with the co-operation of the Ministers responsible for Aboriginal welfare in the Australian States, for use by the National Aborigines' Day Observance Committee and its associates in connexion with the celebration of National Aborigines' Day in Australia, 12th July, 1957.

On the front cover ofOur Aborigines is a posed picture of an Aboriginal stockman. He sits casually on a timber fence, one leg dangling with the other propped up on a cross-post in the foreground, about to strike a match to light his pipe. His gaze is directed off to the right of the frame, while holding the reins of his horse, which, fully saddled, stands directly behind him. A stockwhip is draped loosely over his forearm. We might read the scene as one in which a hard-working stockman has paused briefly for a well-earned rest and smoke, without however, taking his eyes for a moment off his field of responsibility -- the paddock, where presumably sheep or cattle graze. In his clean white bush outfit and stetson hat he is the picture of successful assimilation, the primitive reconciled to Amer-European economic and social orders.

In taking his specific place as an industrial citizen (although he is not yet a citizen in fact) within the modern social order, he is in turn allotted an area of personal control and regulation. Small as it may seem in the larger scheme of things it nonetheless appears substantial in this picture -- power over the leather-bound horse, ownership of the gaze surveying the paddock, a whip to regulate stock, the relative autonomy to determine when to have a smoke-break. In this sense, the front cover of Our Aborigines constitutes a spectacle of idealised relations of power between non-Aborigines and Aborigines in 1957. It is remarkable for its play on the romantic self-image of Australianness, the rugged, hardworking pioneer engaged in surmounting vast un-European spaces, in order to incorporate that which was most un-European, in an attempt to make 'positive' that which historically has been excluded as deviant.

But the Aboriginal man here is necessarily solitary. In Rousseauvean tradition, he embodies the 'noble savage' in which humankind in its 'state of nature', that is, pre-civil society, can be located. As Roberta James (1993: 208) has said 'The 'noble savage' has become part of a rhetoric of images, an iconic mnemonic by which the world is understood'. The image functions here to give moral legitimacy to assimilation policy. Aborigines are pictured as a people who, having been governed by nature, by 'Natural Law', are nonetheless able (through the kind and patient guidance of the civil state) to find a place in the sun of the commonwealth of man. It offers readers a plausible and gratifying solution to the vexing problem of reconciling the 'primitive' and the 'modern' by synthesising the nobility of the savage and the nobility of labour. What we read is a natural progression from the 'state of nature' to the lower rungs of civil society -- rural worker. The latent individuality presupposed of the noble savage is released from the tyranny of nature by his entry into the social contract with civil society, which is co-extensive with the individual wage-labour contract (even though award wages for Aboriginal stockmen did not become mandatory until 1968).

Thus, in this version of the assimilationist imaginary, modernisation is achieved through proletarianisation (in others it is education, training, housing and hygiene). The natural estate of the savage is forfeited in exchange for an individual labour position within the relations of production, with the promise of citizenship if that position is maintained. The gratifying aspect is that the dignity of the native is preserved throughout what is presented as a painless and historically natural and inevitable process. As such, the imagery of the cover is a pictorial lesson for non-Aboriginal readers in the linear and natural progression of history wherein gentle, gradual change is substituted for social rupture and upheaval.

The image fixes Aborigines in the Australian political economy as rural employees, delineating precisely the limits of their power within post-war society. That is, they have, as an entire people, power over animals, which in any case, are presumably owned by whites. There is no mention of indigenous rights here because they do not yet have even citizen rights. There is no requirement to negotiate the terms of representation with the power of an oppositional subject position, as there will be in ten years' time. As non-citizens, or rather, wards of the state, (like prisoners, orphans, asylum inmates) they are not self-representing subjects. They do not have a view because they exist to be viewed. The image is addressed, as are all the pamphlets, to mass urban readerships with an assumed tangential (and mass mediated) relationship with actual Aboriginal people, a constituency where such romantic idealisations can operate without interference from the realities the outback racial order.

Four years later, the front cover of One People delivers an additional moral lesson. The photograph shows Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal school children gathered around a world globe, while their white, male teacher, using a pencil as a pointer, draws their/our attention to the Australian continent. Australia's real, imagined or desired isolation and singularity is contrived in that the globe is bereft of any other lands. Australia floats alone on a vast ball of ocean. The idea here is one of acceptance of spatial sameness in spite of racial difference. 'People' here are the beneficiaries of a shared geography, and the one-ness of the nation, for which 'people' is metaphoric, is both a desire and a necessity borne of shared isolation, rather than cultural homogeneity. This latter objective can, however, be achieved, if Aborigines are successfully assimilated and, as the picture more than suggests, modern schooling, represented by the geography lesson, is one important means to do this. Of course, the non-Aboriginal children are to be assimilated into industrial society too, that's why they are at school. The cultural auto-assimilation of non-Aborigines is perhaps reinforced by Aboriginal assimilation as a kind of final frontier for modernism.

Yet the image also signals the beginning of the break-up of the regime, both semiotic and policy-wise, of exclusion and segregation of Aborigines that was the reality behind post-war 'assimilation', that distinguished it little from the earlier 'protectionism', and which was in fact articulated in the cover-images of the previous three publications. Thus by 1961, 'assimilation' is already achieved and exceeded by the image 'One People' and the final form of inclusion -- citizenship -- is prefigured.

By 1963 we no longer read 'Our Aborigines', but 'The Aborigines and You' (my emphasis). The state has now noticeably disarticulated itself from 'the public' on the 'problem' of Aboriginality and a hitherto assumed consensus organised in the collective subject 'our', has evaporated. Moreover, the title adopts an undisguised pedagogic mode of address with respect to its assumed white readership, as if this 'public' -- 'you' (formerly 'we') -- has now itself become an object of social problematisation with respect to Aboriginal policy in the way it had constituted the 'problem' for almost every other high-modern public instruction task from hygiene, good neighbourliness and morals to national loyalty and industrial harmony. Aboriginal affairs is, in other words, no longer strictly dichotomous (we and they), but triangular -- Aborigines, the state and the people. This diagram of power was to increasingly structure 'race relations' as a public discourse over the next thirty years, as it had done in previous periods, such as during colonial settlement and expansion, and more or less always had done in rural and outback areas. The Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck (1959), signalled this shift to the problematising of non-Aboriginal attitudes and behaviour.

There are available today in most states means by which the aboriginal can go to school, get a job and get a house and become a normal member of the community. Many have in fact made the transition or are making it successfully. The impediments are partly in their own minds. Does he want to make the effort and will he sustain the effort? Is it going to be worth while? What causes him to feel that impediment? The reasons are probably many and certainly complicated. There are all kinds of conflicting influences in his own life and in his surroundings. But some of these influences may be of your making and some of them may be broken by only you.

