The View from Elsewhere

s+d -- the response

I'm here on the couch, drinking lemsip, surrounded by cats with more interest than they should have in vegetable soup, reading/watching romcoms, wondering if I can justify buying a new toaster (one with deco colours) and thinking about what an unusual reality we white (and I imagine some black) expats inhabit in Alice.

I'm reminded of the unusual reality factor after reading comments on Laura's excellent blogpost about S+D.  I was going to comment, but then my thoughts grew too long so I decided to write my own blogpost instead (don't you hate it when someone says that?)

I'm scared of committing some of my thoughts into the ether, because of how they might sound: defensive, hypercritical, and so on.  I'm really quite surprised and overwhelmed by the response to S+D, and I imagine the film-makers are as well.  I thought it would be a boutique film that only a handful of people saw -- those who like to keep up with left-wing political issues. I am wary of ra-ra leftie stuff in general: liking something just because it has Aboriginal or migrant themes, confusing politics with aesthetics, preaching to the converted, and so forth.  I also thought some of the film's nuances might be too enigmatic for a broader audience.   I'm quite amazed by the emotionality of the response to the film from people outside Alice: it suggests to me that the film exposed dimensions of Aboriginal experience that people were not aware of or hadn't fathomed (and perhaps can't be adequately conveyed through other forms, such as investigative journalism and opinion piece-writing).  It's a considerable achievement for Thornton to have communicated so powerfully across so many different cultural barriers.

By contrast, the response in Alice at the screening was, as far as I can tell, a lot more muted, a lot more considered even. I don't know, for example, of anyone who cried. The crowd was strangely quiet for 2000 people at the end; the mood was sombre.  Which might look like indifference, or the conviction of guilty consciences.  But I think the reality is more complex than that.  People seemed to be processing, which continued over the next couple of days in conversations I heard around town.  Interestingly, I heard far more aesthetic evaluations of the film from people in the NT than I've heard in any of the national film reviews I've read, even directly after the screening. For example, people made comparisons with Ivan Sen's Beneath Clouds, which is to my mind a more developed and sophisticated film in some ways.

out of the batcave

Last week was my very last at Bumbledore (aka the 'batcave' -- one of many pseudonyms). It was literally on the campus up north, near where the castle featured stands.

It's not wise to blog about work things, but here I am doing it again. I feel sufficiently rankled to do so. Perhaps I could pretend I'm writing this post in lieu of having done an exit interview.

When I came back from Melbourne, I was immediately overtaken by a virus which refused to shift. Normally, one would take a couple of days off and go to bed. As I had to head up north for my final teaching round five days later, I kept on going (as I've alluded to below): finishing the marking, packing up my office and preparing for teaching. I even went into work on both days of the weekend (more fool me), and had to travel up to Bumbledore on Sunday evening.

The virus took root: I taught mornings, left work for the students to do in the afternoons and went back to my motel room and watched cable. My sinuses were wholly infected: I couldn't get anything from the local medical centre except clarantyne, a hay fever medication, as it was closed for several days after a fatal stabbing (welcome to the NT) (white on black violence, in case you're wondering).

On campus, my so-called team-mates largely avoided me. Senior male academics bustled past with nothing more than a brusque 'hello'. The message was clear: I had 'let the cause down' by deciding to take up another position, a perfectly normal occurrence in any workplace and a not wholly unsurprising outcome in a toxic and abusive one.

On my very last day, my academic supervisor dropped into my classroom on his way past and wished me 'the very best in my future endeavours'. And that was it. There was no acknowledgement of my contribution from senior members of staff or my 'team' -- no morning tea, card, farewell emails or after work drinks. This is despite having done five semesters of teaching at Bumbledore, despite getting the first third-year student through the degree, despite developing new courses, despite getting student work published, despite holding the program together when my other colleague bailed last year, despite suggesting a replacement for my position. And so on. If anything, I was an above-average performer (especially by Bumbledorean standards). I went out and had farewell drinks with some of my students (the ‘people that mattered’, after all) one evening, but there was nothing otherwise.

