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One minute he's the spear carrier of the indigenous grassroots, the next he's the diplomat wooing the UN and dining at the Lodge. Geoff Clark, first elected chairman of ATSIC, talks to Debra Jopson. The most powerful man in Aboriginal Australia is walking beside Perth's Swan River under a clear, early morning sky. A full moon hangs in the warm air. He is talking about the sex life of eels. He tells how at full moon, which brings the king tides in summer, silver-bellied eels slither and flop over the yellow sandbar at the mouth of the Hopkins River close to his home at Framlingham, Victoria, as they migrate north to the warm Coral Sea. The eels dive down hundreds of metres to mate in explosive clouds of sperm. Then, in November, their offspring, the glass eels, return to the river mouth at Warrnambool and swim up to Hopkins Falls near Framlingham. The story has a moral, but it has nothing to do with sex. Geoff Clark, whose story this is, marvels at the way the eels, as theyprepare to migrate, ball up and sometimes even stand on their tails, making them easy to grab. This tale, from the man who represents the hungriest people in Australia, is about the ancient ways of getting "full bellies". "Eels were a staple part of our diet. There'd be times I'd be a young fella going to school, there'd be nothing to eat but eels, or rabbits ...There were times when ... you had nothing to eat in the morning. You went to school not knowing if you had a feed and when you came home, you may have a bit of stale bread," he recalls. Full moon, says the man they call "The Bear", is like "pension day" in these communities. As with the eel feast, the pension only lasts a couple of days. Then, sometimes in his area, an Aborigine would take a sheep from a local farm to feed his family, says Clark, matter-of-fact. This experience of deprivation among his tribe, the Tjapwuurong people of western Victoria, has forged Clark's disrespect for "white" authority and his die-hard politics. It has also given him, as the first elected chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), a credibility with many grassroots indigenous community members who otherwise think the organisation stinks. Clark's two predecessors, being hand-picked by governments, both experienced suspicion from the grassroots. Labor chose Lowitja O'Donoghue, a stolen child who acquired a certain stateliness. The Coalition appointed the Arnhem Land conservative Gatjil Djerrkura, who surprised it by not being a yes-man. It is very unlikely any government would have appointed Clark, still deputy chairman of the Aboriginal Provisional Government (APG) which has never consented to indigenous people being subject to the entity known as Australia. He is still, in his new job, an APG man. He says: "I look at Australia in totality and see Aboriginal land. I haven't conceded one inch in terms of my ideology and my mind." Nor, at age 47, is he willing to consent to Australian citizenship. He was not born a citizen, but had citizenship conferred on him by referendum in 1967 when he was 15. "I've never been through a ceremony. I've never sworn allegiance to the Queen or the Crown ... and I'm not going to, because I'm in my own country. They tried to tell me after 1967 that we were citizens, but they need my consent..." Then there is his fondness for the language of war. He laughs about "psychological warfare" in Victoria over changing European placenames to indigenous. He jokes about the Aboriginal community members he meets on this Perth visit as "the foot soldiers". The UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expresses concern over mandatory sentencing, the native title laws and the refusal to give a national apology over the stolen generations. This is "a little spear throw", he says. But the warrior is also a diplomat. He has dined with the Prime Minister at the Lodge, making positive noises afterwards about what can be achieved by this policy of appeasement. He is capable of a very sophisticated political game, trying to turn every move by John Howard that is negative for his side into a positive. Howard ditches the deadline for reconciliation; Clark says this is realistic, but challenges him to spell out how he is not going to achieve it. The Government rejects the findings of the CERD committee; Clark calls for it to invite the committee members to Australia, declaring: "Petulance has no place in international diplomacy." The Government says no "stolen generation" ever existed. Subsequently, while others threaten mayhem and Olympic disaster, Clark chastises the Government for seeking to re-open wounds, rather than helping to heal them, and calls once more for a formal national parliamentary apology. He also observes, though, that, yes, there could be violence at the Olympics. John Howard, who this week reiterated the belief which is heresy to most Aborigines that their children were taken from their families under benign, lawful policies. Howard, who hates talk of past bloodshed and current discord, and who does not wish to recognise Aborigines as separate people with separate rights, must now deal with an indigenous leader for whom these subjects are bread-and-butter daily conversation. Indeed, Clark is a headache just barely brewing for the Prime Minister. His project is no less than the ultimate reconstruction of indigenous society. He likes to spell out the causes of its destruction. Driving between Warrnambool and Port Fairy, he pulls