Cape York: A History of Aboriginal Dispossession and Resistance

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No.11 Summer 2016

Cape York: a history of Aboriginal
dispossession and resistance
Written by Rebecca Barrigos
We dont want the enemy coming to destroy our land.[1]
[T]hey saw a whole industry of invisible hands at work on those placesthe cold and
ISSUES
heartless ambitions of politicians and bureaucrats who came from faraway cities and
capitals to destroy the lives of Aboriginal people.[2]
No.1 Spring 2010
In November 2014, Western Australian Liberal premier Colin Barnett announced his
No.2 Autumn 2011
intention to close down over 150 remote Aboriginal communities. Then prime minister Tony
No.3 Spring 2011 Abbott told the ABC that governments could not afford to endlessly subsidise the lifestyle
choices of Aboriginal people to live on their traditional lands.[3] And Barnett claimed that
No.4 Winter 2012 the communities were economically unviable. The WA governments recent record of
massive subsidies for the mining industry an estimated $6 billion between 2008 and
No.5 Summer 2013
2014[4] exposed these economic excuses as the lies they were. After a wave of protests,
No.6 Winter 2013 Barnett changed his tune, arguing that his government was motivated by concerns for the
health and safety of Aboriginal children. His allegation that they were subjected to abuse
No.7 Summer 2014 was also exposed as a lie.[5]
No.8 Winter 2014 The subtext writ large of Barnetts assault on Indigenous communities, still under threat
today, is that of a cynical government crusade to clear Aboriginal land located in the
No.9 Summer 2015
heartlands of the mineral fields of the Pilbara and the Kimberley. There is nothing new
No.10 Winter 2015 about governments employing phony concern about appalling conditions in Aboriginal
communities the product of decades of deliberate and systemic underfunding to
No.11 Summer legitimise further encroachments on Aboriginal land and assert more state control over
2016 Indigenous lives. This most recent Western Australian land grab reflects a whole historic
pattern in Australian capitalism in which mining, along with the pastoral industry, has
No.12 Winter 2016 created enormous pressure on Aboriginal life and has been most rapacious in demanding
an unfettered right to access Aboriginal land. The development of Queensland bauxite
mining is a particularly clear example of this.
From the 1950s, the discovery on Cape York of huge deposits of bauxite, the ore from
which aluminium is produced, spurred a chain of dispossessions; thousands and thousands
of miles of Aboriginal land was stolen and ravaged in the service of profit. This theft was
executed under the cloak of racist and paternalistic legislation, and abetted by federal and
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state governments, Aboriginal Affairs bureaucrats, the entire legal system and the churches
that administered many of Queenslands Aboriginal reserves up until the 1970s. Ultimately
the insatiable greed for land for mining development led to the brute force of state violence
being engaged to raze a whole community to the ground in the 1960s at Mapoon, and to
quash Aboriginal resistance to mining at Aurukun in the 1970s. That this quite recent history
of enforced destitution and calculated state cruelty forms such a small part of popular
knowledge today is a testament to the ongoing racism at the heart of Australian capitalism.
It is a history that also serves as a timely reminder that the continued devastation of
Aboriginal communities, supposedly for their own improvement, is in fact a continuation of
the program of land theft and genocide upon which Australian capitalism was founded and
continues to rest.
The Cape York mission system