I’m not someone who actively courts public displays of attention; I tend to find that kind of thing embarrassing. But all the same, I found the lack of acknowledgement startling. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a workplace where there hasn’t been some kind of farewell or recognition of one’s contribution, even from people who hate you. And I gave my lifeblood for that job: I worked through all sorts of trying situations, with difficult people, not to mention all the stuff I did after hours. I could even have resigned earlier than I did, but instead I chose to wait till I’d delivered a workshop I didn’t think anyone else could backfill at short notice.

The end result of all this: it confirmed that my decision to leave was absolutely the right thing to do. It also left me wondering why on earth I had bothered to put so much energy into things: perhaps I had been too good. Maybe I shouldn’t have cared so much about the job or the students. Perhaps I should have been as slack as everyone else.

Over and above all: I would never work for Bumbledore ever again. If they had treated me well at the end, I might have reconsidered in another couple of years if I was looking for work. But now I would never go back. And I would never encourage anyone else to work there. In fact, I would actively discourage them from doing so. This is the price employers pay for treating their employees poorly. I can’t believe they’re stupid enough not to get this basic stuff -- if you treat people badly, they won’t stay -- but time and time again, employers like Bumbledore just make the same mistakes.

I do think a lot of this ‘foul odour’ relates to the two work cultures Bumbledore straddles: being an academic institution and an Abl organisations, which are both cultures with a tendency towards abusive treatment of staff. Although it is a bit of a stretch to call Bumbledore an academic environment (an administrative one more likely), it is embedded in a higher educational framework with the constant demand to achieve and produce (and you can never do enough of that, as we know) without adequate support. And it has the whole ‘Vincent de Paul’ modus operandi of certain Abl orgs: you should give, give, give, especially as a white person. You should be endlessly responsive to any demands that are made of you, although in reality, these demands often come from the organisation itself rather than the Abl client base they purport to serve.

Ideologically shocking though it might seem, some former card-carrying lefties like me just end up saying that idiosyncratic dinosaurs of the eighties like Bumbledore should be mainstreamed because they’re too unhealthy in their treatment of staff and students. Abl students would benefit more from a ‘real world’ experience at a mainstream institution, as long as they’re given appropriate orientation. Hard words? Well, Noel Pearson’s allowed to say them. (Of course, ‘a white girl’ or ‘hey, kungka!’,  as I’m still referred to at the age of 42, would of course be incapable of having or framing such insights and not allowed to say them publicly, should she have the perspicacity to come up with them.) Okay, so I agree with St Noel on a few things at last: the dependency mentality is incredibly toxic and needs to be circumvented. Abl people need to engage with the ‘real economy’. The ‘unreal economy’ of administrivia predicated on the idea that a white person will always be there to do things for you is simply not viable.

Coda: My work email account is still operational, as Bumbledore is too inefficient to close it. Students continue to email me with requests, even though I told them (and sent out an email to the effect) that Friday was my last day. (I’m not responding to any of them; just checking out of curiosity.) On Monday, when I went into the office to hand back my keys, the receptionist asked me if I would take a student enquiry about the course. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do that. I really don’t work here any more.’ It wouldn’t surprise me if they rang up and tried to get me to do some marking or editing pro bono.  Something like that.

Now, I’m a happy resident of the couch, behaving like a sick person at last, and waiting for my next job to start (which it will, shortly).

the match II

I leave Max and his family and go back to the fenced-in area to by a beer. While I’m there, I get talking to a couple of guys wearing fluorescent vests emblazoned with ‘Centre Labour Force’. They look like they’re of Indigenous descent, and quite probably townies.

They also look like they’re security people, but they tell me they’re not: they’re in event management. They tell me that P*pp*red Bl*ck, a local Indigenous security outfit are here, and that the community police and Aboriginal trackers have been brought in as part of crowd control.

While we’re chatting, some teenagers -- two Aboriginal girls and a white boy – start rumbling nearby. The boy is a young punky-type with a blond mullet. He gives one of the girls the finger, right in her face, and says, ‘You don’t understand English?’

The Centre Labour Force men tense, alert for pending hostility, but the moment passes and the teenagers career off.

I see a group of Aboriginal ladies standing near a troopie marked ‘Y8end&m@ Night Patrol’, and decide to approach them. They wear a uniform consisting of a long blue T-shirt over a long black skirt and assorted sandshoes – old Volleys and the black happy-shoes community women sometimes wear.

