Black and White Together: FCAATSI The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders 1958-1973

By Sue Taffe, St Lucia: UQP, 2005, 402 pages, paperback, $24.95. Reviewed by David Ritter in the July 2006 issue.

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Founded in 1958, the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders was the principal national body campaigning for greater rights for Indigenous People in Australia in the latter part of the assimilation era. FCAATSI expressly rejected the prevailing Commonwealth policy, preferring, in Sue Taffe's words, 'the vision of an integrated Indigenous population which maintained its own culture and was developing its own priorities in the fight for recognition as a people' (82). Taffe, a post-doctoral fellow at Monash, argues that '[m]yth and silence' have come to characterise memories of FCAATSI and hers is the first full-length history of an organisation which was characterised by its quality as a 'multi-racial' coalition. Black and White Together is a notable addition to an increasingly rich recent literature probing both the history and historicity of Aboriginal rights campaigns, including Bain Attwood's Rights for Aborigines (2003) and Tim Rowse's edited volume Contesting Assimilation (2005).

Taffe deals adroitly with a large cast of historical actors and a tangle of committees and organisations. Black and White deals with some well known figures, like Don Dunstan and Charles Perkins, but also recovers other participants whose work for FCAATSI was not followed by a rise to greater prominence. The over-arching picture that emerges is one of seemingly endless meetings and compromises. According to Taffe, pressures were often concentrated along racial lines because, while '[b]lacks and whites did work together', their 'priorities were different' (xi). There were also other stresses within FCAATSI, including between the political right and left, but the general commitment to the cause of the 'advancement of Aborigines' allowed substantial philosophical differences, such as 'between liberal individualism and left communalism', to be occluded by the greater struggle. (82) The story, then, is one of perpetual negotiation within FCAATSI in order to retain unity of purpose, with the result that some quite fundamental ideological issues were never resolved.

Taffe's work provides new and important insight into the fluidity of Indigenous legal and political claims, including particularly the emergence of the modern 'land rights' movement in the mid-sixties. In an Australia in which Mabo is fourteen years old and the Aboriginal Land Rights Act has just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, there is perhaps a temptation to recount earlier struggles as forming part of an apparently simple and inevitable narrative of progressive emancipation. Happily, Taffe's account is not a vulgar teleology (though the book is not completely free of sentimentality) and she describes the land rights campaigns of the sixties as a fluctuating process marked by '[i]ndecision, hesitancy and instability' (165). The land question was always politically volatile, straining the partnership between black and white to breaking point. Equality, of course, was one thing, founded on ideals of 'common humanity', but land rights campaigns were necessarily based on 'recognition of a divide' leading perhaps inevitably to more essentialist political formulations (216).

Eventually though, the centre gave way and the book carefully documents the bitter 1970 split within FCAATSI that prefigured its subsequent downfall (257-266). Taffe explains FCAATSI's demise as the product of the rise of 'Black Power', with the new Indigenous leadership growing increasingly impatient to assert complete control. The old enterprise simply fractured under the weight of a changing political context and FCAATSI gave way to Aboriginal organisations, run by Aboriginal people. The new era of 'self determination' saw Commonwealth money directed towards Indigenous run organisations who simply dealt directly with government. Non-Indigenous allies of Indigenous people did not disappear, of course, but the rhetoric changed and the relationships between 'black and white' reformists necessarily became reconfigured.

Taffe is sensitive to the broader historical context of FCAATSI. Indeed, the reviewed work is, to some extent, the story of the 'nationalising' of (some of) the Indigenous peoples of Australia in to a pan-Aboriginal mindset. Yet the account is also one of trans-nationalism, as members of the FCAATSI leadership drew example and inspiration from the wider world, including both emancipatory movements in other countries and the growth of post war multilateral human rights jurisprudence. Particularly welcome is Taffe's engagement with the often neglected issue of the way in which campaigns for Indigenous rights were conditioned by the omnipresent geo-political condition of the Cold War. She reveals predictable tensions between Communists and non-Communists, as well as concerns that an over-association of Indigenous rights with the Australian Marxist left would be counter-productive. Communists were among the keenest supporters of Indigenous rights, but ironically, by providing such support they jeopardised the Indigenous cause garnering support in wider society.

Taffe might have supplemented the usefulness of Black and White Together by more explicitly locating her efforts within the relevant literature. There are also times when a more concerted attempt to connect what was going on within FCAATSI to other intellectual and political currents in Australian life would have added richness to the narrative. The end of the book is also rather abrupt and not altogether satisfying: Taffe might instead, for example, have concluded by investigating how the experience or memory of FCAATSI wittingly or unwittingly influenced later policy makers. Alternatively, although the 'multiracial' model represented by FCAATSI was rejected in the seventies, Taffe might have gone on to consider possible similarities to the work of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in the nineties. Overall though, Black and White Together is a fine book and an important contribution to the historiography of Indigenous affairs. Determining what is in the 'best interests' of Indigenous people has always been, and remains, both deeply contested and exceedingly complicated.

Citation

• David Ritter. 'Review: Black and White Together: FCAATSI The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders 1958-1973 by Sue Taffe' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 23 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• In the l950s Australia considered itself “the land of the fair go”. However, this was not the experience of Indigenous Australians who were excluded from the vote, equal wages, education and social services. Action against such disparity came in 1958 with the creation of the grassroots organisation, the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, whose founding members were black and white. As the first national lobby group of its kind, it achieved sweeping social and legislative reforms for Indigenous Australians. Over the next decade, unions, religious groups, communists, students, artists and activists joined in the timely alliance, campaigning for inclusive civil rights and land rights. Conflicting ideologies and shifts in leadership strained the group's harmony and effectiveness. With the advent of black power politics and the Tent Embassy, FCAATSI became an Indigenous body and the inter-racial coalition came to an end.
  
  This rigorously researched and absorbing book on Australia's pre-eminent Indigenous civil rights organisation began as an oral history and contains rare interviews with former members and strategists, including Faith Bandler, Charles Perkins, Stan Davey, Shirley Andrews and Joe McGinness.

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