In the 1950s, the Indigenous population of Cape York lived largely on the sites of three
missions on the west coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria. The northernmost mission, Mapoon,
located 170 kilometres south-west of the tip of the Cape York Peninsula and 900 kilometres
north-west of Cairns, was the first of the missions to be established in 1891.[6] The Mapoon
mission became the staging post for the later establishment of a further two missions on the
edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria the Weipa mission, south-west of Mapoon, in 1898, and
the Aurukun mission south of Weipa in 1904. Lastly the Mornington Island mission, located
in the Gulf itself, was established in 1914.[7]
The missions were administered by the Presbyterian church, and were jointly controlled and
financed by the Queensland government. The Aboriginal people interned on the missions
held no title to their land; the land and the mineral deposits slumbering in it were deemed
state property. As Frank Brennan described in his 1982 history of the struggle for land rights
in Queensland, these reserves were not seen as Aboriginal land but simply crown land on
which Aborigines would live until they moved to find work on cattle stationsor perhaps
until they died out.[8] From their earliest beginnings, the Cape York missions were the
product of an already long legacy of colonial brutality. On the Batavia River, the future site of
the Mapoon mission, the Indigenous owners of the land had been massacred for the
establishment of the pastoral industry by white settlers, Kennedy and Jardine, in the 1890s.
The settlers killed 250 of the 300-strong Indigenous population to clear the land at Dingle
Creek, and Mapoon mission residents told researchers in the 1960s that their parents had
passed stories to them of how Jardine had killed black children by knocking their heads
against trees.[9]
Needless to say, the missions repositories for a people dispossessed were sites of
misery and extreme oppression in which residents were subject to the control of the
churchs mission superintendents and from 1897, also increasing government regulation
under the strictures of the Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act.
This Act appointed protectors, the leading police officers of each district,[10] to control the
movement of all Aboriginal people. Under section nine of the legislation, protectors could
arbitrarily move any Aboriginal person, without regard to their traditional lands, to any other
reserve of their choosing.[11] It was under this power that the government was soon to
convert the first of the established missions at Mapoon into a reformatory for children stolen
from their families.[12] The protectors were also empowered to prohibit the carrying out of
2 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
Aboriginal rites and customs deemed injurious to the welfare of mission residents.[13] This
practice of cultural assimilation was enthusiastically taken up by the missionaries. Mapoon
elder Jean Jimmy recalled how at that mission, the children were separated from their
families and forced to sleep in the dormitory at the age of three years old and there we had
to learn to speak like our mission ladies. We were not allowed to talk lingo (our language),
because we might learn our legends and things like that.[14] The Act also barred any
person not acting under government direction from access to the missions, effectively
rendering them closed communities, breeding grounds for abuse and neglect shielded from
public scrutiny.
From their inception, the missions were subject to a pattern of financial starvation,[15] with
meagre government grants and the Presbyterian church inclined to view their
responsibilities as limited to tending the spiritual rather than the material needs of their
wards. The impact of this systematic poverty was seen in the appalling health conditions
experienced by Indigenous people, undernourished and perpetually vulnerable to epidemics
of influenza, whooping cough and hookworm.[16] Mission residents were expected to work
for their rations, in the bche-de-mer industry in the early to mid-twentieth century, or in
mission farming. Aboriginal wages were stolen and strictly controlled by the Chief Protector,
used for deployment in mission expenditure or, as was often the case, other state
development projects.[17] On top of this, a government desire that missions be
self-sufficient subjected the residents to regular bouts of survivalism, dependent on
Aboriginal people being sent bush in order to get sustenance and fresh water, or reduced to
eating coconut cash crops for subsistence.[18]
In 1939 the Aboriginal protectors were superseded by a Director of Native Affairs. The
Director would be overseen by the Queensland minister of Home Affairs, but took on all of
the immense power over mission residents formerly held by the Chief Protector under the
1897 Act. In fact, the new legislation broadened the scope of the Directors power by
granting them more oversight of the mission superintendents[19] and explicitly giving them
control over mining interests relating to mission land.[20] The Office of Native Affairs was
administered as a veritable fiefdom by its directors until the 1980s, when the position was
abolished. Over its almost fifty year lifespan, the Office of Native Affairs had only three
directors. The aptly named Bleakley, appointed in 1939, was forced to resign under
allegations of extreme negligence towards his wards in 1941,[21] and was replaced by
OLeary, who in turn was replaced by his deputy, Patrick Killoran, in 1964.
By the 1960s, Aboriginal wards of the government could apply to seek exemption from the
Act, and move off the missions. However, this usually set off a further slide into poverty as
former mission residents experienced racism which prevented them finding suitable rented
accommodation or employment.[22] A series of cosmetic changes to the Aboriginals
Protection Act in the 1960s and early 1970s, and an attendant name change to the
Department of Aboriginal and Islander Advancement, altered little about the realities of the
yoke of oppression under which Queenslands Indigenous population lived. For instance, in
1971, the government handed down new legislation in the form of the Aborigines Act that
merely introduced a new system of permits under which the Director maintained ultimate
say over who could visit or reside in both Church administered missions or government
reserves.[23]
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In 1976, the Black Resource Centre Collective published an account of life under the
Aborigines Act on the Queensland government reserve of Cherbourg. In the account,
Aboriginal activist Lionel Lacey described how, even as late as the 1970s, reserve residents
had to ask the superintendent for permission to use electrical appliances, like hot water jugs
or radios, in their own homes. He spoke of the dictatorial authority the Act bestowed on the
director, under which no person on a Reserve can ever own their own home; this will
always be owned by the Director. So if a wife and husband are asleep in bed, the Director
has the power to wake them up if he wants to. With regard to land rights, Lacey explained,
we have got no right to the land as far as the Director and others think; they own every
square inch of it When a black person is born in Queensland the Director has the full
power to decide everything that will happen to that child.[24]
Importantly, the 1971 Act also gave the Director the right to issue mining leases on reserve
or mission land without consulting the church mission trustees.[25] This new clause
reflected the funding conflict between the state government and the Presbyterian church
administrators that had existed since the missions had been founded, but which had come
to a head around the discovery of bauxite deposits on mission sites. By the 1950s, the
missions were in severe financial crisis. Food shortages prevailed and had been
exacerbated by government rationing and heightened food prices during World War II. The
Department of Native Affairs (DNA), which held joint administration over mission trust
accounts, refused to allow the meagre cash reserves of the missions to be used for
essentials like foodstuffs over development.[26] In this desperate climate, mission mergers
for Mornington Island and Mapoon were increasingly discussed at meetings of the
Aboriginal and Foreign Missions Committee (AFMC) of the Presbyterian church, and were
favoured by the Director of Native Affairs, OLeary.[27]
When significant bauxite deposits were discovered at Weipa, the Church saw in future
mining royalties a way to avoid mission closures. Historian Rosalind Kidd is responsible for
some of the most extensive and thorough research into the Queensland mission system,
government and DNA policy up until the 1990s. In her 1997 book, The Way We Civilise,
written on the basis of access to thousands of previously closed departmental records and
a complete reading of church proceedings, Kidd contends that there is no doubt that the
church saw the vast mining project as a ticket out of poverty and dependency. For years,
the Cape York communities had been caught in a double bind: refused vital revenue without
industrial enterprise, and unable to initiate development because of abject destitution.[28]
So when the Queensland government tried to circumvent the church in early negotiations to
grant mining leases on mission land, the church protested and attempted to assert its rights
to exact a compensation grant from the mining company Cozinc, soon to operate as
Comalco. Church records from 1958 state that the church had sought a sum of 367,000 to
be used for development for an underprivileged people and the establishment of a Native
Welfare Fund comprised of royalties from mining undertaken on state or church reserves
as well as the safeguarding of pastoral rights for the Weipa mission.[29] In October 1957,
the Courier Mail reported an ultimatum issued by church authorities to the minister of Home
Affairs, then responsible for Aboriginal Affairs, that it would not agree to move mission sites
for mining leases at Cape York without assurance of funding for new mission infrastructure
and housing by the government and Cozinc.[30]
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It should be obvious that the church was not operating as a benign force for Aboriginal
rights in the process of these initial mining negotiations. Its primary concern was to secure
the future of its missions and ensure that church administrators had access to the economic
benefits of mining development for this purpose. Its paternalistic attitude towards the
mission residents and the purpose of their Comalco claim was expressed clearly in a letter
from the Australian Presbyterian Board of Missions (APBM), which had replaced the earlier
AFMC, to the Weipa missionary in 1963:
The financial help from Comalco has never been intended as a gift to the people but
as a gift for the people. It has always been intended as a grant in aid to the
Presbyterian Mission in the area in the interests of the Weipa people. This has always
been the official view.[31]
In staking its compensation claim the church inevitably came into conflict with the state
government, which saw unfettered private sector development of mining as increasingly
critical to Queenslands economic growth and was not inclined to press Comalco for
concessions to a mission system that it was itself unwilling to make any financial
commitment to maintain. It should be noted that from 1957, the government was
increasingly discussing its Aboriginal policy in terms of assimilation versus
protection,[32] consistent with a view to abolishing the reserves and having the residents
absorbed into projected future mining towns.
Comalco did eventually concede to a paltry one-off payment of 150,000 for new mission
housing at Weipa.[33] However, when Comalco denied any further financial obligation to
provide for the welfare of Weipas residents and the government eventually locked the
church out of the mining negotiations,[34] church resistance to mining leases on mission
land turned out to be pretty shallow. Thus by the 1960s, the mission board had shifted from
making moderate demands on mining companies to openly collaborating with the
government to move mission residents for mining interests.
Developments in mining post-World War II centrality of

bauxite
The Queensland governments determination to trample Aboriginal rights in favour of
untrammelled access for mining corporations is best understood in light of the importance of
bauxite mining to the economy.
The discovery of large bauxite deposits on Cape York in the 1950s was central to the
development of the national post-war minerals economy. The growing importance of
aluminium on the world market had led the Australian government to covet a local industry.
In 1946, with an aluminium smelter in the works for Tasmania, where a new hydro-electric
plant would provide a cheap source of power for a very energy intensive industry, the
government set up the Australian Aluminium Production Commission (AAPC) to execute
this plan. The next goal was for the AAPC, according to its first annual report, was to secure
a steady source of bauxite deposits sufficient in size and high enough in grade to justify the
establishment of expensive plants[35] and to encourage commercial investment in the
industry.
It was not until 1955 that thoroughgoing exploration for bauxite was undertaken by the
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Australian mining corporation Consolidated Zinc (Cozinc), which commissioned a geologist

