Post by Flash on Aug 10, 2007 10:15:49 GMT -5
The Aboriginal face of the government's intervention is one of the stolen generation - but this self-described "removalist" is prepared to take more children away to save them from abuse.
Sue Gordon speaks in the quiet cadences of the country women of her generation. Over lunch in Canberra, she regales me with the delightful doings of her two grandsons. She doesn't much mind what we eat. And when she laughs it's more of a quiet chuckle than the guffaws emanating from the business crowd around us. Then the conversation turns to her work and suddenly she holds my gaze and repeats what she told a group of Aboriginal women recently about the sexual abuse of a baby, a case she had encountered years before. "I told them, I personally would kill somebody who did that to my child."
RELATED LINKS
* Toohey: Adults behaving badly
* Have your say
At 63, she has been prepared to stand alongside John Howard and his Aboriginal Affairs Minister Mal Brough when other senior indigenous Australians have walked away in disgust. After the elected Aboriginal body ATSIC was disbanded, the government put new arrangements in place, including a hand-picked National Indigenous Council. When Gordon agreed to chair it, she was called a "jackey". Then she agreed to become the Aboriginal face of the government's takeover of Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. And the hostility compounded.
"I don't know why I'm suddenly singled out," she says.
She's in good company. Cape York leader Noel Pearson, whose ideas for welfare reform underpin the NT experiment, is a big target. "He's not the new messiah," was one scathing assessment. Warren Mundine, a leader in indigenous and ALP politics, was dismissed as a "coconut". But the critics reserve particularly vile abuse for Gordon. On Aboriginal radio, the indigenous activist Tiga Bayles said she was a "house nigger". Gordon is clearly dismayed.
"I've been called a coconut," she says. "House nigger is worse. House niggers were the favoured ones who worked in the master's house. The Australian Broadcasting Authority should be monitoring Aboriginal radio. Why do they get away with blatant racism when the ABC can't?"
But what does she say to the claim that she leaves herself open to these attacks by aligning herself with a government which ended the national experiment in self-determination when it disbanded ATSIC?
"Well ATSIC shut itself down, didn't it?" It's not meant as a question. Gordon was one of the first five appointed commissioners to run the newly established Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission in 1990. She's on record despairing about what it became. As for her own position now, she is very clear about that. "I don't work for the prime minister. I took this job because there's a chance to protect Aboriginal children."
Then, for the first and only time during our meeting, she takes careful aim at those who she and Pearson say have willed the intervention to fail, many of whom have now gone quiet.
"My interesting observation in all of this, is: all the Aboriginal naysayers right around Australia, not one of them has offered to help in an Aboriginal community. I have seen the list of names of volunteers. Not one of those Aboriginal people has put their name forward to help their brothers and sisters. And often - this is my own point of view - often some of the urban Aboriginal people have never been to a remote Aboriginal community. [They] are actually frightened of [traditional] Aboriginal people because they're unknown in urban Australia."
What is it that's unknown to urban Aborigines about traditional folks? "They're not political like urban Aboriginal people. Urban Aboriginal people often speak on behalf of 'my brothers and sisters in traditional communities'. But Aboriginal people in traditional communities don't even know who these [urban] people are."
And "these people" had better watch out. Gordon is a magistrate. She says she doesn't believe in public slanging matches. She'd rather rely on the laws of defamation. "I have a very good lawyer who's a partner at Mallesons, who happens to be my younger son. And if there is any thought that there might be defamation - and we've used it in the past - I've just brought it to his attention and he's just written to the person and pointed out what defamation means."
While Gordon might be alert to attacks on her reputation, she is remarkably forgiving about the sins of the past. A member of the stolen generation, Gordon refuses to be offended at the Howard government's claim there is no such thing. She does not need to hear "sorry".
Sue Gordon was four years old when, in 1947, she was removed from her Aboriginal mother Molly at a pastoral property near Meekatharra in WA's Murchison region. She was delivered to Sister Kate's home for half-caste children in faraway Perth, where she was told she was an orphan.
