Football, Democracy & Darwin

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The Tiwi Bombers are the pride of the local population on the islands. The rules of game are not easy to understand. But the players and the enthusiastic crowd seem not to notice. They run, they scream, and they celebrate. There are two main islands, Melville and Bathurst, and many smaller ones. These islands have been cut off from the Australian mainland since the last ice age more than 11, years ago. This seclusion has resulted in a unique culture and language.

For three hours every Friday, people try to drink as much as possible.

Opinion: Democracy in a Cartoon

The consequences are awful, with a lot of family problems, domestic violence and suicide external link , especially among the young population. I have seen and experienced similar situations in once-upon-a-time very proud but isolated cultures across the globe. For example, a few years ago I took the first scheduled flight into Qaanaaq in the far north of Greenland.

It is home to the Inuit, a few thousand people with their own culture and language. As on Tiwi, I met a lot of broken characters and structures. In both cases, foreign colonialists at some point last century tried to catapult these in their view retarded cultures into modernity by brutally suppressing them. Politically and legally these severe mistakes have been understood to some extent. In the case of the Tiwi people and other first nations across Australia, their sovereignty was acknowledged by a colonial Court in New South Wales as early as external link.

In reality, it took more than years to amend the Australian constitution in such a way that the indigenous people of the country were accepted as equals. This was a powerful signal to change track. Later this spring the NT Labour government, which won a landslide in the last election when it opposed fracking, will probably now give the fracking plans a go-ahead. The short-sighted and purely economy-driven approach to local and indigenous communities has nevertheless recently mobilised many people in many places including the Tiwi-islands, where the directly elected Council external link has organised consultation meetings in most of the towns and villages across the nation.

But in a place like that, democracy seems to be between a rock and a hard place. After decades of colonial subordination, the political culture is very weak, and the traditional links to former family and tribe structures are mostly broken. Additionally, the weak economic situation tempts these communities to sometimes engage and accept bad deals with foreign governments and companies. For example, a recent development plan for a proper harbour on the Tiwis got a local yes, as it was linked to the promise of a woodchip export business external link , a promise that was not kept.

There are many similar struggles and broken promises across Australasia, a region with a wealth of peoples and countries without the privilege of being independent nation-states. Once on the United Nations list of to-be-decolonised countries, it covers an area as big as Sweden about , square kilometers and has a population of three million people.

Together with the eastern part of the island called Papua New Guinea, West Papua was retained by the Dutch after Indonesian independence in , but later annexed by the Jakarta dictatorship. While Indonesia has come a long way towards more democracy and devolution in the last 20 years, the people of West Papua still suffer under hard Indonesian rule. It was handed to the UN last September. Just across the border to the east, independent Papua New Guinea PNG is about to allow one of its parts, the autonomous island region of Bougainville, to vote on its national status on June 15, Your Majesty In desperation I am writing to you, knowing that you are genuine and everyone is classed the same… The Government have decreed that only Government Workers are allowed to have accommodation in the Houses that have been built.

And if you are a private resident you are not wanted up here.

Struggling for democracy in remote Australian islands - SWI www.farmersmarketmusic.com

The last of these places are now falling down. And the Government has decided that … the Vestys old Meat Works has to be demolished This has been going on for years. We have had eviction notices given to us to leave Vestys by the end of August. Please Your Majesty cannot something be done for the people who do not work for the Government. At Home in England there are Council Houses but here there is nothing I enclose some cuttings from the paper for you to see.

Thanking you for reading my letter. Unsurprisingly, the Queen did not get to read Mrs Stewart's letter; it was, however, forwarded to the office of the Governor-General who forwarded it in turn to Minister Hasluck as was Mrs Stewart's correspondence with the Prime Minister. The Northern Territory Housing Commission was not established solely due to the lobbying of the Darwin Housewives Association, but it is apparent that they did have some influence in forcing this issue to the attention of the federal government. Mrs Stewart certainly believed that she was instrumental in the decision to set up a Northern Territory Housing Commission; 81 but then, senior Commonwealth public servants also believed they had played a role in its establishment.

It was probable that the case was so pressing that everyone who had anything to do with accommodation in postwar Darwin, not least of all Hasluck himself, appreciated the urgent need for affordable public housing. In May , Hasluck presented a Cabinet paper arguing for the introduction of a housing scheme that could provide accommodation for people other than public servants.