to prospect for minerals, including bauxite, on the far north-eastern tip of Australia, in the
Cape York area. Cozincs survey revealed some of the largest deposits of bauxite known to
exist in the world[36] around Weipa. Cozinc formed a partnership with the American mining
giant, Kaiser, to establish the Commonwealth Aluminium Corporation Pty Ltd (Comalco) in
order to mine the deposits.[37]
The Queensland government saw its own states development as dependent on diversifying
an economy that had been previously heavily dependent on agricultural production.[38] In
the immediate post-war years, the state Labor government had made some attempts to
stimulate secondary industry[39] as part of its plan for northern development. However, it
was with the coming to power of the Nicklin Country/Liberal coalition government in 1957
that state economic policy turned sharply towards the growth of mining previously untapped
ore, with the aid of foreign capital to speed the pace of development.[40] Indeed, during his
1957 election campaign, Nicklin had outlined his plan for Queenslands development as
such:
[W]e have directed our whole policy toward the vigorous and planned development of
all parts of the State. This State is crying out forplanned development of a
State-wide character, which takes into account the great potential of Queensland, and
the need for filling up our empty spaces with people and industry, especially in the
vital North and North-West regions. This work will require capital much greater than
the usual State resources We as a government would be prepared to do all in our
power within our limits to assist investors.[41]
Nicklins sentiment was strongly shared by Labor in opposition. In 1957, speaking of Cape
York mining development, the Labor opposition leader Eric Lloyd said:
It is quite obvious that the area must be a source of great development and one
irrevocably tied to the future of the State and Commonwealth. As such great natural
resources have lain untapped for so many years, it is only right that every opportunity
should be taken to supporttheir exploitation.[42]
With prospecting having revealed that Weipa and its surrounding areas held bauxite
reserves of some two billion tonnes, at a time when known world deposits in total sat at
about nine billion tonnes,[43] the Nicklin government hastened to negotiate the generous
conditions under which Comalco would mine the deposits. The government passed the
Commonwealth Aluminium Corporation Pty. Limited Agreement Act (Comalco Act) in late
1957, which certainly made good on its promise to do all in [its] powerto assist
investors.
The Act granted Comalco an 84-year lease for bauxite mining, which excised the vast
majority of the former Weipa mission, encompassing 5,780 square kilometres of Aboriginal
land.[44] In total, Comalcos lease stole 93 percent of the land officially reserved for the
Aboriginal populations of Mapoon, Aurukun and Weipa.[45] The Act also granted Comalco
mining rights over some 5,135 square kilometres of land on the eastern coast of Cape
York.[46] Kidd notes that the government had drafted the Comalco Act so speedily, and with
such verve for accommodating the companys interests, that it had initially surrendered all
Weipa and Mapoon mission land to the mining lease and had to later renegotiate with
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Comalco in order to retain a small parcel of land for its operation.[47] It was agreed that
even this small allotment of land for the missions would revert to Comalcos control if it was
ever surrendered or abandoned by the missionaries.[48]
With the Comalco Act in place, Henry Noble, Nicklins minister of Health and Home Affairs,
could proudly declare that the Comalco deal was worth 250 million to the Queensland
economy.[49] The parliamentarians made the familiar capitalist argument that state
investment in such corporations was really in the public interest. However, it was Comalco
that was the genuine beneficiary of the deal. Not only had state legislation secured the
company rights to perpetual leases over the mining town area and cattle grazing, timber,
water and farming rights, but the Weipa bauxite deposits were estimated by Comalco to be
worth $60 billion in 1978.[50] Additionally, the government subsidised Comalcos operations
to the tune of millions.
Queensland historian Ross Fitzgerald documented the huge scale of the subsidies; the
Nicklin government reimbursed Comalco three to four million dollars for the construction of
the harbour, channel and wharves at Weipa.[51] Then in 1964, the government liberally
aided the construction of an aluminium smelter to refine Weipa bauxite at Gladstone.
Despite having received such substantial public funds to bankroll its operations,
Queensland Alumina Ltd, the international corporation which was to operate the Gladstone
smelter, paid no income tax at all in the first eight years of its operation.[52] Not only this,
but in the 1970s Comalco admitted that under the agreement with the government it would
pay no more than cost price for electricity for use in its future smelting processes.[53] In
1961 Comalco expanded its profitability by buying the Commonwealth governments share
of the Bell Bay aluminium smelter in Tasmania to add value to its fledgling mining
operations on the Cape.[54] By 1980, Weipa was the worlds largest single mining shipping
centre for bauxite,[55] and in that year Comalco posted a record profit of $75 million after
tax.[56] Moreover, the royalty rate imposed by the Queensland government was actually
almost the lowest in the world, at five cents a tonne compared with Jamaicas twelve
cents.[57]
In the debate between the Presbyterian church, the Department of Native Affairs and the
Nicklin government around the terms that would be set for Comalcos mining leases, the
first of a burgeoning mining boom for Cape York, the rights of the Aboriginal owners of the
land, the Alngith people, and of Indigenous people from at least another twelve traditional
owner groups who were at various times residents of the Weipa mission[58] factored not
one bit. Shamefully, Aboriginal people were not even considered Australian citizens until the
1967 referendum. So it stands as a given that the approval of the Alngith people was never
sought in the conclusion of the Comalco deal. Throughout the parliamentary debate on the
Comalco legislation in 1957, government ministers expressed the most dismissive attitudes
to Indigenous claims to land. Mines minister Ernie Evans stated that he could not envisage
any possible future use of the area over which companies were prospecting in Cape York
for other than mining, except perhaps fishing if markets were available.[59] To the extent
that Aboriginal people were discussed it was in the context of how fortunate they were that
Comalco should see fit to rip up their land and displace them, as this was an opportunity
for these people to be assimilated, to live as human beings should live.[60] The minister
responsible for Aboriginal Affairs, Noble, was decisive in communicating the governments
forecast of a near future when all the people of aboriginal blood in our state will have been
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assimilated into the community, and it would be the height of absurdity if very large areas of
the Statewere tied up and made inaccessible to normal occupancy and development.[61]
The Indigenous people of Weipa were not helpless victims, a subordinate flock merely
submitting their welfare and fates to the hands of the mission superintendent or the church
boards paternalistic and pathetic compensation claim. As soon as its leases had been
granted, Comalco tried to get the church board to agree to a plan to move the mission
residents to Aurukun. When this met with complete opposition from both the Weipa and
Aurukun people, the company constructed a model village at Hey Point in order to entice
the community to move further afield.[62] A letter from the general secretary of the mission
board to the chairman of Comalco in 1964 made clear that the Indigenous peoples reply
was a flat refusal to even consider the amalgamation with Aurukun orthe move to Hey
Point.[63] Eventually it was conceded by the church and the Director of Native Affairs that
they would not be able to convince the Weipa residents to move, and 159 of them remained
at Jessica Point. But they were reduced to living in squalor on a small pocket of land
surrounded by vast red plains of exposed and barren bauxite, and enclosed by Comalco
mining pits that covered the Reserve with a pall of dust in the dry season and isolate it with
a sea of mud in the wet.[64] Nonetheless, the Alngiths stand was significant and but the
first of many instances of courageous Aboriginal resistance to dispossession on Cape York,
stretching from the 1950s into the present. Comalcos aborted but persistent plan to expel
the Weipa residents was a portent of the increasingly drastic measures that would be taken
to ensure land theft for mining rights into the future.
The Mapoon dispossession: they came in the night like

