Indigenous significance not significant enough

The Howard Government has also made it clear that it is reluctant to list anything that reflects upon the fight for the civil and political rights of Indigenous Australians.

Back in July 2004, the current Federal Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Senator Ian Campbell, said that the Wave Hill Walk Off Sites (where protests in the 1960s helped sparked the Aboriginal land rights movement) would be given priority consideration for the National Heritage List. Since then, nothing has been heard from the Minister’s office about Wave Hill.

Minister Campbell also recently refused to list the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the National Heritage List’s companion register, the Commonwealth Heritage List, which is supposed to include places of heritage significance that are located on Commonwealth land.

Like the Wave Hill Walk Off Sites, the Tent Embassy marks an historically significant moment in the history of the Indigenous land rights movement and the development of Australian democracy. Despite receiving advice from the Australian Heritage Council that the Embassy met the listing criteria, the Minister rejected the nomination claiming the listing would be divisive.

The Prime Minister may have made all the appropriate noises about Indigenous heritage in his swipe at the way history is taught in Australian schools, but the administration of the Federal heritage portfolio tells another story. Behold the culture wars, revisionism Howard Government style, where the history of Indigenous Australians and their role in shaping our society and environment is expunged from the record. So much for the Prime Minister’s “progressive spirit of the Enlightenment”.