It wasn't until 1989, when Gordon had become the commissioner of Aboriginal affairs, that she was finally able to read her own native affairs file. In it, the then deputy commissioner of native affairs C.L. McBeath dismissed assurances the child was being well cared for. "I fully realise that Molly is not likely to part with Susie easily, and she is going to suffer the pangs which all mothers must experience upon separation from a child, but this department has a definite duty to carry out an attempt to ensure the future of all near-white children."
Nearly 60 years later, Gordon remembers nothing of the scene at Mount James station when, in the presence of her mother and six-year-old brother, she was forcibly taken away. "This is the part I can't remember. This is where the trauma of it all sets in," she explains. "My eldest brother Norman, he's 65. He said to me two years ago at a funeral, 'I think I should tell you what happened when you were taken away. I was six and I can still see you here'," she recalls, pointing to the middle of her forehead. "So we both had a big cry and I said, 'I wish you'd have told me before' and he said, 'I wasn't ready'."
I'm inwardly squirming now. Not because at some point I'm going to have to pop the question about whether some contemporary Aboriginal kids, who are being abused, need to be taken out of harm's way. It's just the utter incongruity of our surroundings. When asked where she'd like to lunch, Gordon sent back word that she'd be happy with Chinese. Now we sit in one of the finest Chinese restaurants in the country, The Chairman and Yip. This is clearly a favourite place for a jovial slap-up lunch for the business elite of Canberra. It jars with the topics at hand. But Gordon has dealt with far more uncomfortable situations.
Forty-one years after she was removed, she was sworn in as the first full-time magistrate of the Children's Court in Western Australia, becoming in her own words "the removalist", ordering children to be taken from their parents under the same act of parliament which was used against her, the 1947 Child Welfare Act.
"The first time, having to make that decision to take someone, I was thinking to myself, 'this is exactly what happened to me!' But then I thought no, no, no. The definitions [in the legislation] remain the same but I was made a ward of the state for entirely different reasons. I thought about the evidence that was before me in the trial and it was appalling neglect. And I thought, 'why should I get hung up on taking children away when the legislation was to protect children?' And so the decision became quite easy."
Did she ever wonder how the children's mother would feel?
"Nup. I can still see the pictures of the children's sores and I didn't give a thought to the parents, because they had their own issues, alcohol and drugs. And surprisingly they were non-Aboriginal parents."
Did that make it easier?
"No, no difference. A lot of people say that to me: 'you're just child focused'. Well that's actually what my job is. I don't see the other players, I see the children first. The other things come as part of that but the children are always first."
It would be hard to erase from the mind's eye what Gordon has learnt of the abuse of children, both from the dock and from the months she spent in 2002 exposing the rampant abuse of indigenous children across WA, in what became known as the Gordon Report. Now her task is to chair the Northern Territory Emergency Response Taskforce which oversees the intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.
"In remote Aboriginal Australia, some houses can have furniture, others in the main consist of a whole lot of mattresses on the floor. Now there can be 12, 13 people in a house and more. And if people have been drinking and using ganja or something like that - and these are the words of Aboriginal people - people can come back in and someone might start fiddling with somebody or have full sex. And people switch off. They don't want to know about it. Kids will try and hide. Three or four kids will double up on a mattress so they're not attacked. And one of the things, sadly that I know of from first hand, [is that] the older kids, they might be 13 or 14, they will put themselves on the end of the bed to stop the little ones being attacked. They'd rather it happen to them than the little ones."
Who told you that, I ask? "Young girls who've been abused."
All of this is recounted in a matter-of-fact voice. This is a lawyer speaking. But what about the Aboriginal grandmother? How does she feel about it? After nearly 20 years of hearing such stories, does she still get angry? "Yes, angry, because of what's been allowed to continue. Everybody's known about it across the whole of Australia."
