This book arose from a conference on citizenship and indigenous Australians. When we originally started thinking about that conference, we imagined a small workshop in which there would be only limited interest. As it turned out, there was much greater interest than we had expected – in part, we believe, because citizenship provides a focus for people with diverse interests in Aboriginal studies and can energise interdisciplinary discussion. It enables academics, indigenous people and policy makers to meet on common ground because it brings together, within a single framework, theoretical debates, political issues and practical concerns. It also provides a key focus for reconciliation and dialogue between indigenous and other Australians.

The conference was sponsored by three bodies from within the Australian National University: the Reshaping Australian Institutions project of the Research School of Social Sciences; the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research; and the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology. Participation was sought from numerous indigenous and non-indigenous people and organisations. Yet, disappointingly, very few indigenous people eventually took part. One reason for this was that the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (atsic) called, at short notice, a major meeting of indigenous organisations to be held at the same time as the conference, and several people who had planned to attend our citizenship conference felt compelled to go to the meeting.

Citizenship defines the membership of a common society and the rights and duties of that society's members. ‘Citizenship’ is usually used for ‘membership’ in a state society where there is a strong emphasis on individual rights as a result of the development of commoditisation and the economy. Throughout this book the word ‘citizenship’ is sometimes used in the looser sense of full membership in any society.

For most of Australia's colonial history the great majority of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders have been denied full membership of Australian society and consequently the rights and equal treatment that other Australians take for granted. Further, the settler society has, since the earliest decades of colonisation, ignored the existence in Australia of indigenous societies or social orders, which have provided, and continue to provide, the first locus of social membership and identity for most Aboriginal people. The fact that, after a long hard struggle, indigenous people finally secured full formal equal rights within the encapsulating settler society in the 1960s, gaining access to the same set of citizenship rights as non-indigenous Australians, was a vital step, but the question of the recognition of membership in their own indigenous social orders remains unaddressed.

The failure of the colonists to recognise, at the outset of colonisation, the rights of the people who were here first has left not only a moral and legal taint on the nation's title to the country but also many unanswered questions about the articulation of settler and indigenous societies.

The 1938 Day of Mourning, held in Sydney on 26 January, was (to the knowledge of many white Australians) the first public demonstration on the issue of citizenship rights by Aboriginal people. It was a demand for full citizen status and equality. The following resolution was unanimously passed:

Fourteen days earlier Jack Patten, president of the Aborigines' Progressive Association, and Bill Ferguson, organising secretary, had sent their manifesto, ‘Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights’, to the press, national libraries and selected people. Jack Horner rightly described it as ‘very brash’ and its plain style ‘somewhat offensive’. To have spoken politely to a white audience would have seemed to Patten and Ferguson to be doing what Europeans expected of them. Supplication was not their purpose. What they sought was ‘justice, decency and fair play’. ‘Is this too much to ask?’ they wrote.

In 1935 a fair-skinned Australian of part-indigenous descent was ejected from a hotel for being Aboriginal. He returned to his home on the mission station to find himself refused entry because he was not Aboriginal. He tried to remove his children but was told he could not because they were Aboriginal. He walked to the next town where he was arrested for being an Aboriginal vagrant and placed on the local reserve. During World War II he tried to enlist but was told he could not because he was Aboriginal. He went interstate and joined up as a non-Aboriginal person. After the war he could not acquire a passport without permission because he was Aboriginal. He received exemption from the Aborigines Protection Act – and was told that he could no longer visit his relations on the reserve because he was not an Aboriginal. He was denied permission to enter the Returned Servicemen's Club because he was. In the 1980s his daughter went to university on an Aboriginal study grant. On the first day a fellow student demanded to know, ‘What gives you the right to call yourself Aboriginal?’

We can multiply examples of this kind of extinction by legislation to the present day. In the 1960s Charles Perkins was told more than once that he could not be Aboriginal because he was a university graduate.

Anglo–Australian law has long had connections with international law. This is scarcely surprising, given the Eurocentric basis of modern international law, and the importance of England within Europe during the period of its evolution.

