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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-10-14 Daily Xml
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Ministerial Statement

WINDLASS, MR K.

The Hon. M.D. RANN (Ramsay—Premier, Minister for Economic Development, Minister for Social Inclusion, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Sustainability and Climate Change) (15:35): Madam, I seek leave to make another ministerial statement.

Leave granted.

The Hon. M.D. RANN: I want the house to acknowledge the passing of Mr Kunmanara Windlass, an Aboriginal elder of the Pitjantjatjara people and a leader of the Aboriginal people of the Maralinga Tjarutja lands, who was highly respected by many people throughout South Australia and beyond. The South Australian government was saddened to learn of the passing of Mr Kunmanara Windlass on 16 September and we extend our sincere condolences to his family, extended family, the Aboriginal people of the West Coast, Oak Valley, Yalata, Maralinga Tjarutja, the surrounding areas of South Australia and Western Australia, and to all those who knew and worked with him. Mr Kunmanara Windlass's funeral was held on 8 October.

Mr Windlass was born about two kilometres north-east of Kingoonya, in the bush not far from the railway line. The missionaries estimated his birth at January 1928. He was about 82 years old when he passed away. Mr Windlass's father was called Windlass while he was working at Coorabie, where his job was to draw water from the well using the windlass, hence the family name. During his earlier life, Mr Windlass lived at different places along the trans-Australian railway line with his family and other Anangu, making artefacts for selling to passengers on the trains, obtaining rations, hunting rabbits and kangaroos and doing occasional station work. His Anangu community then moved to Ooldea where he went to school to learn to read and write.

As a child, Mr Windlass was responsible for caring for his blind grandfather, to guide him as he walked, to give him food, to fetch his firewood and generally care for him. These caring qualities and his kindness towards others remained with Mr Windlass throughout his life. While living in Ooldea, he went through the law and became an initiated man. During his lifetime, Mr Windlass and his family and community experienced a number of life-changing shocks. The first came in 1952 when the mission at Ooldea was closed. People left the mission and were scattered across the countryside, with many people moving to the new mission at Yalata and further afield, and the community lost its cohesion. Mr Windlass settled in Coorabie and Koonibba.

The second key life-changing event was the atomic bomb tests on the Maralinga Tjarutja lands. Mr Windlass was in Koonibba when the atomic bomb was detonated at Maralinga and heard the explosion while speaking on the phone at the mission. A total of seven atomic devices were tested on Maralinga lands in 1956 and 1957. Rather than being defeated by this event, Mr Windlass took action and made a significant contribution to advancing the interests of the Maralinga Tjarutja people, and he became an important spokesperson for his community.

Mr Windlass demonstrated a tireless persistence in fighting for the rights of his people. In 1992, when I was minister for Aboriginal affairs, he was part of a delegation that travelled to London and presented the British parliament with a piece of contaminated Maralinga land and appealed directly to the British government for compensation. This resulted in compensation being paid to the Maralinga Tjarutja people by the British government in 1995. Mr Windlass also played a critical role in organising and participating in delegations to Adelaide and Canberra, resulting in the commonwealth government's support for the clean-up of radioactive contaminants on the Maralinga Tjarutja lands in 1999. This was the second clean-up that followed the initial attempt made by the British government in the 1960s and, indeed, in 1979.

Mr Windlass and his community had returned to their country in the 1980s. The land had been returned to them and the community chose to live in an area they called Oak Valley, named after the desert oaks. He and the late Mr Archie Barton were the leaders of the Oak Valley people for over 25 years. They worked closely together to realise the community's land rights and gain compensation for the damage done to their country by the atomic tests in the 1950s. He was a passionate, articulate and effective spokesperson for his people and spoke a number of Aboriginal languages, as well as English.

The clean-up of the Maralinga Tjarutja lands made possible the historic hand-back of Maralinga section 400—the actual bomb test site and last remaining former prohibited area—to the traditional owners, including Mr Windlass, in December 2009. Mr Windlass's contribution was acknowledged by the Hon. Jenny Macklin MP during the hand-back ceremony at the time. Mr Windlass's last official duty for Maralinga Tjarutja was on 18 December when he raised the Aboriginal flag at Maralinga Village to mark its hand-back by the commonwealth.

Although Mr Windlass died less than a year after this event, it must be a great comfort to his people that he lived to see the completion of his life's work: the return of his people's traditional lands. His representative roles were impressive. He was Chairman of the Yalata community from the late 1970s until 1984 and was then the principal traditional spokesman for Maralinga Tjarutja from 1984 and for most of the 1990s, as well as being the council chairperson. He was an ATSIC regional councillor and represented Yalata and Maralinga Tjarutja on the Aboriginal Lands Trust.

Mr Windlass was one of the first Aboriginal park rangers in South Australia and represented Maralinga Tjarutja on the joint management board with National Parks , was the representative for the hand-back of the Unnamed Conservation Park (now known as Mamungari) in 2004, and was a representative of the Alinytjara Wilurara Natural Resources Management Board. He continued travelling into the bush and visiting his country to the very end.

Mr Windlass's major contribution to South Australia was not only the representative offices that he occupied but the advocacy for his people and the contributions towards a fairer South Australia in which rights are acknowledged and observed. Mr Scott Cane, an associate of Mr Windlass, commented:

To white people, Mr Windlass' life was one of leadership, and political and personal achievement. To Mr Windlass, his life was one of landscape and ritual association. His greatness lay in his love of country, his religious knowledge, his wisdom, vision and reasoned sense of social justice.

Mr Windlass was not only a dedicated and serious campaigner for the rights of his community and of Aboriginal people as a whole but he also had the capacity to laugh and to play. He was a very good footballer, playing with both district and mission teams. The late Mr Archie Barton described Mr Windlass as 'the most elusive footballer—his feet were as nimble as his mind'.

Mr Windlass encountered and challenged many obstacles that his people and his generation faced, including the traumatic removal from his country and its destruction by the atomic bomb blasts, as well as the subsequent effects of these events on the community's social cohesion, the erosion of traditional authority and the opportunities available to members of his community.

In conclusion, it is with great sadness and a profound sense of gratitude that we honour and salute the life and commitment of Mr Windlass. I first met him in 1984 in the process for the handover of the first Maralinga Tjarutja Land Rights Act. I then became a member of the parliamentary committee on Aboriginal affairs and spent considerable time with Mr Windlass. I then became minister for Aboriginal affairs and worked with him and Archie Barton to pass legislation that was to return the Ooldea lands as a major handover of important spiritual lands.

I made a promise in the early 1990s that a future Labor government would return the Unnamed Conservation Park, and I was very pleased to be able to join with Mr Windlass, who I knew as Hughie, to hand the land back. Of course, that was completed with the handover of section 400. He was a very effective campaigner, a very decent man and will be sadly lost by our state. Our thoughts are with his family and community and all those who mourn his loss at this sad time.

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