He believed that this hiatus in public policy was holding back the Territory's development. The rent formula was based around national housing costs. This was well beyond the means of the average client. In the end the solution was found through building smaller houses. Public service housing was on average 12 squares; 89 Housing Commission houses would be eight. The public servants enjoyed the elevated breezy louvered houses while the Housing Commission houses were smaller and at ground level.

The architecture echoed the social divide of the town. In addition, there was another housing scheme that had technically been in place since to place 'mixed-race' families into Administration-owned houses. Native Welfare Branch had recommended such a scheme since at least , 93 which aimed to 'assimilate' chosen families of Aboriginal descent into the mainstream suburbs of the Territory's urban centres. Frank Wise as Administrator had been keen to promote a scheme of subsidised housing for 'coloured couples and their families.

In Alice it was sometimes called 'Gap Housing', not in the sense of stopgap, but in reference to the location of the houses — 'fibro cottages on the Gap Road. This dedicated scheme had yet another complicated formula for calculating rent, separate from the Housing Commission or public service housing formulae. The 'mixed-race' housing scheme set rent at 20 per cent of the basic wage 96 less a weekly allowance to cover garbage, water and sanitation not paid to the tenant but included in the total rental , with a further 20 per cent rebate for rent paid on time.

The problem with any formula tied to income was that there were clear cases where 'mixed race tenants' could not pay an economic rent without undue hardship because of the low wages they received. On the other hand, the Commonwealth rejected special rental conditions based 'only on race. It was an awkward problem for the government.

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The Commonwealth recognised the importance of the home:. At the same time, the government did not want a rental rebate and did not wish to institute yet another separate scheme for Aboriginal housing. The notion of a Housing Commission was greeted by the Northern Territory Administration as a way of addressing the needs of 'part-coloured' families. The Administrator, 'Clarrie' Archer, wrote:.

Despite everyone's hopes for mainstreaming, it is clear that distinctions were made between the different groups — and the system of social differentiation that Archer hoped to avoid was established. Canberra did not support the Housing Commission supplying housing for 'part-coloured' families. As the Minister himself noted, the Housing Commission hadn't been set up to deal with 'this particular social problem. Native Welfare Branch lobbied to include housing for 'part-coloured families' as a part of the essential mandate of the Housing Commission but their demands were extremely modest — for the —60 budget, it was proposed to construct five of these houses in Darwin with a view to more in future.

Archer realised that the nature, development and very character of the town lay squarely with this section of the population because of their long-term commitment to staying in Darwin and building the region through work:. Archer here drew out what others had commented on but not addressed, that is, that the Commonwealth focus upon housing for public servants did not benefit the long-term development of Darwin as a town. Darwin's economic and cultural future could only be guaranteed by providing secure accommodation to that section of the community who intended to stay in the town for the long-term.

By the end of the decade, the 'Territory' perspective had started to differ on a number of points from the 'Canberra' viewpoint. Despite the harsh conditions and, in particular, the very poor housing and accommodation most Darwin people experienced, many remember the decade positively. This includes many people who were arguably in the most disadvantaged category, that is, those people accommodated in camps or institutional 'homes'. As former Retta Dixon resident Barbara Cummings asserted, the people who arguably suffered most disadvantage in this decade formed the nucleus which enabled the city to grow and would continue to give Darwin its unique character:.

My study reveals that the great difficulties of housing in Darwin in the s were shared. It was difficult for anyone apart from the most senior public servant to achieve security of housing — and even that was usually conditional upon holding the position. The extreme shortages forced a kind of democracy upon Darwin's citizens. Housing in the old wartime camps was primitive and conditions tough, but people helped each other; in doing so, they became active agents for political change in Darwin. Despite the numerous schemes proposed throughout the decade to encourage a spirit of civic consciousness or sense of self help for the tenants, what people really remember as fundamental to the decade was the sharing of hardship and the creation of corporate entities of loyalty and political action as a result of the enforced communal living in the camps.

