Permanent partnership boost for reconciliation
How about some good news in Aboriginal affairs? Intermarriage is the unsung hero of reconciliation. It is the dominant relationship between black and white in this country. Today should be Intermarriage Day in Australia.
There are plenty of occasions in the calendar to celebrate differences.
NAIDOC week, National Close The Gap Day, Anniversary of the Apology to Australia’s Indigenous peoples, National Sorry Day, National Reconciliation Week, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children’s Day, Indigenous Literacy Day and many more.
Of course, then there will be the usual bunfight on January 26.
Radicals will call it Invasion Day and the remainder of the nation will celebrate a day of nationhood and take pride in it.
One essential thing that came out of the polling, to which I was privy, during the Voice referendum was the strong support for Australia Day and the fear that the Yes camp wanted it abolished.
The majority showed a lot of sense; they knew changing dates changed nothing.
Intermarriage has been a significant theme of the adjustment of Aborigines to their new world since 1788. There is no more substantial measure of reconciliation between two races than that people choose to share their lives.
The intermarriage rate between Aborigines and non-Aborigines in Australia is very high. Aborigines on the East Coast marry outside of their community in very high numbers — around 70 per cent and as high as 80 per cent in the cities.
Across Australia, almost 60 per cent of partners involving an Aborigine are with a non-Aborigine.
Of the Aboriginal births registered in 2017, 27 per cent were births for which both parents identified as Aboriginal, 43 per cent were births where only the mother was Aboriginal and 30 per cent were births where only the father was Aboriginal.
The Northern Territory had the highest proportion of births where the mother and father were Aboriginal (43 per cent), while Western Australia was 42 per cent.
Tasmania had the lowest proportion of Aboriginal births (12 per cent) where both mother and father were Aboriginal.
In the Australian Capital Territory, 39 per cent of Aboriginal births were to non-Aboriginal mothers and Aboriginal fathers (11 per cent in the Northern Territory).
Whether it was a contest for women, a survival strategy on the part of Aboriginal women or, indeed, a matter of joy, intermarriage was a significant element of the adjustment of Aborigines to their new world and is a matter to be celebrated and commemorated.
It’s not as if this sentiment is new. In the period between 1848 and 1911, sections of Aboriginal reserve land in South Australia were granted to Aboriginal women who married nonAboriginal men.
The idea was to encourage marriage, as opposed to cohabitation, of Aboriginal women and nonAboriginal men to regularise or moralise the situation.
Miscegenation, sex between people of different races, was not considered the problem; indeed, the state sanctioned it by a land grant “to protect [a] wife from chances of desertion”.
The Reverend Ernest Gribble, a white missionary whose father established the Yarrabah mission south of Cairns, was keen to prevent the destruction of Aboriginal society and insisted on separation between whites and blacks.
Despite his views, he fell for an Aboriginal woman, Jeannie Brown, getting her pregnant and arranging for her to marry an Aboriginal man.
Ernest Gribble’s sister, Ethel, fell for and married Fred Wondunna, trainee preacher and Badjala man of K’gari (Fraser Island) on December 30, 1907.
It’s been going on for a very long time, yet our elite Aboriginal leadership acts as if we are two different people, black and white. The evidence says not.
In time, with continuing significant intermarriage, we may all be Aboriginal.
This day should be declared a celebration of reconciliation and known as Intermarriage Day, as intermarriage is, after all, the most common form of relations between black and white in Australia.