This Paper details
smaller gatherings that were some of the precursors to ConFest.
Gatherings
held in North East NSW during the years 1971-1973 were arranged in 1970
by Dr. Ned Iceton, a former Doctor with the Royal Australian Flying Doctor
Service and a lecturer at the University of New England Extension Service.
Iceton held the first gathering in 1970 with only Aboriginal males attending, as
in Iceton’s view, the colonial experience had been more destructive to the
Aboriginal men).
Dr Neville Yeomans attended the 1971, 1972,
and 1973 Gatherings playing a pivotal behind-the-scenes role. Consistent with
Neville’s earlier action research at Fraser House and Cultural Keyline, the
1971-1973 Gatherings were theme based – using the theme: ‘Surviving Well in the
Dominant World’. In keeping with Neville’s interest in gender balance, both
males and females attended.
Consistent
with Dr Yeomans’ Fraser House being a ‘balanced community’, these gatherings
were attended by equal numbers of:
·
Aboriginal and
non-aboriginal people
·
Males and females
·
Under controlled and
over-controlled people
During an interview I had with Dr Iceton in
Armidale[1] he described local young
Aboriginal man Terry Widders’ 1970-1973 role at the Armidale Gatherings as
being quite crucial in these Gatherings. Widders knew the cultural nuances
supporting the Aborigines’ opening up during the first of these Human Relations
Gatherings - a milieu that was strange and potentially very threatening for
Aboriginal and Islander attendees at the outset. Terry started talking about
the difficulties he had faced in surviving well and about his plans for his
future. On hearing one of their own speaking in this forum, other Aboriginal
people followed. Neville knew that while the social topography was diverse,
this theme about ‘surviving well’ was a Keypoint touching the lives of all attendees – Aboriginal and
non-aboriginal alike. It was a theme
conducive to coherence. Soon attendees were following Keylines of
discussion. Neville, Widders and Iceton all confirmed Neville’s pivotal behind
the scene enabling role.
Sociologist Margaret-Ann Franklin[2] makes particular
reference to Terry Widders’ contributions to these Gatherings and their consequent
ripple-through effects in the local Armidale NSW Aboriginal community. She
quotes Terry commenting on the Human Relations Gatherings:
They
were good for different people in different ways. It intensifies communication,
that’s what it does. It focuses you. You get down to the specifics of social
and cultural communication rather than just, ‘how’s the weather?’
Terry’s
comments aptly describe Big Group at Fraser House – relational exchange[3] is both
social and intercultural.
Additionally, all involved are personally affected in differing ways.
Franklin
quotes Iceton’s summary of outcomes:
……purposeful
local group activity, and in which an
evolving underpinning is to be provided by an updated and appropriate set of
commonly accepted ideas (worked out together) about what are the right ideas
and right kinds of behaviour towards each other and the world outside, and the
right way to help each other stick to them after they are worked out.
This
quote is resonant with Fraser House way and Aboriginal traditional sociomedicine
for social cohesion.[4]
Resonant
with Fraser House, at times, the Armidale Human Relations Gatherings operated
at very intense, though ecologically tight levels. As in Fraser House, Neville
ensured that the context-specific
functional aspects of behaviour were
supported and that the context-specific non-functional
bits were not supported. Both Neville[5] and Iceton[6] confirmed
this. In sorting through big issues
and the minutia like the Big Groups did
at Fraser House, each Human Relations Gathering at end was deemed to be a great
success.
A
young Aboriginal woman sent Ned a copy of the diary she kept during the second
Armidale Workshop. This diary was published with her permission in the next
issue of the Human Relations Magazine.
Excerpts
from her diary:
I
feel very mixed up, uneasy, frightened and I try to get myself out of this by
staying in my room while the meeting is on, but I feel that it will only work
in two ways, either (1) I will close up altogether, and go back to my old ways
of joking my way through, or, (2) go and sit in and listen to the discussion
and see how I feel when I have finished there. I decide to go back and sit down
and listen to the rest speak.
The
final comment in her diary:
It
was a good week for everyone I talked to, and the next one will be even better.
