Powerful, universal themes.

Rob Riley

Australia remains a deeply unreconciled nation, explains Quentin Beresford.

The story of how modern Australia failed to make a lasting settlement with its Indigenous people is embodied in the life of one of the nation's most widely recognised Aboriginal leaders, Rob Riley.

The list of Riley's involvements is a narrative of the contemporary Aboriginal movement itself: from land rights to native title; the campaign for a Treaty; the creation of ATSIC; the inquiry into the Deaths in Custody and the lobbying for the Stolen Generations inquiry.

In 1996 Riley hung himself in a lonely motel room racked with pain from his past and disillusioned with the unyielding nature of race politics in Australia.

His life and death compel us to face our historical relationship with Aboriginal people. Riley intended his death to serve this purpose. His suicide note began: "White Australia you have much to answer for ..."

Exactly what there is to answer for is revealed in Riley's painful childhood and political career. It is the intertwining of these two parts which makes his story such an illuminating one for understanding race relations in Australia.

Riley's family history reveals the grip of racist policies in Australia and how these created intergenerational damage to Aboriginal people. Under the infamously racist WA 1905 Aborigines Act, his maternal grandmother was incarcerated in Moore River Settlement, north of Perth as a teenager. A ministerial warrant was used to remove her from her family in the late 1920s and, despite repeated protestations to secure her freedom, she languished in the institution for the remainder of her life. She once told authorities "this place send anyone mad".

Her children - Rob's mother and four other children - were born into this racial prison but removed from her immediate care. When she died at the age of 39 they were sent away, in the back of a truck, to the far flung parts of Western Australia's mission system. Released at 16 after little education and training and with no "country" to return to, Riley's mother fell pregnant, giving birth to him.

Riley became the third successive generation of his family to be removed. He was taken in infancy in 1954 - still under the provisions of the 1905 Act - to spend the next twelve years in Sister Kate's Children's Home where he was denied knowledge of both his family and his Aboriginal heritage. Riley was never able to resolve this conflicting experience: the bonds of growing up with "brothers" and "sisters"; the loneliness of wanting to belong to someone; the sexual abuse inflicted on him; and the denial of his culture.

Once reunited with his family, he was plunged into dire poverty when forced to live on a reserve under the policy of segregation operating in rural Western Australia, enforced as strictly as any part of the 'Deep South' of America at that time. He lived in a draughty tin shed for three years. He experienced his first encounter with "street level" racism when a group of local boys challenged his right as an Aboriginal to be walking on the town's footpath. He would never again be silent in the face of racism.

But racism became the defining experience of Riley's political life. In the late 1970s he encountered the institutionalisation of racism in the Western Australian police force and its justice system. Aborigines were being beaten into submission and incarcerated in shocking numbers. Rob saw all this working at the fledging Aboriginal Legal Service. An angry member of the emerging wave of '70s radical Aboriginal politics, he also was optimistic that the political system would right the wrongs of the past and the present.

Noonkanbah was a turning point. Riley was at this remote Kimberly pastoral station in 1980 when the Premier, the staunchly conservative Sir Charles Court, helped arrange a convoy of mining trucks with police protection to break the first determined protest to protect sacred sites in the modern era. Riley witnessed first-hand the combined power of international capital and the state to resist Aboriginal rights.

It was a pattern repeated many times in the next 20 years. Riley was leader of the National Aboriginal Conference in 1985 when the mining industry funded the infamous media campaign to convince the Hawke and Burke governments to back down on agreed principles to land rights. From this campaign, Riley believed racism in Australian politics had developed into an all-encompassing system of power and community prejudice. He never forgave Hawke for backing away from the historic opportunity to forge a settlement with Aboriginal people.

When he went to work for Federal Aboriginal Affairs Minister, Gerry Hand, in the late 1980s, Riley had seen the power of race regularly played out in Australian politics. He was well versed in its instruments: political populism; media propaganda; historical denialism; and ideological righteousness. But nothing prepared him for the backlash directed at Hand's office over plans for a Treaty, the creation of ATSIC, and the establishment of the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody, which were all attacked through extremist language.

Riley's encounter with racism intensified when he returned to Western Australia in the early 1990s to head the Aboriginal Legal Service. Here the skirmishes over the 'lock-them-up' approach to Aboriginal juvenile crime fuelled by talk-back radio, the continuing anti-Aboriginal stance of the mining industry and the lack of government commitment to implementing the recommendations emanating from the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody had him permanently locked in combat with the Lawrence and Court governments.

But it was his struggle with the Keating government over native title that completed his disillusionment with Australian politics. The painful split in Aboriginal ranks over the native title bill saw Riley publicly backing the need for legislation enshrining native title - fearing another backlash from conservative states - while anguishing over the realisation that the dispossessed had had their rights wiped away.

Worn out by continual conflict with governments, despairing at the failure of psychiatric intervention and plagued by the trauma of his past, Riley slid into a deep depression. He contemplated long about ending his life and had a clear grasp of the reasons for his decision: the personal and political torments were too much. His death shocked the community.

Riley's life contains powerful, universal themes: early triumph over adversity; the search for justice; and disillusionment over reformist politics. Not all will agree on either his vision or his political methods. But the legacy of Riley's life is to force us to reflect on why the battle for reconciliation was lost by this generation and what this says about the nation.

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