up to point out a white painted roadside grave marker - a cross that reads: George Watmore. Speared by Blacks 1842. "It shows some bastard got his due," says Clark, who wants war and massacre sites marked. "It wasn't all one-sided. We didn't lose every battle." Such jokes, delivered with no bile, do not endear him to many locals in western Victoria, where according to a local journalist who has followed him for 20 years, he is seen as "a ratbag" and "the aggressive, angry type of Aborigine". They remember his days of pub brawling and rough footy playing (the team he captained and coached was suspended for violence 13 years ago and he was rubbed out for two years). They find that hard to reconcile with his current position. On the other hand, Clark's white friend of some 12 years, Neil Martin, describes him as "very kindly" and a sucker for a hard luck story. "When we were building our house on a very exposed open site, my wife Jeannie and I were living in a caravan without power. Geoff came over and said, 'This is backward. We're the ones who are not supposed to be living in houses!' He came back in half an hour with a power generator and a refrigerator." Clark is also quite a wit. When he was elected to ATSIC's top spot, he rang friends in Perth and sang to the Play School tune: "There's a bear in there and he's chair as well." The Opposition Aboriginal affairs spokesman, Daryl Melham, thinks that in burying the bovver-boy image so far, Clark has shown great political cunning and "recast himself as a moderate". Even his own fellow ATSIC commissioner, Steve Gordon of western NSW, was surprised. When they called together on the Deputy Prime Minister, John Anderson, the chairman was a pussycat: "His style changed. I was a bit aggressive. Geoff played a softer role. He's trying a different tactic." This is the man who, three years ago in Geneva, said he would be "kicking the shit out of" the Federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Senator John Herron, "no matter what he says". So just how "moderate" is he? By becoming the foremost indigenous leader in the pay of the Government, just how much has he consented to? "I'm consenting to the point that I'm now at the table, ready to do business ... I'll sit at the table for three years. If they don't want to do business, I'll walk away ... Unless the power-sharing ratio in the country changes, I'll continue to say nasty things to them [the Government] and about them. We have enough Aboriginal people who are massaging them gently." By dint of being chair of ATSIC, Clark is now a member of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, but he considers its reconciliation documents due for launch next month to be wishy-washy. He wants to negotiate a treaty, setting out "how we each act in this country". Says his friend, Democrats senator Aden Ridgeway: "Clearly what he is saying is 'All right, you guys, you know what I'm like. I'm rough and brazen, bring everything to the brink, but I'm also a guy you can deal with. Here's the olive branch I'm offering. Talk to me'." Clark says he learnt from boxing that "there is nowhere to hide". But he no doubt also learnt the art of the feint and of fast footwork that keeps the opponent off-balance. He appears up-front and yet is hard to read. He seems a mass of contradictions. He is a blond Koori married to the white teenage sweetheart he met 30 years ago. His blondness comes from his father, a Scottish-born Melbourne wharfie, Jeff McIntosh; his Aboriginality from his mother, Maisie Clark. He is a former Aussie Rules footballer so tough he once broke one of the point posts at Perth's Subiaco Oval by running into it. Now he dabbles in art, creating bluestone sculptures. He is the radical who speaks of spiritual feelings evoked walking a Dreaming track in Framlingham Forest, yet keeps a keen eye on real estate prices. He travels on an APG passport and drives a white Commonwealth Ford Ghia. He's the country music fan who reads treatises on the nature of time. "Clarkie," jokes Daryl Melham, is "a knockabout bloke. What you see is what you get. Everyone gets belted." But that is not quite true. If talking soft can score points in the political arena for his fringe-dwelling constituency, he will talk soft. As the T-shirt with the picture of the American Indian with the AK-47 which he wore in Parliament House in 1993 (and gave Ridgeway as a wedding present) says: "By all means." Even as a child, he had a distinctive way of rebelling, says Alice Clark, the Aboriginal grandmother who raised him at Framlingham mission. "His hair was growing a bit long. My mother stood him on the table [to cut it] and he started crying. He jumped on the floor to put the hair back on his head." Now in her 90s, Mummy Mick, as Alice is known, was a crack shot with a .22 rifle who cared for a score of children, feeding them by hunting. His second cousin, Len Clarke, claims his own late father, Banjo Clarke, brought the six-month-old Geoff back from Melbourne "because no-one wanted him". However, Clark is furious at implications that he was abandoned, saying it was normal Aboriginal practice to be raised by his grandmother. His mother visited himself and two older sisters, Rose and Jeannie, who also lived at "Fram". His father came sporadically bearing money and Clark remembers Luna Park and too many sarsaparillas when visiting him in St Kilda. He calls Alice "Mum". He remembers being carried back from Framlingham Forest on her shoulders, with the rifle and dead rabbits