There is nothing more corrosive to a relationship than the belief you have been lied to.
That is why suggestions that Indigenous Australians have fabricated stories and traditions to prevent development, or gain more purchase in land disputes, are so damaging to the goodwill on which any hope of reconciliation must rest.
And it is why white Australians should also meet high standards of honesty. Unfortunately, in the past two weeks, some in the media have revived untruths that were debunked 24 years ago.
The context is the decision by the federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, that the headwaters of the Belubula River are sacred to the Wiradjuri people because of their blue-banded bee dreaming. This has led to the halting of a $1bn goldmine development in the New South Wales central west.
Last week News Corp outlets reported that the anthropologist Dr Philip Clarke had concluded it was “highly unlikely” the blue-banded bee was a totemic ancestor and that there was no record of the tradition before the story appeared in the media in 2022. Some Wiradjuri elders have also said they have no knowledge of the blue-banded bee tradition.
The article suggested that Plibersek had been lied to.
In these reports, News Corp emphasised Clarke’s credentials by reporting he was “the anthropologist whose research helped to debunk the ‘fabricated’ secret women’s business at the Hindmarsh Island royal commission”.
I know nothing about the Belubula River and the blue-banded bee, but I know a lot about the Hindmarsh Island bridge affair. I wrote a book about it.
The Hindmarsh Island bridge affair was a key episode in the battles over Aboriginal connections to land in the years after the Mabo decision of the high court.
The events are now out of the memory of anyone under the age of 40 but the affair remains one of the key events of recent Australian history, and arguably the beginning of the culture wars.
The claim that “secret women’s business” was debunked is wrong.
How ironic, and how sad, that we cannot accurately state what happened only a quarter of a century ago.
Hindmarsh Island, or Kumerangk to the Ngarrindjeri people, lies at the mouth of the Murray River within Lake Alexandrina.
In the early 1990s there was a plan to build a bridge from the mainland town of Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island, which had previously been serviced by a ferry.
At the last moment in the planning process, a group of Ngarrindjeri women claimed the island was special to them for reasons that could not be revealed. They applied to the federal government for an order prohibiting the bridge. The women were successful. The then Labor minister for Aboriginal affairs, Robert Tickner, banned the bridge.
About a year later another group of Ngarrindjeri women came forward and said the claim of what had become known as “secret women’s business” was a hoax. The South Australian government called a royal commission. It had an inherently odd, complicated task. To establish if a religious belief, a dreaming, was “genuine”.
From the start, the royal commission was a heavily politicised exercise. The so-called “dissident” Ngarrindjeri women – those who said they knew nothing of secret women’s business – had been adopted by Liberal politicians and amplified by journalists. In December 1995 the royal commission found the secret women’s business was a fabrication. “Lies, lies, lies” was the newspaper headline in the Adelaide Advertiser.
The affair played a role in the defeat of the Keating government by John Howard. Tickner’s career was destroyed.
The phrase “secret women’s business” entered the popular lexicon, used mockingly and ironically.
And that is where today’s cultural warriors would like the story to end. But it didn’t end there.
The royal commission got it wrong. It has been conclusively established that it did not have enough evidence to reach its conclusion of fabrication – and that it overlooked evidence that went the other way.
The most thorough investigation of the Ngarrindjeri women’s competing claims came in a federal court civil action brought against the commonwealth and a consultant anthropologist whose work had informed Tickner’s decision. The action was brought by the developers whose desire to build a marina on the island was the reason for the bridge. This case was heard by Justice John von Doussa.
Both groups of Ngarrindjeri women appeared before him and were cross-examined. A great deal of other evidence was called as well. Women came forward who had not previously been involved in the affair but who recalled being told elements of “secret women’s business”.
Philip Clarke, then an employee of the South Australian Museum, also appeared both before the royal commission and before Von Doussa.
Von Doussa found that Clarke’s diaries, written during the royal commission, showed “that he was the originator of the fabrication theory … he claims to have taken a role and provided information that influenced the course of the royal commission in a way that I consider lacks professional objectivity and was inappropriate”.
The Von Doussa judgment was an effective debunking of the royal commission and established that the weight of the evidence went the other way.
Von Doussa concluded: “Upon the evidence before this court I am not satisfied that the restricted women’s knowledge was fabricated or that it was not part of genuine Aboriginal tradition.”
The so-called “dissident” Ngarrindjeri women were sincere, Von Doussa found, but the fact they didn’t know about “secret women’s business” was not proof it had been fabricated.
Also before Von Doussa was work done by Peter Sutton, who then as now was a fiercely independent and eminent anthropologist. He has been in the news for challenging the claims made in the book Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe.
Sutton’s work established that the royal commission had erred when it found that the Seven Sisters was not part of Ngarrindjeri mythology – this being part of the women’s business.
The anthropologist had at first been unwilling to take a stand on either side during the Hindmarsh Island affair. But after reading the Von Doussa judgment and my book, he said: “The balance of probabilities lies with evidence suggesting jealously guarded fragmentary parts of maybe several old traditions, whose custodians tended to treat such knowledge as private or family property … the pattern and the matches with earlier material on some key strands makes the overall fabrication theory insupportable.”
The bridge was built. Early in its term, the Howard government passed a special Hindmarsh Island Act to remove heritage protections.
The Ngarrindjeri challenged this legislation before the high court, but the court declared the Bridge Act valid, thus establishing a precedent undermining protections from discriminatory legislation.
So the Hindmarsh Island affair is of continuing importance. Meanwhile, the South Australian government has since 2010 acknowledged that “secret women’s business” was a genuine set of beliefs – that the royal commission was wrong.
As I said earlier, I know nothing about the Blayney mine and the stories about the blue-banded bee. But the lessons rightly drawn from the Hindmarsh Island bridge affair are that Aboriginal people – just like any other people – can have different knowledge and understandings of their traditions.
Colonialism and the different ways in which Indigenous people adapted and responded can mean knowledge is sometimes fractured and differently held.
None of that is evidence of lying.
Those cultural warriors who, rightly, see respect for evidence as a key enlightenment value and strength of western culture should, if they wish to continue to assert that the Ngarrindjeri women lied, at least address the evidence and show where the work of Von Doussa and Sutton and, for that matter, my own work went wrong.
They have never done this yet continue to promote the findings of a discredited royal commission. So much for lies.
