Rediscovering Team Australia

My return to Arnhem Land

Most of us with strong opinions on the rights and wrongs of Aboriginal Australia have never been in the remote places where these are most pronounced and often don’t actually know any Aboriginal people. As a new MP, I was in that position myself; so given the importance of Aboriginal Australia in our ongoing national story, decided that I should make the effort to become better informed.

That started in 1994 and 1995, with spending a week each year in and around Alice Springs; including long talks with Charlie Perkins, then one of our most senior Aboriginal leaders, and Pastor Paul Albrecht, whose family had helped to found the Hermannsburg mission. It continued with regular week-long trips to outback Australia, as employment minister in the Howard government, especially to Cape York; and as health minister, especially to the APY lands in South Australia, for which my departments had “whole of government” responsibility for co-ordinating federal services.

Early in 2008, after becoming shadow minister for indigenous affairs, I called Noel Pearson, confessed that I’d visited dozens of Aboriginal settlements over the years, but had hardly spent longer than 18 hours in any of them, and asked if he would sponsor longer trips where I could actually be useful as opposed to being a glorified tourist. I was very conscious of not being a “seagull”, the term I’d first heard years earlier in Wujal Wujal, to describe official visitors: “white guys, who fly in, shit on us, and then disappear”.