Arnhem Land, Northern Territory: Inside a small tent in a remote stretch of outback bushland, Australia’s prime minister, Tony Abbott, pulled his seat up to a portable wooden desk on which sat his laptop computer, deodorant, insect repellent and sunscreen.
It was an unusual choice of lodgings from which to govern the nation for a week: a khaki canvas tent, containing a hard, single mattress and a sleeping bag, in a eucalyptus forest considered sacred by the local Aborigines.
But Abbott’s five-day outdoor sojourn was no ordinary camping trip. In an unprecedented act by an Australian prime minister, he was trying to remove what he sees as an enduring stain on the national character: the unjust treatment of the Aborigines, that dates back to the earliest British settlers.
Speaking in a makeshift prime ministerial office in a nearby wooden pavilion, Abbott told The Daily Telegraph: “There is a discomfort in our national character. To this day we have not entirely come to terms with this side of the Australian reality.”
Abbott, a conservative and monarchist, was born in London, studied at Oxford and describes himself as an “incorrigible Anglophile”.
But he believes the arrival of British settlers on the First Fleet proved devastating for the Aborigines. “Initially the impact [of British settlement] was all bad — disease, dispossession, discrimination, at times wanton murder,” he said. “While justice was colour-blind, there was still the enormous discrimination. There was not a lot of official respect in the early days. There was even less popular respect.”
Abbott, 56, a fitness-obsessed former boxer and trainee Roman Catholic priest, is not known for his sentimentality: Australian voters have spent years watching him subject himself to feats of endurance, including working as a volunteer fireman and lifeguard and completing 600-mile (965km) bicycle rides and a 14-hour iron man contest.
But before he became prime minister a year ago he regularly visited Aboriginal communities and his decision to shift the seat of government to the outskirts of Yirrkala, an Aboriginal township with a population of 843, a 16-hour drive from Darwin, was intended to deliver a symbolic message.
“This is, I think, an appropriate way of saying to Aboriginal people, you should be and are first-class citizens of your own country,” he said.
“Indigenous people’s concerns every so often should be front and centre in the minds of our national leaders because they are, after all, the first Australians. They were, to our discredit, ignored and at times mistreated for much of the first couple of centuries of our national existence.”
Such remote Aboriginal communities, scattered across regional Australia, are notorious for high rates of infant mortality, disease, unemployment and crime and drug problems; Australia’s 700,000 Aborigines on average die some 10 years younger than non-Aborigines and are 15 times more likely to be in prison.
To help counter this, Abbott proposes rewriting the constitution, formally to recognise Aborigines as the nation’s first peoples — a change that, he argues, would help to complete the national journey towards reconciliation, 226 years after the first settlers arrived.
He discussed with local elders a plan for a national referendum to do so, likely to be held in 2017, the 50th anniversary of a landmark referendum in which Australians voted overwhelmingly to consider Aborigines as part of the Australian population.
The Yolngu people, who are believed to have lived in Arnhem Land for 40,000 years, claim to be the inheritors of the world’s oldest living culture. The Yirrkala camp is on a site where, Aborigines believe, an ancestral spirit named Ganbulabula once passed through and created the didgeridoo, the well-known indigenous wind instrument.
“We have seen prime ministers come and go,” said Djawa Yunupingu, a local elder. “In the past, they let us down. This one is the first one to come and stay with us. In the past, prime ministers did not really stick up for the indigenous people.”
Abbott’s attempt to interact with local children was met by muted blank stares, however, as they had yet to learn English and could not understand what he was saying. Some of Abbott’s top civil servants travelled with him to Yirrkala, installing a secure phone and video lines for cabinet meetings and to consult with his security advisers.
“The reality is that long before the First Fleet arrived, Aboriginal people were here,” he said. “It was a very different society to enlightened Britain. Nevertheless, it had its own strengths, it had its own patterns, it had its own relationship with the environment. It was worthy of respect and recognition ...
“Now there’s enormous pride in [local] Yolngu culture, and a fierce determination to preserve it, as there should be. There’s a deep commitment to acknowledgement of the place of Aboriginal people in modern Australia, and that’s right too. “Aboriginal people are not a problem to be solved. Aboriginal people are a reality, indeed an asset to be cherished, to be made the most of. This will be an important part of making that happen.”
