The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Endnotes See, for example, Gabriel de Foigny's The Southern Land, Known, trans. and ed. David Fausett, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NewYork, 1993; originally published as La Terre Australe Connue (1676). Sadeur, the book's narrator, is an orphaned hermaphrodite who is shipwrecked on the Australian coast, a utopian land populated by hermaphrodites. 2 On Sunday 28 May 2000, what was estimated to be more than 200 000 people participated in a 'walk for Aboriginal reconciliation' across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, in an impressive gesture of support for reconciliation.The walk followed the 'Corroboree 2000' Conference and the official handing over of the statement 'Towards Reconciliation' by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.The Council was established in 1991 by the Commonwealth Parliament to promote a process of reconciliation between Australian Indigenous peoples and the wider community for the benefit of the nation. Similar walks occurred in other capital cities in the following months. The Australian Government under John Howard has steadfastly refused to apologise for past injustices to Australian Indigenous people. 3 The White Australia policy was the Australian Government's restrictive immigration policy, which began in the 1850s with limits placed on the number of Chinese on the goldfields, and later extended to include other groups of people. After World War Two the policy was gradually relaxed, and in 1973 the Labor Government under Gough Whitlam removed the remaining vestiges of the policy. From the 1970s onwards 'multiculturalism' evolved as the government policy approach to Australia's cultural diversity. 4 In August 2001, an international incident was sparked when the Norwegian-owned ship MV Tampa, which had rescued 438 refugees from a sinking ferry bound for Australia, was denied permission to land. Australian troops took control of the vessel when the captain defied orders and entered Australian territorial waters near Christmas Island. After a seven-day stand-off, Prime Minister John Howard announced that the refugees would be sent to New Zealand and Nauru (see also note 10). 5 'Stolen Generations' refers to Aboriginal children who were removed from their families and communities by government or non-government agencies, in order to enforce integration into white society; the practice continued in some areas until the 1960s (The Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd edn, Macquarie Library, Sydney, 1997). The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, which was established in May 1995, resulted in the 1997 report Bringing Them Home (see also note 11). 124 APT2002 6 7 8 9 10 11 Eddie Mabo (1936-92), from the island of Mer (Murray Island) in Torres Strait, was the successful principal plaintiff in the landmark High Court of Australia ruling on native land title. In June 1992, six months after Mabo died, the decision of the High Court overturned the doctrine that Australia was terra nullius (unoccupied; belonging to no one) at the time of British settlement. The High Court ruling gave legal recognition, for the first time, that Indigenous land ownership existed in Australia before European settlement, and recognised that in some cases this land tenure was not subsequently extinguished by the Crown. See note 2. In October 2001, at the beginning of the federal election campaign, the HMAS Adelaide intercepted an Indonesian fishing boat with 187 Iraqi asylum– seekers on board. In the ensuing chaos, some people leapt overboard and a father appeared to threaten he might throw his daughter into the sea.The story that children were thrown overboard by their parents, which was later shown to be false, gained widespread currency and was used by the Howard Government to gain electoral support for its tough stance on illegal immigrants, whom it described as 'queue-jumpers'.The 'children overboard affair' is now the subject of a Senate inquiry. In 1994 the federal government banned the construction of the Hindmarsh Bridge in South Australia because the local Ngarrindjeri women said it would violate 'secret sacred women's business'. In what became known as the 'Pacific solution', offshore detention centres were established in Nauru and Papua New Guinea in late 2001 to hold asylum seekers while their applications for refugee status were processed. In return Australian Prime Minister John Howard pledged special financial aid to the host nations. Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Sydney, 1997. The report is also commonly known as the 'Stolen Generations Report'.