Justice: A History of the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia by Fiona Skyring, UWA Publishing, Perth, 2011, ISBN 9781921401633 (pbk), $39.95.

Fiona Skyring’s history of the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia (ALSWA) over the 40 years between 1970 and 2010 is an important contribution to understanding the civil rights movement in 20th century Australia and the role of Indigenous community-controlled services in challenging inequality. It also adds to our understanding of the internal white Australia policy and the depth to which it remains imbricated in our social, political and economic structures and continues to resist demolition.

The book begins where it ends. Discrimination, poverty, over policing, over imprisonment of children and adults, and the numbing institutional brutality by the state and its criminal justice system. In what could have been just another commemorative history she asks very frank questions. Why is racial disparity in Western Australia (WA) now worse than it was when the ALSWA was established? What benefits do Aboriginal people have to show for its existence?

The origin of the service is traced through the influence of Aboriginal and non-Indigenous people in wider social movements in WA, including trade unions and the legal profession. Encouragement from the rest of Australia also made an impact, including from the founders of the Aboriginal Legal Service in Redfern and the model it provided. The national networks of Aboriginal people, which became possible after the advent of the Whitlam government in 1972, were also formative in the final developments which led to its incorporation in 1975.

In successive chapters the book follows the ALSWA’s expansion into new territories and their further development. These new territories included WA outside of Perth, the representation of Aboriginal people by lawyers in courts, including in Perth, and of Aboriginal people, working as courts officers, who began to appear in the same courts for Aboriginal people. It traces particular events and themes which have preoccupied Indigenous communities in WA and the ALSWA. Some have been constant. It covers the Laverton Royal Commission; Indigenous languages and the acceptance of the Anungu rules for the interrogation of Aboriginal people in police custody; the quest for recognition of land rights; the problems of providing legal services state wide; the organisational management and reform of the service; the establishment of its own agenda for change including ending violence against women; stopping deaths in state custody including its roles with the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody; mandatory sentencing; the advent of native title and its part in resisting WA legislation seeking to reverse the effect of Mabo v Queensland (No 2) in the Native Title Act case; and, the stolen generations and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry and report.

Over four decades the ALSWA grew from a number of voluntary and parallel activities including those of the Justice Committee of the New Era Aboriginal Fellowship Inc into the largest community-based Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal organisation in Australia. It has a head office in Perth and 17 regional offices and employs over 100 people. It continues to defend Aboriginal people charged with criminal offences and provides representation in family law matters. It is actively involved in individual civil cases relating to human rights. It also retains a focus on law and advocacy and policy and law reform, community legal education, media, human rights including targeted activities. In Australia’s less formal network of interest group politics it is one of the Indigenous organisations with which state and federal governments feel the need to engage.

The Laverton Royal Commission into the brutal treatment of 30 Aboriginal people at Skull Creek in Wangkatha country was an important early success for the new body. It exposed racism in policing policies which the state would have preferred to keep undisclosed. This brought the service to prominence and into issues of conflicts between official practices and law and customary Indigenous law. The royal commission may have led to the prominence that public inquiries have had in its advocacy role. The ALSWA also followed up on less striking but serious discrimination by drawing attention to the two lists of applications for housing based on race maintained by the State Housing Commission.

These advocacy and representative activities ultimately made the ALSWA more visible in WA with the increasing insistence by Indigenous people on equality in respect of civil rights and over land and resources. The events around Noonkanbah are relatively well documented, the role of the ALSWA less so. The book places this conflict into a wider context and the lesser known resistance to mining in 1977 by the Oombulgurri community on the Forrest River reserve, the site of the 1926 massacre. The struggle to prevent mining exploration at Noonkanbah from desecrating a sacred site was lost. The national and international publicity was a major embarrassment for the federal government. The ultimate result was that it acquired the power to protect areas of importance to Indigenous peoples within states in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 (Cth).

The book also points out significant instances which failed to produce positive outcomes. The frustration of the Seaman Land Rights Inquiry and the government’s rejection of its recommendations overshadows the influence of premier Brian Burke in the Hawke government’s abandonment of its national land rights policy in 1986. The confrontation with the Legislative Council over the ALSWA’s records and the Lawrence government’s introduction of mandatory sentencing are stark examples of the use of state power against both the service and its clients.

