Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Yvonne Margarula describing in the Gundjeihmi language how her father, Toby Gangale, and other Mirarr traditional owners felt worn down by negotiations for the Ranger uranium mine on their land at Kakadu in the Northern Territory. Jacqui Katona says the Mirarr people were told they should sacrifice their rights in the interest of national progress. Footage of Gangale and the mine and black-and-white photographs of the negotiations are included. The clip is subtitled and includes music and the repeated sound of a politician’s speech.

Educational value points

• The negotiations referred to in the clip took place in the 1970s between the Mirarr people, the Northern Territory Land Council and the Australian Government and focused only on the terms and conditions under which the Ranger mine would go ahead. Although the site is on Mirarr land, the Mirarr people could not veto the mine because the Government had exempted Ranger from the veto rights given to traditional owners under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 (NT).

• The structure of the clip and the choice of audio and images are used to argue that the traditional owners were under relentless pressure to sign the agreement. The photographs selected by the filmmaker depict the owners with downcast heads and even huddled together as if defeated, while in contrast Ian Viner, then minister for Aboriginal Affairs, appears confident. The drone-like music and the monotonous speech reinforce the argument.

• The agreement was signed on 3 November 1978 and Toby Gangale was quoted as saying that he’d finally given up. Traditional owners are responsible for their country – environmentally, culturally and spiritually – and Gangale’s family members, including his daughter Yvonne Margarula, felt that Gangale’s struggle to resist signing the mining agreement dramatically affected his health.

• Margarula, the senior traditional owner of Mirarr country, indicates that by 2002 the Mirarr people had still not seen the promised benefits of uranium mining. Despite assurances of work at the Ranger mine few Mirarr people were employed and poor living conditions in the community have remained largely unchanged since the 1970s. Jacqui Katona commented in 1997: ‘We have no graduates of secondary education, housing is substandard, the vast majority of community is unemployed’ (http://www.greenleft.org.au, 1997).

• An activist, writer and academic, Katona is of the Djok people whose land is within Kakadu National Park. She was invited by Margarula to work on the 1990s campaign to stop the intended Jabiluka mine. As executive officer of the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, she represented the Mirarr in negotiations with the Government and Energy Resources of Australia. She and Margarula received the 1999 Goldman Environment Prize for the successful campaign.

Crickets chirp

English subtitles: They got tired and they would say, ‘They are destroying our land and interfering in sacred sites.’ They got sick of it and would say, ‘Why don’t you white people go back where you came from?’ That’s what they used to say. They were sick and tired of interference with sacred sites and meddling in our affairs. It really wore those old people out.

Images of a man inspecting land with the caption: Toby Gangale – Yvonne’s father. Sombre didgeridoo music plays and is drowned out by the menacing sounds of machinery digging.

Jackie Katona Aboriginal people were not required to agree. They were required to sign off on a document which outlined a series of benefits that would result from a mine that they opposed.

Yvonne (in language)
English subtitles: When the mining company arrived, they made lots of promises. Money, vehicles… they said, 'Everything will be wonderful.’

In the background, we hear a politician making a speech about the agreement.

It’s true they kept putting pressure on my father until he signed the mining agreement. I never believed what they told us.

Jackie Certainly the tactics of the mining companies and the governments in terms of telling people that it was better to give up than it was to fight. They could only lose. The only option was losing. There was an overwhelming and relentless message in this for Yvonne’s father and the Mirarr people, and that was that their rights were perceived to be secondary, not only to other Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, but to the rest of Australia’s needs as a nation, and that the Mirarr people should rightly sacrifice those rights in the interests of what was deemed to be social and economic progress in Australia.

An image of an Aboriginal signing a document

Politician voice over, 1978 We think it is a fair agreement and we think it is a proper agreement for the Aboriginal people and for the whole of Australia.