Are we neglecting our aborigines? Get out of the habit of firing that question at your government and leaving it to find an answer or take the blame. Shoot the question at yourself. Are youneglecting our aborigines? What are the needs of those in your district and what have you ever done to help them? [original emphases]

Annette Hamilton (1990: 21) asserts that during the 'initial phases of invasion, resistance and accommodation by Aborigines in settled areas, the Aborigine as object of fear was replaced by the Aborigine as figure of fun'. Hamilton traces what she calls 'two circuits of meaning concerning Aborigines' emerging from the period up to the Second World War:

On the one hand, there was the 'real' Aborigine, a good figure whose wisdom could be tapped by whites (explorers, settlers, policemen) ... He was polite to whites, did what he was told within their sphere, and in return was offered the preservation of his own sphere. (p. 21)

a second circuit of meaning [which] constructed an utterly negative picture of Aborigines, derived from their 'detribalisation', the loss of their essential cultural attributes and their desire to 'ape' whites by attempting to improve themselves. This negative image was applied to 'Mission blacks' and 'educated blacks' who didn't know their place, as well as to half-castes and fringe-dwellers, who seemed to embody the worst fantasies of white Australians -- drunkenness, vagrancy, despair and disorganisation. (p. 21)

The representation of Aboriginal people in WA's news press in the period from 1960 to the present can also be defined by a series of transformations -- from marginal problem to public threat; from powerless objects to powerful subjects, from oppressed sub-proletarians to privileged elites. However, overarching all of these was, I believe, a transformation of the object of journalistic social problematisation. If, following Ericson et al (1987), the work of the news media is in visualising deviance as an act of problematising areas of the social, in order that state technologies of social control can be brought to bear, then in 1960 the 'problem' consisted of the need to assimilate Aborigines into a society that was, in the context of the discourse of assimilation relatively unproblematised itself. That is, the standing of society in these press articles -- a society to which the reader is assumed to belong -- is, for all its assumed complex modern-ness compared to Aboriginality, actually simplified and constructed into a cohesive, idealised whole, and through this the readership is unified into a collective identity. This identity is not class-fragmented, nor generationally divided, nor regionally diverse, nor educationally differentiated -- it is simply and explicitly modern, and implicitly 'white'. Aboriginality needed to change, to dissolve into an already complete, homogenous and unchangeable white modernity. Aspects of white society were of course, the focus of forms of journalistic problematisation outside of the discourse of assimilation, but unproblematic in relation to assimilation. This was the dominant reading position in 1960. By 1991 there was no longer a single dominant reading position, but a number of journalistic problematisations of Aboriginality and society that competed for hegemonic status and the winning over of public opinion. What I want to develop in the remainder of this paper is a genealogy of contemporary news media discourses about Aboriginality. I want to do this in order to later re-focus attention on 'anti-Aboriginal' media campaigns in terms of their competitive relationship with media discourses of Aboriginal liberation which also developed over this period.

I will map out these discursive changes by way of survey of the two Perth daily papers from 1960 to 1972. The data was collected from microfilm copies of The West Australian and the Daily News for the months of January and February, and June, July and August (to obtain an early and mid-year range) from 1960, 1965, 1970, and 1972. In addition to this sampling at five-yearly intervals, I have surveyed the press reporting surrounding two extraordinary national events that have come to symbolise the changing political status of Aborigines -- the 1967 federal referendum and the 1972 Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. At least one qualification has to be made here. The news articles cited came overwhelmingly from The West Australian because, simply, this paper contained far more coverage than the Daily News in the same sample periods.

The analysis is of course, not statistically grounded nor comprehensive in scope (for example, no data were available on radio and television from 1960 to 1972). Rather, it sought an indicative sample of routine reporting over this period so a general sense of changes in topic, frequency, emphasis of reports and sources; changes in the subject-object relations between assumed readers and the Aboriginal-related issues presented, and to draw some broad conclusions about the relationship between changes in the political status of Aborigines and their representation in key media that organise the public domain.

Reports concerning Aboriginal people in The West Australian and the Daily News in the early 1960s were typically short and infrequent (that is, from 4 to 7 paragraphs, not appearing on a daily basis). They referred to 'natives', and dealt with concerns about the health and welfare of people on reserves, government funding, alcohol problems and some criminal matters. Pastoralists, Native Welfare Officers, police and missionaries constituted the primary journalistic sources of knowledge and information about remote area Aboriginal people in this period, prior to the development of autonomous Aboriginal organisations with self-management roles and a communicative interface with news media.

It was through the institutional, industrial and political perspectives of these sources that the news media made sense of day to day matters involving Aboriginal people. 'Poll may Change Drink Law' (The West Australian, 14.1.60, p 12) concerns parliamentary moves to abolish discriminatory drinking laws in the Northern Territory. The Daily News item, 'Native Charged' (5.8.60, p. 3), reporting on a murder at the Warburton Mission, describes the accused as 'Full-blood native' who killed 'another native'. Racial sub-classification is similarly meaningful in 'Half-Caste Awaits Sentence' (The West Australian, 15.1.60, p. 20), telling of a 'half-caste labourer' found guilty of assaulting a 'half-caste' woman on Christmas Eve. However, these racial gradings are not used in 'Aborigines Committed' (The West Australian, 16.1.60, p. 14). A sympathetic letter to the editor (The West Australian, 8.8.60, p. 6) calls for 'housing for the natives', on the grounds that their conditions are 'deplorable' and links the resulting uncleanliness of Aboriginal school children to their being racially 'snubbed' by white children. The editor's response to the letter consists entirely of a quote from 'A Native Welfare Department spokesman'. It should be noted that the call for housing was a demand upon government, and responded to directly by the appropriate bureaucracy, but also that the government was the only agency to be called and to respond in this period -- Aborigines do not yet constitute a subject autonomous from the state within the discourse of the social problematisation of Aboriginality. Although 'the responsibility of improving their way of life rests with the natives themselves', apparently the granting of independence does not extend to an independent public speaking position.

Similarly, 'Dept. Makes Ready For Pension Day' (The West Australian, 21.1.60, p. 8) is able to report an important policy initiative -- the granting of pensions to Aboriginal people -- without using any identified Aboriginal sources. Aboriginal cultural practices are also represented through white expert mediators. A preview for theChildren Channel 7 television program entitled 'Tribal Lore For Children' (The West Australian, 22.1.60, p. 14) has naturalist Harry Butler telling Aboriginal legends, displaying sacred artefacts, playing recordings of a corroboree and demonstrating the didgeridoo.

When aboriginal ichurungas (sacred sticks) are brought out, bull roarers warn women and the uninitiated to go bush. Profane gazing on these sticks -- some of them centuries old -- can bring dire tribal penalties.

The Parker's Christmas guest is rather shy -- at least when strangers are present. And who can blame her? She's only 12, and to this native girl from Onslow a lot of things must be very strange and new ... like the scooter owned by one of the Parker girls or the TV set in the lounge room.