thieves
Sitting on a peninsula of land between the Gulf of Carpentaria and Port Musgrave, the
Mapoon mission was situated on the traditional land of the Tjungundji people.[65] However,
because the children stolen from their families were from all over Queensland,[66] it had
become the dwelling place of many different Indigenous peoples. Some of the Aboriginal
traditional owner groups represented at Mapoon included the Mpakwithi, Taepithiggi,
Thaynhakwith, Warrangku, Wimarangga and Yupungathi.[67] From 1957, the mission site
had been engulfed by Comalcos mining leases, and from the early 1960s a Canadian
mining company, Alcan, had also commenced prospecting on former Mapoon land, just
inland from the Comalco lease area in the zone between the Ducie and Batavia rivers.
Mapoons location near Port Musgrave meant the mission also stood in a prime location for
a future mining harbour. It was not until 1965 that the Nicklin government granted Alcan a
105-year mining lease over all of the remaining choice Mapoon mission land. This was the
culmination of a campaign of state-led terror waged against the Mapoon people over almost
a decade to clear their land for mining interests.
From the 1950s there had been moves afoot to relocate the Mapoon mission. In April 1954,
the Courier Mail speculated about the impending closure of the mission, stating lack of
cultivatable land as a reason, and outlining a proposal to move the 250 residents south to
the Weipa mission.[68] In that year, a stalemate between the state and church over the
financial burden of improving horrendous living conditions ended. A final resolution by the
general assembly of the church administration decided to close the mission and absorb the
residents into the Weipa reserve.[69] Undeniably, the missions future had been in question
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before the Comalco lease had been concluded and the Queensland government always
publicly denied that the eventual closure of the mission in 1964 had anything to do with
mining interests on Mapoon land. So in March 1964, three months after the government
executed a final order to close the mission, the minister responsible for Aboriginal Affairs
told the Telegraph that the mission was shut down not because of an agreement between
the Government and Comalco but for the provision of better living conditions for its
residents.[70]
However, the 1955 discovery of bauxite deposits proposed a more viable or profitable use
for the land consistent with the governments plans for northern development, and it was
from this point on that the missions fate was sealed. State policy towards the mission
turned from systemic but passive neglect to calculated destruction, with the director of the
department of Native Affairs, OLeary, and his deputy Patrick Killoran enthusiastic partners
in government tactics to starve out the community.
Initially, the strategy to force residents to move centred on the intensification of the historical
and deliberate underfunding of the mission. By July 1958, the government had dropped its
subsidy to a mere eight shillings a week per resident. The government acted in full
knowledge of the acute poverty already confronting mission residents. In May, months
ahead of the subsidy cut, the department had received information that Mapoon had been
short of rations for weeks.[71] Moreover, Rosalind Kidd argues that [c]abinet documents of
the time reveal that annual subsidies were twice as much per head for government
settlements than for church missions.[72] That the rations shortage was no product of
administrative oversight, but reflected deliberate pressure tactics, was confirmed by the
confident announcement made by Henry Noble to fellow ministers in the parliamentary
discussions of the 1957-58 state Budget that the Mapoon mission would be wound up
within a year.[73] Having increased the degradation of Mapoon, the government cynically
engineered a government tour of the Presbyterian-run missions in October 1958, ostensibly
to condemn the deplorable conditions for their Aboriginal inmates and thus publicly
undermine the churchs administration. Kidd states that this tour became the basis for
numerous MPs to make press statements expressing their concern for the Mapoon
residents and calling for an official inquiry and a government takeover because Gulf
missions were not doing anything for the money the Government granted them.[74] Yet
this feigned concern did not halt a further government funding cut six months later which
reduced the food allowance to five pence per day, insufficient even to meet the official
basic ration scale.[75]
Long reconciled to the prospect of a government takeover, indeed even advocating for this
outcome,[76] the church was no real opponent to a further excision of land for mining rights
at Mapoon. The one factor the government had not yet considered was the trenchant and
inspiring resistance of the Aboriginal community. The Indigenous people had always
refused to be moved off the mission. By 1962, with the governments campaign of attrition in
full swing, the residents appealed to the Cairns Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander
Advancement League for resources in their struggle. One letter to the League detailed the
Mapoon communitys intransigence: We all here are standing very strong We all said we
wont shift from here Uncle, you must try and help us fight strong.[77] The League
responded by publishing a pamphlet entitled They have made our rights wrong to bring
public attention to the forced closure of the mission and to encourage public outcrystrong
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enough to halt dispossession of Mapoon people and to force the Government to pause
before taking similar action on other missions and settlements and before allowing further
alienation of Aboriginal lands to mining and pastoral interests. The pamphlet also detailed
the persecution already being meted out to residents like Allan Parry, spokesperson for the
Aboriginal Council, who for the impertinence of having spoken out at a meeting with the
head of the Queensland missions board, Reverend Sweet, in 1959, was sacked from his
job, dismissed from leadership of the church, and eventually exiled to Thursday Island in
the Torres Strait.[78]
With a new government plan in place to move Mapoon residents to another state-
administered reserve at Bamaga or Hidden Valley on the northernmost tip of Cape
York,[79] and with community unrest growing and increasingly public, the state pursued
even tougher means to quell resistance. All mail was read by the authoritarian church-
appointed mission superintendent, Filmer, to hinder protest and the deputy of the DNA,
Killoran, began issuing transfer orders for mission residents identified as opposition
organisers.[80] The mission was placed under siege, with the DNA scrupulously monitoring
the Aboriginal communitys movements, refusing troublemakers entry, and then
deliberately separating families to further coerce residents to move. In 1975, sociologist Jan
Roberts travelled to Cape York to document the dispossession of the Mapoon people. Her
interviews with former mission residents, later compiled into a series of works known as the
Mapoon Books, provide some of the most extensive and significant accounts of the
eventual forced removal of the community and the events preceding it. Rachel Peter
described how the government manipulated its control over mission residents to clear
Mapoon. She said, Maybe a wife goes up to hospital on Thursday Island to have a baby,
but she isnt allowed to returnthey have to go to Hidden Valley. Thats how they tricked
us.[81] The church cooperated with the departments despicable subterfuge, especially in
pressuring residents to seek exemption from the Protection Act and thereby leave Mapoon.
Another resident, Jack Callope, told Nation magazine in 1962, The mission has been
hammering people to get their exemption and leave When we asked the missionaries
who will take over our land, they do not reply When I said I did not want to leave Mapoon
because I was born there and my father lived there before me, I was told You have no say
now. The land is not yours anymore.[82]
The words of the Mapoon people also provide the most compelling evidence of a
long-standing plan by the state government to clear Mapoon for mining interests. In
particular, Rachel Peter remembered a meeting with church authorities and Killoran at
Mapoon in 1959 where Killoran directly threatened that the bull-dozers will come and dig
up all our homes and will dig holes over all our hunting grounds, and we will have nothing
left.[83] Jean Jimmy, another Mapoon leader, also recalled confronting Killoran, by then the
Director of the Department, years later at Bamaga. She told Roberts, When I asked Mr
Killoran about our removal, he said Well, the miners wanted the land.[84]
As the Mapoon residents stood their ground into 1963, the level of state neglect and terror
escalated. By early November, the church had abandoned the mission and all the services
had been closed down. Jean Jimmy told the Communist Party paper Tribune, [w]hen we
refused to leave our homes in Mapoon they closed the school, they left us without a flying
doctor for seven months.[85] On November 8, with the store running out of supplies and
with residents noticing that the delivery plane had bypassed them on route to Weipa and
10 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
Aurukun, they had no choice but to plead for relief from the superintendent at the Weipa
mission.[86] Ultimately, on 15 November, the government forcibly removed the majority of
the remaining inhabitants of Mapoon in what historian Geoffrey Wharton, an authority on
the Mapoon expulsion, describes as one of the worst examples of paternalistic and
ruthless actions to control Aboriginal people in the recent history of Queensland.[87]
The Department of Native Affairs sent a detachment of police from Thursday Island
accompanied by government contractors to burn down the mission and deport its
inhabitants to Bamaga. Jean Jimmy described how on November 15, [t]he D.N.A ship
came with the police on board. They gave us an hour to pack some belongings and took us
to sleep at the mission cottage guarded by four policemen, like criminals. Next morning the
D.N.A ship took us to Bamaga.[88] In a written account for the Mapoon Books, Jimmy
elaborated:
Next day was Saturday, 16th November, 1963. Orders were given to us to roll up our
swags and to take everything down to the beach We sat all day until after five
before all families were given orders to go on board the Gelam You can see the
harbour of Mapoon was covered with millions of birdsthe Government boat Gelam
was sailing under the shadow of birds. When Gelam reached Mapoon Point, our
people that stayed behind cried so bitterly on our parting day.[89]
Another mission resident, Victoria Luff, explained to Jan Roberts how the residents had
challenged the police, resisting the removal to the very end:
We asked them what they had come for. They said, Mr Killoran has just sent us to
pick you up. Well be going to Thursday Island to have a court case. They asked
me, Do I have anything to say? I thought I was being arrested. I asked him why they
came in the night like thieves.[90]
The police were unable to remove all the mission residents, and the 48 who remained bore
witness to the razing of the community buildings. Rachel Peter told how she saw the D.N.A
carpentersgoing to the coconut trees getting dry coconut branches, put it under the
homes and into the homes and strike a match and up goes the flames and down comes the
house with everything in it. Even stoves, new stoves that were expensive, but they were
burnt down and we didnt have the chance to get anything out.[91] Simon Peter attested
that after the mission homes were destroyed, all the important community buildings
followed. The Church, cookhouse, school, work-shop, butcher shop, store all burnt down.
They left the medical store, he explained, but they took away all the medicines.[92] Left
among the ruins and without essential services, the remaining Mapoon residents were
eventually forced to leave in early 1964.
Although the Mapoon residents would continue to fight for the right to return to their land
into the 1970s, the fruits of the governments misdeeds were soon realised in the passage
of the Alcan Queensland Pty. Limited Agreement Act 1965, granting the company a mining
lease over Mapoon for an area encompassing 536 square miles of stolen Aboriginal land.
This legislation granted Alcan rights as broad as those already conferred on Comalco, and
with construction of an aluminium refinery underway at Gladstone on the east of Cape York,
the scene had been set for large-scale bauxite extraction from the areas surrounding
Mapoon. The government had laid the basis for a mining explosion, and the brutal
11 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
dispossession of the Mapoon people showed its determination to obliterate Aboriginal