Her
diary is resonant with the diary of the Fraser House resident included in the
back of the Clark and Yeomans’ book on Fraser House.[7]
There is the same emotional turmoil and confusion. She could make little sense
of what was happening within her during that Gathering, though there is a
strong sense as the diary proceeds that she is integrating many aspects of her
being - corrective emotional experience rather
than insight.
Three people from the Aboriginal communities
around Bourke attended the Human Relations gatherings in Armidale in 1971 with
Professor Max Kamien, a psychiatrist. In Kamien’s book, ‘The Dark People of
Bourke - A study of Planned Social Change’,[8] he refers to these
Armidale and Grafton gatherings as ‘a milestone’ in renewal among the
Aboriginal people from around Bourke, a remote town in New South Wales’.[9]
I spoke to Professor Kamien about his
experience of attending the 1971 Armidale gathering and he had vivid
experiences of the exchanges in the circle. I asked him if he knew Dr Neville
Yeomans and he said that he had heard good things about Neville’s work at
Fraser House and that he would have been very interested to meet him. It turned
out that Professor Kamien had no
knowledge that Neville was not only at that gathering in Armidale, that he was
also the behind the scenes enabler of process. While I was surprised to hear
the Professors comment, at another level it fits with the subtle role that
Neville played. Neville would engage Aboriginal Terry Widders as the group
leader and Neville’s subtle, not so subtle, highly provocative, evocative,
invocative, and timely speech acts would have been hidden in plain view unless you had past experience of Fraser House
community way. For Kamien, Neville would have been just one of a number of
non-aboriginal males in the circle. Neville would have been totally immersed in
observing and interacting with everything happening in the interactions among
the Aboriginal and non Aboriginal people present in circle and especially
during the breaks (where lots of
significant minutia happen to ever
have either a professional or non professional chat with another Psychiatrist
in attendance. All of this is Neville’s way. Neville was very mindful of how he used his time.
While
returning to Bourke, one of the three Aboriginals who had attended the Armidale
gathering had extensive conversations with members of different Aboriginal
communities visited on the way. Upon returning to their own remote community
out in Bourke, and on their own initiative, the three commenced in their own
community similar human relations gatherings to what they had experienced in Armidale.
The Aboriginal person who had carried out the conversations in the communities
on the way back to Bourke was the key enabler for the local Bourke action.[10] This is
one example of the presence of nurturers in oppressed communities. It was also
in part, an indicator of Neville’s ability to pass on community healing ways
such that others who have been traumatized may be ready, willing and able to
enable gatherings and have the follow-through to organize and actually hold
gatherings with local members of their community on an ongoing basis.
Local
non-aboriginal teachers in Bourke had their first contact with adult
Aboriginals (the parents of their students) when they attended these Bourke
human relations groups.[11]
As
a follow-on gathering, Terry Widders enabled two human relations workshops for
Aboriginal youth in Armidale on the weekends 26-27 June 1970 and 10-11 July,
1971 – another example of a local nurturer self starting action. He reported on
these in Issue No.1, July 1971 of the Aboriginal Human Relations Newsletter.[12] An
almost complete set of the Newsletter is held at the National Library in
Canberra.[13]
This newsletter contained reports of the Human Relations Gatherings as well as
wellbeing related contributions from Indigenous and resonant people from all
over Australia. The University of New England cut funding for the Aboriginal
Human Relations Newsletter. This was when Connexion, a self-help Functional
Matrix Network evolved by Neville and others around Sydney took over the
editorial, printing and distributing role with Rick Johnstone playing a lead
role (he was a mover in getting the Maralinga Atomic Test Royal Commission
started which resulted in a major clean-up of Aboriginal traditional lands in
South Australia). Neville took me to meet Rick in Sydney in the late 1980s as
part of Neville’s linking me into his networks.
During
14 - 22 May 1972 a third Human Relations Gathering was held in Armidale NSW. A group
of thirty-four Aborigines from around Bourke journeyed to Armidale and
twenty-one actively participated in that Gathering. The three from Bourke who
attended the first gathering came to the second gathering. Neville, Widders and Iceton again enabled
these gatherings.
