Swan Valley Nyungah Community razed, but fight continues

Last month, the Western Australian government bulldozed the Swan Valley Nyungah Community (SVNC) despite desperate protests by the Bropho family, on whose traditional land the community is located.

For six months, weekly protests had been occurring outside the community’s locked gates. A week earlier, they took the protest to the steps of Parliament House.

The Barnett government’s cruel response was as much about crushing hope as it was about destroying buildings.

There’s a plaque in the SVNC acknowledging residents as the “last of the river-people”, the remnants of a culture that, through its survival on that land, had defied white colonialism. Although the recent fate of the SVNC is a vivid illustration of the brutal, state-sanctioned racism faced by WA’s Indigenous population, the community’s history also shows the power of struggle.

The SVNC was first built after a struggle by the traditional owners that began in 1977. Nyungah people from the Bropho family had set up a protest camp in the north-eastern Perth suburb of Guildford, after local authorities burned down their original dwellings.

In 1980 the protesters relocated to their traditional land in nearby Lockridge. For a long time the Swan Valley Nyungahs lived in abject conditions. They erected tents and occupied old cabins that had originally been built by mining companies.

A section of land was finally given back to the Nyungah by the government in 1994. The Brophos then built their own housing. The Swan Valley Nyungah Community was born.

A people who had been colonised and dispossessed for generations had scored a resounding victory.But the SVNC’s control over their own affairs was to be tragically short lived. WA’s racist political establishment hungered for revenge.

In 2003, amid sexual abuse allegations levelled against elder Robert Bropho, the entire community was shut down by Geoff Gallop’s state Labor government. Due investigation of the allegations was sidelined in favour of blanket assertions, amplified through the media. Despite protests outside parliament by women and children from the community, a bill was rushed through, leading to the eviction of all residents.

Just as with the NT Intervention, the true intentions of the government had nothing to do with concern for Aboriginal families. For current community elder Bella Bropho, the real reasons for shutting down the SVNC were blatantly political. “You can go after Robert Bropho, but why close down the community? Because of who dad was”, she says. “When he was too outspoken about the protection of sacred sites from development, he became a political target.”

Following the mass eviction, the SVNC was left to grow derelict for more than a decade, while former residents died on the streets of Perth (many were never provided with the alternative housing promised by the government).

The appalling treatment of the SVNC, both in the past and to this day, serves as further proof that Australia’s genocidal dispossession of the First Nations continues. But the Brophos will continue to fight for the rights of their community, for their culture and for an end to the crippling life on the streets to which the government has damned so many.

Anti-racists in WA and around the country should stand in solidarity with the Swan Valley Nyungah people as they demand justice.