claims to land.
Land theft accelerated by Joh Bjelke-Petersen

In 1968 Joh Bjelke-Petersen became Premier of Queensland. By this time, the mineral
wealth unearthed in Cape York was of huge proportions, and for the next 20 years, Bjelke-
Petersen presided over a government with an explicit electoral base in rural and mining
interests[93] and a decided commitment to accelerate mining development. Throughout his
term in government, Bjelke-Petersens patronage of big mining, described by the state
mines minister as a partnership for progress between this government and private
enterprise,[94] would result in notoriously draconian policies to deny Aboriginal claims to
land. In fact, one of the first scandals confronting the new government revolved around a
conflict of interest related to ministerial kickbacks in the form of Comalco shares. In 1970,
when Comalco was floated on the Australian market, the company offered cheap shares to
both state and federal politicians, and Queensland cabinet ministers and public servants
from the premiers department were encouraged to take up the offer by Bjelke-Petersen.
Although he did not accept any himself, the premiers wife, Florence Bjelke-Petersen, took
up extensive shares, with a 105 percent capital gain.[95] Of course, the displaced
inhabitants of the Weipa mission were offered no such benefits.
Bjelke-Petersen attempted in 1974 to impose an increase in the paltry royalties paid by

Comalco. In 1972, mineral production was generating $100 million in profits for the
company, with the state government receiving less than $2 million in royalties.[96] Comalco
claimed discrimination and the High Court ruled in the corporations favour, issuing an
injunction on the collection of further royalties. However, not even this row could shake
Bjelke-Petersens sponsorship of mining interests, which extended to massive state
subsidies for the building of a harbour at Gladstone and for the construction of schools,
housing for government employees and a hospital at Weipa.[97]
Bjelke-Petersen was a champion of the assimilationist policies favoured by previous

Queensland governments, which were seen as central to the states economic agenda for
rural development. Put baldly, these were policies of genocide. Resisting the rising modern
national land rights movement that had started to raise the demand for Aboriginal
self-determination, the Queensland government consistently and cynically argued that this
would lead to an independent black state in Australias north, and separate development
that would seriously impair Aboriginal living conditions.[98] Charles Porter, Bjelke-
Petersens minister for Aboriginal and Islander Affairs, summarised state policy regarding
land rights as acceptance of all Aborigines and Islanders as equal citizens with the same
rights and responsibilities as every Queenslanderensuring that damaging separate
development cannot occur.[99] Such ministerial proclamations laden with concern for the
development prospects of Queenslands Indigenous population were just a smokescreen
for the viciously racist policy at the heart of the governments agenda. So, by the early
1980s, Bjelke-Petersen would proudly declare to the Courier Mail, that regarding land
rights:
Queensland is the only state that hasnt fallen for their soft soap about land rights and
mining rights. And it wont happen in Queensland while Im here Add up the
12 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
amount of money spent on Aboriginal people its much more than the whole rest of
the ordinary people get on average All money given to these people acts to their
detriment in terms of drink.[100]
Bjelke-Petersens project to extend mining interests hinged on a further offensive on the

remaining Cape York reserves, in particular at Aurukun mission on the land of the Wik and
Wik Way people.[101]
Aurukun: who knows by what Act of Law the white man

