Indigenous Australia

Michael John (Mick) Miller (1937–1998), schoolteacher, political activist, and policy adviser, was born on 16 January 1937 at Palm Island (Bwgcolman), Queensland, eldest of seven children of Queensland-born Michael Miller, a Waanyi man, labourer, and slaughterman, and his wife Cissie Agnes, née Sibley, a Kuku Yalanji woman. Mick attended St Michael’s Catholic School on the island. Riding, fishing, and hunting were his and his brothers’ recreations. He then boarded at Mount Carmel College, Charters Towers, a Christian Brothers school where a contemporary later described him as ‘unofficial school captain and spokesman’ (Aust. HOR 2005, 24). Completing teacher training at Queensland Teachers’ College, Kelvin Grove, in 1959, he and Phillip Stewart, also from Palm Island, were the college’s first Aboriginal graduates, and the first Indigenous teachers to qualify in Queensland. The State’s director of native affairs had proudly noted their progress at the college in his annual reports.

Posted upon graduation to Cairns North State Primary School, Miller connected with members of his family; Auntie Rose Richards (then Levers), in whose home he lived for a while, as well as Auntie Esme Hudson and Uncle Clarrie Grogan. It was the start of a long association with Grogan. In the early 1960s Cairns was a centre of Aboriginal activism, provoked by incidents of colonial excess such as Pastor E. Kernich’s flogging of a Hopevale mission resident, James Jacko, in 1961. Miller participated in the Cairns Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander Advancement League, whose president was Gladys Dorothy O’Shane. On 5 May 1962 he married Gladys’s daughter, the Queensland-born schoolteacher Patricia June O’Shane, at St Monica’s Catholic cathedral, Cairns. They had two children: Lydia Caroline (born 1963) and Marilyn Rose (born 1964).

The Cairns league expressed the political views of an Indigenous community made cohesive not only by its opposition to government policy, but also by a lively culture of organised sport. Miller was a keen participant in swimming, basketball, rugby league, hockey, and athletics. Political activity put him in touch with Indigenous Australians from other regions, for the league was affiliated with the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. He thus became part of a movement both local and national. FCAATSI agitated for the repeal of legislation that, in every mainland State and in the Northern Territory, restricted the citizenship rights of Australians classified as either Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. He became a vice-president of FCAATSI in 1971–72.

Miller helped form several local Aboriginal organisations, notably the Aboriginal and Islander Legal Service in Cairns (1972), the Woompera Muralug Housing Association (chair 1979) and the Wu Chopperen Medical Service, of which he was one of the original directors. Through his and others’ associations with such bodies, they challenged a State government that believed it knew what was best for Aboriginal and Islander Queenslanders.

With the State under conservative parties’ rule from 1957 to 1989, officials and police dominated the lives of First Nations people, on and off reserves. Queensland’s government had legislated to end what remained of protectionist policy in 1965. It legislated again in 1971, confirming a policy of assimilation—reconstituting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s identity to conform to what was then referred to as ‘the Australian way of life.’ As a professionally qualified man proud of his Aboriginal heritage, Miller’s ideas about Aboriginal advancement aligned with what some critics of assimilation called ‘integration’—honouring Indigenous people’s identity while empowering them to participate in the broader economy. At a Canberra seminar on ‘the education of Aborigines’ in September 1971, he pointed to two linked factors handicapping Aboriginal children. One was ‘inadequate motivation’—a defect that both governments, by providing pre-schools, and parents, by valuing schooling, could remedy. The other limiting factor, arguably exacerbated by assimilation, was his people’s ‘loss of racial pride and self-respect’ (Miller 1971). To restore their self-belief would require changes not only among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but also in government policy and in non-Indigenous people’s attitudes. Miller was challenging the widely held view that social change required only Aboriginal and Islander people’s efforts.

Miller and his friends were alert to the circumstances on the several reserves within Cairns’s Cape York hinterland. As long as governments and the public assumed that it was the responsibility of Indigenous Australians to embrace whatever changes governments thought best for them, they could dismiss residents’ objections to the State’s leasing of reserves to any developer. In 1963 the State had evicted the traditional owners of Mapoon reserve in far north Queensland to make way for bauxite mining, which did not go ahead. Of the thirteen most populous Queensland reserves, nine, including Palm Island, were administered directly by the State and four by church organisations.

The election of a Federal Labor government in December 1972 brought the prospect of change. In 1973 Miller was seconded from the Queensland Department of Education to advise the new government on setting up the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee. He was also appointed to the Aboriginal Arts Board of the Australia Council. Changes to the Australian Constitution arising from the 1967 referendum gave the Federal government authority to legislate on Aboriginal and Islander matters. Many hoped that the prime minister, Gough Whitlam, would oblige each State to institute land rights. With that prospect, disputing the Queensland government’s right to develop reserve lands became a theme of Miller’s political activism. With the Queensland-born journalist Barbara Joyce Russell, he formed the Jaragun Publishing Company in 1975, and began to issue a newspaper, the NQ Message Stick, to disseminate the views of the recently formed North Queensland Land Rights Committee (NQLRC), which gave his home as its address. He and Russell had met in 1973, and since 1974 she had been living in his home—‘abuzz with people’ (Miller 2018, 118)—as she involved herself in upholding the rights of Queensland’s reserve residents. Endeared by his ‘ABC announcer voice’ (Miller 2018, 147), his affable personality and his mentorship, she nick-named him ‘Maestro.’ Although the Federal government assured certain rights of Queensland reserve residents by passing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Queensland Discriminatory Laws) Act 1975, it declined to legislate reserve residents’ land title in any jurisdiction other than the Northern Territory.