In this chapter I will place national law in the wider context of international law, and will explore how recent developments in international law relate to Australia's Aboriginal people.

The relationship between international law and national law

In classical theory international and national law represented two quite distinct domains. International law was concerned with the relationship between states (inter nationes) as represented by their governments, and it had little concern for matters internal to such states. It was national law alone that addressed relationships among people and relationships between government and people.

There were, however, exceptional areas in which international law did concern itself with the rights of people, either as individuals or as groups. Such topics included aliens; diplomatic representatives; slavery; piracy; and, in wartime, civilians, the sick and wounded, and prisoners of war.

International law's concern with people, as distinct from states, has increased enormously since World War II, largely through the development of a substantial body of standards and processes relating to human rights. This evolution has developed a growing area of overlap between the international and national systems and raises questions as to the influence of international law within national law.

Effective citizenship, even among people of diverse interests and values, requires a shared sense of political community, including allegiance to common legal and political institutions and general acceptance of each other's legitimate membership of the community and right to citizenship. In most democratic countries, issues of legitimacy are relatively insignificant, provided the borders are well established and the basic constitutional rules uncontested. In some democracies, however, particularly former settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada, the legitimacy of the regime and therefore the legitimacy of its citizens have been called into question. The assumptions that underlay colonial settlement, including the supposed civilising mission and ethnic superiority of Europeans, have been discredited. With this discrediting has come the realisation that the regimes of the settlers were imposed on the indigenous peoples by force and with callous disregard for their cultures and rights. For the indigenous minorities themselves, there is little reason to owe allegiance to a legal and political system to which they have never consented and by which they continue to be dispossessed. While the legitimacy of their residence in the country is beyond doubt, they must question the legitimacy of the imposed regime and the citizenship it confers. Like other colonised peoples, they are seeking restoration of the rights lost through colonisation, particularly the right to their lands and the right to political self-determination.

For the settler and migrant majorities, at the same time, the shift in values can be disturbing.

Although the social rights of citizenship lie at the heart of the state's relationship with most Aboriginal people, nowhere are they more important than in the Aboriginal communities of remote Australia. Yet despite full citizenship, the expenditure of much money and effort and twenty-five years of benign government policies, these entitlements and policies have had disproportionately little effect on the material circumstances of the people in such communities. Their life circumstances are a shock to anyone seeing them for the first time; and for those familiar with them, the problems can seem intractable. They raise the question as to why the granting of citizenship has had so little effect.

One concept that both addresses this problem directly and proposes an explanation is that of welfare colonialism. The central proposition of welfare colonialism is that the granting of the social rights of citizenship to indigenous people in first world nation–states is, unintentionally, as debilitating as it is beneficial because of the social and political dependencies it creates.

I want to argue that this view is only a first step in developing an understanding of the problems of social policy in relation to remote Aboriginal citizens and that, if the analysis is to be taken further, it has to incorporate a more situated and complex account of the conjunction, compatibilities and consequences of the two ways of life for each other. In particular, those using a welfare colonialism framework tend to privilege the political to the neglect of the economic and cultural.

Discussions about citizenship and indigenous Australians are characterised by two divergent sets of ideas. On the one hand there are ideas about equality, equal rights and sameness. On the other, there are ideas about difference, indigenous rights and uniqueness. Relationships between these two sets of ideas are inevitably rather complex and may also be changing over time. One common way of analysing discussions of recent years, for example, has been to suggest that an emphasis on equality and equal individual rights for indigenous Australians that prevailed from the 1930s to the 1960s began in the early 1970s to give way to an emphasis on difference and group indigenous rights.

Although there is considerable truth in this analysis, the reality of recent discussions about citizenship and indigenous Australians is in fact more complex. Considerations about indigenous group difference, if not quite indigenous group rights, were already being articulated in the 1960s and before, while considerations about equality and equal individual rights continue to be articulated to the present day. What has, perhaps, changed is the relative prominence given to these two sets of ideas and the precise ways in which they are balanced and reconciled with each other.

