The Brewarrina event achieved particular infamy because Australia’s prime minister announced the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody partly in response to Lloyd Boney’s death. As a result, a television crew was in Brewarrina to cover Boney’s funeral as well as the broader theme of Aboriginal–police relations. When the disturbance in the park began, the crew members were still in town and began filming the event. Like the video footage depicting Rodney King being beaten by police in California a few years later (which Morris cites in his analysis), the Brewarrina footage helped to turn this local disturbance into a major media event which convulsed public opinion for years thereafter.

For Morris, social and political tensions relating to indigenous people in Australian society and particularly the north-west of New South Wales were ‘crystallised’ in this event at Brewarrina. Citing Brewarrina police reports uncovered by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody which speculated about an armed Aboriginal uprising on the occasion of the 1988 bicentenary, Morris identifies anxiety and a fantasy of menace in the community around this time. Morris argues that such paranoia reveals instability within which new political possibilities resides. But for Morris, such possibilities were tragically foreclosed by state paternalism and the impact of neo-liberalism.

Barry Morris
(photograph supplied)

Used loosely by Morris, neo-liberalism references the pro-market economic reforms that swept through Australia in the 1980s and early 1990s, promoting deregulation and increased competition. Such reforms particularly impacted on rural communities sheltering behind the tariff wall. Already marginal populations of Aboriginal Australians were especially vulnerable, suffering increased unemployment and heightened inequality as local economies declined.

At the same time, neo-liberalism extends beyond a focus on economic reform to encompass a broader ideology relating to the recognition of difference. Like classic liberalism, neo-liberalism promotes the primacy of the individual against social collectives. It therefore conflicts with the collectivist tendency of 1970s and early 1980s land rights legislation and other forms of ‘emancipatory change’ associated with self-determination and alternative development. Neo-liberalism accordingly ‘reshaped the horizon of Indigenous political consciousness and aspirations’ (to quote Morris), in ways that continue to be felt today. Indeed, Morris explicitly connects the Greiner government’s approach to indigenous politics from 1988 to 1992 with later developments like the Howard government’s Northern Territory National Emergency Response in 2007.

Protests, Land Rights and Riots presents a strong argument against such neo-liberalism, calling instead for ‘social and cultural recognition of postcolonial rights’ for Aboriginal people. However, while capturing the broad sweep of 1980s New South Wales politics through such critique, Morris’s focus on neo-liberalism is arguably oversimplistic. While doubtlessly influential across the 1980s and early 1990s, neo-liberalism only partially explains the issues discussed here. Other factors, such as allegations of financial mismanagement occurring under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, probably shaped the Greiner government’s attempts to reform the act, just as reportage of child sex abuse and neglect shaped the Intervention some twenty years later. In critiquing neo-liberalism, Morris tends to marginalise the significance of such other factors.

More seriously, Morris’s interest in dramatic and spectacular events like the Brewarrina mêlée leads to a tendency to overstate the importance of resistance to neo-liberalism and ‘the state’ in understandings of Aboriginality, ignoring the everyday ways in which Aboriginal people engage with the broader society as fellow Australians. Morris’s account of the trial of those accused of involvement in the riot provides an example. Morris writes: ‘In the trial … Aboriginal silence, for legal reasons, effectively rendered the accused as abstractions in the courtroom and the objects of post-event narrative framings of the melee’s violence in the video.’

Two interjections by Aboriginal defendants during the trial shattered this silence. In the first, a defendant interrupted the sentencing of another by claiming responsibility for his co-defendant’s offence, stating: ‘Arthur Murray did not break the policeman’s leg. I did. That’s how much your justice is worth.’ In the second interjection, another defendant challenged the judge’s nostalgic account of Aboriginal life in the 1960s, citing the oppressive impact of paternalism at the time, and contesting the ‘erasure’ of ‘other social experiences’ that the judge’s ‘forgetfulness’ of such paternalism conveyed. As Morris argues, ‘In this erasure, we gain a grasp of something of the grounds for the formation of postcolonial social and political Indigenous identities that disrupt and transgress such “forgetfulness”.’

Compellingly presented on the last pages of the concluding chapter of this book, the defendants’ interjections dramatically subverted proceedings, offering tantalising insights into their attitudes towards the trial and the broader apparatus of the state, as Morris argues. But the tentative nature of Morris’s conclusion above is noteworthy. While avowing an ethnographic approach to the analysis of events like those at Brewarrina, Morris offers little information about these defendants’ lives outside the courtroom, or about the broader substance of ‘postcolonial social and political Indigenous identities’. Frustratingly, in restricting his focus solely to expressions of resistance in protest, Aboriginal people remain abstractions here, seeming to float about in a denuded world.

Nevertheless, Protests, Land Rights and Riots provides an overdue account of Aboriginal political agency during a significant period in Australian politics. Morris’s discussion of the impact of neo-liberalism on Aboriginal people is powerful and compelling, if only partially convincing. It offers an antidote to more celebratory accounts of the noteworthy reforms achieved in this tumultuous period by Greiner in New South Wales, and, more significantly, by Hawke and Keating in Canberra. Readers with an interest in indigenous Australia, as well as in the politics of recognition within post-settler colonial societies, will find much of interest here.