Jessie, a woman with slightly wild bobbed hair, says that they would be happy to speak to me. Of all the people I spoke with, she seems the most eager to be interviewed. There was even a sense that she’s a seasoned interviewee or spokesperson, which might not be unlikely, if she’s the front person with the media, government bodies, etc, for the Night Patrol.

She ushers me over to sit on the edge of an old well that’s been concreted in. A couple of kids crawl over the remaining joists above our heads while we talk. Three other ladies follow, and stand at a slight distance from us. Jessie explains that they’re keeping an eye on their vehicle, as someone went through their bags earlier in the evening and cleared out their wallets. She introduces me to two of the other ladies – Maisie and Nellie. They complain that it’s getting cold; it is an unexpectedly cool desert night for February. One of them wears a Magpies beanie, and another produces a blanket from the troopie and wraps it round her shoulders as we talk.

the match

Once a year, two national-level AFL* teams play a game in Alice. This year, competition two heavy-weights – Carlton, from Melbourne, and the West Coast Eagles, from Perth, are playing. It’s rumoured that the big teams play soft when they’re here, conserving their energies for the big city crowds. But still, it’s exciting that they would even come to Alice. It’s a major social occasion; everyone goes. You don’t have to be interested in sport or to follow the AFL.

At about five o’clock, I go down to the local pool for a swim. Even though the game proper isn’t meant to start for another couple of hours, there are people pouring into Traeger Park Oval, opposite the pool. A police road-block has been set up at the end of the street. I have to park in the bowling alley car park across the road, and walk up to the pool in my rashie, scungies and sarong (Americans: that’s anti-ultraviolet radiation T-shirt, bikini bottoms and sarong), feeling conspicuous. The atmosphere is keen round the oval. There are people in their best shorts and shirts, a lot of whom look to be from out of town. Many of them are young families with children. A group of young Aboriginal people help a friend in a wheelchair out of a car.

As I’m getting ready to leave after my swim, I catch the seven o’clock news bulletin on the radio. Apparently, 300 litres of alcohol have already been tipped out by police, 95 people have been taken into protective custody, and 250 people have been ‘moved on’, as part of a euphemistically-named anti-social behaviour strategy. Sporting matches in town are notorious catalysts for violence and substance abuse, so various policing strategies and alcohol restrictions have been trialled over time.

A little later, I join the press of bodies at the gate on Traeger Street. There’s increased security on the gates – that is, more than I’ve seen in the past. Aboriginal Community Police Officers ring the gate and run metal detectors up and down each person’s limbs on entry, presumably searching for weapons or maybe smuggled beer cans. Some people are ushered to one side for a random bag check. I doubt it has anything to do with the age of terror, and more to do with concerns about anti-social behaviour.

markets

Markets are being held in the Mall abutting the Town Council lawns to celebrate Chinese New Year.  I’m not sure that these markets are any different to those usually held on the first Sunday of each month.  If anything, the stalls seem a little depleted in numbers; the full complement of sellers and buyers are probably still yet to return to town after the summer break.  The standard fare is on sale -- jewellery, old books, handicrafts, bags, clothing.  The Ba’hais and the environmentalists have their stalls out.  The Aboriginal hawkers are sitting in clusters on the Uniting Church Hall lawns, with paintings fanned around them.  Each group sells unframed canvases according to a particular style, in acrylic paints.

I draw back and sit on the low stone wall in front of the uniting church, eating a fruit sorbet.  Tourists and family groups sit in the shade on the lawns, eating and talking.  There’s no intermingling between black and white, except for a curious little white girl who starts tumbling in the grass with some Aboriginal girls her age.

what now?

February the 2nd was the tenth anniversary of my initiation into the Public Service.  I was going to blog about this on the actual date itself but 2 February 2008 was one of those days that was lost in the ether of international travel.  I'm not sure whether I was on a plane, in an airport or whether it actually existed for me.

Anyway, 2 February 1998 is one of those dates etched in my memory, partly because I routinely put it down on forms along with my APS number, but moreover because it marked a transition in my life of working in Indigenous affairs, an area with which I've been connected one way or another ever since.  I've often wondered if there'll be a transition out of this area, sometimes if I'll ever get away. I feel privileged to have seen -- and to have been burdened by -- the underbelly of Indigenous affairs.  Things are a lot more messy than the Manichean battle with ideological light sabres often depicted in the media.  I've been to some places that most people don't get to see, and I've met and worked with some remarkable people.  But still...there's an uneasy sense of das unheimliche about it all for me.  The unhomeliness of home or the unhoming of home.

