Timothy Rowse is a professorial fellow at the University of Western Sydney, who has also taught at the Australian National University, Harvard University, and Macquarie University. He is the author of Divided Nation?, Indigenous Futures, and Obliged to be Difficult.

Rethinking Social Justice

From ‘Peoples’ to ‘Populations’

By Tim Rowse

Aboriginal Studies Press

Copyright © 2012 Timothy Rowse
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-922059-16-1

Contents

Foreword by Fr Frank Brennan,
Acronyms and Abbreviations,
Introduction,
Part I: Recognising ‘Populations’ and ‘Peoples’,
1. Recognising ‘Peoples’ and ‘Populations’,
Part II: Evoking People-hood,
2. Hasluck and Elkin,
3. Strehlow Damns Coombs,
4. ‘The Whole Aboriginal Problem in Microcosm’: The South Australian Land Rights Debate of 1966,
5. The Politics of Enumerating the Stolen Generations,
Part III: Critical Reflections on Political Capacity,
6. The Changing Cultural Constitution of the Indigenous Sector,
7. The Ambivalence of Helen Hughes,
Part IV: Thinking Historically About 1967–76,
8. ‘If We are to Survive as a People …’: Noel Pearson’s Economic History,
9. Peter Sutton and the Historical Roots of Suffering,
10. The Coombs Experiment,
Part V: The Appeal of Quantification,
11. The Australian Reconciliation Barometer and the Indigenous Imaginery,
Notes,
References,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Recognising ‘Peoples’ and ‘Populations’

Are Indigenous Australians — that is, Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders — ‘peoples’ or ‘populations’? Perhaps the reader is puzzled by this question: what’s the difference? As long as we acknowledge Indigenous Australians as people — that is, as human beings — why does it matter whether we refer to them as peoples or as populations? In this commonsense view, the phrases ‘Aboriginal people of Australia’ and ‘Aboriginal population of Australia’ mean the same thing. In this chapter, however, I want to argue that ‘peoples’ and ‘populations’ are significantly different concepts, and that when we refer to Aborigines (or Torres Strait Islanders) as a ‘people’, we are thinking about them in a specific way that is not the same as referring to Indigenous people as a ‘population’. In this ‘people’/’population’ distinction, we find a subtle but important struggle in the politics of recognition.

Recognition

Recognition matters, and it is political. In the emergence of Indigenous peoples as a global political presence, ‘recognition’ by others is complementary to Indigenous peoples’ declarations of their own survival and ongoing needs and rights. For much of the twentieth century, non-Indigenous Australians recognised Indigenous Australians in ways that diminished them. Aborigines (a term often used as if it included Torres Strait Islanders) were not only a tiny minority; they were also a fading presence — demographically and culturally — in an ethnically ‘white’ nation. For much of the twentieth century, to the extent that they were ‘recognised’ it was as objects of humane solicitude, soon to be gone, ‘absorbed’ or assimilated. In the 1960s, that confident and sometimes regretful scenario lost credibility among thoughtful non-Indigenous Australians. They began to realise that Aborigines were not dying out; that even those with some ‘white blood’ identified as Aborigines; that they were aggrieved about how they had been treated; and that they were proud of their heritage. In a series of shifts in public perception — recently narrated with scholarly detail by Russell McGregor — non-Indigenous Australians began in the 1950s and 1960s to recognise Indigenous Australia in new terms. Starting in the late 1960s, reformed Indigenous affairs policy encouraged Aborigines and T