Wattie Creek is an episode from the series Australia’s Heritage – National Treasures with Chris Taylor, produced in 2009.

Series Synopsis
Take a voyage of discovery with Chris Taylor as he reveals the secrets behind a fascinating mix of treasures from Australia’s National Heritage List. In the third season of five-minute documentaries in the National Treasures series, Taylor travels around Australia delivering historical snapshots of objects and places from the National Heritage List. He talks with experts and enthusiasts, revealing fascinating insights into our famous and not-so-famous past.

Australia’s Heritage – National Treasures with Chris Taylor is a Screen Australia National Documentary Program produced in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and made with the assistance of the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts.

Before the 1967 referendum the Australian Constitution prevented the Australian Government enacting policies for Aboriginal people at a national level. Policies and approaches to Aboriginal legal status, employment and living conditions were implemented under different state and territory administrations without national coordination or national responsibility. This resulted in a pattern of neglect, dependency and marginalisation, where Aboriginal Australians were highly vulnerable to exploitation.

Anthropologists Catherine and Ronald Berndt surveyed Aboriginal labour on Vestey’s pastoral leaseholds in the Northern Territory between 1944 and 1946. Vestey’s was a British business group, the largest international meat producer in the western world. They leased the Wave Hill cattle station. The Berndts documented appalling working conditions, squalor and poverty in many of the camps, and endemic malnutrition and high infant mortality rates. They reported widespread dissatisfaction and resentment of working and living conditions on pastoral stations. Indigenous accounts of ill usage, extremely limited life chances, degrading treatment, racial and sexual abuse were documented. Further, in the 1950s it was found that in the Northern Territory Aboriginal stock workers received less than 15% of the basic wage.

The immediate impetus to the Wave Hill walk-off in August 1966 by the Gurindji people, the traditional indigenous landowners, was the March 1966 decision by the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission to delay the payment of award wages to male Indigenous workers in the cattle industry until 1968. The walk-off concluded in March 1967, where the Gurindji settled at the place they named Daguragu, on Wattie Creek.
Their plan was to establish a pastoral operation and community run under their own leadership, on their traditional lands, to be owned by them.

This model combining Aboriginal autonomy and land rights shaped Australian government policy following the 1967 referendum.