Which brings me to my next subject -- the apology.

I've felt a sense of flatness and suspicion about the apology, at best a cautious optimism. It's not that I don't agree with an apology, but rather than a grand gesture, it seems like a perfunctory one, something that should have been done years ago. I remember all the drama around 1998-99, the Prime Minister's intransigence about the apology, the sabotaging of reconciliation and so many other aspects of the Indigenous struggle.  The candles on the lawn outside Parliament House last night were eerily reminiscent of the Sea of Hands and some of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation's previous gestures. But into what era are we moving?  What is possible? 

I'm sure the apology will mean a lot to the Stolen Generations and to Aboriginal people more generally.  Unlike the outcome of one poll I read, I genuinely believe that the acknowledgement of past wrongs can make a psychological difference.  All the same, the Government's non-committal stance on the rest of the Bringing Them Home package makes it none too clear what will come next (though it would hardly be tactical to commit too much too soon).  So much of my time in Indigenous affairs has been spent in obscure and deadening administration.  Successive attempts to re-cast Indigenous affairs have often seemed merely to succeed in swaddling Aboriginal people in further bureaucracy.  What now?

To me, there's a whole sense of disjuncture between a national, Canberra-given apology and the everyday life of Aboriginal people.  It seems terribly abstract. Here in central Australia, there's a real sense of division between the population, as if there are two tiers of existence between those who walk the same streets in town. The work situation here is often somewhat different to an East Coast or even a Darwin one, where you might have Aboriginal colleagues and socialise with them. Symbolically, I suspect it's a truer representation of the relationship between black and white Australians. The fact that a white person wouldn't talk, let alone socialise, with an Aboriginal person in central Australia, unless facilitated by a work pretext or without passing through a series of culturally-sensitive protocols or a gatekeeper organisation, strikes me as very odd.  There's so little normality in any of our relations with Aboriginal people, it's hard to believe that we know anything of their everyday realities.

Coda: Being the kind of misanthropic nay-sayer and late-riser that I am, I watched the apology from the couch with Otty and Lulu at 7.25 am CST, rather than going into any of the potential sorry breakfasts in town.  As I pulled up outside work just before 9 am, I could the itinerants stirring where they slept on bits of tarp and garbage bag under the saltbushes in the strip of land between the railway line and my institution.  I wondered if they knew what had happened in Canberra today.

I went and spoke to these people the other day.  Actually, they flagged me down, and tried to cadge money off me.  I gave them some fruit from my bag instead.  I asked them where they were from.  They told me Hermannsburg (or Ntaria, where Strehlow set up the mission associated with Namatjira). Then I asked how long they'd been living in town.  One of them said, 'Nineteen ninety-four.'

They've been camping under trees in town since 1994?  I suspect they're fairly peripatetic and visit other locations such as Ntaria.  But still...

ten cents' worth

When I heard the news yesterday that Prime Minister had declared that the situation in Indigenous communities in the NT was a national emergency, my initial reaction was a dull sense of relief.  At least, someone was going to DO something, and given the poverty of responses at Territory and local government levels, it seemed appropriate that the Commonwealth should intervene. 

The relief gave way to cynicism about the rather limited and incohesive nature of the federal government's response to the crisis, not to mention the political agendas that might be driving it.  (I'm sure we all know what those agendas might be, esp in this election year, and others have commented on them, so I'll put them to one side.)  The PM claims to support and endorse the contents of the Report on child abuse in the NT but his response couldn't even be said to be cherry-picking what appears to be a balanced, carefully-thought-out set of recommendations (more likely cherry-picking the contents of Mal Brough's head). As someone said on NT news last night, there's a lack of respect not only to the team who undertook the Inquiry but also to those Aboriginal people who gave information to the Inquiry in good faith.  He's clearly seized on the Report as leverage to intervene in the Territory's affairs, buttressed no doubt by Pearson's own report and response earlier this week -- though at least in the Cape York situation, there is some involvement of Aboriginal leaders and community governance.