after an entire day of walking and hunting. She carried water in kerosene tins from the river and picked fruit for money. When he was 12, Clark lost all his fingernails, through night-time bandicooting at nearby farms - digging up potatoes, but leaving the plants tops in place in the soil. Lionel Harradine, a relative by marriage, says Clark was a shy child: "But he had to be. The welfare was always waiting to take the light-skinned children." Those snatched from Framlingham included the singer Archie Roach. Alice says stoically: "We had to sit down and feel sorry for them. We couldn't do anything for them." Clark remembers, when he was about seven, the community fiercely resisting government attempts to demolish their houses. "It was nothing for us to be out on the road trying to block trucks, hanging barbed wire and even ploughing the horse and cart around the house so the truck couldn't get in to get your house." These memories shaped Clark's belief that "the oppressors" want Aborigines to be "good little white people. Stay obedient, dress up like them, wear suits and ties and look like them and you're acceptable." Because of these experiences, Clark clearly does not feel "white". "What is it that carries your identity? It's in the heart and mind, isn't it? And it's in your practice. It's your ideology, your spirituality. It's all rolled up. Appearance may be just one small element of it and I think it's had too much weight." Yet, his appearance regularly throws up doubters. In Perth, when Clark is telling ATSIC staff he wants to lift the proportion of Aboriginal employees from 40 to 60 per cent, a white employee whispers to me: "What do people think of his skin being white?" At Warrnambool Technical School, where he completed five years of secondary education, Clark was routinely forced to "defend" his "honour" as an Aborigine even though, eventually, its 300 students elected him house captain and prefect. "When I first turned up ... there were plenty of fights to be had, because I've had my mates say, and they were serious, 'My father used to round you mob up and shoot you for Saturday and Sunday entertainment'." Clark is descended from Nellie Cain, an Aborigine who lived around Warrnambool in the late 19th century, and whose light skin was attributed to her being a descendant of a shipwrecked Portuguese or Spanish sailor. He sees the lighter skin as Aboriginal "containment" through inter-marriage with the white invader. "Any species in order to survive, has to change their appearance. I think we're no different. When is a bird not a bird?" The great political transformation in Clark's life occurred when, in his mid-20s, he returned from six years in Perth as a football hero to the grinding prejudice and unwanted attention of the Warrnambool constabulary. The police, oblivious to the fact he had re-made himself and been feted as a professional Aussie Rules footballer in Claremont and Subiaco, remembered him as the wayward teen from the mission and targeted him again. As a youth, he knew and liked the hard men in the Port Melbourne pubs where his father drank with members of the notoriously violent Painters and Dockers' Union. He got into a bit of boozing and a bit of violence. The police picked him up regularly for "loitering" or being "drunk and disorderly". Once, he was arrested with his cousin and each was charged with "consorting with a known criminal". At 16, he spent six months in Malmsbury boys' home for assault during a street fight. If Victoria had had mandatory sentencing then, Clark believes, he would have been inside so long and so often, he would have turned into a career criminal and could even have been in jail now. At 19, seeing the pattern developing, he fled across the Nullabor in an old Valiant to a life he had never imagined. "Those [football] clubs were very prestigious. Charlie Court was the number one ticket holder [for Claremont], so he'd be hosting lunches with you and all those rich people. You'd think, 'This is the kind of life I didn't know about.' When I went back home, it was a shock. We were living in such terrible conditions." "I didn't have any fans back there. It was a bit of a culture shock to me. I'd always been told about Aboriginal issues and stories and politics, but it didn't click with me. I thought: 'Hang on, maybe you ought to get involved'." He travelled to meetings around the country and learnt from activists like Sol Bellear, Naomi Mayers, Gary Foley, Patrick Dodson and especially Michael Mansell, with whom he was to formulate the policies of the fledgling APG. He considered the strategies of Marx, Gandhi, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, but: "I thought, I'm not sure if that's relevant to where I'm coming from because I come from pure community ideals and views that were shaped by the oppressive nature of where we were." At rallies nationwide, he learnt how to talk. He was groomed; the Aboriginal leadership sent him to a 1983 protest in Panama, where he joined an indigenous delegation to meet the dictator, General Noriega. He also learnt when not to be too tough. He attended a University of NSW diplomacy course, where the East Timorese leader Jose Ramos Horta imparted "a gentle approach". "I see him and [Xanana] Gusmao now, in some [television] clips being forceful, but also gentle and persistent. Just like Chinese water torture, drip, drip, drip." The man from the fringe is now in charge of an organisation that spends $1 billion annually and has a staff of more than 