SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 29 2018 WEEKEND 19

V1 - NTNE01Z01MA

September 29, 2018

• OPINION • BOATING • QUIZ • CAMPING •

JASON WALLS REPORTS

In 1979, hundreds of hectares of Crown land was handed back to Darwin’s indigenous Larrakia people.

Nearly 40 years later, thousands of them remain cut off from their ancestral homeland.

CLOSED COMMUNITY

22 WEEKEND SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 29 2018

NTNE01Z01MA - V1

“I have no doubt that theLarrakia people were thetraditional owners ofwhat is now the whole

Darwin area. Some of the survivors,together with a few other Aborigines,have formed an organisation calling it-self Gwalwa Daraniki.

“The secretary of this organisation,a white man, has achieved remarkableresults in obtaining press coverage andother forms of publicity for the claimsof this group.

“In the result, Kulaluk has becomesomething of a symbol of the standwhich Aborigines, with help and guid-ance from many different sources, arenow making against the past tendencyto put their interests last in any con-sideration of land usage.” A.E. Wood-ward — Aboriginal Land RightsCommissioner (1974)

■ ■ ■

It was the recommendationshanded down by Aboriginal LandRights Commissioner Justice Ed-ward Woodward in the mid-1970sthat would pave the way for the pass-age of the Aboriginal Land RightsAct in 1976.

Justice Woodward’s second andfinal report in 1974 ran to almost 200pages and would in turn form thebasis for the claim under the act tothe land that straddles Dick Ward Drin Darwin’s west, known as Kulaluk,by the Larrakia people which was ult-imately granted in 1979. But for

anthropologist Bill Day, two passagesof the lengthy report stand out inparticular. The first being that inwhich His Honour acknowledges theroll of the “white man” (Dr Day) inthe achievements of the early landrights movement in Darwin.

The other is Justice Woodward’sview that the organisation Dr Dayhelped found to fight for land rightsfor Aboriginal people in the Top Endand which was ultimately given cus-todianship of the lease at Kulaluk —the Gwalwa Daraniki Association —“would not be a suitable organisationto have this land vested in it”.

Four decades later, the suitabilityof the GDA to control the lease is justas contentious, as questions mountabout the organisation’s financialsustainability and ability to managethe asset.

Today, some of those involved inthe land right’s movement over theyears feel they have been squeezedout by the GDA, leaving more than300ha of Crown land in central Dar-win under the control of a small, se-cretive and unaccountable cabal,which they say is not representativeof the wider community.

Under the GDA’s original 1973constitution “all Aborigines residingin the Northern Territory” and “anynon-Aboriginal the executive maydecide to admit — providing thattotal membership remain not lessthan 90 per cent Aborigines” wereeligible for membership.

But that constitution was amend-ed in 2006 and now reads: “A person

is not eligible to be a member of theassociation unless the person is a cur-rent member of the Kulaluk Com-munity and has lived in the KulalukCommunity for a continuous periodof 12 months.”

Dr Day, who now lives in Perth,says not only does the clause shuthim out but it bars membership evenfor many Larrakia descendants inDarwin who live outside the smallcommunities on Dick Ward Dr.

“You’ve got 300ha of urban Dar-win land controlled by a culturallyanonymous group who aren’t ac-countable to anyone,” he says.

■ ■ ■

Various plans to develop the landhave come and gone over the years— the McDonalds on Bagot Rd beingone notable going concern — but anumber of other plans have been an-nounced and cash poured in only tobe quietly shelved without expla-nation.

One such venture was a mud crabfarm lauded by Federal TreasurerPeter Costello in 2006 as “a real com-mercial project giving training, givingjobs, making a profit and providingfor the local people” which receivedhundreds of thousands of dollars ingovernment funding before the busi-ness name, Mudla Farms, was mys-teriously cancelled in 2008.

“I call it the Magic Pudding,” DrDay says.

“You can sign away, have deals,get money, just keep taking it and the

pudding is still there and there’snothing there (to show for it).”

Despite the fanfare around thevarious projects, it remains unclearexactly where the money has gone asthe announcements and grand plansfade from the public consciousness.

As an incorporated association,the GDA is required to lodge yearlyfinancial statements with the Terri-tory Government but has not done sofor two years after being granted re-peated extensions by Licencing NT.