There was a select core of public service employees who lived above the others in their elevated louvered public service housing, the so-called 'government greys', but they were always viewed as separate from the rest of Darwin — transient, temporary, just passing through. Darwin people suffered hardship, but they also partied hard; the weather was tropical and the town was 'free and easy. Probably most importantly, everyone was young. Most of the townsfolk who actually lived in Darwin shared the hardships equally and, for the most part, no one was seen as better off or different from anyone else.

Tenants complained that the huts at Vesteys let in the water and that they were never dry. The Administrator of the Northern Territory's roof leaked in the wet season and the administration struggled, unsuccessfully, to find other appropriate accommodation in Darwin for its most senior political appointment. The public housing of the s, with its multicultural, multiracial communities, had generated a particular kind of social makeup in the town.

New corporate identities had grown up around communities that had sprung up around the camps, hostels and even the institutions that provided a home to the Darwin residents. People would speak about the uniqueness of the Darwin identity, predicated upon sharing of hardships, poverty, heat and entertainment. Long-term residents look back nostalgically to postwar Darwin as a town of friendliness and trust, without doors or locks. But the enforced cooperation of the camps, institutions and hostels also enabled Darwin people to begin working together cooperatively for political change.

At first this took the form of grass roots organisations with the simple aim of bettering conditions. As the s progressed, political changes included the reinstatement of the Darwin Town Council in , city status for Darwin in , and, also in that year, the number of elected members in the Legislative Council was raised to six. In addition, also in , the right to vote on Territory matters was granted to the Territory member for the House of Representatives. Although these changes appear small, they marked huge steps forward in democratic representation for Darwin people.

David Carment has argued that in the contemporary period governments have promoted a particular kind of regional political identity for Territory residents which he calls, ironically, 'Territorianism'. This is, he says, a device to establish 'bonds of loyalty to the Territory among its non-Aboriginal population, most of whom came from other parts of Australia and the world.

The notion in Northern Territory politics that there is a kind of separate identity — the Territory 'patriot' — that cuts across traditional allegiances and boundaries to define a new loyalty of place, current in the contemporary period, has its clear origins in the s. In the steps towards political autonomy and self-government of the Northern Territory, the grass roots actions by its citizens, in banding together to facilitate social change, have somehow been forgotten.

It is salutary to remember that significant political changes were taking place amongst the people of the camps and huts, and that their actions brought about a more just society with greater equality, democracy and sharing of resources. A study of housing in Darwin in the s offers many insights into the past and the present. Whilst the decade began in poverty and poor conditions that were common to many, the enforced sharing of hardship, nonetheless, had a unifying effect.

If the hardship and isolation reinforced a sense of Territorians against Canberra, this too would become a significant factor in the formation of a distinct identity within the community that found expression in political action. Modern Darwin is a city of transience and rebuilding, and there is apparently little there to remind the visitor of life even before Cyclone Tracy. Nonetheless, there are continuous political, cultural and social threads that endure that have clear origins in the postwar period.

Historical material from the postwar period inevitably means dealing with nomenclature that would not be considered appropriate or acceptable in the contemporary context. Use of terms such as 'half-caste' or 'part-coloured', for example, are acknowledged to be offensive and are only used in quotations specifically relating to the period. Use of these terms is not endorsed by the author and only included where unavoidable as evidence of policy and language from the period.

It is always difficult to make sense of cost and pricing in the pre-decimal period, particularly as costs and wages have increased overall. Using the formula recommended by the University of Melbourne Giblin Economics and Commerce Library , based on a ratio created through comparison of Australian Bureau of Statistics Consumer Price Index figures between the year given and the latest figures available, , modern estimates in dollars are given in the footnotes for those interested in indicative costs. When possible, original prices are matched to other costs at the time, such as wages, to provide a relative guide.

The original Imperial measurements of length, volume, area etc given at the time are used in the text but footnotes provide the metric equivalent. A manuscript of the same name comprising the full research is currently under consideration for publication by Charles Darwin University Press. Past, Present and Future? National Research Venture 3: During the war, Aboriginal people were removed from the town and taken to Berrimah Camp.

They were not permitted to return to Bagot Aboriginal Reserve until T Bauman, Aboriginal Darwin: By the number of people in Darwin had risen to , representing an increase of some per cent. In the Annual Report of —53, the Administrator of the Northern Territory, Frank Wise, reported Darwin's population as , but the Australian Year Book gives the figure as a little lower, for By Darwin was recorded as having residents. At 30 June , Darwin's population reached This figure does not include Aboriginal people. This number approximately corresponds with the population figures given for Bagot Aboriginal Reserve the previous year of around , although archival sources also note that this could increase seasonally.