The PM's actions might be defensible if he had well-thought-out and 'wholistic' (to invoke that much overised word) plan, but he doesn't, though he's clearly abounding in agendas. A couple of Aboriginal leaders cautiously expressed their support for federal intervention on RN breakfast this morning, making similar points about the lack of a plan and need to consult with Aboriginal people (tho neither of them seemed that clear on the details of a plan themselves). I'm reminded very much of the response to petrol-sniffing in central Australia, where Tony Abbott took cherry-picked aspects of solutions without realising, at least not for some time, that they wouldn't work without being applied in their entirety.  One of his chief motivations in doing things this way (e.g. not introducing non-sniffable petrol in communities) was undoubtedly to keep white townsfolk on side. 

Anyway, some brief thoughts on the proposed interventions (I've seen other responses; I'd just thought I'd add my ten cents worth):

* medical checks for Aboriginal children -- I can imagine this proposition sounding as though 'something were to be done' to a certain part of the electorate , but putting any civil rights concerns to one side, I'm quite unsure of the value of this exercise: what will be done with this information and how will it benefit those involved, particularly given the lack of adequate health services in communities and therefore potential follow-up?  (Is Howard going to pay for these kids to be flown to boarding schools on the east coast instead -- one of the popular solutions for avoiding the perils of community life.)

The more significant question herethe lack of access to primary health care services, medical and health practitioners in communities -- any additional services and programs existing health centres could be offering to address abuse issues are probably a pipe dream. (Programs and counselling for male perpetrators in Alice are apparently unable to meet demand present -- this is just in town; what about some more targeted funding for these programs?)

This also one of the reasons why the federal government should be offering more incentives to get doctors out into remote areas (and this is why we need doctors to become public servants, at least at the GP level, so they can be given their marching orders out of the leafy suburbs). This may seem like a convoluted way of addressing child abuse -- and health practitioners would need specific training in dealing with these issues.  But if you don't have these basic services, I don't see how you're going to address more complex issues -- let alone carry out health checks on all Aboriginal children under the age of 16.

* increased policing -- there is an argument for an increased police presence in communities to address safety issues, esp in regard to violence.  I haven't looked at what the recent report has to say on this issue, but in some remote parts, there may be one full-fledged police officer for an area of several hundred kms, which might include a number of communities.  So it's not in anyway a comparable situation to what exists in most towns and cities, where at least in theory, you can call out police to intervene in a violent situation.

On the other hand, all we ever seem to get out here are more glossy brochures about how the NT government are ramping up the number of police to deal with anti-social behaviour.  (At present, I believe we have the highest number of police per capita of any state or territory -- but much of this is concentrated in town or in Darwin.)  But no one says anything about other approaches to addressing anti-social behaviour, like intervening before it becomes a criminal matter or providing proper diversionary programs.

And why does the interface between the white and black populations in communities have to be construed in criminal terms?

* grog banned in all communities -- This doesn't really make much sense to me.  People from dry communities load up at the local take-away all the time and take grog back to the homes.  If you're going to 'turn off the tap' of the 'rivers of grog' (and I agree, there's a good case for this one), you need a consistent supply reduction policy.

As Fran pointed out on RN this morning, it's a nonsense if measures aren't implemented at Alice Springs Woollies as well.  But the PM didn't understand her point at all; he thought it was being cited as an ideological objection against any restrictions being introduced.  This lack of understanding of the details annoyed me, esp the federal government is in a position to legislate more consistent alcohol restrictions across the NT.

* quarantining welfare payments -- this does represent a diminution of citizenship entitlements -- and the PM is savvy enough to say it won't be colour-based, so it will be interesting to see what's coming next for the poor, re: social reform (as I've said in a comment thread previously).

However, the rights of the child, while being used in rather an emotive and reactionary way by the Prime Minister, and to a lesser degree, Pearson, is the real trump card that they have in relation to this issue and others here.  I do think there's a case for substituting food and clothing vouchers for cash payments to ensure that children receive entitlements that might otherwise be squandered by adults.  But it would be preferable for these types of solutions to be negotiated with or coming from community leaders themselves, and for them to be applied on a trial basis and reviewed.

