes me, includes everybody. And the whole idea
behind these Aboriginal elections is to make it fair, make it reasonable and make it appropriate
so that before people go to an election, you know that the candidates are Aborigines and
those who are participating in voting are in fact Aborigines.
In practice the result has been chaos. Just 1300 people have applied to vote. Michael
Mansell isn't one of them and so cannot be challenged. But hundreds have been. Why have
you personally challenged 900 applicants for the electoral role?
Simply because they're not Aboriginal people.
The date of the ATSIC elections has now been put back due to the sheer volume of challenges
received.
That panel's got a very important job on what they're doing and I don't envy them people
on that panel. It's going to be a very hard job. This is a very important role that they've
got and I think that people don't realise the importance of this role.
I'll start trying on the andrel looking at the gear.
Look at that.
Come on, read me.
Rodney Dillon is the current ATSIC commissioner for Tasmania. He likes nothing more than an
afternoon spent diving for abalone and cooking up a feed with fellow ATSIC councillor Rocky
Sainte. Dillon tries to steer clear of the controversy associated with community identity.
I've tried to stick to culture and issues like that rather than if I sat down and thought
about who was Aboriginal and who was not I reckon I'd become a very twisted man.
Dillon recognises that people who've worked long and hard within their own communities
may soon be stripped of their public identity.
Some of those people from all areas are my friends, you know. It's a pretty uncomfortable
time that we're all going through and that's how this has been for quite a while and it's
been uncomfortable unless something is done like this we're going to keep going through
this and we'll end up destroying ourselves.
I think that the process for what it's worth, I can't think of a better one, has to be done,
that's what's got to be done.
But could it lead to even more disagreements?
Well so be it because like you know I mean the people who have snuck in, the people who
want to keep sneaking in are going to still be there so there's always going to be disagreements
until this is sorted out about who is and who isn't.
Ethnic cleansing and genocide do not need bloodshed to achieve their aims. Death by
denial of existence instigated into the fabric of democracy by bureaucratic bullies whose
manipulation...
The Lyaputa community, Kay MacPherson and her friends are among those trying to join
the ATSIC role. Most have been challenged. MacPherson says she'll write to the United
Nations if, as is likely, her group is denied the opportunity to vote.
Since 1996 we've been denied access to absolutely everything that's Aboriginal, all because
we're not from the best trade islands. They're writing the rules, they're enforcing the rules
and we're supposed to live by them, they're denying us who we are so isn't that genocide?
Isn't that ethnic cleansing?
Well genocide means wiping out entire communities and groups of people. No one's trying to kill
you.
No but they're wiping us out as far as our heritage goes. We're being denied who we
are. That's genocide.
Tasmania's problem may soon become wider Australia's.
I suspect the same problem might arise in many of the older settled parts of Australia,
the south west of Western Australia, South Australia and parts of Victoria and New South
Wales. Now I've talked to some of my friends from those parts of Australia and they say
oh look there's no problem, the communities know who belongs and they will determine the
situation so that anyone claiming will fall by the hurdle of community acceptance. But
when I explain to them that there are whole communities that establish themselves and
identify as Aboriginal, that others doubt, rightly or wrongly, they are amazed and see
that this may well indeed become a problem in many parts of Australia.
Even if the problem is recognised the solution is far from clear. The man who went to Libya
with Michael Mansel sees a tough road ahead.
The hardening of the doors into Aboriginal communities will come and it's a phase that
we're going to be faced with for quite a period I believe. We can't afford to sit back and
leave this door half open and only check it every now and then.
Debbie Oakford who's worked for a number of Aboriginal bodies now thinks all funding for
Tasmania's indigenous groups should be stopped.
I have thought long and hard for a long time how could it be fixed or a solution came about,
how could I get a solution for this and I thought well if there was no funding there'd
be nobody to argue with, no greed and everybody would live as one happy family.
Hopefully.
Well yeah.
Black fella, white fella, it doesn't matter what your colour, as long as you're a true
fella, as long as you're a...
The passionate debate in Tasmania has failed to answer one fundamental question. At what
point do families cease to be Aboriginal and become principally European? Is it time to
consider another definition of indigenous identity?
There are many, many, many Aboriginal families over the last 200 years who have ceased to
be Aboriginal and now see themselves as European. This process probably going on all the time
and has been going on since the beginning of European settlement. But we still have
no real agreement about where that point is or whether indeed there should be a category
that scarcely exists in Australia and that is people of mixed descent. Now it seems to
me the lack of that category in Australia is one of the things that means this problem
will continue as far ahead as I can see.
You can join an online discussion including Cassandra Pybus, Kay MacPherson and reporter
Quentin McDermott from 9.30 tonight Eastern Time at abc.net.au slash Four Corners.