This suggests that the Darwin population in would be close to 10, people. But clearly people were coming and going all the time; by the non-Aboriginal population had declined slightly to The following year, it had risen again to and by June had reached people. These figures suggest a stable population increase with minor fluctuations but it is likely that there was a high level of transience. Contemporary accounts describe the difficulty of filling positions and of the great rates of arrivals and departures in Darwin.

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Between and , for example, the Public Service Association of the Territory in Darwin reported a total of new employees. There were probably much larger numbers of people both arriving and leaving the town than the relatively smooth population increase suggests, which would have created a situation of much greater social instability than is apparent in the data.

What is clear from the figures though is that Darwin started with a population of a little over people in and finished the decade with a population three times that number. Baiba Berzins, Australia's Northern Secret: Hasluck', Northern Territory News , 20 August I am indebted to Jan for discussion and making a copy of this paper available to me. See also Mickey Dewar, 'It's about lifestyle: This aspiration had broader applicability beyond the Northern Territory.

Although noting that migrants had a 'markedly different' experience from Aboriginal people in the postwar years, John Murphy summarised the imagined Australia of the period: Murphy, Imagining the Fifties, p. The accommodation required was as follows: Works, 68 males and 30 females; Civil Aviation, 12 females; Health, 18 males and 7 females; Trade and Customs, 7 males and 2 females; Audit, 1 male and 1 female; Postmaster-General's, 34 males and 12 females; Attorney-General's, 4 males and 5 females; Labour and National Service, 2 males and 2 females; Immigration, 2 males and 1 female; Territories, 61 males and 36 females; South Australia Education, 12 males and 22 females; Commonwealth Education, 2 males and 3 females; Army, 2 females.

In the camps, the individual hut dwellers cooked for themselves. Ted Egan provides a good description of Belsen: It is sufficient to note here that the comments by the Acting Hostels Supervisor at Marrenah House, that 'urgent attention is necessary' to the septic system, can be applied almost universally across the hostels and camps in this period, whether dealing with septic systems or 'flaming furies', which was the colloquial name for incinerator latrines.

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J McLeod et al. In a candid report, 'Future of Camp Area: Nightcliff', to the Administrator, Hugh Barclay points out that when, in , the Department of Works and Housing found the wiring to be substandard, it was decided to sell the huts to the occupants 'in situ' at a 'low figure': Today Parap is the name given to the suburb between Fannie Bay and Ludmilla on one side of the Stuart Highway and opposite the suburb of Woolner on the other.

In the s, the name Parap was used as a general term for what would now be called Stuart Park, that is, the area of land on the western side of the Stuart Highway between, and including, Duke Street in the south to Armidale Street in the north. To make it even more confusing, sometimes it was also called Stuart Park, but this seemed to mean the area, rather than Parap Camp, or Parap Community Centre as it was sometimes known.

In the immediate postwar period, squatters moved into old Vesteys houses there but the government acquired these along with all the other properties in Darwin. See, for example, LF Finniss, No. Bauman, Aboriginal Darwin, pp. F, Register; others appear more generally in correspondence files. One camp attendant at Winnellie Camp found 'working in the sun is to[o] hard for him'. If the person was very poor and they couldn't afford to pay for the funeral, certain people would open their home to have a gambling game to make money, just for that purpose, to help pay for the funeral.

Nonetheless, the cohesion and success of the Show Society demonstrates that the community at Berrimah was agriculturally, rather than residentially, based. See, for example, the correspondence in NAA: Since another archival file NAA: NAA, ' — Menzies government ', accessed 22 August He, like Barbara Cummings, describes a sense of community and extended family in the corporate identity forged amongst what he termed the 'Gappies', which included sharing resources and barracking for the same football team.

