Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of the native title litigation process for me has been in observing how the claimants managed their relationships in court with the pastoralists on whose properties they reside and for whom they have worked, in many instances, for several generations. In this part of the paper, I discuss some of these engagements in the interests of showing how various Aboriginal people attempted to sustain the established tone of those relationships at the same time as frankly putting on record their own views of the power relationships involved. Many Ngarinyin people were all too aware that the court room drama presented a once in a lifetime opportunity to put their stories ‘on the paper’ (i.e. on the public record). As an ethnographer who has generally tip-toed around the deeply ambivalent and politically sensitive worker–boss relationships in the region for years (mainly for the self-serving purpose of retaining access to these settlements), I was sometimes startled by the frankness of the claimants’ narratives (see also Merlan 1994, which challenged some earlier assumptions about the ‘nostalgia’ of Aboriginal workers for the pastoral era).

In one of the earliest court sessions at the Mowanjum community hall the local non-Indigenous pastoralists were present in force as their past and present workers prepared to take the stand. Indeed, one senior witness, now deceased, prefaced his evidence with a declaration of how his boss, sitting two rows behind him, ‘been minding me very well’. The fact that he felt moved to offer this character reference for the same people who were opposing his rights and interests in land suggests that, on the one hand, he remained acutely aware of his own dependent situation, and secondly that this kind of contestation over land was not simply to be avoided. His character reference for his boss was made very much in the local Aboriginal rhetorical style in which denials of ill-intent and hostility frequently open up dispute proceedings.

Later, a former head stockman for the same pastoral lease (and who still resides there) took the stand. This man is also a renowned composer of traditional dreamt songs known as jurnba and carries his reputation as a barnman (healer/composer) with considerable gravitas through the local life-world. His evidence revealed that he had come to live at the station from a young age when his step-parents and extended family, who had been living a hunting and gathering life along the Drysdale River until the end of World War II, were captured by a police party, before which time, as the witness put it, they ‘never work or anything like that, only just walking backward and forward’.^[3] When they returned to their ‘special camp’ on the Drysdale River the police arrived, put his parents and the other adults, male and female, on neck chains and took them to Mt Elizabeth.^[4] At Mt Elizabeth, his parents were tied to trees at night to prevent them running away. The young boy spent his time by himself down by the river.^[5] After about 10 days at Mt Elizabeth, his parents were taken in chains by the police from Mt Elizabeth west to Munja, leaving the boy behind at the station. His parents were being used by the police to find other people living in the bush. The police chained up the people living in the bush in order to, in the witness’s words, ‘make them civilised’.^[6] Months later, at the beginning of the Wet, his step-parents returned to Mt Elizabeth and they were released from their chains.^[7] Meanwhile the witness had been cared for by another step-mother. His parents stopped there then and worked at the station for many years. The witness never attended school and began working as a boy at ‘old Mt Elizabeth’.^[8] When he was 17, he began adult stock work: mustering, branding, droving cattle to Wyndham through Karunjie, and breaking horses.^[9] The witness lived and worked with a large group of older people^[10] in humpies about 100 yards from the boss’s house.^[11] When the people living at Mt Elizabeth decided to set up their own community away from the station-house in 1982, the owner eventually agreed to give his work-force, in the witness’s words again, ‘a little bit of matchbox on a bit of side of road’.^[12] They lived in tents there for five years before the first permanent shelters were built.^[13]

It was clear during the witness’s evidence concerning the circumstances under which he came to live on Mt Elizabeth that a wave of annoyance was running through the pastoralist contingent. He was after all a ‘favoured son’, formerly head-stockman, and brought up from a child on the same beef, if maybe not the same cut, as the heir to the lease. After a short recess, the barrister for the PGA put it to the witness that the reason he and his family had been apprehended in their camp along the Drysdale River was that this was part of a benevolent campaign to control leprosy amongst the indigenous population. Here I cite the transcript of the cross-examination by the barrister for the PGA.

The witness’s revelations about his capture and subsequent life of work on the station was stated as a set of fairly unproblematised biographical facts and without any evident sense of malice towards the boss’s family. Indeed, it is not at all uncommon for Ngarinyin people to express sympathy but also to laugh and joke about the humiliations and punishments inflicted on their older relatives, though whether this was a means of concealing their embarrassment at such subordination was never entirely clear to me. Othering one’s own subordinate position is a common means of projection and denial. Though by no means naïve, simple, or compliant, the witness was also eager to ‘do the right thing’ by his employers and was probably dismayed at their annoyance. After all, in his terms he had just told his story as he had been asked to do.

Later in the proceedings, the witness was punished for his revelations when the barrister for the PGA asked him on the stand, in front of a roomful of his countrymen, whether or not it was true his current marriage was murlal or ‘wrong way’, a question which could have occurred to the barrister to ask only if he had been informed by those intimately acquainted with social life in the settlement. This use of shaming techniques continued throughout the proceedings through constant suggestions under cross-examination that individuals had either ‘lost their culture’, ‘didn’t know where their country was’, were ‘lying about their connections’, ‘didn’t follow the law’ or only danced or painted ‘for money’.^[15]

I was surprised how robustly these individuals responded to such suggestions despite the formal and intimidating context of a courtroom, which for most of them had only ever been experienced as a place of punishment. That reservoirs of resilient self-appraisal underlay the usually very circumspect interpersonal styles of dealing with whitefellas came as even more of a shock I think to their employers and managers than it did to me. After all, a number of these pastoralists enjoyed a fairly jocular relationship with these same witnesses and made a show of this during the lunch breaks when they intermingled with the witnesses to show that they were, at heart, one of the boys.