calls himself in his many disguises[102]
An American company, Tipperary, had been prospecting at Aurukun since the mid-1960s
and had discovered at least a billion tonnes of bauxite over 736 square miles of Wik/Wik
Way land.[103] Formerly a Presbyterian mission, and by the late 1970s under the
administration of the Uniting church, Aurukun was one of the most isolated Cape York
communities. This meant that the Indigenous community had retained a very close and
proud connection to their land and traditional practices.[104] Large-scale mining operations
on Cape York had already impacted on the people of Aurukun and contributed to the
squalid conditions at the reserve, where the 650 residents often found their well
contaminated with bauxite sediment.[105] However, the residents had steadfastly resisted
the encroachment of mining on their land for years, and by their persistent protest, had
wrung a written assurance from the government in 1972 that there would be no mining
agreements signed without direct consultation with the Aboriginal community and the
church.[106] The people of Aurukun did not just rest on this promise, and in 1973 when
Tipperary practices threatened to flood sacred places around the Watson River, the
community evicted the company from their mining camp, forcing Tipperary to abandon their
vehicles to the care of only two staff.[107] In 1974, the rightly suspicious community
expelled a geologist who claimed to be working for the federal government and who had
been carrying out drilling on their land.[108]
By the early 1970s, Tipperary had begun to speak of plans to construct the largest mining
town yet in Cape York at Aurukun, along with an international airport to service the
industry.[109] So with the companys designs on Aurukun land increasingly clear, the
Bjelke-Petersen government stepped in to smooth Tipperarys path and aid the course of
development. Already, the government had cut its budget for the missions at Aurukun and
Mornington Island, also under threat from mining leases, from $186,000 to $51,942[110]
and had started to implement the now tried and true method of starving the mission to make
it unviable and thus justify a government takeover.
On 4 December 1975, the government bypassed any pretence of negotiations with the
church authorities or community and rushed to push through legislation, the Aurukun
Associates Act 1975, granting a new mining consortium, headed by Tipperary and
incorporating Billiton and the French corporation Pechiney, mining rights worth a
conservative $14 billion.[111] The whole Act was enacted after a discussion two days
earlier when Killoran, now the acting director of the Department of Aboriginal and Islander
Advancement (DAIA), and the state minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Wharton, had visited
Aurukun. At that meeting, the government gave the community to understand that mining
would not take place without their approval,[112] as explained in a press statement made
13 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
later by the Aurukun Council and reproduced in a pamphlet by the Communist Party:
When the Queensland Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and the director of the DAIA
came herethe Minister did not even mention about the mining Mr Killoran, the
Director, said if we did not want the mining there would be no mining Several spoke
out against the mining and none for it.[113]
The community lost no time in registering their opposition to the Act and the deception
undertaken by the Bjelke-Petersen government. Just days after the legislation was put they
kicked off a campaign of resistance with a press release stating, We Aurukun people will
not allow any mining at all on our land. We will not accept any money for our land We
want Comalco, Billiton, Pechiney and Tipperary to leave our land alone.[114] Soon, the
people of Aurukun were holding daily meetings to organise against the Act, and sending an
armed delegation from the mission to evict the remaining two Tipperary staff at the
company camp, destroying prospecting markers along the way.[115] They also received
financial backing by the church to take legal action against Killoran for breach of trust and
pursue a writ to stop the mining going ahead.[116] Unlike at Mapoon, at Aurukun the
mission authorities, the Board of Ecumenical Missions and Relations (BOEMAR), did take a
public position of opposition to the government for its failure to negotiate the terms of the
mining leases and its dismissal of moderate demands that Tipperary share mineral wealth
by providing employment and training for the Aboriginal population[117] and granting some
degree of control to the community over the introduction of alcohol.[118] Yet it is important
to point out that the church was by no means seen universally by the Aurukun residents as
a purely benevolent force. In 1974, the church had accepted Comalco shares, prompting
one Aurukun elder, Albert Chevathen, to register the following protest to a representative of
BOEMAR on 9 December 1975:
We dont want the enemy coming to destroy our land no matter what we got here,
gold, minerals or anything. Dont let it go Where do the shares go to? In your
pocket? No, we havent got anything. Maybe the Church got it?[119]
The Aurukun people actually won their case in the Queensland Supreme Court, which
upheld their claim of abuse of trust and ruled that they had a right to challenge any mining
they had objected to on their land.[120] Undeterred, the Bjelke-Petersen government
appealed this decision at the Privy Council in London.[121] In January 1978 the Privy
Council found in favour of the government. Confident in the states legal position, Charles
Porter, then minister for Aboriginal and Islander Affairs, notified the church of the
governments intention to assume management of Aurukun at the end of March.[122] In
announcing its decision to take over Aurukun, the Bjelke-Petersen government cited poor
health and living conditions at the mission as the rationale for intervention. Yet as Kidd has
argued, internal departmental records give a different twist, with a federally-funded nurse
informing her superior that the Aurukun hospital had been kept empty, saving the state
$1,000 a week in wages.[123]
Meanwhile at Aurukun the community continued its protest, soliciting support from trade
unions with the Cairns branch of the Seamans Union declaring they would black ban
Tipperary,[124] and sending a delegation of community elders on a national speaking
tour.[125] With considerable media coverage of the plight of the Aurukun community, and in
14 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
the context of growing support for land rights, the conservative Fraser government felt
compelled to intervene to save its credibility. Fraser had after all pledged to maintain
legislation introduced by the Whitlam government to grant Aboriginal land claims in the
Northern Territory, albeit in a weakened form.[126] With an eviction order for Aurukun
looming, the Fraser government in April moved the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
(Queensland Reserves and Communities Self Management) Bill, to allow Aboriginal
communities on reserves to opt out of state government control.[127]
Bjelke-Petersen retaliated by passing the Local Government (Aboriginal Lands) Act 1978
while Frasers bill awaited debate in the Senate. This Act abolished Queenslands
Aboriginal reserves and converted them into local government areas, rendering the Fraser
bill irrelevant.[128] It also had the effect of preventing the new local councils from acquiring
direct title to any land comprising former missions areas and gave the state exclusive
access to mining and mineral rights.[129] Predictably, Fraser capitulated in favour of
preserving a working relationship with the Queensland government, failing to use his
capacity to make the Queensland Reserves Act retroactive and override the state law.
Nevertheless, the Aurukun people refused to give up their fight. They occupied the
community airfield, the only way to access Aurukun, and other buildings and facilities. In
August 1978, when a triumphant Bjelke-Petersen and his minister for local government
Russ Hinze toured the new local councils on Cape York, they were refused access to
Aurukun.[130] It was becoming apparent that it would take further punitive measures to
quell the struggle, and so a furious Bjelke-Petersen sacked the Aboriginal-elected councils
at Aurukun and Mornington Island,[131] alleging that the community had been brainwashed
by radicals and held under a reign of terror.[132] For good measure, the government
deployed a detachment of police from Brisbane to Aurukun to quash any further
unrest.[133] The Fraser government backed this repression, publicly stating it was not
unhappy with Bjelke-Petersens actions in dismissing the Aurukun council.[134] So at
Aurukun, all arms of the Australian state, from the courts to the state and federal
governments, had acted to ensure that the Indigenous population lost all control over their
land and to secure access to it for mining interests.
The Wik and Wik Way people never ceded their claim to their traditional land, and right
through to the end of his term in government Bjelke-Petersen would face their resistance.
For example, in the late 1970s, Bjelke-Petersen was found guilty of discrimination under the
federal Racial Discrimination Act when he refused to transfer title of land to Aurukun
resident John Koowarta. Koowarta had acquired a pastoral property through the federal
Land Fund Commission.[135] Determined to prevent any precedent for Aboriginal land
ownership, Bjelke-Petersen simply had the area upon which the property sat on the Archer
River re-gazetted as a national park in 1982 to stymie the transfer of land.[136] By 1987,
when Bjelke-Petersens disgraceful career as premier came to an end, he had well and truly
lived up to his pledge to smash Aboriginal land rights, or what he scathingly termed,
[t]erritorial acquisition en masse for Aborigines as a race in isolation.[137]
Conclusion
On Cape York, despite government rhetoric, the total surrender of land to mining interests
yielded negligible public benefits. The sacrifice of the Indigenous population delivered
15 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
insignificant and short-term gains to the state, as the mining companies dodged taxes and
refused to pay anything but token royalties. The wanton and casual way in which the state
dismissed Aboriginal rights is perfectly exemplified by the fact that in 1963, the year of the
abhorrent expulsion at Mapoon, the mission site had been found not even to hold economic
deposits of bauxite.[138]
The history of the establishment of Queensland bauxite mining is also a history of the
resilient and unceasing struggle for land by the Aboriginal peoples of Cape York. Despite
Bjelke-Petersens determination to bring the Aurukun community to heel, the inspiring
refusal of the Wik and Wik Way people to cede their land to mining in the 1970s, even in the
face of intense repression, laid the basis for the most significant modern land rights claim:
the Wik Native Title claim lodged in the aftermath of the historic Mabo decision which
established the legal concept of an Aboriginal claim to land. In 2012, after a decade of court
deliberations and appeals, the High Court finally recognised native title rights for the Wik
people over 4,500 square kilometres of land and waterways in Cape York.[139] Despite its
undeniable significance, the Wik ruling also demonstrates the inferiority of native title, a
form of tenure overridden by any other lease at play on Indigenous land, including pastoral
or mining leases. Indeed, the momentous Wik victory has not held off mining interests on
traditional land. The battle for Aurukun, commenced in the 1960s, continues today in the
form of a recently lodged High Court challenge to secure community rights to determine the
terms upon which further mining will take place on Wik land. The Wik are fighting to
overturn an agreement signed by the former Liberal/National Newman government, and
upheld by the current Palaszczuk Labor government, that granted Glencore rights to mine
Aurukun bauxite deposits without their consent.[140]
The history of the development of the Queensland bauxite industry shows the extreme and
violent lengths to which the capitalist state under Labor and Liberal/National state and
federal governments alike, over decades of Aboriginal affairs bureaucracy and policy has
gone in order to clear the land for mining interests. Whats more, these genocidal crimes
were perpetrated under the permissive watch of the church mission system which
incarcerated Aboriginal people for almost a century.
References
Brennan, Frank 1992, Land Rights Queensland Style: The Struggle for Aboriginal
Self-Management, University of Queensland Press.
Cousins, David and John Nieuwenhuysen 1984, Aboriginals and the Mining Industry:
Case Studies of the Australian Experience, George Allen & Unwin.
Fitzgerald, Ross 1984, A History of Queensland: From 1915 to the 1980s, University of
Queensland Press.
Frankland, Kathy 1994, A Brief History of Government Administration of Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Peoples in Queensland, Queensland State Archives and
Department of Family Services and Aboriginal and Islander Affairs,
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http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/__data/ assets/pdf_file/0008/93734
/Admin_History_Aboriginal_and_Torres_
Strait_Islanders.pdf.
Griffiths, Max 1998, Of Mines and Men: Australias 20th Century Mining Miracle
1945-1985, Kangaroo Press.
Kidd, Rosalind 1997, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs the untold story,
University of Queensland Press.
Lacey, Lionel G. 1976, Life Under the Act in Attwood, Bain and Andrew Markus (eds)
1999, The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History, Allen & Unwin,
pp286-288.
Mandeville, T.D. 1980, The Impact of the Weipa Bauxite Mine on the Queensland
Economy, Comalco Limited.
North-East Branch of the Communist Party of Australia 1976, The Aurukun Associates
Act 1975: Whats in it for Aborigines and why they dont want mining.
OLincoln, Tom 2012 [1993], Years of Rage: Social Conflicts in the Fraser Era,
Interventions.
Queensland Legislative Assembly, 28 November 1957, Parliamentary debates

