ATSI people are warned this story contains references to the deceased.
Palm Beach local Jeff McMullen has spent a lifetime detailing the disadvantage and persecution of indigenous people in Australia and around the world. Editor in Chief Michelle Giglio speaks with the veteran journalist, author and filmmaker about his next chapter – improving the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Jeff McMullen has a serious air about him on the day we meet. Jeff has lost three close friends this year, all of whom died before their time. They were Australian First Nations people, and like so many of their background, with a life expectancy well below that of non-indigenous citizens.
Jeff has seen some of the worst of humanity in a career spanning 50 years as an ABC foreign correspondent and a reporter on Four Corners and 60 Minutes. Genocide in Rwanda, famine in Eritrea and civil war in Nicaragua, where children as young as 10 took up arms instead of pencils, never having the opportunity for education in a world where battlefields were their schoolyards.
He has seen the best of First Worlds as ABC Washington correspondent in the early eighties, with all the glitz and glamour of the White House and American elite, regularly crossing the paths of presidents, prime ministers and celebrities from across the globe. He has also seen the worst of the Third World, where generations of disadvantage entrench the status quo of citizens.
But Jeff says there is a Fourth World right here in Australia. And that is the world where many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (ATSI) live.
“The Fourth World exists alongside the extraordinary prosperity of Australians,” Jeff explains. “We have technology, resources, a highly educated society. And yet alongside that gleaming First World where many see us as one of the best places on Earth to live, we have something that is Fourth World.”
Jeff spent some of his childhood in Penang (now part of Malaysia), where his father was stationed with the Royal Australian Air Force. He has called Palm Beach home for 37 years, settling there after he started working with Sixty Minutes.
Some of Jeff’s work in the 1970s, 80s and 90s took him to parts of the Earth nobody had ever seen. Well before the Internet and iPhones, a cameraman, photographer and journalist were the only way people could find out about atrocities across the globe. It showed him that the plight of ATSI was not so different from the indigenous people he spoke to world-over.
Jeff in the Amazon Basin with indigenous people.
Trekking out of Guatemala to Mexico in 1982 while covering the slaughter of the Maya people.
Boy soldier Javier Blancher was just 11 and fought in the Nicaraguan civil war (1984).
Close friend and ATSI advocate, the late Rosalie Kunoth-Monks (far left), with daughter Ngarla.
“As I travelled the world and saw the predicament of First Peoples all over the Earth, I saw the pattern. I made some of the world’s first films about the genocide against indigenous people in the Amazon. I reported on the genocide of the Maya people in Guatemala.
“The pattern from every First Nation setting is similar, in that the original loss of land and loss of control set up a deep, persistent disadvantage, and obliteration in some cases of culture, and the loss of hope for so many First Peoples.”
For many decades now, Jeff, 75, has dedicated his life to improving ATSI access to health and education. And he has been speaking out more as the vote for the Voice to Parliament Referendum nears.
When we meet, he has just chaired a two-day forum in Sydney about the removal of Aboriginal children from their families. In 2008, then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to ATSI people for the forced removal of children from their families on the basis of race, mostly from the late 1800s until the government policy ceased in 1970. It may, therefore, come as a surprise to many that ATSI children in New South Wales (NSW) are once again being removed from their families at an alarming rate.
“If you only sit back and watch it, you are part of the trap that keeps so many of the First Peoples in what is Fourth World poverty.”
“NSW has 6,509 Aboriginal children removed from their families and living in what they call out of home care, which is a euphemism for them being put into the foster care system that almost always separates them from culture and family,” Jeff says. The end result is identity crisis, as these children do not get to learn their cultural backgrounds or know ‘country,’ that is, traditional homelands. Nationwide, 23,000 ATSI children have been removed from their families. NSW has one of the highest rates, creating an ‘ongoing Stolen Generation pattern,’ Jeff says.
“It’s very damaging to children, and it’s why so many of those children will struggle. And too many of them end up going on to disruption. A lot of them are drawn into minor misdemeanors and crime. And that pattern that ends up being one of those terrible statistics.”
Jeff says while he started as a storyteller, the plight of ATSI made him understand that words were not enough.
“I look at over 50 years of storytelling and see that it was the truth that I tried to share. And the truth about the First Peoples is what made me see individually I had to do something more than tell the story. I needed to act.”
So Jeff started to do that, and now flies around the country giving advice and chairing discussions with politicians, advocates and ATSI about the best way forward for ATSI children. Access to education is key, Jeff maintains. As a child, Jeff remembers his mother telling him that Aboriginal children were turned away from her school in the Hunter Valley.
“For me, literacy is the life-changing factor for most human beings. If you are able to know your story and tell your story, to write, speak, film, dance, or sing it, literacy is a very powerful thing that takes the caged individual and lets anyone walk free, be themselves and actually work with others.”
