‘Find things in common': After a cancer shock, Pat Dodson has words of hope

The Age

4 days ago

Patrick Dodson stands on a headland above Broome's Simpsons Beach, a picturesque spot for tourists to capture images of the red pindan country, azure waters and mangrove stands. In Dodson's youth, it was an important place for sustaining Aboriginal people. 'My uncles would walk along here looking for turtle eggs, crabs, anything they could bring home to eat.' He adds, grinning: 'It was also where all the offal and blood were discharged into the sea from the back of the old meatworks. Every shark in north-west Australia decided it was the place to be!'
It's only 7am but the sweat is pouring off us all in the Kimberley heat, as Dodson, our photographer and I stand looking down at the lapping sea and discuss the best photo angle. 'Make it look like I'm coming out of the water,' he says, joking, 'a modern native.'
This is classic Dodson, his wry humour reflecting almost every utterance. It's a glimpse of a Yawuru senior elder who has come back home to country he knows intimately. It's also a rare insight into a charismatic leader who is relishing a second bite at life.
It's hard to imagine that, just over 18 months ago, Dodson's grip on life seemed as doomed as the Voice referendum that loomed at precisely the same time. 'Out of the blue I got crook with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. I felt crook the day of the announcement by the prime minister [Anthony Albanese] and the leaders that set a date for the referendum to be held. The next day I went to Winnunga, the Aboriginal medical service in Canberra, and the doctor said, 'There's nothing we can do for you here, you better go to the hospital.' The medical people said, 'You've got a pretty serious medical problem.' They told me it was an aggressive form of lymphoma that was actually restricting oxygen and blood supply to the vital organs. Which, if nothing happened, would be the end of my life here on this earth.'
Dodson asked to fly back to Perth to undergo treatment and at least be on the same side of the continent as his home in Broome. Then things got worse; during an exploratory operation, his oesophagus was damaged. 'It led to an infection butting up against the lymphoma. And that contributed to what was already making me ill. For six weeks, I was pretty much on my back with nasal tubes to give me oxygen. I wasn't afraid initially until a visiting oncologist came in and described the situation, saying basically that, 'If this infection bursts, then the surgeons won't be able to get to do anything with it. You'll be dead within a couple of minutes.' That really frightened the life out of me.'
The medical and nursing staff were 'fantastic, brilliant people; they got me through. The chemo dosages were pretty high initially, and it was pretty toxic stuff; the hairs on my beard started to fall out.' The chemotherapy finished mid-last year. 'Then I got shingles and that knocked me about. Your immune system goes down and you still have the lingering effects of tingling in your fingertips and toes from the chemo.'
Letters and cards flowed in from well-wishers, 'even people on the other side of politics'. On his own side, 'all my colleagues in the Labor Party, whatever their reasons were, felt it important to send me messages.'
Their messages were no doubt prompted in part by deep regret that, at a crucial time in the nation's history, the man dubbed the Father of Reconciliation had to step away from the fight. Unfortunate timing? 'Absolutely,' says Dodson emphatically. 'The last two years have been an up and down process. But I'm hoping there's a few years in me yet!'
A remarkable life
Dodson turned 77 in January, a few days after the first anniversary of his formal retirement as Labor senator for Western Australia last year. 'Chemo tires you out. I felt I couldn't do my job, so in fairness to the people who elected me I decided to resign.'
He has just collaborated with me on a short memoir for Reconciliation WA, but he still has his own book to write. It will be a much longer tome, touching on his childhood experience of racism and native welfare control in WA and the NT. Dodson's parents died within months of each other in 1960; his father, John, in mysterious circumstances from a gun wound, while his mother, Patricia, fell from a bridge while avoiding a passing car. Dodson and his brother Mick were destined to be sent to Garden Point Mission on NT's Melville Island as wards of the state. 'It was where the stolen generations kids were sent,' he says, 'but the boat sank and they didn't want to pay for a charter plane.' His older sister intervened and ensured both orphaned boys were sent south to be educated in a Catholic boarding school in country Victoria.