(Hansard), Queensland Government Printer.
Raggart, H.G. 1968, Mountains of Ore, Landsdowne Press.
Roberts, J.P. (ed) 1975a, Mapoon Book 1: The Mapoon Story by the Mapoon People,
International Development Action.
Roberts, J.P. (ed) 1975b, Mapoon Book 2: The Mapoon Story According to the Invaders,
International Development Action.
Roberts, J.P. (ed) 1976, Mapoon Book 3: The Cape York Aluminium Companies and the
Native Peoples, International Development Action.
Roberts, Jan 2008 [1978], Massacres to Mining: The Colonisation of Aboriginal Australia,
Impact Investigative Media Productions.
Taffe, Sue 2009, The Cairns Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander Advancement League
and the community of the left, Labour History 97.
Trengove, Alan 1979, Discovery: Stories of Modern Mineral Exploration, Stockwell

Press.
Wharton, Geoffrey Steven 1996, The Day They Burned Mapoon: A Study of the Closure
of a Queensland Presbyterian Mission, University of Queensland Department of History.
Wright, Alexis 2006, Carpentaria, Giramondo.
17 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
[1] Aurukun elder Albert Chevathen, 1975.
[2] Wright 2006, p128. In 2006, Alexis Wright, a member of the Waanyi nation of the
southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria, published an award-winning novel,
Carpentaria, set in a fictional mining town on the Gulf. This powerful and poignant work
paints a vivid picture of the experience of Aboriginal dispossession for mining interests.
[3] Miranda Wood, Aboriginal activists stand strong at Matagarup, Red Flag, 19 March
2015.
[4] Simon Frazer and Rachel Brown, Mining industry receives billions of dollars in state
subsidies: report, 24 June 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-24/mining-industry-
receives-billions-of-dollars-in-state-subsidies/5545714.
[5] Colin Barnett links closure of remote Aboriginal communities to child abuse, The
Guardian, 20 March 2015.
[6] Mapoon Aboriginal Shire Council, http://queenslandplaces.com.au/mapoon-aboriginal-