D Bridgeman, 'Modern or modernism: He was, among other things, a passionate advocate for political reform for the Territory and personally went to Canberra where he argued vociferously with Hasluck and others for more self government and greater Territory representation in the Commonwealth Parliament. He continued to fight for this throughout his life and died in Darwin on New Years Day Richard Charles Ward or 'Dick' Ward, a law graduate, saw active military service during World War II and stood successfully for the Legislative Council in when based in Alice Springs but did not contest the seat in In he, with Paddy Carroll, was elected for the seat of Darwin.

Ward was sometimes known as 'Red Richard'; a dedicated socialist, he eventually joined the Labor Party in the s. Dick Ward was well known as an advocate for the poor and the disadvantaged, and he died in Ron Withnall in tribute said: Former Territory Administrator 'Aubrey' Abbott also used the term. He lamented that the Territory 'has not produced a local patriot who can speak for his country and urge its progress': Dr Mickey Dewar is currently working as a freelance historian and museums policy consultant based in Darwin, and teaching northern Australian history at Charles Darwin University.

The views expressed in this paper do not necessarily represent those of the National Archives of Australia. Skip to content Skip to primary navigation. Search the collection Ask us a question Using the collection A—Z for researchers Fact sheets Family history Popular research topics Snapshots of the collection Managing our collection Preserving our collection Publications and podcasts Research guides news archives Papers and podcasts The Archives Act Australian Constitution Cabinet release Designing Canberra Family history Government policy Immigration Indigenous Australians Intelligence and security International relations and foreign affairs Prominent people Social history War.

Darwin — no place like home: A history of Australia's northern capital in the s through a study of housing 1 Public lecture for the National Archives of Australia, presented in Canberra by Dr Mickey Dewar 28 October When the war ended, Darwin was a town where much of the housing had been destroyed, either as a result of nearly 20 months of Japanese bombing raids or because of the military occupation of the town after the evacuation of all civilians.

Changes are taking place in the Territory which would kindle the imagination of any persons of sensitivity … Irrespective of creed, color, racial origin, capacity or place of resident, the society we are going to build is that of one single, unified Australian people … This must be a first-rate Territory, with first-rate people in it… 15 Hasluck argued that the only way the Northern Territory would become 'normal' 16 was to bring it into the mainstream by de-emphasising the remote, the exotic and the frontier aspects of Territory life.

There were a number of ways public servants were allocated housing. Even though my father was a returned soldier, he wasn't allowed to take his wife to the RSL Club because of the colour of her skin. In those days social functions and dances were segregated. They acquired a hall and a band and even though that Sunshine Club was formed for Aboriginal people, white people still came.

Music played a vital part in community life, as returning string band players and visiting TI [Thursday Island] pearlers such as Seaman Dan, joined forces to make music, provide entertainment and fight for the right to set up their own 'Sunshine Club' for community dances and social functions at Parap Camp. Indeed, music, dance, sport and struggle were the 'cement' that bound together that post-war Parap Camp community.

They remain the ties that bind, down through the years, to this day. After Police Paddock we shifted to Parap Camp. Mostly the coloured families, also white people stayed there too. We lived in the Sidney Williams huts left-over from the Army. That's why that political kind of action sprung up. Because men were saying 'We went to the war and fought and now when we came back we are not allowed to drink in the pubs. Bob Menzies was Prime Minister … one bloke got up and he put it to a motion — a motion to go to the Prime Minister — 'we fought the Germans, the Italians' … 'and fought the Japanese, [but were] not good enough to go in the pub and have a beer' … I think that really hurt us most, you know.

The Association declared that: There were expectant mothers and women with young babies in the camps, and no improvement in conditions was in sight. Many women,who would otherwise be only too glad to stay here and develop the country, would not do so for the sake of their children. The disparity of conditions enjoyed by public servants as opposed to everyone else was particularly galling: The Darwin Housewives Association, would like to draw your attention to the following; - The wet season will soon be upon us, here in Darwin, this will mean that many families, who have no proper accommodation, will be in a desperate position, some with quite a number of children.

They are not in need of food or help that way, but they do need accommodation. A roof over their heads. They are Australians Sir, people who have come out to Australia to settle. Also those who were born here. Who else has a better right than these people? There are houses here empty, waiting for people living down South who are being brought up here as Government employees, to live in.

Often these people leave good houses, to be rented, closed up, or sold, and have their furniture brought up here at great expense to the government. If they stay a year or two, its an achievment [sic].

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