After Malcolm Fraser became prime minister in late 1975, his government legislated a version of Whitlam’s lapsed Northern Territory land rights bill. Hoping that Fraser would also intervene in Queensland, the NQLRC held a conference in January 1977, which Whitlam attended as leader of the Opposition, and formed the North Queensland Land Council. Funded by sympathetic donors in lieu of federal government support, it appointed Miller as its founding chair. Comprising delegates from every reserve and from the towns of north Queensland, the NQLC demanded the ‘granting of all reserves and traditional lands to be controlled by the respective Aboriginal and Islander governing bodies’ (quoted in Miller 2021, 93). In September 1977 the NQ Message Stick published his open letter to the Federal government minister for Aboriginal affairs, Ian Viner, imploring him to legislate Aboriginal residents’ title to Queensland reserves.

At that time, Miller’s life was changing in several ways. First, he and Patricia dissolved their marriage in 1977 after years of separation, and he married Russell on 23 July 1978 in the Cairns Botanical Gardens. Second, he clashed with the Queensland government. He had recently taken leave from teaching to attend, as one of five Australians, the second World Conference of Indigenous Peoples in Kiruna, Sweden. Returning on 14 September 1977, he refused an offer to transfer to a school at Ingham; the Department of Education suspended him on 22 September. With Grogan, he soon joined the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program as a north Queensland field officer. The premier, (Sir) Joh Bjelke-Petersen, accused the program’s proponents of promoting the Australian Labor Party to Aboriginal people. Naming Miller and Grogan, he demanded that the program be suspended, and the Federal government obliged.

Miller also defended the rights of residents of Aurukun in far north Queensland. Having legislated to open the reserve to bauxite mining, the Queensland government took over the reserve from the Uniting Church. The mission had been in the process of transferring control to the residents. The Aurukun people fought the government in the courts, all the way to the Privy Council. The Fraser government, dissatisfied by negotiations with the Queensland government about the rights of Aurukun residents, passed the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (Queensland Reserves and Communities Self-Management) Act 1978 to prevent the Queensland government from taking over both the Aurukun and Mornington Island missions. The Queensland government was determined to block Federal intervention; it terminated the reserve status of Aurukun and Mornington Island, constituting them as local government bodies. Aboriginal and Islander activists demanded that the Commonwealth remove all reserves from Queensland’s control by compulsory acquisition, but the Federal government had no appetite to confront Bjelke-Petersen’s defiance. As well as campaigning within Australia, Miller turned to global opinion, flying to Europe, with Joyce Hall and Jacob Wolmby, in November and December 1978 to publicise the wishes of Aurukun residents. After a second trip in October 1979, he reported that Europeans ‘just can’t believe a racist like Joh exists in Australia today. They thought I was talking about South Africa or Zimbabwe’ (NQ Message Stick 1979, 8). He advised Granada Television when it made Strangers in Their Own Land, directed by Chris Curling, about conflict between Aboriginal people and bauxite miners in North Queensland in 1979.

By the early 1980s, Miller was both admired and reviled as a critic of Queensland’s administration. He advised the Wik elder and land-rights claimant John Koowarta on litigation against the Queensland government that led to a High Court judgment in May 1982 upholding the validity of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. That year he was prominent in Aboriginal and Islander protests when Brisbane hosted the Commonwealth Games. When, in the mid-1980s, the Federal Labor government clashed with Queensland over reserve residents’ rights to self-determination, he warned that residents’ ‘desperation may result in desperate measures’ (Miller 1988, 144). He did not gloss over the more self-destructive forms that desperation was taking. Collaborating as writer and narrator with Denis O’Rourke in 1984 to make Couldn’t Be Fairer, a documentary on Queensland’s racist political culture, his interviews included Aboriginal people lambasting the government while unsteadily nursing their beers.

Though unwilling, like its predecessors, to legislate national land rights, the Federal Labor government engaged Miller as an adviser on other aspects of Aboriginal policy. On 29 March 1984 it appointed him acting deputy chair of the Aboriginal Development Commission, which made grants and loans to enable Indigenous Australians to purchase land, including family homes, and to establish enterprises. He served as its deputy chair from March 1985 to June 1987.

In October 1984 Miller accepted the government’s invitation to chair the National Inquiry into Aboriginal Employment and Education Programs; this required him with Barbara and their son to move to Melbourne for several months, and for Miller to travel widely for six months of consultations. The ‘Miller Report’ (1985) included advice that government programs should respect the wishes of the least colonised Indigenous Australians to support themselves, not only by selling their labour in the market economy, but also by continuing practices of the traditional hunter-gatherer subsistence economy. The government formed a national Aboriginal Employment Development Policy Task Force to implement the report’s recommendations, and appointed Miller as a member in 1987.

Miller did not stand for election to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission at its first elections in 1990. Like many, he was wary of the new body’s prospects, but was elected a councillor of the Cairns and District Regional Council of ATSIC in 1993. He was serving his second three-year term when he died from multiple pulmonary emboli in Cairns Base Hospital on 5 April 1998. While his graduation as a teacher made him an exemplary citizen from the point of view of assimilation policy, his active citizenship over thirty years went much further, asserting land title and self-determination—Indigenous rights—to be essential to Indigenous people’s acceptance of Australian society. He was survived by two daughters, Lydia and Marilyn, from his marriage with Patricia, and a son, Michael, from his marriage with Barbara, which had ended in 1987.