* ban pornography -- I can't get too excited about this, one way or the other. I imagine it appeals to pro-family types.  There are other more pressing things to be done, like funding male perpetrator programs (I can't imagine banning porn's going to stop them; curtail their imagination maybe).

* five-year leases on communiteies -- one of their agendas coming to the fore here, in the attempt to wind back land rights legislation and no doubt, find another way of bringing in their private home ownership thing.  It's another one that doesn't make a lot of sense to me, how people are actually supposed to benefit from giving up control over their communities and land -- for five years.  I would have thought that to include people in decision-making processes and strengthen their governance would have helped in developing their sense of autonomy and control over individual and collective situations.  But no, that would probably sound too much like self-determination, which we know 'didn't work'... (I suspect Mal Brough's still sore about being knocked back by the town camps, and he's looking for another win.)

There's also a weird dichotomy being set up between 'communities' and 'towns' dichotomy which plagues the whole debate...  Communities are continually demonised as cesspools of iniquity, along with being presented as the only place where Aboriginal people live (the 'real Aborigines', no doubt).  Dooen't the PM and his cronies realise that the majority of the Aboriginal population live in urban centres?  Do they think that communities are the only place where abuse, etc, is occurring? 

It's more the case that this situation is an opportunity for them to get control of Aboriginal communities and probably also to get rid of them, obviating the need ever to have to provide proper essential services, et al, to them.  Aboriginal people should live in proper towns etc and assimilate into the mainstream population is the Coalition's real plan, after all.  But the consequence of such a scenario here in Alice at least is that even more Aboriginal people will come into town to buy food, other supplies and grog...more people will end up camping outside because there isn't any accommodation for them, and more violence will occur as people from clan groups who shouldn't mix do, often fuelled by grog, etc.  This is my guess, anyway; I supect that 'sustainability' and 'self-governance' may be dirty words as far as the Coalition is concerned in relation to Aboriginal communites.

But back to the original issue of intervention: I don't have a problem with a national crisis being declared -- it's the sort of thing COAG meetings should have been doing in the past.  The states and territories have had too control over Aboriginal programs and spending for too long without much transparency or accountability.  Personally, I feel the NT government has failed its constituents on child abuse and other matters. Clare Martin is a pissweak show pony who has consistently controlled her Cabinet and Indigenous MPs to stop them speaking out on issues. The Coalition government loves to use the word 'responsibility' in relation to Indigenous people; it's more than time to ask what forms of responsibility all levels of government should exercise themselves.  But there do not seem to be any compelling, 'wholistic' policy approaches developing on this front yet.  Ruddy has 'chucked a Beasley' and agreed with everything Howard has said, which I construe as a lack of vision on the part of the 'new ALP' in relation to Aboriginal affairs (along with toadying to electoral perceptions re: Indigenous issues) and possibly also a sign of an emerging Blair-style, Third-Way-ist policy approach to welfare issues and social reform.

End of the sermon; back to work....

very bad dreaming

Several years ago, I was part of research team for a submission on customary law.  In the process of our research, we travelled to far north Queensland and then to the Top End of the Northern Territory  and central Australia.  We spoke mainly to Aboriginal women as part of our process, but also some men.

A couple of themes came through strongly in our consultations:

• What passes for culture or customary law these days is not necesarily an accurate reflection of the social codes that existed in Aboriginal societies prior to colonisation, but in many cases may be a perversion.
• 'Culture' was no excuse for violence against women and children.  The rights of women and children prevail over cultural rights.

These views were grounded in an understanding that Aboriginal cultures are hybrid, dynamic, adaptative entities: while they possess certain continuities with the past, this does not mean that they are locked in the past, but are capable, for example, of incorporating international human rights law standards.

Sadly, this view of Aboriginal cultures seems to be lacking in Louis Nowra's recent essay, Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal men's violence against women and culture. When I read the original summary version of Nowra's essay in the Weekend Australian, I was a little uncomfortable with some of its content but prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt till I'd read the full paper.  My reservations were as follows: Nowra appears to place too much emphasis on the role of culture as as source of Indigenous violence; his solutions are lightweight and read like a tract for the Coalition government.  On the other hand, I agreed with him that the issue of violence in Aboriginal families and communities needed to be kept on the national agenda.