GLADYS, the tiny black girl with a husy [sic] voice, was the only fullblood aboriginal in the camp. As such, in other camps she would have been a menial. But in Mick Daly's droving outfit she has no set tasks. She is the boss's wife, and other people are paid to work for HER.

"I like it out here" she said. "I'm glad they let me marry Mick. I love him, yes. But I wish he wouldn't get wild with me."

Photographs occasionally complemented articles, usually depicting Aboriginal people either as being assisted by non-Aboriginal people (technicians, teachers, priests) in some manner, or as 'visitors' (such as Doris above) or cute babies and children. In 'Terry Is One Year Old' (Daily News, 9.8.60, p. 2) the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families and communities is implicated.

FORMER Wiluna mission baby Terry Robert, now Terry Robert Duyker of Bamiston St. Scarborough needs to know some 'blood brothers'. At least that's what his legal guardian mother, Dutch born Mrs. Frank Duyker said at his first birthday party. Guests at the party included some young foster mothers of Native Welfare Department children. ... Terry was an unwanted two-months old twin rejected by his tribe.

Overall such stories characteristically conveyed themes of cultural and social assimilation such as the acquiring of Western industrial skills, social values, behaviours and lifestyles. Traditional Aboriginal culture and ritual was contextualised anthropologically as exemplary of a primitive stage in the history or evolution of 'man', or interpreted as 'witchcraft' and occasionally being of mild aesthetic interest to non-Aboriginal readers in terms of exotic artefacts and craft. While this might indicate at least some degree of appreciation of traditional Aboriginal culture in its own right, there is no evidence of a problematising of the implications of the assimilation project for this culture's future.

The scarcity of coverage overall indicated an assumed marginal interest in Aboriginal affairs by the readerships of these papers, and very much conveyed an impression that although Aboriginal welfare is of some concern, state and church systems of regulation, surveillance and paternal care were firmly in place. Feature articles were very rare. Significantly, the 'native problem' was not regarded as presenting a threat to non-Aboriginal society as it had clearly in earlier frontier periods. Decades of intense surveillance and policing and concentration on reserves and missions (Haebich 1988) following the crushing of the last armed Aboriginal resistance in the Kimberley in 1897 (Pedersen and Woorunmurra 1995) had long since removed any anxiety about the certainty of European settlement. For the time being, the task was the quiet, background one of assisting 'primitive' nomads to make the 'transition' into modern white society.

A number of developments combined progressively to erode the suffocating self-assuredness and uniformity of the assimilationist paradigm over the next few years. First, growing Aboriginal political activism, particularly in New South Wales and exemplified in the 'Freedom Rides' led by Charles Perkins in 1965, directly associated Aboriginal concerns with those of the African American civil rights movement, in terms of political objectives (social equality with whites) and methods (media-oriented protests and civil disobedience). As Scott Bennett (1989: 8) notes:

Taking the lead of the Freedom Rides in the southern States of the USA, the Freedom Riders took a well publicised bus ride through north-western New South Wales towns, where they drew attention to examples of petty discrimination such as Aborigines-only sections of cinemas and the banning of mixed swimming in community swimming pools.

Second, according to Richard Broome (1982: 173) broad changes were taking place in the cultural and ethnic constitution of Australian society in the early 1960s:

Australia was now no longer entirely British in ethnic character due to the large number of European migrants who had arrived since 1947. Initial prejudice among British Australians had given way by the 1960s to greater tolerance, so much so that the federal government had eased the restrictions on Asian immigration in 1966. Economic prosperity and post-war affluence helped this growing tolerance of others, and this was further encouraged by the increasing number of Australians whose opinions had been broadened by travel.

Also of great importance was the fact that Aboriginal affairs became of special interest to the media in the 1960s. The reporting was often negative or sensational, but at least some concern about the Aboriginal predicament was generated. Events outside Australia also played a part in the changes. The vocal new states in the United Nations which had recently emerged from colonial subjection kept their eyes on those governments still controlling indigenous peoples. The Australian government, which administered New Guinea under United Nation's trusteeship, became very sensitive about the possibility of international criticism on race relations in either New Guinea or Australia. (p. 173)

The impact of television upon relations between Aboriginal people, the state and civil society should not be seen as limited only to the effect of the increased coverage, and its visual immediacy, of civil rights, anti-colonial and national liberation developments from around the world, but as central to the structuring of a now fully constituted consumer culture which upset prevailing hierarchies of power. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985: 163) argue, particularly in relation to the advent of television, against the pessimism of the 'mass culture' prognosis (associated with the Frankfurt school):

along with the undeniable effects of massification and uniformisation, this media-based culture [the societies of the industrialised West] also contains powerful elements for the subversion of inequalities ... the reigning appearance of equality and the cultural democratisation which is the inevitable consequence of the action of the media permit the questioning of privileges based upon older forms of status.

democratic consumer culture has doubtless stimulated the emergence of new struggles which have played an important role in the rejection of older forms of subordination, as was the case in the United States with the struggle of the black movement for civil rights. (pp. 163-164)

They should be helped towards assimilation in the way migrants are helped ... where is the hope? This sitting around the park creates the wrong atmosphere and leads to prejudice.

In 'Warning on Wage Rises For Natives' (The West Australian, 7.8.65, p. 10), moves toward the equalisation of pay and conditions for Aboriginal pastoral workers are obviously upsetting longstanding production relations based on low paid and unpaid Aboriginal labour. The chairman of the Australian Meat Board warns that equal pay may 'make it impossible for station owners to employ natives as at present'. He argues for the positivity of existing inequality on the grounds that stations provide rations 'for the native families many of whom were not able to make any contribution to the work force of the station', and offers a common-sense of racial difference that is impenetrable by the logic of industrial equality: 'the way of the native is very different to the way of the white man'. Thus the fact that award wages are, in principle, supposed to provide for the family of an employee and not just the employee alone, is denied in order to justify an infinitely cheaper ration system. The structure of the pastoral industry has been rendered exploitative by the external discourses of wage standardisation and racial equality. In response, its lobbyist has attempted to recuperate a morality by arguing a local, pragmatic 'knowledge' of racial difference and 'positive' differential relations. In any case, it is the viability of the pastoral industry that is presented as the paramount concern as wage equality 'could seriously impede the development of the pastoral industry in the North and so prevent a spectacular increase in beef cattle production'.

Here we have the now familiar counterposing of the interests of 'the economy' over the assumed sectional interests of Aboriginal people, even when these latter are claimed as nothing more than universal worker rights established within the post-war industrial system. This is in fact an anti-assimilation rhetoric, for it precludes Aboriginal inclusion into commonplace social and industrial structures on the basis of immutably 'different ways'. Unlike 1960, Aboriginality again poses a threat to white interests and, also unlike 1960, it is the external discourse of equality -- even when coupled with assimilation (because assimilation implies an equal outcome) -- emanating from state instruments that constitutes the object of problematisation in this story.   