1,200. Finding Canberra "closed in", he sometimes works from a Framlingham office where he can hear geese and chooks. He has met the Dalai Lama and once lunched with US Democrat presidential hopeful Al Gore at the Rio Earth Summit, asking him about the American position on indigenous people. (Clark was impressed.) In Perth, he asked to visit a prison and there saw two of his cousins' sons. The West Australian Premier, Richard Court, refuses to deal with most Aboriginal leaders in his State. But Clark gets a breakfast meeting with him and even has to cut the time short as he has a conference to attend. First, he talks footy with Court. Then, he tells Court: "We need to tear up the rule book and look at doing business differently ... We have to look at partnerships." An hour later, back at the grassroots, he tells an indigenous housing conference that Court gave him a "dingo's breakfast - a drink of water and a good look around". Actually it was toast and tea. Clark may have started gently with the nation's powerbrokers, but not with those inside ATSIC, whose board may now understand why his football nickname was "the borer". In a considerable hands-on expansion of the chairman's role, after the board elected him, he gave himself four portfolios outright and is in charge of two others with four commissioners "assisting" him. The fight for chair was originally between Gatjil Djerrkura and Sydney commissioner Charles Perkins. When it became clear that Djerrkura could not defeat Perkins outright, Djerrkura gave his preferences to Clark. Subsequently, Djerrkura got four portfolios. The four West Australians whose bloc of votes got Clark to the chair - Eric Wynne, Eric "Dickie" Bedford, Terry Whitby and Preston Thomas - were also handsomely rewarded. However, the former "kingmaker" from Queensland, "Sugar" Ray Robinson, who is thought to be Perkins's number-cruncher, got half of one portfolio. He will share reconciliation with Clark. The portfolio push created havoc. "They were flapping around like wounded ducks," Clark chuckles. This coup was the result of a massive leap for Clark, who became a commissioner in 1996. Fellow commissioner Steve Gordon recalls when Clark said "he wouldn't join ATSIC because he had to be on the electoral roll". In his first few months in the chair, he has got ATSIC bureaucrats worried. They wonder why he is not returning calls, or signing important letters; why he is not in Canberra. Alarmed commissioners have called the Canberra office to ask why he is talking publicly about the end of ATSIC. Back home, his 26-year-old son, Jeremy, works in an office adjacent to his as administrator of the Framlingham Aboriginal Trust, a position the father occupied for 17 years. Clark's wife, Trudy, who is trust secretary, also occupies an office next door. His new, spacious cedar home with its skylights, comfortable leather lounges and a veranda hammock and punching bag is just steps away. Through a recent $1 million National Aboriginal Housing program, he and some of the other 130 people at "Fram" recently got new homes. The Clarks' house until recently was a small portable which had a split down the middle with leaks requiring constant patching. Jeremy Clark, who has two younger brothers, 18-year-old Aaron and Jidah, 12, recalls when they lived in a caravan. The Clarks like to show how under their administration, Framlingham is achieving some self-reliance. Says Jeremy of his father: "Him and work have always been one thing." On the nearby coast, Clark shows off the 320-hectare dairy farm, Boona, which Framlingham Aborigines own. It currently runs some 300 cows, with plans for 600-700 using a $500,000 Indigenous Land Corporation loan. Ten tough years away, Clark projects, it can make "$1,000 a head or better" and help get his people off government funding. Also nearby is the 400-hectare Deen Maar, an official indigenous protected area where local Aborigines work on bush regeneration and run the 20-bed Eumaralla Backpackers in an old schoolhouse. Framlingham Aborigines are also involved in a joint venture with a company that is trialling Blest shampoo and conditioner (to their secret recipe) in Perth supermarkets. Previously ATSIC's native title commissioner, Clark keeps his eyes peeled for any Crown land which could yield a claim. Any change of use opens up the way. He sees small boathouse shacks become beachfront mansions and seethes that his people get no benefit. Warrnambool Yacht Club, which recently opened a cafe that straddles Crown land outdoors, is now under claim. Clark frankly admits he has made enemies. Among them are his second cousin, Len Clarke, administrator of the Framlingham Aboriginal Trust until he took over in 1979. Their relationship is so bitter that both men make unpublishable allegations about each others' activities. Len Clarke says that while Geoff Clark's supporters enjoy new houses, his family members at Framlingham suffer in "tin sheds and caravans" (although he lives in a house given to him by a non-Aboriginal friend, and his father, Banjo, who died in March, had a new house). Len Clarke claims that Geoff Clark and his family control the trust and "because we won't get down and polish their shoes ... we get nothing". Geoff Clark says Len Clarke is bitter because he has not been successful in getting funding, but that the organisations he worked through were not properly structured to attract it. Geoff Clark says he and his supporters battled for years to get funding, because he was punished by funding