shire-council.
[7] Wharton 1996, p15.
[8] Brennan 1992, p7.
[9] Roberts 1975a, p6.
[10] Kidd 1997, p48.
[11] Section 9, Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897.
[12] Wharton 1996, p16.
[13] Section 31, Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897.
[14] Quoted in Roberts 1975a, p7.
[15] Kidd 1997, p61.
[16] Kidd 1997, pp92-93.
[17] Frankland 1994, p6.
[18] Kidd 1997, p93.
[19] Kidd 1997, p147.
[20] Section 32(2), Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act 1939.
[21] Kidd 1997, p148.
[22] Cairns Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advancement League 1962, They Have
Made Our Rights Wrong: The Struggle for Mapoon, 6 November,
http://indigenousrights.net.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/383748/f19.pdf.
18 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
[23] Frankland 1994, p10.
[24] Lacey 1976, p287.
[25] Kidd 1997, p267.
[26] Kidd 1997, p193.
[27] Kidd 1997, p195.
[28] Kidd 1997, p201.
[29] Cited in Roberts 1975b, p63.
[30] Call for policy on bauxite missions, Courier Mail, 5 October 1957.
[31] Cited in Roberts 1975b, p64. My emphasis.
[32] Wharton 1996, p27.
[33] Roberts 1975b, p69.
[34] Kidd 1997, p203.
[35] Cited in Wharton 1996, p64.
[36] Trengove 1979, p10.
[37] Roberts 2008, p92.
[38] Fitzgerald 1984, p299.
[40] Raggart 1968, p52.
[41] Quoted in Wharton 1996, p77.
[42] Queensland Legislative Assembly 1957, p1418.
[43] Raggart 1968, p91.
[44] Roberts 2008, p97.
[45] Cousins and Niewyenheusen 1984, p15.
[46] Roberts 2008, p97.
[47] Kidd 1997, p204.
[49] Kidd 1997, p206.
[50] Roberts 2008, p97.
19 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
[53] Roberts 1976, p3.
[54] Griffiths 1998, p49.
[55] Mandeville 1980, p5.
[56] Roberts 2008, p97.
[57] Fitzgerald 1984, p305; Cousins and Nieuwenhuysen 1984, p17.
[58] http://napranum.qld.gov.au/community/napranums-history/.
[62] Roberts 2008, p104.
[63] Cited in Roberts 2008, p104.
[64] Roberts 2008, p104.
[65] Mapoon Aboriginal Shire Council, http://www.mapoon.com/37.html.
[66] Roberts 1975a, p7.
[67] Mapoon Aboriginal Shire Council, http://www.mapoon.com/37.html.
[68] Mapoon to be closed?, Courier Mail, 20 April 1954.
[69] Kidd 1997, p197.
[70] States oldest mission closes, Telegraph, 13 March 1962.
[71] Kidd 1997, p217.
[72] Kidd 1997, p217.
[73] Kidd 1997, p216.
[74] Kidd 1997, p217.
[75] Kidd 1997, p218.
[76] Kidd 1997, p199.
[77] Taffe 2009, p160.
[78] Cairns Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advancement League 1962.
20 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
[79] Wharton 1996, p18.
[80] Kidd 1997, p220.
[81] Roberts 1975a, p8.
[82] Roberts 1976, p10.
[83] Roberts 1975a, p9. Original was capitalised.
[84] Roberts 1975a, p9.
[85] Shameful story of Mapoon, Tribune, 8 April 1964.
[86] Roberts 1975a, p11.
[87] Wharton 1996, p24.
[88] Shameful story of Mapoon, Tribune, 8 April 1964.
[93] OLincoln 2012, p137.
[94] Roberts 1976, p44.
[96] Fitzgerald 1984, pp313-314.
[97] Mandeville 1980, p6.
[98] Quoted in Brennan 1992, p13.
[99] Quoted in Fitzgerald 1984, p522.
[100] Cited in Fitzgerald 1984, p536.
[101] Aurukun shire council, http://www.aurukun.qld.gov.au/shire-profile/our-culture

/traditional-countries/.
[102] Wright 2006, p134.
[103] Roberts 2008, p118.
[104] Roberts 1976, p35.
[105] Kidd 1997, p284.
21 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
[106] Roberts 2008, p118.
[107] Roberts 1976, p40.
[108] Roberts 1976, p41.
[109] Roberts 1976, p40.
[110] Kidd 1997, p286.
[111] Roberts 2008, p119.
[112] Roberts 1976, p41.
[113] North-East Branch of the Communist Party of Australia 1976, p4.
[114] Fitzgerald 1984, p315.
[115] Roberts 1976, pp42-43.
[116] Kidd 1997, p289.
[117] Church criticises Government, Courier Mail, 16 December 1975.
[118] Kidd 1997, p285.
[119] Roberts 1976, p31.
[120] Roberts 2008, p123.
[121] The Privy Council could hear appeals from Australian state courts until this legal
avenue was closed in the 1980s.
[122] NAA 1978, Submission 2046: Proposed Queensland Government takeover of

management of Aurukun and Mornington Island Reserves Decision 4909, 21 Mar
1978-22 Mar 1978, A12909, p.14, http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/
SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=8147067.
[123] Kidd 1997, p295.
[124] Roberts 1976, p44.
[125] Roberts 2008, p123.
[126] OLincoln 2012, p161.
[127] Kidd 1997, p297.
[128] Roberts 2008, p52.
[129] Kidd 1997, p298.
[130] Kidd 1997, p298.
[131] Roberts 2008, p52.
22 of 23 12/18/16 8:18 PM
[132] Kidd 1997, p299.
[133] Fitzgerald 1984, p317.
[134] Fitzgerald 1984, p317.
[135] Kidd 1997, p289-290.
[136] Kidd 1997, p328.
[137] Quoted in Brennan 1992, p12.
[138] Wharton 1996, p31.
[139] Jamie Walker, Bittersweet end to Wik native title saga, The Australian, 12 October
2012.
[140] Natasha Robinson, High Court to hear Wik case against Mineral Resources Act, The
Australian, 20 August 2015.
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Cape York: a history of Aboriginal dispossession and resistance http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php/no-11-summer-2016/127-ca...

No.11 Summer 2016

We dont want the enemy coming to destroy our land.[1]

The Cape York mission system

Developments in mining post-World War II centrality of

Australian mining corporation Consolidated Zinc (Cozinc), which commissioned a geologist

The Mapoon dispossession: they came in the night like

dispossession of the Mapoon people showed its determination to obliterate Aboriginal

Land theft accelerated by Joh Bjelke-Petersen

Bjelke-Petersen attempted in 1974 to impose an increase in the paltry royalties paid by

Bjelke-Petersen was a champion of the assimilationist policies favoured by previous

Bjelke-Petersens project to extend mining interests hinged on a further offensive on the

Aurukun: who knows by what Act of Law the white man

Frankland, Kathy 1994, A Brief History of Government Administration of Aboriginal and

Queensland Legislative Assembly, 28 November 1957, Parliamentary debates

Raggart, H.G. 1968, Mountains of Ore, Landsdowne Press.

Trengove, Alan 1979, Discovery: Stories of Modern Mineral Exploration, Stockwell

Wright, Alexis 2006, Carpentaria, Giramondo.

[1] Aurukun elder Albert Chevathen, 1975.

[6] Mapoon Aboriginal Shire Council, http://queenslandplaces.com.au/mapoon-aboriginal-

[7] Wharton 1996, p15.

[8] Brennan 1992, p7.

[9] Roberts 1975a, p6.

[10] Kidd 1997, p48.

[12] Wharton 1996, p16.

[14] Quoted in Roberts 1975a, p7.

[15] Kidd 1997, p61.

[16] Kidd 1997, pp92-93.

[17] Frankland 1994, p6.

[18] Kidd 1997, p93.

[19] Kidd 1997, p147.

[20] Section 32(2), Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act 1939.

[21] Kidd 1997, p148.

[23] Frankland 1994, p10.

[24] Lacey 1976, p287.

[25] Kidd 1997, p267.

[26] Kidd 1997, p193.

[27] Kidd 1997, p195.

[28] Kidd 1997, p201.

[29] Cited in Roberts 1975b, p63.

[31] Cited in Roberts 1975b, p64. My emphasis.

[32] Wharton 1996, p27.

[33] Roberts 1975b, p69.

[34] Kidd 1997, p203.

[35] Cited in Wharton 1996, p64.

[36] Trengove 1979, p10.

[37] Roberts 2008, p92.

[38] Fitzgerald 1984, p299.

[39] Fitzgerald 1984, p186.

[40] Raggart 1968, p52.

[41] Quoted in Wharton 1996, p77.

[42] Queensland Legislative Assembly 1957, p1418.

[43] Raggart 1968, p91.

[44] Roberts 2008, p97.

[45] Cousins and Niewyenheusen 1984, p15.

[46] Roberts 2008, p97.

[47] Kidd 1997, p204.

[48] Queensland Legislative Assembly 1957, p1413.

[49] Kidd 1997, p206.

[50] Roberts 2008, p97.

[51] Fitzgerald 1984, p308.

[52] Fitzgerald 1984, p309.

[53] Roberts 1976, p3.