This chapter examines how these two broad sets of ideas have been implicated in the development of what has become, in dollar terms, the largest single program of the Commonwealth's Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs portfolio, the Community Development Employment Projects (cdep) scheme.

Certain literature on notions of citizenship in societies such as Australia posits a sense of collective commitment to the nation as crucial to being a citizen. A good example is Robert Birrell's argument that:

In this chapter, I consider the relevance of this proposition to the place of indigenous people as citizens in the Australian nation. Is the ‘sense of affinity’ that Aboriginal people feel with the wider society such that appeals to a common citizenship (underpinned by shared interests) can be embraced? I pose this question in the context of indigenous responses to a large-scale mining development in the Gulf Country of north-west Queensland. More specifically, I address two issues. First, I look at how the discourses and practices of large-scale mining enterprises encompass a particular vision about what being a good Australian citizen entails, this vision mirroring Birrell's sense of a close connection between citizenship and commitment to what is seen as a ‘national good’.

The 1967 referendum to alter Australia's Constitution is now seen as an event that marked a major turning point in Aboriginal–European relations in Australia. In this chapter we will examine the referendum from a number of perspectives. First, we explore its constitutional significance: can the argument be made, for example, that it conferred citizenship on the Aboriginal people in a legal sense? Secondly, we consider the much more complex issue of the meanings attached to the referendum, both in the immediate context and in the medium and long term: how was the referendum understood by the government that presented it to the electorate, by the political lobbyists who argued for change, and by those who voted? How have these understandings changed over time, and what explains the divergent meanings attached to the referendum today?

Over the last decade enormous significance has been attributed to what is now called the 1967 Aboriginal Rights Referendum or simply the 1967 Aboriginal Referendum. Meanwhile the nature of the constitutional changes it entailed has been increasingly submerged. Myths about the referendum are promulgated in many forums and have acquired enormous authority over time.

When Muslim women in purdah came to the women's movement to request support so that they could meet for their traditional prayer sessions, or non-English speaking background women wanted their children taught their cultural traditions in their mother tongue within the state school system, they received little understanding from Anglo feminism (Kalantzis 1990:40). As Jeannie Martin (1991:126) notes, Anglo feminism often constructed the ‘other’ as victims of greater oppression, offering to ‘help’ them but only if they threw off their patriarchal traditions (Vasta 1991:163). In 1973 Anne Summers suggested that rural women were ‘puzzled by the anti-organization, anti-leadership slogans being parried at them’ from the Women's Electoral Conference in Canberra (Rowbotham 1992:265). Of the nine women firefighters in Carol Finlay's (1994:3,8) study, two ‘discussed the achievements of Germaine Greer’ while the others ‘knew little to nothing about her’, suggesting that their ‘Amazonian concept of femininity’ and their awareness of gender discrimination had come from other sources.

This chapter explores the claim that the women's movement has not only been a mainly urban Anglo middle-class phenomenon – which is probably largely true – but that this is the only constituency which has responded to feminism.

In ‘The Blank Page’, Isak Dinesen tells of a Spanish convent where framed wedding night sheets of aristocratic marriages hang on the walls. The blood on the sheets signals the virginal repute of princesses. But there is one sheet which is a blank page:

Sidonie Smith (1993:2–3) suggests that while these sheets are ‘signatures of cultural expectations’, the stories are not written by the princesses themselves. Rather, women's stories are written from their bodies, ‘their bodies have expelled them’. In writing from their bodies, women comply with the cultural expectations of femininity – like being chaste on marriage – and unswervingly follow a biological destiny, to marry and have children. But even in this past time, not all women followed their destinies; one princess is represented by an unmarked sheet. Because her page is blank, the obvious implication is that she has even less to say than those who have followed their expected paths. However, the blankness of her page conjures up questions for all who see it. As I read this story, I wondered what those questions might be.

Just as Jillian found her prince (who turned out to be a ‘dickhead’), in 1971 over three-quarters of surveyed women under 35 years of age felt that a woman's ‘most important role in life’ was as a mother, whatever her career; the percentage who so opined falling to less than half a decade later (Glezer in McDonald 1990:13).