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Noel Pearson Eulogy for Gough Whitlam Transcript November 4th 2014
Subject: Engineering
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School: St Paul's Catholic College
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Noel Pearson’s Eulogy for late Prime Minister Gough Whitlam – Transcript November 5th, 2014
Paul Keating said the reward for public life is public progress.
For one born estranged from the nation's citizenship, into a humble family of a marginal people
striving in the teeth of poverty and discrimination, today it is assuredly no longer the case.
This because of the equalities of opportunities afforded by the Whitlam program.
Raised next to the wood heap of the nation's democracy, bequeathed no allegiance to any political
party, I speak to this old man's legacy with no partisan brief.
Rather, my signal honour today on behalf of more people than I could ever know, is to express our
immense gratitude for the public service of this old man.
I once took him on a tour to my village and we spoke about the history of the mission and my youth
under the government of his nemesis, Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.
My home was an Aboriginal reserve under a succession of Queensland laws commencing in 1897.
These laws were notoriously discriminatory and the bureaucratic apparatus controlling the reserves
maintained vigil over the smallest details concerning its charges.
Superintendents held vast powers and a cold and capricious bureaucracy presided over this system
for too long in the 20th century.
In June 1975, the Whitlam government enacted the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders
Queensland Discriminatory Laws Act.
The law put to purpose the power conferred upon the Commonwealth Parliament by the 1967
referendum, finally outlawing the discrimination my father and his father lived under since my
grandfather was removed to the mission as a boy and to which I was subject [for] the first 10 years of
my life.
Powers regulating residency on reserves without a permit, the power of reserve managers to enter
private premises without the consent of the householder, legal representation and appeal from court
decisions, the power of reserve managers to arbitrarily direct people to work, and the terms and
conditions of employment, were now required to treat Aboriginal Queenslanders on the same
footing as other Australians.
We were at last free from those discriminations that humiliated and degraded our people.
The companion to this enactment, which would form the architecture of indigenous human rights
akin to the Civil Rights Act 1965 in the United States, was the Racial Discrimination Act.
It was in Queensland under Bjelke-Petersen that its importance became clear.
In 1976, a Wik man from Aurukun on the western Cape York Peninsula, John Koowarta, sought to
purchase the Archer Bend pastoral lease from its white owner.