Besides overcoming apathy towards Gnowangerup's natives, welfare authorities face a big problem in housing the town's native population.

Townspeople agree that because of its substandard accommodation the reserve contributes greatly to the natives' inability to lift their standard of living ... [and most also agree that] ... the sooner the natives are moved from the reserve to suitable housing the sooner will their chances of assimilation improve.

Institutional competition in the production of knowledge about Aboriginal conditions is reported in 'Lewis Defends Rule On Native Survey' (The West Australian, 19.8.65, p. 10). In this story, the Native Welfare minister is insistent upon his department's sub-editing of a proposed 'economic survey of natives in WA' by a University of WA academic prior to its publication. The minister doubts the 'purpose of many of the questions' and is 'far from satisfied that the proposed survey would be of any benefit to natives'. The story indicates the kind of control still exercised by the state, under the Native Welfare Act 1954, over interaction between Aborigines and non-Departmental agencies with rival claims to policy-oriented knowledge production.

The problem of meddling outsiders in Aboriginal life is also the focus of 'Publican's Claim Disputed: Drinking and Aborigines' (Daily News, 23.8.65, p. 10). A Walgett, NSW hotel licensee (identified as 'A. White') complains that 'university students and agitators' have 'interfered' with the running of the pub, which includes refusing Aboriginal entry to the public bar. Claiming support by local Aboriginal people, White is drawing up a petition against a group of student-backed Aborigines who are to attempt to drink at the public bar.

The petition would point out that the university students and 'agitators' had done nothing for the Aborigines and had taken away many of the amenities and privileges they had.

He [White] said: 'Don't think for a moment that the townspeople are against the dark person. The communist element has got among them and stirred up trouble. They have to be curbed.'

Non-Aborigines are again the sole sources of quotations in a similar report, also dealing with anti-racism activism in Walgett -- 'Students, Natives Arrested' (The West Australian, 9.8.65, p. 1). University students and Aborigines were arrested for 'obstruction' in the Walgett picture theatre after attempting to sit in the whites-only upstairs section. Nonetheless, the report does enunciate the Aboriginal position rather than that of the theatre manager.

Alongside the civil rights stories it was possible to find the most extreme assimilationist perspectives, such as 'Seven Girls And A Dream (The West Australian, 11.1.65, p. 5) about Tardun mission (motto: 'Light in Darkness') where totalitarian church control and the forced separation of families is legitimated, if not exalted, and the lack of any civil rights is made virtuous -- 'in our Beatle-ridden world they work 16 hours a day, seven days a week without pay'.

Matters of prejudice and racism had entered the previously non-political and routine 'native visits city' story. 'Native Girl's Weekend In Perth' (The West Australian, Features, 5.1.65, p. 4) is also a departure from the genre (it is a play upon it) in that the 'attractive young native girl' who remains unnamed in the story, is in fact 'a girl of the night', street-walking 'a few minutes from the heart of Perth'.

She spoke of sex in a frank and disarming manner. She swore infrequently.
She was bitter because she could see no end to racial prejudice in Australia.
"I hate coming to Perth" she said. "People just stare and stare and stare at you. Australia would find itself in the same position as Africa if there were a lot more of my people."

While the parents of white children competed in the East Kimberley interschool sports held recently at Kununurra sat under the awning, most of the parents of the native children sat apart. They were welcome to share the shade under the awning, but they sat in little groups around the ground. This I pointed out to the Rev. Barry Green, of Wyndham ... and asked him if there was any answer to the problem of the integration of whites and blacks. "Don't regard what you see as segregation" he warned. "Those natives over there gather together from choice. They are happier in their own group ..."

Short 'native' crime and disorder items were routine with occasional increased significance given to those incidents affecting non-Aboriginal people. An example is 'Eight Years For Rape' (The West Australian, 12.8.65, p. 1) about a 'native station hand' who was sentenced for 'having raped a 61-year-old white woman'.

Ellis was an Aboriginal with a low intelligence and a background which no doubt made it easier for him to fall into such a crime than a white man, but a severe penalty was necessary.

"In too many cases they are not regarded as members of the community. Their future will depend largely on the attitudes and behaviour of Aborigines themselves."

"I received complaints today about the gross misbehaviour of some children in Pingelly". These people were letting the side down and deferring the time of full acceptance.

"Right now many natives down here are living on charity (social service payments). They don't want to work and it causes a lot of trouble in the town" he said yesterday.

Mr. Watson told of a native who this week refused an offer of $9 a day to do clearing work on a property. "He said he wouldn't work for less than $10 a day. Nine dollars a day is good money by any standards&" he said.

Two days later in 'Firm Policy On Native Aid Urged' (Daily News, 22.5.67, p. 2) the theme of Aboriginal mendicancy is more fully elaborated. The Pingelly Shire President 'today called upon the State Government to implement a positive policy on Aboriginal welfare' during a visit to the town by the Native Welfare Minister:

Mr. Stewart described the Government's present attitude to Aboriginal affairs as a policy of appeasement. "They (the Aborigines) have liquor rights, social service benefits ... it only encourages them to be lazy."

A town social worker 'said that before Aborigines were given citizenship rights Pingelly had the reputation of the best Aboriginal town in the Great Southern'.

The following day a meeting was held in Pingelly to discuss the 'native problem' and was attended by the Native Welfare Minister. The West Australian headlined its report 'Head Denies Aborigines Stoned A Teacher' (23.5.67, p. 2) in reference to the town's high school headmaster who had refuted allegations of Aboriginal violence. The Pingelly Shire President repeated his views of the day before:

"The present policy is one of appeasement, with the government allowing natives to have liquor and social service handouts" he said.

"... must be tackled on humanitarian, economic, social and political grounds. Society has not done enough to help these people" [Minister]. Later Mr. Murray [headmaster] told the meeting the school had no serious disciplinary problems. He would rise to the minister's challenge and look at the problem in the wider aspects of the culturally underprivileged.

said there were 43 native men in the town. Seven were permanent pensioners, 22 were employed, seven were visitors and four serving prison sentences. Sentences for drunkenness had dropped from a monthly average of ten in 1964 to 3.8 at present. ... in the past seven months 72 charges had been heard in the children's Court involving 30 children. Eleven of them were not resident in Pingelly. Last October 12 children were involved in breaking and entering a shop to steal sweets and cigarettes. In March 11 children were involved in 29 charges for breaking and entering a shop.

Mr. Stewart said "We want some positive reform, some positive farm scheme, where natives can be trained and assimilated into the community". (Weekend News, 22.5.67, p. 2)

"society has not done enough to help these people." He [Native Welfare Minister] hoped teachers would accept the challenge and look deeper than the effect and look through to the cause.