But the bulk of Dodson's own writing will revisit his remarkable career, which incidentally began with a brief detour into religion in 1975 when he was ordained as Australia's first Indigenous Catholic priest. He is better known for his commanding presence at pivotal movements in Australia's history, as the only Indigenous commissioner for the late 1980s Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, a prominent land rights activist before and after the 1992 Mabo decision and the inaugural chair of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. In more recent years, he's been a prominent contributor to shaping Australia's path toward constitutional recognition of its First Peoples.
When Dodson first stepped into a Senate vacancy in 2016, many people saw him as a shoo-in for Indigenous affairs minister in a future Labor government, a role he never occupied in the end. Having now put 3000 kilometres between himself and Canberra, he has begun to look back on his 7½ years in federal parliament and ponders whether he should have gone into politics at all.
'I'm not a born politician, in the sense of being party political,' he says. 'I never was a member of the Labor Party – or any other party – until I responded to Bill Shorten's generous request to go into the Senate. Once you join a party, you're deemed to be their property, your credibility is correlated to the party's credibility or lack of it. Walking away from the Senate, what did I achieve? I could take a negative view and say that I achieved very little from any of these efforts.'
He judges his work as a land rights activist less harshly, looking back proudly on his leadership of both the Central and Kimberley land councils, negotiating with governments over NT land rights and national native title laws. 'And when I was doing the work of the royal commission looking at the underlying reasons why Aboriginal people were dying in custody, I was focused on specific things where you had some authority and you could influence the outcome.'
His writing will no doubt reflect on his influential role in the Juukan Gorge inquiry, which looked into the destruction of the 46,000-year-old caves in 2020. As a member of the Northern Australia joint standing committee inquiry, Dodson visited the site that had been blown up by mining giant Rio Tinto in the Pilbara region of his home state. It was a shock even to him.
'The site looked terrible,' he recalls. 'There was a little creek, the Dreaming site for a snake, and then the caves were blocked by rubble that had fallen off the cliff face. One part was open but still vulnerable, and the runoff from the area exposed by the detonation was running off the cliff face into this little creek system, the snake pool. It was very hard for people, they felt ill walking up the creek. I was moved, we all were. It was a blatant act of cultural genocide in the full light of day.
'What's more galling is they found a human hair belt in the excavation and the DNA from that clearly linked these people who are alive today to those ancestors.'
He still believes the WA Heritage Act – which lets mining companies apply for permission to destroy or damage sacred sites – forces native title bodies to agree to site destruction in return for certain benefits. 'The so-called benefits that go to the negotiating party on the Aboriginal side are primarily the aggregated funds needed by the company to facilitate their operations on those lands. Funds to employ people to do the heritage work, do the monitoring work, get the surveys done on the environment.'
He says the dividends often don't flow back to Aboriginal communities, instead going into a trust. 'Because of the nature of how those trusts operate, they lock up millions of dollars while people are living in the spinifex or around the fringes of Karratha or Kalgoorlie or Newman. There's a whole need to have a look at the trusts and how the dividends are being used to set up a commercial base because the mines will end at some stage.'
He says the Juukan destruction 'shows up the hypocrisy that goes with the phrase, 'the oldest living culture on Earth'. In every state and territory, we are facilitating the destruction of the evidentiary base of that oldest living culture.'
Beyond the Voice
The failure of the Voice referendum in October 2023 was a blow. 'I remember being very disappointed, of course. But after serious knockbacks in the political space, I tended to feel sad about letting down those who have gone before, who had fought the good fight. But I believe every person who felt shattered and despondent should put that to one side. It's one vote, it's not a judgment about reconciliation.'
It didn't surprise Dodson that Indigenous issues barely rated a mention in the recent federal election. 'It doesn't mean the matters of justice have gone away.' He'd like to see the re-elected Labor government return to the Uluru Statement proposal for Indigenous regional assemblies or councils, 'but give them broader authority than peak bodies to set priorities and manage expenditure, like a de facto regional Voice'.
He also urges governments to back Indigenous native titleholders to leverage their land-based assets, offering finance and loan guarantees. 'The [North Australia Infrastructure Facility] applies from Geraldton to Townsville, but there's no money specifically for Aboriginal people in that fund.'