Success where it appears is often incremental, such as the spread, from the Northern Territory, of the Anungu rules for the interrogation of Indigenous peoples by law enforcement agencies. Some may also be unstated as they may be difficult to quantify. The manipulation of electoral rolls and intimidation, by scrutineers for the Liberal Party, of returning officers in the seat of Kimberley led to the Court of Disputed Returns sitting at Kununurra, Turkey Creek, Halls Creek, Fitzroy Crossing and Derby. This educated a judge about the fragility of the civil rights of Aboriginal citizens in the north-west. The Chief Justice, Sir Francis Burt, experienced the colour bar in bush hospitality himself when a publican at Kununurra refused to accept his cheque for accommodation when conducting a hearing into the bashing of Aboriginal children.

The book is open in dealing with the conflict to be found in any organisation in management and governance. Not surprisingly the ALSWA’s expansion from criminal law into land, resources and political lobbying meant that its importance to the Indigenous community grew. This saw internal as well as external conflict. One form will be familiar to some other organisations in their early phase, that between the non-Indigenous professional and the Indigenous executive officers. Another was the role of the elected board overseeing the service. That role waxed and waned depending on the relationship between the principal legal officer and the executive officer. When Rob Riley took over as executive officer in the early 1990s the service was at a low point. His skills and commitment re-energised it with a new outreach to, and focus on, the wider WA community.

Some of the conflicts between the ALSWA and other Indigenous organisations are also covered. The maturing of the land rights movement and the appearance of native title posed new challenges for it and its relatively large land and heritage branch. It became a native title representative body for the whole state. This produced conflict with both new land councils and the well-established Kimberley Land Council. Part of the conflict is explained as over the negotiated political and regional approach taken by the ALSWA and the more court-based anthropological approach taken by the NT land councils influenced by the model of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment Act 1978 (Cth). Running through this is also the conflict found in the law imposed on Indigenous peoples by both land rights and native title. These include the differences between people able to remain on their country compared with those not able to as well as the false promises of the Aboriginal Land Inquiry, the Hawke government’s national land rights, and of native title.

One of the great strengths of the book is the voices of the people who have made the ALSWA which continuously speak through it. They carry the narrative forward over the many events and themes. They talk directly to the reader about their experience and memories. For those who have lived through the past 30 years snatches of the events of which they tell of are known. In time they will be a lasting record of these events.

Understandably part of the ALSWA story is yet to be told and set in other contexts. There were wider movements in legal aid in the 1970s which saw, in the first year of the Whitlam government, the establishment of both Aboriginal legal services and the Australian Legal Aid Office. John Toohey QC when he located to Port Hedland also acted for non-Indigenous peoples. The House of Representatives inquiry into Aboriginal legal aid in the late 1970s and the Harkins inquiry in 1986 are covered and were informed by other forms of legal aid. The similarities which led to wider support for legal aid in the 1970s and 1980s, including community legal services, and which appear to have faded in the 1990s and 2000s, are still to be joined up. These need to be more widely explored. This book will contribute to that.

Another story which is only partly revealed is what, if any, has been the impact on those who became involved with the ALSWA in their contribution to other areas of public life? Aboriginal people went on to senior roles in other organisations, the public service and in their own communities. Non-Indigenous lawyers also have become ministers, premiers and judges, including three judges of the High Court of Australia. Other Indigenous organisations also have distinguished former associates but those of the ALSWA may have achieved more prominence than others. Some return in this book to speak of their experiences at the time but rarely of the influence the service had on them or on the roles which they came to later. Understandably these themes are too many for one book, particularly one which is the first in its field.

The core activities of the ALSWA remain around the excessive policing to which Aboriginal people are exposed. The imprisonment rates for Aboriginal people in Western Australia are the highest for indigenous peoples in the OECD. In 2011, the year the book was published, Aboriginal people represented 3.3 per cent of the population of WA yet 68 per cent of all children in juvenile detention and 38.5 per cent of adult prisoners were Indigenous. One explanation for this is suggested to be the trend in advanced English speaking economies to imprison more people in the past 30 years. Any reversal may come from the search for more rational approaches to criminal law enforcement as a result of economic pressure on governments who have less revenue because of pressures to tax less.

What of the honest questions which the author asks about how racial disparity appears to have intensified and what do Aboriginal people have to show for its existence? These may not be the ways to measure the unresolved issues of how Australia remains diminished while Aboriginal people are still seeking equality. The question may be, how much worse would things now be without the ALSWA.

Neil Andrews

Victoria University