While the microcosm of Pingelly served as a stage for visualising the impact on community of social change, similar issues were reported on closer to the bulk of the press's readership. In 'Native Welfare has staff problems' (Daily News, 26.5.67, p. 7) the Deputy Commissioner for Native Welfare responds to criticism by a police prosecutor that his Department 'never seems to be represented [in court] to help these people [Aborigines facing charges]'. The Native Welfare head says his Department is:

responsible for about 1000 Aboriginal men, women and children in Perth. There were three women and two men to look after their employment, housing and education problems and to carry out preventative work essential to help keep natives out of trouble.

It is really at this point that we can speak of a distinct change in the discursive configuration of relations between the state, the public and Aborigines constituted in news reporting since 1960. Press reporting on country town opposition to Aboriginal policy and the sagacious response of the government helped to consolidate a new public subject position -- or new readership of Aboriginal affairs. 'The problem', and Aboriginality itself was no longer strictly the province of native administrators, missionaries and other experts because this expert knowledge was now seen to be challenged by local experience, common-sense and practical wisdom of good down-on-the-farm Australians. The State had lost its monopoly on the production of public meaning about Aboriginal affairs and in this process we can see the re-emergence of a body of public opinion that is sceptical, incredulous and hostile to state Aboriginal policy. None of this would have been possible, of course, for metropolitan readerships at least, without its visualisation in news.   

The referendum marked the beginning of a significant increase in press coverage of Aboriginal affairs and its advancement to the status of a 'political' issue. According to Bennett (1989: 11):

Most of the media was firmly behind the campaign, giving much space to YES campaigners, running supportive editorials, and reporting injustices suffered by particular Aborigines.

Federal opposition leader Whitlam said that a Labor Government would play a more active role in native welfare if the referendum was carried. Labour would introduce legislation to enable natives to have the education, good housing conditions and public health and hygiene available to all other Australians.

Mr. Holt said that the Commonwealth aim was to co-operate with the States to ensure joint action in the best interests of the natives.

It might also bring interference in State affairs. [voter] Opposition to the question might give Canberra the excuse to wash its hands of Aboriginal matters altogether, outside the Northern Territory.

The proposition that they [Aborigines] should be counted in the census is straightforward and should be universally acceptable. In this vague situation we feel drawn to vote yes to end discrimination against Aborigines in the census and to hope for a constructive approach by Canberra to Australia's most urgent social problem.

The overwhelming yes vote on the second question revealed a deep-seated national conscience on the Aboriginal's lot and a nationwide desire that the commonwealth should take positive action about it. Canberra's main responsibility is to find money for education and housing and to undertake research into the practical problems of hastening integration between white and black.

our forefathers thinned out the tiresome blacks with musket balls and arsenic. Except for Tasmania, which imposed its final solution last century, all states have been under fire for inhuman neglect or exploitation of their Aborigines.

He said other countries would judge Australia mainly by its performance in discharging its obligations to Aborigines, developing the North and preparing New Guinea for independence.

Probably very important in this development in post-war Australia was the positive publicity gained at the time of the 1967 referendum which built on this more sympathetic coverage, for the guilt-induced mood of 'righting the wrong' prompted newspaper and television investigation of the place of Aborigines in Australian society.

Moreover, here was a public that the media could now refer to as existing independently. If journalistic investigation of the 'place of Aborigines in Australian society' had, until the referendum, been sporadic and unsure of its mandate, it could now proliferate on the basis of the public's desire to know rather than simply the journalist's desire to show.

However, at the level of news discourse in Western Australia, political citizenship did not reflect itself as semiotic citizenship in ways that might have been expected in the liberal democratic imaginary. That is, Aboriginal people continued to be treated as an aggregated entity, referred to, according to Stephen Muecke (1992: 23) as a collective pronoun -- they. However, this is a problematic issue because, after citizenship, Aboriginal people were themselves compelled to re-constitute themselves as a positive collective identity to replace the negative and undifferentiated subject of absent-citizenship. Furthermore, it is a commonplace of public politics, which journalism renders meaningful, that sectional interests be positioned with a 'they' identity. This is an inescapable duality of the democratic public sphere (and of course, any rational communication process) -- the necessary temporary exteriorising of an interest from the imagined collective space while its claims are negotiated. Any constituent part of the whole must be spoken of as 'they' (politicians, bureaucrats, unions, capitalists, workers, children etc.) in the calculation of interest guided by a principle of a collective good.

Aboriginal status as wards of the state prior to 1967, roughly equivalent to prisoners and the insane in the sense that democratic rights were denied, and also equivalent to children in the sense that they were expected to undergo a long rite-of-passage into (adult) citizenship, meant that individual Aborigines were not, a matter of course, expected to speak for themselves in the public domain. Journalistic common-sense held that authorities from the apparatus of expertise were to be sought out for comment on matters Aboriginal. Moreover, and this is equally important, as non-citizens of a collective subordinate identity defined by race, there were few, if any matters of any kind on which Aboriginal people could be expected to have a legitimate say. That is, any view, comment, or idea an Aboriginal person might have, was automatically an Aboriginal one, and would logically pertain to Aboriginality, which, again, was the knowledge domain of white expertise. Aborigines were excluded from those journalistic spaces where the 'ordinary citizen' or 'man in the street' was represented, that is, those styled as representing citizen views on social and political issues. A full-page of 'vox pop' comments about conscription, or youth, or industrial disputes and so on could not conceivably include Aborigines because they were not understood as Aboriginal issues. However, neither could WA Aborigines be seen commenting, for example, on the 1967 referendum question, and this was an both Aboriginal issue and a general political issue (the relative powers of state and commonwealth).

Yet, in the years immediately after the consolidation of citizenship, Aborigines continued to be treated in WA newspapers as if little had changed. They were, semiotically at least, still denizens, not citizens, with a coterie of experts to speak on their behalf. Formal political equality was slow to impact upon journalistic routines, but more than this, it had an effect which was to combine, by the early 1970s, the older 'they' status of non-citizens with a newer 'they' status of political adversaries. In other words, Aborigines were to retain their totalised identity as aliens within the social order beyond 1967, but whereas prior to 1967 they were seen as something less than citizens, by 1972 they were to become something more, and less, than citizens: less because the older discourses constructing Aborigines as primitive dependants persisted, and more because the growing politics of Aboriginal nationalism placed demands upon the political order that exceeded conservative conceptions of the limits of the obligations of the liberal state to its citizens. The question of formal political equality was rapidly overtaken by demands for social equality (housing, employment, education). Social equality, in the form of the 'Welfare State' and Keynesian economic strategies had indeed been largely accepted as part of the post-war renegotiation of relations between capital and labour, but Aborigines had been excluded from this process and were party to none of the class or associated power bases (unions, employer bodies, political parties), and structures of negotiation (industrial arbitration, parliament). As formally equal citizens who were expected to advance themselves according to liberal and social democratic ideals of equality of opportunity, they were, however, outside the structures and relationships which had been negotiated and developed that gave to this ideal whatever substance and credibility (whatever hegemonic or consensual legitimacy) it had. Further, Aboriginal people came into this situation stripped of their inheritable capital -- the land. In such a situation, a political course open to emergent Aboriginal politicians and activists was to develop in the direction of national self-determination. This meant turning alien-ness into a positive identity -- a basis for demanding social equality and extracting resources, rights and concessions by holding up the spectre of a subversive national liberation movement which could draw immense moral power from international parallels.