The most recent financial state-ment it lodged, covering the 2015-16financial year, shows the associationmade a net loss of $817,068 whilemaintaining “there are reasonablegrounds to believe that the associ-ation will be able to pay its debts asand when they become due and pay-able.”

But that view was not backed upby auditors BDO Australia, whofound a lack of proper record-keep-ing by the GDA made it impossible toconduct a review of the association’sself-assessment.

Adding to the questions surround-ing the GDA’s ability to self-govern isa series of legal disputes currently orrecently before the Supreme Court.

In one such dispute, the GDA wasearlier this year embroiled in a rowwith its former lawyer, Michael Chin,who the association claimed mis-managed a development deal involv-ing more than $1 million in rentalpayments that the GDA feared itmay be forced to hand back.

Mr Chin denied any wrongdoing

and the matter has since lapsed —though it is unclear whether theclaim was withdrawn or a settlementreached. Court transcripts from thelatest hearing are revealing.

A judgment delivered in April thisyear by Associate Justice Vince Lup-pino revealed the GDA was “im-pecunious” and its lawyers hadclaimed the association was negotiat-ing with the NT Government for “aloan of approximately $3 million toenable it to pay a taxation liabilityand outstanding rates and taxes”.

In handing down his decision, Jus-tice Luppino cited “evidence of theactual, ongoing and apparently in-creasing losses being made by theGDA”, as well as “evidence that theplaintiff has a substantial existingliability to the Australian TaxationOffice and other substantial debts forproperty rates and taxes”.

“In part the loan sought to be ob-tained from the Northern Territorywas to address those liabilities. Thatevidence therefore shows that notonly is the plaintiff making ongoinglosses, the plaintiff cannot meet ex-isting commitments,” Justice Luppi-no wrote.

But in response to questions fromthe NT News, a Planning Depart-ment spokeswoman said while it wasunderstood the GDA “have beenworking on improving their financialstability” the government was notconsidering any loan. “It is under-stood that GDA were in discussionswith the previous government in re-spect to loan funding support,” she

NT Weekend04 NEWS FEATURE

Hundreds of hectares of Crown land handed back to Darwin’s indigenous Larrakia people in 1979 is now in the hands of a small, secretive group which tightly controls access to the land and information about what goes on there. One of the founders of the Gwalwa Daraniki Association now says its current administration runs the organisation like its own personal fiefdom, to the exclusion of all other Larrakia people. To make matters worse, there is mounting evidence the GDA’s ‘magic pudding’ of funds has finally run dry and the organisation may be flat broke. JASON WALLS investigates.

Shut out of their own community

Dr Bill Day (inset) with a sample of asbestos he says he found at Kulaluk, next to the Minmarama Aboriginal Community Picture: PATRINA MALONE/ELISE DERWIN

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 29 2018 WEEKEND 23

V1 - NTNE01Z01MA

said. “This government has not con-sidered financial support to GDA.”

In a statement to the NT News, AGDA spokeswoman did not directlyaddress questions about the purport-ed loan or the GDA’s finances butsaid it was “working with all threelevels of government in an open, ac-countable and transparent manner”.

“GDA are trading to the satisfac-tion of the deputy commissioner oftaxation with the Australian Tax-ation Office,” she said.

“GDA receive no recurrent fund-ing from any level of government.”

The spokeswoman said the NTOmbudsman was “working directlyon a number of matters for GDA”.

■ ■ ■

Bill Day’s concerns about themanagement of the GDA’s financesare compounded by an apparent lackof government knowledge and over-sight of what goes on inside thelease’s boundaries. Kulaluk land hasbeen used as a dumping groundthroughout the history of the lease,including at the Minmarama Com-munity which was itself built on thesite of an earlier landfill.

Dr Day has also found asbestos atthe site — which the NT Environ-ment Department acknowledges butclaims poses no risk — and in Junethis year, he wrote to the departmentto share his concerns about historicaland more recent dumping. The re-sponse from environment operationsdirector Peter Vasel, in which he ad-

tion rubble was dumped but were“unable to locate any permits or ap-provals granted by any governmentagency for reclamation behind Min-marama Village”.

“Officers have also been unable todetermine what, if any, financial orother non-regulatory arrangementsmay have been in place that allowedthe fill, or been able to satisfactorilydetermine who may have conductedthese activities in 2009,” he wrote.

“That also astounds me,” Dr Daysays.

The department spokesman latertold the NT News the EPA had “noindication” the dumping had oc-curred prior to receiving Dr Day’sletter and it was unable to determinewho was responsible and what mate-rials had been dumped.

