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Dillon awarded Tasmanian Human Rights Award
by Tracey Currie 8 December 2013
R
odney Dillon has been working as an advocate for Aboriginal human rights for 40 years. He has been dedicated in fighting for the rights of Indigenous Australians in Tasmania and on the mainland. A Palawa Elder, Rodney is currently the Indigenous Rights Campaigner for Amnesty International. In the 1980s he began his advocacy career by instigating
Rodney Dillon, 2nd from left, with his proud family at the Governor’s House in Tasmania at the announcement of his award on 3 December. Image supplied
court actions asserting the rights of Aboriginal communities to conduct fishing for abalone and muttonbirds in southern Tasmania on their own terms. Refer Dillon v. Davies and Dillon v. The Crown (3 cases). He has promoted Aboriginal fishing rights at state and national levels and chaired a World Indigenous Fishing Conference in Vancouver. In the 1990s he sought to put right the injustice perpetrated by museums in the UK and elsewhere, who had appropriated remains
of Aboriginal people for their collections. His campaigning, with others, resulted in a meeting between John Howard and Tony Blair in 2000, which was a turning point. In 2002 he invited Professor Norman Palmer, the chairman of a House of Commons working group inquiring into human remains held by British institutions, to make a trip to Tasmania’s Bruny Island, where Truganini’s ashes are scattered. Prof. Palmer commented: “I was told that it would heighten Page 1
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my appreciation of what led to these tragic circumstances. And it is right. I approach this place with much humility. I gain a sense of the spirits and the ancestry here.” Prof. Palmer later wrote a report which was instrumental in changing British repatriation policies. In 2006, while Rodney was Chair of the National Reference Group for Repatriation of Australian Indigenous Remains, agreement was finally reached with six British museums for the return of the Aboriginal remains, including samples of Truganini’s skin and hair held by the British College of Surgeons. Rodney Dillon served three terms as an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commissioner for Tasmania. He is a member of the Stolen Generations Alliance: Australians for Truth, Justice and Healing, which saw Tasmania become the first state to remunerate members of the Stolen Generation. He is a founding member of the South East Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (SETAC). Consistent with his belief that land rights, cultural rights and economic viability of communities cannot be separated, he instigated negotiations for the purchase of the Murrayfield sheep station on Bruny Island and this property was bought for $4 million by the Indigenous Land Council in 2001 for the use of Aboriginal people of Tasmania. The farm is now run as a commercial enterprise while preserving Aboriginal values (there are more than 200 artefact scatter sites on the farm). He is a founding member of Weetapoona (the Murrayfield Management Committee) and chaired the Committee for eight years; he still sits on the committee.
Since 2010 Rodney Dillon has been a member of the Australian Heritage Council. Rodney Dillon at present works as Indigenous Rights Campaigner for Amnesty International. One of his major activities in this role has been to resist the harsh effects on local people of the federal government’s Northern Territory “Intervention” and to act as advocate for Aboriginal homelands residents at the state and federal level. The potential human rights tragedy that the Intervention threatened to unleash are best summarised by Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, an Alyawarr/Anmatyerr elder and Utopia homelands resident (Utopia consists of 16 Aboriginal homelands 270 km north of Alice Springs): “[In 2007] we had the visit from departmental staff, the army and the police, who told us we were now under the Intervention. Suddenly there was a policy in the Northern Territory that took away our rights. It was assault. It traumatised all of us, so we looked around to see what made sense. What made sense was at all costs to hang onto the land. We see that there are certain Aboriginal communities earmarked as growth towns. Let me assure anybody who cares for the Aboriginal people of Australia that once we are moved from our place of origin, we will not only lose our identity, we will die a traumatised, tragic end. We cannot have identity if we are put into these reservations that are now called growth towns, we will become third-class, non-existent human beings.” Amnesty International, in a report on homelands and the Intervention, declared: “These policy initiatives fall below international human rights
standards, in particular the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Central to the Declaration are the rights of Indigenous peoples to own, live on and develop their lands; to consultation and free, prior and informed consent; and to culture.” Rosalie commented on Rodney Dillon’s approach to human rights issues in the Utopia homelands: “What amazed me was that Rodney came in, clear of any preconceived idea. He was extraordinary in closing the gap and finding ways of communication and getting a lot out of it for our people and himself. He established trust over a period of six months and thereafter you couldn’t divide him and the people. His greatest gift was listening, and listening at a depth that we mere mortals can’t do.” “ [When he arrived] Rodney had a shock. This was third world conditions. The shire office has air conditioning but he didn’t stay there. He camped out with our people, in the bush. He brought the plight of our people into the light of day. He set up a platform so that parliament could have communication on a human level and opened their eyes to what was actually happening in the homelands. We wouldn’t have survived the Northern Territory emergency response – he enabled us to survive.” “Rodney understood more than the average person that in dispossession people lose the essence of themselves.” In his work at Amnesty International Rodney is at present working on the rights of young Aboriginal adults in detention, and specifically tackling the issue of why so many young adults are in prison in Western Australia.
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