One of the effects of these political transformations upon news journalism in WA was that journalists were now faced with a new set of choices in covering Aboriginal matters. On the one hand, they had, as authoritative sources, the customary welfare officials, teachers, police, politicians, priests and academics, and on the other an as yet small but growing number of Aboriginal community spokespeople. The latter start to emerge in press reports with more frequency after 1970. The problematic for journalism emerged as to who represents Aborigines (however not yet a question of which Aboriginal people represent which Aboriginal sector, issue or views). Central to the problem was the ambiguous status of Aboriginality itself -- its proto-national identity, which had always existed though repressed and denied, carried with it an implicit contestation of the legitimacy of mainstream political representation. Essentially it is the logic that if Aborigines are outside the 'we' community, of which the parliamentary system is both part and representative, they cannot be treated as citizens with normal lines of political representation. This problem could not arise in 1960 because Aboriginality was a stable and fixed entity as a subordinate dependency of the state; their interests were understood to be represented by the collective body politic. One could report, at will, the comments and issue definitions of everybody except Aborigines themselves, without any anxiety about having overlooked any of the key sources of information crucial to a story's credibility. But once an Aboriginal political subjectivity had been established, autonomous from the state, based in a free association of citizens, its voice had to be dealt with in ways that no longer meant a simple deference to state and civic authorities, academic and church expertise.

Moreover, Aboriginal political subjectivity began to assert itself at a time when other local non-traditional political estates (women's liberation, youth counter-culture, anti-war movement) had already established a journalistic category, and public domain space, of radical protest, and the displacement of news tropes from these to Aboriginal actions was inevitable. Thus, the politicisation of Aboriginality meant that, even if the older colonial news representation of indigenous status as a dependency below the threshold of civil society could have died away after 1967 Aboriginality would continue as a 'they' constituency.   

A small report 'Native Leader In Hospital' (The West Australian, 16.1.70, p. 9) indicates this emergence: 'W.A. Aboriginal leader Jack Davis has had a heart attack and been admitted to the Armadale-Kelmscott memorial Hospital'. The report describes Davis (who was later to become famous as an author, poet and playwright) as a 'liaison officer for the WA Aboriginal Advancement Council'. Similarly in 'Natives May Give Talks' (The West Australian, 8.8.70, p. 10) 'Mr. J. Davis', now the president of the Aboriginal Advancement Council, is reported to have proposed that:

Aboriginals want to give lectures to policemen, particularly those working in country areas, so that the police will have a better idea of Aboriginal behaviour.

The Daily News, (17.8.70, p. 1) appears to be introducing Jack Davis to its readers for the first time in 'Perth man For Black Power Talks'.

A Perth part-Aboriginal will attend a Black Power conference in the United States next month. He is Mr Jack Davis, president of the Aboriginal Advancement Council.

"The aim, like the movement in America, is to get at the minds of the poorly-educated and illiterate," he said. "I am anxious that black and white realise education could halt the spread of the movement."

With Black Power we now have the conditions for a categorisation of Aboriginal political stances in terms of moderate and radical and their alignment with corresponding non-Aboriginal political movements, parties and philosophies. However as Bennett (1989: 13) points out, following Christine Jennett (1980), Black Power itself was not to become the manifesto around which Aboriginal national liberation would galvanise. Although it influenced some Aboriginal leaders, it actually marked the last strong association with African American parallels that had begun with the civil rights movement. There was a realisation that Aborigines, unlike African Americans, had territorial claims and as such had more resonance with US indigenous peoples' experience.

In 'Aboriginal Housing: Davis Hopes To Talk To PM' (The West Australian, 5.7.72, p. 11) Jack Davis, secretary of the WA Aboriginal Advancement Council, is 'seeking a meeting with the Prime Minister, Mr. McMahon, to put a case for urgent aid for Aboriginal housing'. As a citizen, Davis is able to ask:

the Labor MHR for Hughes, Mr L. R. Johnson -- a member of the Opposition's Aboriginal affairs committee -- to arrange the meeting. Mr Davis has told Mr Johnson [my emphasis] that some Aboriginal families are living in deplorable conditions in WA. Mr Davis wants to persuade Mr McMahon to make and emergency allocation in the Federal budget.

There is also evidence of the degree to which the 'native problem' previously seen as a country town issue, was by 1970, urban, and newsworthy because of its negative effects on non-Aboriginal metropolitan communities. 'This Black Spot of Misery And Vice' (Weekend News, 21.1.70, p. 4) is an on-the-spot tabloid investigation that seeks to represent the experience of poor but 'clean, hard-working people living in misery in Perth today' because:

Their neighbours -- half-castes, "off-whites" and alcoholics -- have created filthy conditions which remind me of compost heaps I have seen in Middle East ghettos.

He [Cr Andrews] said that he ... would welcome native children in East Fremantle -- but not in that house. He did not know what nearby residents thought of the proposal. It would not influence him if they opposed it on the question of colour.   

The sites were an integral part of the songs and ceremonies associated with the initiation and circumcision rites of the Papa legend. If the sites were damaged or destroyed, the whole song cycle and legend could be lost.

Native Welfare Minister Lewis said that the report's recommendations would be in his mind when he put the case for the preservation of sacred Aboriginal sites to the cabinet. Details of the report would be sent to the Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mr Wentworth, who had expressed concern about danger to the Wingellina sites.

'Survey finds 116 natives in 10 houses' (The West Australian, 11.8.70, p. 7) reports on a survey by the Carnarvon Aboriginal Advancement Association showing gross overcrowding in government built houses on the Carnarvon reserve. The important point about this article is that it publicises the demands of an Aboriginal organisation upon the state, and details the research carried out by that organisation to back its claims. The research aspect is powerful in that it uses the statistical methods we saw the state employ in relation to Pingelly three years earlier to quantify the problem and render it actionable in the context of governmental discourse.

Another 46 adults and 90 children live in 13 shanties and eight tents. Fourteen families with 36 adults and 35 children live in tin shanties, tents and caravans ...

The association wants an immediate grant from the N.W.D. [Native Welfare Department] to build at least 20 conventional houses in Carnarvon.