Who allowed it to happen?
"Governments of all persuasions."
Must Aboriginal leaders share some of the blame?
"I wouldn't say Aboriginal leaders. Aboriginal families."
Noel Pearson despairs that Aboriginal leaders burn out after a few years in the frontline. Gordon, in turn, worries about "young Noel", as she calls him, "He looks older than me!" So how does she cope with the grief, the frustrations and the politics? "I just focus on children. Noel focuses on the whole community. I just worry about the kids."
It's a deliberately narrow approach and one - you suspect - which ensures she's not overwhelmed by the complexity of the social decay of remote Aboriginal Australia. She has visited six Top End communities in the past month. A few days before we meet, she spent hours with the women of Maningrida, explaining exactly what is child abuse.
"We spoke real, down-to-earth language," she says. "I spoke to the women about digital penetration. I spoke to them about grooming: men, boys sitting kids on their lap. Touching, [saying] 'don't tell anyone'. So kids [think] 'it didn't hurt so it's not sexual abuse'. It is. It's abuse of a child. Children can't give consent. And some women [are] just stunned when they realise what sort of offences people can be charged with."
How do they respond?
"Oh, question after question. I explained where I once sat in court before I was a magistrate. What happened was this little child had been taken from its house where its mummy and daddy were looking after it. It was taken away and raped, horrifically, and put back in its little bed. And the parents found the kiddie in the morning covered in blood. And the kiddie was obviously in shock. I actually sat in the court and I heard a surgeon from [Perth's] Princess Margaret Hospital explain the 24 separate operations they had performed 'down there' on this little child. I explained this to these women. I said, 'I personally would kill somebody who did that to my child'."
If some people think declaring a national emergency in Top End Aboriginal Australia is taking the "jackboot" approach, then what Gordon is describing is shock therapy: using tough language to impart courage to women often bound by shame and the complex kinship systems, which are sometimes used to pressure them into silence.
"Women are put into fear. But to me, none of that matters. It's the kid first."
In Maningrida, she was yarning with the women from the night patrol, who gather up kids off the streets and keep them out of harm's way. "So to them, the children were first. But they wanted to know, how could they go about talking to the parents who were in denial? Who were fearful of getting beaten up if they told." By the perpetrator, I ask? "Yep, and other family members, because it brings shame on the whole family. So I said to them, 'if you can say to the parents that the children come first'. If it's recent stuff, the police have to know so they can gather evidence. But if it's something that's happened [in the past] that child needs help. That child needs some counselling."
Perhaps it was inevitable that Sue Gordon would become an advocate for children. She is still looking out for those who went to Sister Kate's home with her. She calls them her brothers and sisters, sends out a fortnightly newsletter to one group and has raised funds to build aged persons units for those who "didn't do very well and would like to spend their remaining years together".
Gordon's own family story ended better than most. She and her mother were reunited in the 1970s. "When I met my mum we just shook hands. She didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do. Mum was black, pretty black and I got a surprise there. Because you don't have a vision of what your mother is, because I didn't think I had a mother."
Less than 20 years later, Molly said goodbye to her other children and relatives around Meekatharra and Carnarvon and travelled to Sue in Perth. "Mum came down to me to die. I think it was just a closure, a closure for Mum. I always said I never blamed her for being taken away, never ever blamed her. And she was very happy with that." Was that important to her? "Very important to her. My mother never stopped looking for me and neither did my older brother."
It's easy to see contemporary Aboriginal history as all grief and social decay. Gordon is far more optimistic; perhaps a better word is pragmatic. She remembers the women of the night patrol in Maningrida. "They just had a spirit there that they wanted to change things in the community. Strong women got together and stayed together under terrible odds," she says.
But given the scope of the problems, why will this plan make the difference? "It won't fail," she says simply and laughs. "I don't do fail. I don't get involved in anything that does fail. Fail's a waste of time."
Ellen Fanning is the co-host of Channel Nine's Sunday program