For 15 years, Jeff was the voluntary chief executive officer of Olympic swimming champion Ian Thorpe’s Fountain for Youth charity which encouraged literacy in 22 remote ATSI communities. And now he is ambassador for NOFASD, the National Organisation for Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, which works to improve the life of children born to mothers who have had excessive alcohol during pregnancy – indigenous and non-indigenous.
While the solutions are not straightforward, what Jeff facilitates is an approach which involves and empowers ATSI people – which is what the Voice to Parliament asks for. Hence his recent discussions with the NSW Government about the forced removal of ATSI children and a group of ‘very angry and focussed’ voices who wanted to be heard.
“The missing ingredient in most government policy is recognition of the views and the lived experience of the people who are subjected to that policy. Government claims to consult. But what that means is they put a plan in front of people that has already been shaped by the government.
“The policy is generally assimilationist and paternalistic in the sense that it does not reflect the real world that ATSI people live in.”
The way to change a ‘very broken system,’ Jeff says, is to support families from an early stage.
“What is required is early attention to family situations, to see that children are not put into circumstances where their wellbeing is under threat. But in NSW, ATSI babies have been removed from young mothers in hospital before they’re put on the breast of the mother. There is no justification for such an inhumane approach.”
In his early years as a journalist – and Jeff started out as one of the youngest, at just 18 with the ABC – Jeff met some of the early ATSI activists like Charlie Perkins and Lowitja O’Donohue who showed him that a ‘unified, stronger nation’ was key.
“(Their vision) drew me into action. How do you contribute to the change? Mere words you see in journalism can inform people, but the next step is to work together.
“It’s a fairly simple philosophy because Aboriginal people are so open-hearted and want to share.”
So he and his wife Kim Hoggard, with then-young children Claire and Will, helped Aboriginal communities build solid structures – like a cultural centre in Wugularr in the Northern Territory to ‘hold the stories’ of the elders. Twenty years on, Jeff is a director of the Nova Peris Foundation which obtains clean water and improves nutrition in remote ATSI communities. He is patron of the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association, and says he’s seen the ‘powerful change’ of having ATSI doctors now running community-controlled health services, including in Western Sydney. He does all this for no pay and no personal reward – but hoping to make a difference.
“Advocacy becomes the inevitable consequence of thinking deeply about an issue. You can’t come back from a conflict, a war, an area of famine around the world without looking at your own country. And then feeling ‘we have so much here’.
“We have such a hopeful mix of peoples, of histories, of deep ancient culture, that we have the foundations for a place that really could be a shining example to the world of how to live together.”
Jeff has been called all over the country to talk about the Voice Referendum, including several forums on the Northern Beaches. He says some of the discussion has been quite damaging. “We can tear one another apart, or we can find the best in one another,” he reflects. “We have to do the hard work that is about recognising the deep hurt that is there and the damage across generations.”
Some of Jeff’s most ‘devastating’ travels have been to visit juvenile youth detention facilities in the Northern Territory, Western Australia and NSW.
“What stays with me is the alienation of those young ATSI kids. They’re just kids. And yet they’re in this cage. And the look in their eyes is anger, alienation and really deep hurt.”
Jeff helped the late Tom E. Lewis, seen with partner Fleur Parry and children, to build a cultural centre at Wugularr, NT.
One reason Australia needs the Voice is because ‘we aren’t listening,’ Jeff argues. “We aren’t understanding how that child got into that trap. And when I listen to the young men, most are culturally lost, they are struggling to find where they sit in the Australian story. And they feel, in many cases, removed from the strengths of the longest cultural stories.”
The effect of putting an ATSI child in detention is ‘grievously wrong’ and has a lifelong impact, Jeff argues.
“If the child before the court is 10 years old, sending that child into the juvenile justice pipeline (can mean that) ultimately, a big percentage of those go on to an adult court. And so you’ve really got to come back to the rights of the child and realise that government interventions are about controlling Aboriginal communities and families.
“What we need is to hear the advice of communities that say, ‘our children have nothing. They don’t feel there is hope’. That’s when the light goes out of a child’s eyes.”
The Voice will at least put the perspective of ATSI people at the forefront of lawmaker’s minds, in a world where ‘the system is rigged’ against an ATSI child born today, Jeff maintains.
“I think it’s important to really spend your energy and effort on the support that grows the wellbeing of any child in our country, and see them as our children, our responsibility. And then challenge yourself to the action.
“If you only sit back and watch it, you are part of the trap that keeps so many of the First Peoples in Fourth World poverty.”
Jeff encourages everyone to get to know ATSI people, as we are all ‘part of the story’.
“They always say: ‘our arms are open. Come and sit, come and yarn.
“And then you have this beautiful balance. You realise it doesn’t matter where you came from, you discover the humanity in the other instead of fearing and misunderstanding.”
In the busy lives that everyone leads, Jeff says what his own family treasures most is that balance – of just enjoying the world and one another.