In a follow-up report three days later: 'Native Health, Houses: Lewis says reports are exaggerated' (The West Australian, 14.8.70, p. 12). The Native Welfare Minister, in Parliament, defends the record of his Department by questioning, not the demands of Carnarvon Aboriginal Advancement Association directly, but the community doctors' claims made in their letter to the editor.

Mr. Lewis to Mr Daniel Norton (Lab. Gascoyne) in the Legislative Assembly [said] that in his view the letter was exaggerated.

Unless he can get his hands on some extra capital soon, Mr Edgar Lewis will be faced with one of the hottest Aboriginal issues since he took over the native welfare portfolio eight years ago. It concerns Aboriginal housing, which, from all accounts is becoming a grim problem.

It is hard to estimate just how much money is needed to put Aboriginal housing right in WA, but on present indication it could run to $10 million or more. The money available for the job last financial year totalled about $1.6 million. As almost $1 million of this amount came from the Commonwealth it is clear that it cannot be managed with State resources.

A cartoon in The West Australian, 15.8.70, p. 6) articulates this move. It depicts an Aboriginal family living in a corrugated tin 'humpy'. A male adult is addressing what we recognise is a city-based government officer (his climatically inappropriate suit, brief-case and discomfort in the outback heat): "Tell Mr, Lewis, sure we're grateful for our transitional house ... it prepared us for this!". In this way Aboriginal people are made to speak the absurdity of the government scheme of 'transitional houses', which according to the concept, functions to train people in modern home-craft but in effect distribute tiny, cheap, transportable huts, after which the inadequate budgetary allocation has meant there will be no 'progression' to genuine post-war standard nuclear family houses. State and ministerial competency here is ranked considerably below that of 'the natives', and, of course, the readership of the paper that is expected to well understand the irony.

Knowledge production about Aboriginal affairs is located at a plurality of sites that are now competing for press attention. Yet this plurality inevitably meant that the liberal consensus for the improvement of Aboriginal status established in the referendum could not remain uncontested for long. If governments could be criticised for acting too slowly and devoting insufficient resources to the task, they would soon be attacked for doing too much.   

The expectations of self-government and sovereignty are of a different magnitude than cries for 'equal opportunity' and 'fair play'. Liberal democracies have a long tradition of attempting to accommodate the latter, but are relatively inexperienced in responding to the agenda of aboriginal nationalism. The full political and social agenda has not been acknowledged by the central governing bodies.

The major national reportable event around which citizen-plus demands were made was the maintenance of the Aboriginal Embassy' or 'Tent Embassy' by Aboriginal political activists at Parliament House, Canberra. The Embassy was set up on Australia Day, 26 January 1972, when Aboriginal youths erected a beach umbrella on the lawns of parliament bearing the sign 'Aboriginal Embassy'. The Embassy came to be staffed by hundreds of Aboriginal people over the next six months, and attracted national and international attention until it was violently removed by police under a new law specially introduced for the task by Liberal government. The black, yellow and red Aboriginal flag, designed only months earlier by Darwin Aboriginal artist Harold Thomas, became the emblem of this shift from native 'problem' to indigenous nation at the Embassy. As Roberta Sykes (1989: 93) points out, the Embassy gained far wider Aboriginal support than the referendum that precipitated it:

Although the 1967 referendum was an important event marking change in Black/white relations, most notably in the sphere of politics, the establishment of the Aboriginal Embassy was a much larger event in the minds of most Blacks. There were actually very few Blacks involved in the movement towards the referendum. The Aboriginal Embassy is credited with bringing more immediate and much wider changes, although the possibility of some of these changes stemmed from the results of the referendum.

The president of the Aboriginal Advancement Council, Mr Jack Davis said yesterday that an "Aboriginal consulate" to be set up in Kings Park today would remain until there was Commonwealth or State action on housing.

He [Davis] said that all those taking part would be Aborigines'. "If not, it would be felt that we were being pushed into this by non-Aboriginal people." Mr Davis said.

The squatters, led by the president of the Aboriginal Advancement Council, Mr. Jack Davis and its secretary, Mr. Ken Winder ... who intend to remain there until the State Government makes available the money to build 1,500 houses to meet what they regard as the minimum housing needs for Aborigines.

We can see the extent to which Aboriginal affairs news had become in 1972 a domain of Aboriginal political agency, on page four of The West Australian issue for 15 July. Four stories on this page 'Action on Consulate: Board to Prepare Bylaws'; '20 Aborigines Take Part in Perth March'; 'Aid Pledge by Dunstan' and 'Canberra "embassy" to remain' all concern Aboriginal political actions locally and nationally and government reactions and responses to them. The particular frames around which some of these stories are woven are open to question -- for instance, The West Australian clearly wants to make a loud point about the fact that 'Policemen almost out-numbered Aborigines at the Black Moratorium through Perth yesterday' rather than a point about the quieter fact that 'About 70 people -- including trade unionists, university and high-school students and about 20 Aborigines took part' (it is possible to read here that Aborigines are counted separately from 'people'). The report, in other words, could have stressed diverse non-Aboriginal support for Aboriginal politics as important news.

Such framings are clearly matters of editorial choice -- consciously understood or otherwise -- that implicate interest in the in-principle disinterested neutrality of news values. However, I have been less 'interested' thus far, in the inevitable editorial biases of the material discussed in this paper than with the broader trends in WA press visualisation of what constitutes Aboriginal affairs in the first place. I am more interested that this coverage shows that the five short years since the 1967 referendum had indeed seen a remarkable transformation in both the issues constituting Aboriginal affairs and the configuration of discursive relations between readers, the state and Aborigines as organised and made available for public consumption in news.   

In an editorial 'Native housing' (The West Australian, 20.6.72, p. 6) the paper states:

The State Housing Commission is making a novel approach to the vexed question of housing for Aborigines in investigating a scheme involving housing land rights for tribal natives. The proposal would allow an Aboriginal community to share title to land and let individual natives own houses built on it. This, it is felt, would preserve the special bonds and relationships peculiar to the Aboriginal kinship system.

The degree to which the notion of 'segregation' is understood to be politically and morally incorrect is indicated in the sentence: 'Though it smacks of segregation, this is a sound plan for Aborigines moving into towns from stations and missions'. The editorial writer is attempting to negotiate a path between competing historical policy logics. These are: racial segregation practices organised under decades long policies of 'protection', practices which in any case endured throughout 1950s assimilation, and which are now at odds with 'integration', a vague and ambiguous concept of social re-organisation that implies considerable behavioural change but does not hinge upon the uncompromising disavowal of Aboriginal cultural identity and lifeways required under high-assimilation -- 'Tribes would have a better chance to retain their identity, while adjusting to urban life'.