After
the Grafton workshop in 1973, Neville and Terry enabled human relations
gatherings of aborigines in Alice
Springs and Katherine in the
northern territory. Neville said[14]
that the indigenous networks that were evolving through the Armidale, Grafton,
Alice Springs and Katherine human relations gatherings and the associated
aboriginal human relations newsletter were seminal in the evolving of the
Laceweb. These networks continue to evolve.
Neville
reported that in Alice Springs Aboriginal people were coming a few at a time
and leaving and bringing others back with them. The numbers remained small with
a constant roll-over of people. Then during the mid afternoon Terry began
storytelling in a very enchanting kind of way that created in Neville a very
lucid and highly evocative dream state and Neville re-oriented at one stage to
find the room jammed full of Aboriginal people all deeply into this dream state
as well.
Neville
and Terry Widders[15]
confirmed that networks formed through these four gatherings continue to this
day. Many aboriginal
and Torres Strait islander people who attended the human relations workshops are
now playing key enabler roles within aboriginal and islander communities and have gone on to become key people in
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs.
Eddie
Mabo’s attendance at the 1973 Grafton gathering is noted in Ned Iceton’s file
notes in his archives, and in the human relations newsletters. Eddie Mabo was the Torres Strait islander
who energized the legal challenges relating to the invalidity of the notion
Terra Nullis that led to the Mabo decision granting indigenous land rights in
Australia. Eddie Mabo wrote a letter dated 2 march 1974 published in the march
1974 human relations newsletter about his attempts to get funding for an
aboriginal run school in Townsville before current funding ran out.
As one example of follow-on from the
human relations gatherings, Terry Widders networked through the UN indigenous
working group. Neville said[16] that
Terry Widders and himself were two of a very few people who had been granted
observer status at meetings of the Unrepresented Nations and People
Organization (UNPO) based in the Hague.
Neville
himself had returned to full time study at the University of NSW from 1975
working on his law degree, and when this was completed he shifted north. Terry went on a study tour of China in
the 1970’s and later obtained a masters degree on Chinese and Japanese
minorities and had teaching fellowships in both countries. In the late 1980’s
Terry and Neville went to china and had a meeting with three members of the
Chinese Central Government on Chinese minorities.
From these 1971-1973 gatherings and
their outreach, networks of indigenous healers and resonant others have been spreading through the Asia Pacific
Australasia Region with links to other indigenous networks around the world.
In this timeline, the Spirit of ConFest
had already spread internationally five years before ConFest started.
By 2002, write-ups of these Armidale
Gatherings were on the Laceweb Site
and a person from UN-INMA, one of the self-help groups evolved by Neville, was
travelling to five countries through South East Asia Oceania and finding and
linking up with 49 networks and meeting 140 healers. This engaging was widened
to 11 countries and 49 healers from these countries participated in a sharing
gathering in the Philippines country side facilitated by the person from
UN-INMA, a professor from the University of the Philippines and a principle of
a Philippine institute. Four heads of country and a regional head of a UN
agency also attended.
Other
Links:
ConFest
and the Next 250 Years
[1] July, 1999.
[2] Refer (Franklin 1995, p. 59).
[3] Refer (Franklin 1995,
p. 59).
[4] Refer (Cawte 1974;
Cawte 2001).
[5] July, 1999.
[6] July, 1999.
[7] Refer (Clark
& Yeomans’ 1969).
[8] Refer (Kamien 1978, p.
48, 49, 55, 57, 69-70, 77-78, 297, 324).
[9] Refer (Kamien and Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies 1978, p. 48, 49).
[10] Refer (Kamien and
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies 1978, p. 48, 49).
[11] Refer (Kamien and
Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies 1978, p. 48, 49).
[12] Refer (Aboriginal
Human Relations Newsletter Working Group 1971a).
[13] Refer (Aboriginal Human Relations Newsletter Working Group 1971b).
[14] Dec 1993, Dec 1994, July 1998.
[15] Aug 1999.
[16] Dec, 1993.