bodies for being a rebel. Len Clarke, he says, did not assist. Therefore, those who should share in the rewards first are his "inner family" and supporters. A recent review by an ATSIC senior manager, Dr Paul Kauffman, and a University of Canberra law academic, Dr Neil Andrews, of the act that granted land to the Framlingham community in 1987, states: "Irreconcilable differences have been apparent between the two extended family groups since former South Australian premier Don Dunstan wrote a report in 1983 on the Framlingham Aboriginal Trust dispute." This is despite members of both clans doing their bit to acquire rights in the 1,120-hectare Framlingham Forest near the original mission. Len and Banjo Clarke blockaded it in 1979 and 1980. Geoff Clark, among others, lobbied the Labor Federal Government and succeeded in getting a Federal act passed, vesting the forest in the Kirrae Whurrong Aboriginal Corporation (KWAC). However, this corporation, run by Len and Banjo's clan, received no funding. There were also problems with the way KWAC was run. According to the review, the act requires that more than half its governing committee live at Framlingham mission, but only "one or two did so" over 12 years up to the end of 1999. Geoff Clark and family live at the mission; Len Clarke and some of his clan in the forest. In 1996 the Registrar of Aboriginal Corporations could not get a list of members, nor an audited financial statement from KWAC. The following year, when KWAC was still operated by Len Clarke's clan, Geoff Clark wrote to the registrar "with serious concerns" about its governance. Two years ago, the registrar began Federal Court proceedings to wind up the corporation. The differences between the clans appear to spring partly from different world views. The registrar said there had been "no active management of the corporation" and "the forest has become neglected ..." with overgrown fire trails, degraded picnic sites and illegal logging allowed. But Banjo Clarke said the forest was more important spiritually than as a financial asset: "I would like to live quietly in peace in the forest without being a radical or a politician. The most important thing for me is to keep our Aboriginal ways ... These are more important than power or money." Last November, the Federal Court approved a settlement, with members of both clans to be members of the corporation. Len Clarke claims Geoff Clark's group has subsequently gained control of the committee and he slams ATSIC, the ATSIC chair and the entire government system which lets some Aborigines get ahead while others languish. Says one western Victoria journalist: "Geoff made his career from his Aboriginality, whereas Len was left behind." Geoff Clark says there is simply not enough money to go around; that similar politically damaging feudal fracturing is occurring in communities nationwide as they divide a small cake. He believes funding and resource allocation should be restructured to recognise smaller family groups. It reflects traditional Aboriginal ways of clans caring for their own, he says. In WA, he implores organisations to settle their differences and not to send complaints to Senator Herron, who has used them to attack indigenous communities. "If blackfellas can't solve their own issues, who is going to do it? Is Richard Court going to do it? Is John Howard going to come over and reconcile you? ... It's no use going to the UN and saying we want self-determination if you can't manage a small area." Daryl Melham used to tease Clark about that "mickey mouse" government, the APG. Now that he heads the Federal Government's own indigenous government, Clark says his future hinges on whether he can wed the two. "If ... within three years, we can't marry the ideologies and produce results in terms of overcoming disadvantage, we've failed. It [ATSIC] no longer needs to exist. We'll move on." Aden Ridgeway thinks this stance of "always pushing the line on how far you can actually get things, always having a back door out" is part of Clark's political personality, forged in the APG. It allows blame to be apportioned when more radical Aborigines criticise him for consenting to a deal, and already Kakadu activist Jacqui Katona has said Clark should quit the corridors of the oppressor. Ridgeway saw the "back door" phenomenon in operation seven years ago when he was working with Clark and fellow APG members Michael Mansell and Bob Weatherall on an eight-point plan to get southern Australian Aborigines a good deal out of Labor's Native Title Act. In negotiation, they won every point. Then, says Ridgeway, the APG men wanted to "throw it out the window". "I think they were confronted with the reality of success and the possibility of participating in the system they'd always ideologically denied. [Now] they had to consent." But once they turned that corner, they saw what was possible. Clark has now employed Les Malezer, a mastermind of the UN Geneva campaign and a close political ally, as his executive assistant at ATSIC. About once a week, Clark talks over strategies with two friends, Ridgeway and Mansell, the Aboriginal leader inside the Federal political tent and the ideologue outside it. Clark is trying to be both places at once. What does he really think will produce change? He finds hope in the high Aboriginal birth rate lifting populations in some towns and giving them a black majority. Reprinted from The Sydney Morning Herald - 15/4/2000 |
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