However, this editorial, which we can think of as symptomatic of an epochal crisis in policy, brought about in no small measure by the sharp rise in Aboriginal political activity, actually tries to hold together different moments in the history of 'native administration'. Some of these moments are durable enough to retain credibility and cohere with others, and some cannot logically be held together at all.

a) 'Possession of titles for individual homes could establish an appreciation of the ownership of property and pride in its maintenance'. [assimilation]

b) 'Tribes would have a better chance to retain their identity, while adjusting to urban life'. [integration]

c) 'The village concept might work better where Aborigines could engage in economically promising pursuits in their tribal country away from towns'. [segregation]

d) 'The village concept might work better where Aborigines could engage in economically promising pursuits in their tribal country away from towns'. [self-determination]

e) 'Communal living would encourage the preservation of tribal culture and discipline'. [cultural maintenance]

f) 'Communal living would encourage the preservation of tribal culture and discipline'. [protection]

This editorial was followed by another three weeks later titled 'Social Welfare' (The West Australian, 10.7.72, p. 8). This statement more carefully controls the range of meanings about Aboriginal status, and assembles a more coherent argument about the responsibilities of government. It does this by establishing citizenship as a nodal point and then moving to structural and historical inequalities to justify special government measures on Aboriginal behalf.

Repeal of the Native Welfare Act has established Aborigines as citizens in their own right. But the Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority Act recognises that Aborigines are members of a deprived and culturally damaged group -- that they need special help.

Aborigines as a group have only recently found their voice. But it is proper, as well as politic, to give them added opportunities to solve their problems.

Lest the obvious signs of attempts to master the complexity of Aboriginal affairs seen in these editorials be mistaken for an even and universal change in press discourse, an article only a month earlier: 'Early Lesson In Beating Racism' (The West Australian, 14.6.72, p. 11) shows how enduring is the logic of assimilation, at least the sub-editorial level where headings are written. There is, despite the heading, nothing in the article about 'racism'. Indeed the lead paragraph states:

KATANNING, Tuesday. Young Aboriginal children at Gnowangerup, 35 miles south-east of here, are getting an early start in assimilation.

The president of the committee [local kindergarten] Mrs A. Stewart, said today that the reserve children were being taught the usual routines. These aimed to teach good social manners, respect for equipment, hygiene appreciation and a desire to conform to expected standards of behaviour.

The above example demonstrates an important aspect of news media representations of Aboriginal affairs -- that while we can observe the broad paradigmatic shifts that occur over time, these are by no means expressed as uniform logics informing all reporting. Rather, the logics of earlier hegemonic policy moments, and contained within them older predominant discursive configurations, continue to have narrative power. These can co-habit, sometimes awkwardly, with newer sensibilities in texts such as the 'Native Housing' editorial, or they can serve as the core idea of an entire article, as in the above example.   

Referring to an allegation of discrimination against Europeans, Mr Willesee said that the Aboriginal people were an educationally and economically retarded group living in a highly technological society. It would be illogical if the special needs of Aborigines were acknowledged but remedial action was denied on the grounds that the bulk of the community was not receiving it.

The Minister is thus concerned to correct what is constructed as a public misconception (an illogicality) about government policy and intentions. To do this, he has had to racially bi-polarise the social (Aboriginal poverty, ignorance, technological incompetence, non-Aboriginal wealth, knowledge and technological competency) and necessarily totalise both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal social status. Aborigines are 'educationally and economically retarded' as a 'group'. He speaks as it were a matter of common-sense and consensus that disadvantage should be distributed equally across and among citizens regardless of ethnicity, and that if it is found to exist disproportionately among any ethnic group, in this case Aborigines, then special state 'remedial' measures are proper to achieve a democratic distribution of opportunity. The allegations are 'illogical' because they fail to understand that the special measures are designed to equalise Aboriginal social status and not to raise it above non-Aboriginal status. They also fail to accept that government policy has followed the will of the people ascertained in the referendum.

Such sense-making difficulties grew with the evolving complexity of the 'special treatment' argument, as can be seen a year later in 'MLC Says Bias Against Whites' (The West Australian, 30.5.72, p. 11). This time the issue is the payment of secondary education assistance.

The Liberal MLC for North Province, Mr. W. R. Withers claims that the Commonwealth is discriminating against whites with grants and subsidies it pays for the secondary education of children of Aboriginal descent.

Mr Withers has previously referred to anti-white discrimination in the North.

Mr Withers said he did not dispute that Aboriginal people needed help to educate their children. "However, these benefits should be available to all people regardless of their colour or back-ground," he said.

Whereas, in the earlier housing story, we saw a fellow politician, in his capacity as Minister for Community Welfare, racially polarise the social to argue his policy, the move made in Withers' argument is to fragment the totalised social status of non-Aborigines assumed in the special educational initiative, and in the special housing initiative of the earlier story. It moves in the direction of a more universal, disadvantage-based claim for state aid, and, if we can sustain this reading, its content can be plausibly more democratic given the defining criteria of disadvantage.

The visualisation of Aborigines as favoured recipients of state aid, seen above in its embryonic form would develop, in the 1980s, into a powerful resource for political parties and sectional interests to generate publicity campaigns that had decisive implications for the conduct of government in relation to Aboriginal emancipatory demands. These campaigns were able to claim enormous popular support in Western Australia, such that they could be held responsible for influencing and even deciding the course of government policy on land rights, sacred sites protection and funding. Therefore, reducing these campaigns to simple racism doesn't sufficiently explain how a public that was able to be represented as enlightened and egalitarian in 1967 could be represented as ignorant and prejudiced in 1987.   

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2. Such systems had been in place since the WA Aborigines Act of 1905. This Act gave the Chief Protector of Aborigines the statutory powers to institute measures for the relief, protection and control of Aborigines. It legalised the removal of Aboriginal children from their natural families, and encouraged the establishment of a system of missions and reserves in which thousands of Aboriginal people were subject to severe restrictions and deprivations (see Haebich 1988). This Act was amended and re-named the Native Administration Act in 1936, which resulted in greater control of people's lives and state 'guardianship' of their children. Not until the Native Welfare Act of 1954 did state restrictions and controls upon Aboriginal lives begin to diminish, culminating with an amendment in 1963 which finally removed them (Aboriginal Affairs Department 1995).

3. In the Northern Territory, 'full-blood' Aborigines were 'wards' of the state in name and fact. (Bennett 1989: 51).

4. Christine Fletcher (1992: 3) describes them alternatively as 'relocation' policies:

Earlier policies developed specifically for Aborigines in Western Australia, particularly during the first three decades of the twentieth century, were relocation policies. Governments simply moved Aboriginal communities from their traditional lands to another location. The people were then sustained with handouts of tea, flour, sugar and tobacco.

Since Aborigines were specifically discriminated against by both commonwealth and state laws it was paradoxical that assimilation into the wider Australian community would be considered while the institutions prohibiting Aborigines from becoming Australian citizens remained unchanged.