I canvassed some of my friends who work with both the victims and perpetrators of violence in central Australia.  There was a split in opinions on the value of WA Nowra article: some felt it was good that Nowra was seeking to keep the issue on the table.  The others were upset, saying that the effect of the recent media debate, including Nowra's article, had been to demonise Aboriginal culture.  Now having read the full article, I find myself agreeing with both views.

When I read the WA essay, I had some misgivings about the way Nowra had presented the role of culture in the current epidemic of violence.  He seemed at pains to source Indigenous violence as cultural phenomenon in historical documents dating back to the First Fleet, etc, pretty much all of which were white sources.  This seemed to me a problematic move at best; surely the least inflammatory approach would have been to acknowledge that while it's difficult to understand that violence played in pre-colonial Aboriginal societies, what we have now is an epidemic of violence that needs addressing. (The women I spoke to in the consultation process I mentioned above emphasised that  much the violence that was being undertaken in the name of 'customary law' these days was ad hoc, individually defined (i.e. without reference to elders) and extreme.)  I hoped that Nowra's emphasis on the traditional culture as a source of violence would be counterbalanced by other factors in the essay-proper. 

But this unfortunately is not the case. Instead, Nowra roots most of his argument in the proposition that traditional culture is inherently violent and the prime source of the violence in contemporary culture.  He does not give anywhere near as much attention to the disruptive and traumatic effects of colonisation, dispossession, relocation, etc, on Aboriginal communities as either a source of violence or exacerbating existing violence.  In making his case, Nowra draws attention to the way that lefties and 'New Agers' have tended to idealise Aboriginal culture, turning a blind eye to some of the excesses and problems that currently exist, including the degree of violence.  He's right to make this point -- and I'd go one further to say that many well-intentioned people are so immobilised by the prospect that they might end up 'speaking for' Aboriginal people that they fail to speak out at all (added to which is the fact that Aboriginal people only make up two per cent of the population; most of the non-Aboriginal population do not have direct contact with Aboriginal people but relate to them as symbolic, mainly media-constructed artefacts).  But once Nowra takes this position, he runs with its flipside -- that of demonising Aboriginal culture.  There surely has to be a more temperate and realistic approach.

(To be continued)

Utopia

There was an interesting good news story yesterday about research examining why the central Australian community of Utopia has a lower Indigenous mortality rate than most of the NT.

Researcher Kevin Rowley, from the University of Melbourne, says as well as the lower death rate, the community has less heart disease, low smoking rates and almost no obesity.

"It's really encouraging, particularly at a time when there's so much despair about the state of Indigenous health," he said.

"Here's a really good model of something that's working."

One of the reasons why this story is so interesting is that the federal government is currently reviewing the viability of outstations, the satellite homesteads often connected with various communities in central Australia and other remote areas (sometimes hundreds of kilometres away).  Outstations are often seen as a romantic remnant of the 'return to country' push that accompanied the land rights movement in the '70s and '80s: people were facilitated to return in family groups to their own country.  Outstations have also been used for other purposes such as providing better options for juvenile offenders and petrol sniffers, and economic projects. 

Over the years, queries have been raised about how effective the outstation movement has been in terms of economies of scale, infrastructure, provision of services (incl education and health), and as a basis for self-sufficiency and economic development.  There has been some skepticism and even scorn about the uses to which outstations are put and the level of decay of some of these settlements.  High mobility and the need to link in with more urban centres such as Alice as, for example, have led to talk of some families occupying a 'town' house and a 'country' house).

I don't want to descend into some misty-eyed, pre-lapsarian fantasy here, but this latest research seems to suggest that with some lateral thinking, a network of outstations in a discrete area can be used to promote a better quality of life.  Here, primary health care services have been pivotal, which is also significant.  There's been some policy debate about whether housing or health services are more fundamental to ensuring better mortality rates and quality-of-life for Indigenous people.  (That's an oversimplification of the debate, but it's what it's often reduced to.)  Some claim that housing is fundamental to ensuring better educational participation, health, employment rates, etc.  The health pundits say that the infectious diseases associated with poor housing have been addressed by drugs and that the real health issues facing Indigenous people are chronic internal diseases (heart, kidney failure, diabetes, etc) and that these can only be addressed through better access to medical services.  There's also international demographic research that indicates access to health services and education are the key indicators of improved life expectancy, along with reproductive control and the autonomy of women.  I.e. better housing may not make too much difference if you can't get to a doctor or a school.