Dodson says he wasn't surprised by former opposition leader Peter Dutton's 'culture wars' strategy of rejecting the Indigenous flags and criticising Welcome to Country ceremonies. 'It was bully-boy ­tactics – like the coward on the keyboard posting derogatory things. It did him no credit and brought no pride to politics in this country.'
What does Dodson make of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who has switched her alliance from the National Party to the Liberals? Price argued that an Indigenous Voice to parliament was divisive, and unnecessary because when she entered federal parliament in 2022, she was one of 11 Indigenous MPs, including Dodson.
'We're not there to represent the Aboriginal people,' Dodson responds. 'She represents the party she belongs to, and I was there to represent the Labor Party. The point of the Voice was that it would represent the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. That's the point.
'I don't particularly want to talk about her but she seems to have experienced violence in her life – and not always from Aboriginal people, I might say. At the centre are probably some good intentions, but when you're young and a bit tantalised by the popularity, you don't realise that can easily be taken away tomorrow by the ruthlessness of party operators. While she's sitting on top of the wave, she's united with that particular world. But it can change if party priorities change.'
Dodson won't join those who criticise Labor leaders for the Voice's failure. 'Bill Shorten was the first to go out on [support of] the treaty stuff, and Albo did allow a process for Aboriginal participation in a Voice and a set of words. It's foolhardy to accuse him of taking his ball and going home.'
Yet Australia still lacks a culture of agreement-making, he says. 'What's required now is the courage to sustain the effort in finding a way to justice linking back to the Uluru Statement. And it's not just the job of political leaders – the people need to encourage their politicians, speaking out and holding to account whoever is elected.
'Australia must now stand up to the high values we espouse.'
Patrick Dodson
'We don't have time to despair or to feel despondent. We haven't lost the fight, we lost the referendum. Whoever is in government, their obligation is to honour Australia's commitment to the United Nations declaration on Indigenous people's rights, which we signed but haven't properly implemented.'
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Dodson's final act as a senator was to deliver a parliamentary inquiry report recommending the declaration's implementation. Without codifying it into domestic law and engaging with Indigenous rights, he says, Australia will continue to attract criticism about how it treats its First Peoples.
'Paul Keating [while he was prime minister] copped it when he tried to give a lecture to [former] Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad about how he should behave. Mahathir reminded Keating of the deaths in custody of Aboriginal people. So Australia's vulnerable, even if people from the right of politics want to bury their heads in the sand. We might all stand back and wince at other countries' behaviour, but we can't step away from what goes on in our own country. Australia must now stand up to the high values we espouse.'
Words from the grave
Dodson drives his ute around the roads of Broome with the ease of someone who knows every corner, every landmark in his Kimberley birthplace – even the ones that aren't there anymore. 'This is where the old divers, the Malays, Chinese and Japanese, lived along here in huts and mended the boats,' he says, as we drive through town. 'The sad thing is that there used to be an old pearl shell shed here, too, where the luggers used to come up the creek and drop the shell off. It's gone now.'
He cites the names of town royalty, white families who prospered in Broome's pearling and fishing trade. 'This land belongs to the Male family, this land is Paspaley,' he says, pointing left and right. 'But often the recognition of native titleholders to the town, the Yawuru people, is not made. We've accommodated third-party needs in all sorts of ways but not much is made of our contribution and the concessions we've made.'
The Yawuru group, of which Dodson is a customary elder, is the single largest owner of land in Broome. For years, they fought for it in native title battles, defending court challenges and with Dodson and other senior figures giving many days of evidence.
He says contemporary Broome is built on collaboration between Aboriginal people and the shire. 'We have agreements to work in a collaborative way on the physical infrastructure that enhances the town.' He cites a crucial road extension made when the Yawuru ceded native title land for the benefit of public access. 'And at Town Beach, there's a series of seats where tourists can sit and watch the Staircase to the Moon, a natural phenomenon [the reflection of the moon on tidal flats resembles stairs] free of charge. Aboriginal people and the shire together scoped its use for all the people who come to Broome.'