“If dumping occurs on the Kula-luk lease area and it cannot be deter-mined who is responsible forcarrying out the dumping, the re-sponsibility to remove the materialfalls to the GDA,” he said.

Mr Vasel’s letter also revealed theEPA had taken action against a com-pany found illegally dumping ma-terial in the Minmarama area in 2015.

In response to further questionsabout that incident from the NTNews, the department spokesmansaid after investigating officers ident-ified and took action against thoseresponsible, the GDA barred its stafffrom the site. “Following the investi-gation of that incident, the GDA re-quired that NT EPA officers onlyaccess their land with their prior per-

mitted officers had been unable tofind evidence to confirm the exist-ence of the original landfill shockedDr Day, so he followed up with astack of newspaper clippings fromthe 1970s and 1980s proving theexistence of the dump.

“To me it’s a shocking, slackness,you’d call it, surely a little bit of dig-ging would reveal something of whatI’ve done myself in my own sparetime,” he says.

“If they don’t know those sort ofthings what else don’t they know?”

After receiving Dr Day’s secondletter, an Environment Departmentspokesman told the NT News the En-vironment Protection Authority had“limited records” of events prior tothe establishment of Minmarama.

“These documents (provided byDr Day) make references to the con-struction and operation of a rela-tively short-lived municipal wastedisposal site beneath what is nowMinmarama Village,” she said.

“The NT EPA has no ready accessto this kind of historical informationand thanks Dr Day for its provision.”

The spokesman said the EPA wasnow “investigating Dr Day’s allega-tions” to try to fill any gaps in itsknowledge.

Dr Day also raised concerns in hisletter about the dumping of construc-tion waste into the mangroves atMinmarama in 2009, naming a con-struction company he believed wasresponsible. Mr Vasel responded thatdepartmental officers had identifiedthe site in question where construc-

mission,” he said. “To date there hasbeen no further reports from theMinmarama Village that have re-quired site attendance by officers.”

■ ■ ■

Larrakia man, Eric Fejo — wholives in Darwin but not on the Kula-luk lease and as such is excludedfrom membership of the GDA —says the old people he watched fightfor land rights in the 1970s and who“claimed Larrakia country back” byraising the nation’s flag over thecourthouse in Darwin in 1972, wouldbe disappointed by the current divi-sions.

Mr Fejo calls Bill Day “an oldchampion for the Aboriginal people”who “educated the old people on howwhite governments do their busi-ness”.

“That was the first flag raised by asovereign people in this country andthat was a non-indigenous man’s de-sign, old Bill Day, that was his design,but the design was a special place atKulaluk which is the nest and wherethe water spring is there,” he says.

“With the education that he had,you’ve got to understand, back thenthere was creole, pidgin getting spo-ken and for many of them Englishwas a third or fourth differentlanguage, so to have a personlike Bill there gave them abit of a better understand-ing of how thingsworked in the West-minster system.”While Mr Fejo de-clines to commenton where it allwent wrong forthe GDA, he isadamant the“whole area washanded back to

all Larrakia people” and should notbe in the hands of one small group.

“I’m not into this black bashing,we get enough of it from everyoneelse, it’s just really, really disappoint-ing that things have gone this way,”he says.

“I know them old people, they’dbe rolling in their graves, all thestruggles, the hard times they wentthrough. Today these so-called lead-ers that we’ve got now, they’re therole models for our future and it’sscary, it’s bloody scary.”

■ ■ ■

The GDA spokeswoman declinedto answer a series of questions fromthe NT News but said in a statementit was the GDA’s policy not to com-ment on private or commercial mat-ters.

“I certainly won’t be commentingon the vexatious and spurious ques-tions brought about by the usualNIMBY suspects that continue tohold old grudges against GDA withhatred in their hearts,” she said.

Discover theTjuwaliyn/Douglas

Hot Springs ParkTravel:

P15

‘ Today these so-calledleaders that we’ve got

now, they’re the rolemodels for our future andit’s scary, it’s bloody scary

E R I C J E J O

NT Weekend 05NEWS FEATURE

Shut out of their own community

Dr Bill Day (inset) with a sample of asbestos he says he found at Kulaluk, next to the Minmarama Aboriginal Community Picture: PATRINA MALONE/ELISE DERWIN

Bill Day in 1985, already a well known Aboriginal rights activist