The 7.30 Report showed people in Utopia rejecting much of the housing that had been provided for them over the years by government.  They had returned to a more traditional lifestyle, which included hunting, gathering and preparing food (i.e. exercise and less junk food) and sleeping outside or in makeshift shelters (less crowding, better ventilation, etc).  The report also showed traditional medicine being practiced alongside its western counterpart.

Utopia's doctor, Karmananda Saraswati, says his community's health is so good because people have chosen to follow a traditional lifestyle on their own land.

"You have also got to cost in the cost if there was 30 to 40 per cent more cardiovascular disease and in-patient time in hospitals and more evacuations to the hospital," he said.

"You need to factor in those costs before you say the outstation mode of living is not cost-effective."

Anyway, a possible model for the near future, especially when so much should be possible through more creative use of technology. 

Unfortunately I don't know where this research on Utopia is to be published, so I can't link you there.

antichrists

This week, one of the things we've been talking about in class is whether all writing is inherently political, and also, whether Abl writing is inevitably political.  We've looked at ways writers address social and political issues in their writing (this is first year).

I suggested that the students focus on writing about particular characters and settings as a way of bringing social and political themes into their writing.  We went to a historic site on the edge of town which was at one stage used as an institution for Abl children removed from their families, the idea being that they could use the visit to write about stolen gens themes if they wanted (I gave them some other options as well).  I said that they could join the official guided tour there as part of their research.  Some of them did, and most of these students walked away, disgusted by how 'whitewashed' the tour was.  Later I introduced the students to 'Uncle', an 82 yo man who was taken to this place when he was only three.  He took the students on his own tour and gave his story of the hardship he experienced there. 

The students got a lot out of meeting Uncle.  Some of them wrote poems and stories based on what he told them about the place. Of course, they were always going to be sympathetic towards him, because he was Abl too. But the point was that they had the choice between the black armband and the white bandaid histories to use as source material or inspiration for their writing.

This morning as I was running round in a mad panic preparing for my last teaching session, I caught some of a debate between David Marr and Gerard Henderson on RN on the latest in the culture wars that's being going on this week.  I was vaguely aware in my manic teaching haze that this debate was happening; I'm sure much of the Ozblogosphere has been consumed by it over the past week and I'm yet to catch up.

Anyway, a part of me wanted to laugh it all off and say, here we go again.  Another part was getting seriously nervous.  In her introduction to the topic, Fran Kelly said that the PM saw the last bastion of the unvanquished elites as being the ABC, SBS and some left-wing humanities depts -- and he's still not happy that he's pushed things back that far.  I mean, crikey -- that's not very much left (tho he surely has to be concerned that commercial rather than middle-brow media has become the natural home of the right). It's also worrying after the discussion of sedition laws last year. I remember the days when lefty stuff was novel, even slightly discriminated against in the otherwise conservative, New Critical dept of my undergrad degree.  We don't have to go back to all that, do we?  Even in the po-mo dept of my postgrad, you could still write a New Critical style thesis if you wanted to (tho you might be a bit on the nose socially -- but then everyone was on the nose in that dept, with the exception of about three academic staff).

What's really worrying of course that the State should direct the content of an academic (esp tertiary) syllabus and not the intelligentsia.  Kevin Rudd has raised similar queries in relation the relationship between politics and the Christian Right, and the increasing (conservative) conflation of church and state. The  driving idea behind democracy is after all that there should be freedom of thought and belief.  We're going to end up like America in the sense that there's going to be no separation between the State and other institutions such as schools, the churches, etc.  But even in America, there's an acknowledgement that the progressives and the conservatives have their own territories in the culture war.  In a smaller, more politically apathetic country, it may be easier to stifle the progressives.

Anyway, as I listened to the debate on RN this morning, I felt very uncomfortable.  What did this latest volley in the culture wars make me, I wondered.  Some kind of antichrist?  And what obscure little peninsula of the left did I occupy, talking to Abl students about the politics of writing and the idea of competing histories?  How much longer will places like Bumbledore be allowed to exist?  Are we going to end up educating future students about the contestability of history in private, in secrecy, at the threat of losing our jobs?