The Yawuru have built their own impressive cultural and administrative centre around the corner from fabled Cable Beach. As we pull in, a group of young Aboriginal stockmen wearing wide-brimmed hats, colourful shirts and cowboy boots clamber out of a utility truck. They greet Dodson warmly.
He explains that they've driven into town from Roebuck Plains, a Yawuru-owned pastoral station. 'These young ringers are going out to a property owned by Aboriginal people to learn the skills of a stockman. They're being trained to go and work on other cattle properties one day. In my day, the big aspiration was that if I was really smart I might get a licence to drive a truck for the public works department.'
Other Yawuru-led activities are happening within a few metres of where we sit drinking coffee. The centre's cafe provides training in hospitality, while next door in the Mabu Yawuru Ngan-ga Language Centre, people are being trained as interpreters or teachers of the language.
Dodson looks around him. 'To think the Yawuru people could have this presence in a town that previously defined itself as a multicultural pearling and fishing society with no recognition of Yawuru people. Thirty-odd years ago, all this would have been unthinkable without the Mabo decision and a High Court decision in our favour. It gives some of us a seat at the table, although it hasn't resolved the fundamental issue of prior occupation of these lands.'
'The challenge of life is to do the best you can.'
What about Dodson's personal aspirations? He says he'd like to direct his efforts to working with civic leaders, the legal fraternity and corporation heads. 'Think how many corporate leaders came out in favour of the Voice. They should be proud of that. They've got reconciliation action plans, so they should have a relook at them; make them not just about offering jobs but going further, helping people to become economically independent.
'The other thing I want to do is work with young people rebelling against something. The Voice referendum has made them feel we're failures because we didn't deliver for them. We have to sustain their hope in being advocates and leaders, because they are important to the nation.
'We also have to build on what goodwill was beginning to emerge in the states. We know South Australia created a Voice to its parliament, and Victoria is pursuing treaty-making and agreements.' Yet he concedes that a new government in Queensland cancelled its Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry and the NT government withdrew from a treaty-making process.
So, does the Father of Reconciliation feel defeated?
'No. We have to send a message back to those who thought they won that they didn't win. You just tell them, 'You've got no legitimacy to your argument. We haven't reconciled as a nation, and we need a process for us to reconcile.' You try to find things in common, you build that up. This electorate here in Broome gave a positive response to the Voice, and so did the Kimberley overall.
'The challenge of life is to do the best you can. I'll continue to advocate and encourage in whatever capacity I can.' And his advice for others? 'Find common ground, don't lose hope and engage, even in small ways, in the debate.
'Many years of my life have been built around getting recognition of Yawuru people's native title rights. I now want to do some things the Yawuru need to tidy up. Our ancestors' remains – like many other Aboriginal peoples – were taken away and have now been returned to their country. They need to be properly cared for in a public space. In most towns, Aboriginal people were buried at the back of cemeteries, not in the front.'
Dodson takes me to visit Broome cemetery and the grave that he and his family erected for Paddy Djiagween, his admired grandfather, whose skills included stockman, tailor and station bookkeeper. Four years before the 1967 referendum that gave him voting rights and effective citizenship in his own country, Djiagween was formally introduced to Queen Elizabeth II during her royal visit to Broome. 'My grandfather put to her, 'Why can't we Aboriginal people be equal to the white man?' ' says Dodson. 'The Queen is supposed to have said, 'Well, I can't see any reason why you shouldn't, Paddy.'
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'He took that to mean that he was [equal]. So he went straight across to the pub and demanded a drink. He was refused, so he sent for the Queen's equerry to come over and tell them the Queen had said he could be a citizen. He got his drink.'
We walk to Djiagween's grave, situated in the deep shade of a mahogany tree. Dodson leans over and touches the bronze plaque mounted on local Kimberley stone. Next to the words 'Outstanding Leader of the Yawuru' is the image of a Broome pearling lugger that Djiagween worked on. Below is the old man's eloquent motto that Dodson has told me comforted him during times when he felt the world was against him and his people.
He reads the words out loud. 'The sun rises, wind blows, grass grows, the tide comes and goes. No one can ever take your land.'