Global Burning by Eve Darian-Smith

Global Burning by Eve Darian-Smith

Author:Eve Darian-Smith [Darian-Smith, Eve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-07-15T00:00:00+00:00


The Northern Territory is a very large area of Australia with a population of only 220,000, of which about 35 percent are Indigenous. First Australians technically own half the land mass of the territory. Six months prior to the 2007 Intervention, the federal government offered to build homes for some Indigenous groups in exchange for ninety-nine-year leases over tribal lands. Indigenous peoples, including the Yolngu people, rejected the offer, seeing it as a bribe by the government to mine and decimate sacred sites. This prompted the government to take more aggressive action and declare emergency measures to address what they claimed was widespread sexual abuse of Indigenous children, including pedophile rings. Without consulting Indigenous leaders, the government quickly sent the army into the remote Northern Territory. As a result, seventy-three Indigenous towns and encampments were targeted for a range of changes to welfare services, land tenure, and other civil and political rights. In addition to outlawing the use of alcohol, people’s welfare checks were partially quarantined, their income supervised, and mandatory medical checks were performed on children to ascertain abuse. Legal actions were exempted from considering customary law and cultural practices, and Indigenous peoples lost their right to manage access permits for non-Indigenous people to enter their local communities.15

But the Intervention’s most devastating long-term impact was the takeover by the federal government of tribal lands. Indigenous land holdings were initially confiscated under five-year leases, but these turned into leaseholds up to ninety years, to be controlled by the government in return for essential services.16 The leases were then parceled out to mining companies to dig and remove mountains of soil, extract minerals such as uranium, lower groundwater levels, leach toxins into fragile bushlands, and kill local flora and fauna, all the while contributing to climate change and the conditions in which catastrophic bushfires burn (Figure 10).

The net result of the Intervention was that all sense of dignity and self-determination, including control over traditional lands, was taken away from targeted Indigenous groups. Experiencing the Intervention firsthand, Ali Cobby Eckermann, an acclaimed Australian poet and Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha woman born on Kaurna land in South Australia, writes about the horrifying conditions under which Indigenous communities suffered and continue to suffer. This includes the building of toilet blocks on sacred lands, the enclosing of administrative offices in barbed wire, and the use of doctors without providing for local interpreters. In a poem titled “The Parable,” she writes how the “army arrive in their chariots,” and “Parents and children race for the sand-hills . . . hiding in abandoned cars along the fence line.” Eckermann goes on to say that the Intervention “was the moment that any sense of equality and respect, garnered over the previous long years by our grandparents and parents, was abandoned by Australia’s majority. This was the pivotal moment of division; the moment when the ‘freedom of rights’ within the ‘lucky country’ was eroded for Aboriginal peoples, and for other minority groups to come.”17



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