Aborigines, Cattle-Stations, and Culture:

A commentary on policies and goals

by Roger Sandall

(Mankind, June 1973)

The Gibb Committee Report

In December 1968 Aboriginal stockmen in the Northern Territory received for the first time the same wages as the white men who worked beside them.

To those who knew what Aborigines had contributed to a hundred years of mustering in the Territory this seemed both to eliminate a long-standing injustice and to mark the first step toward a general improvement in the lives of cattle station communities. Central Australia was still recovering from the drought of the early 1960s: it was hoped that an expansion in beef production would steadily continue, bringing with it more jobs for everyone.

With the publication of the Commonwealth Government's Report of the Committee to Review the Situation of Aborigines on Pastoral Properties in the Northern Territory (the Gibb Committee Report, December 1971) it now appears that these hopes were premature. The growth of the beef industry has been negligible—from 1965 to 1971 'there has been little change in the total livestock situation' (p. 7)—and since limitations on productivity in much of the Northern Territory are fundamentally limitations of pasture, climate, and terrain, little change is foreseen.

As for Aboriginal employment, a survey in mid-1972 showed 'a reduction in employment of aboriginal males of 122, from 383 to 261 (32%), and an increase in employment of other males of 111, from 168 to 279 (60%)' (p. 11). The Gibb Committee attributes most of this to the equal pay decision.

The survey from which the above figures were taken did not cover all pastoral properties and the committee cautions that the fall in employment may be only a temporary effect. Nevertheless it is clear that the decision to award aboriginal stockmen equal pay cruelly clarified a number of things.

The results of equal pay

It revealed first that the employment of Aboriginal labour on cattle stations, which the public had come to think of as naturally ordained, was more a symptom of the technological backwardness of the pastoral industry than anything else. Under unaccustomed pressure to review its labour needs it responded as industry usually does in such circumstances by discharging inefficient labour and by mechanizing. More subdivisional fencing was put up which reduced the need for stockmen.

Trapyards which use one-way gates to trap and hold cattle at watering points became more and more common. Properly seen, the trapyard, like the helicopter used increasingly for mustering, is a machine for dispensing with the services of the illiterate hunter/ musterer just as the road-train sent the drover into oblivion.

If it would be naïve to see these developments simply as the acts of mean-spirited station managements, it would also be blind to deny their significance. They are in fact the symptoms of a steadily growing discrepancy between the skills and training of Aborigines and the requirements of employment in the modern world.

Another effect of the equal pay decision has been to bring the cattle station and reserve populations closer together. There had always been movement between the two, and during the off-season on the stations many Aborigines who thought of themselves as belonging to particular stations would reside for long periods on the reserves. After 1968 some pastoralists forcefully 'encouraged' entire station communities to make this move positive and final.

Even where this has not occurred station managements are putting growing pressure on Aborigines to look to the Welfare Division of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs for the food, medicine, and education which the stations are neither adequately equipped nor any longer willing to provide.

The result has been that in 1965-9, despite a natural rate of increase for Aborigines in the Northern Territory of 29 per thousand, the total of Aborigines resident on cattle stations fell both absolutely (4,676 to 4,305) and as a percentage of the total Northern Territory Aboriginal population (24 per cent to 20 per cent) (p. 34).

The birth of the outstation

If these employment and population trends continue they could have two possible outcomes. One might be the complete and permanent removal of most cattle station communities to the reserves. The other might be the gradual extension of the institutional apparatus of the Welfare Division to the scattered stations themselves.

Neither prospect had much appeal to the Gibb Committee, and it was plainly in an attempt to outmanoeuvre such eventualities that it came up with a new idea, that

"in appropriate areas land be obtained by excision, or by sub-lease from the pastoralists for Aboriginal communities for limited village, economic, and recreational purposes to enable Aborigines to preserve traditional cultural ties and obligations and to provide the community with a measure of autonomy." (p. 74)

Furthermore it recommended that legislation be drawn up to enable an Aboriginal Community Society to be loosely incorporated; community representatives to be chosen by the Aborigines themselves as far as possible by their own methods' (p. 75).

The intention of the committee is plain. Autonomy and independence are of the essence since their absence is widely believed to be the root cause of many difficulties facing Aborigines today. And since the dependence of outback cattle station communities is fundamentally economic dependence, what the Gibb Committee has to say about this can fairly be taken as a test of its ability to deal with central issues: without at least a measure of self-sufficiency the hoped-for measure of autonomy is likely to be a mirage.

What degree of economic self-sufficiency can these station communities, reconstituted as villages, expect to have? To begin with, the language of the report is not reassuring. A village after all is more than just a name; it's the natural expression of rural economic needs, a place and a polity composed of self-sufficient domestic and commercial units. Little if any of this applies to the cattle station communities today and it is hard to see how an act of reconstitution will make it apply tomorrow. The unavoidable question must be faced. What are these villagers going to do?

But what will they do?

Since the areas proposed for lease excision appear to be about one to ten square miles in area they cannot be used for running cattle. Five hundred square miles is more like an economic pastoral holding in the Northern Territory. The committee lists supplementary activities it would like to see encouraged. While some residents will continue to work on the stations others should turn to such things as 'pig farming, poultry and fishing, gardening and artifact-making etc.' (p. 74). It has been observed that Aborigines appear to dislike pork because they dislike pigs. As a result they show little interest in raising pigs for domestic meat supply. And nothing could be more ominous than the slack etcetera with which the list absent-mindedly concludes.

In fact what the committee proposes to occupy the time and energies of its villagers is little more than an inventory of the economic activities which are begun and often abandoned year after year on the reserves, failing, when they do, because they are established in a vacuum and are sustained neither by incentive nor felt need.

What incentives will make such schemes successful in the villages? The words of the committee on this matter are ambiguous. In the same breath that it advocates pig and poultry farming it says that there is to be a minimum 'interference with the internal workings of the traditional social structure, sources of authority and mutual economic obligations' (p. 75).

A reconciliation of such goals seems unlikely, not least because the incipient farmer is the very man who may find it necessary to resist traditional sources of authority and mutual economic obligations. And more often than not where economic enterprises of any vigour and success have been established this has been in spite of 'the internal workings of the traditional social structure'. It would indeed be difficult to deduce an appropriate course of action from the recommendations of the committee. Though perhaps this doesn't matter: whatever a man does he will be both following and frustrating its advice.

Although some income will continue from the manufacture of artefacts—of spears, shields and boomerangs—a detached appraisal of the prospects of economic self-sufficiency for communities living on small excisions from pastoral leases suggests that these are somewhere between marginal and nil. To say so is not to reflect on the people themselves.

A bizarre ecological anomaly

One hundred men, women, and children permanently settled on a patch of sand in central Australia constitute a bizarre ecological anomaly for which the only obvious parallel is a village of scientists at the South Pole. It is a matter of labour, resources, and markets, but it may well be argued that in central Australia there is an important difference. However anomalous their present situation, the patch of sand is where they have lived for years, their country, the place where they feel they belong. All said and done, isn't this where they choose to live?

Choice is the idea and the ideal most favoured in the Gibb Report after autonomy. This echoes current government policy which emphasizes 'the rights of individual Aborigines to effective choice [my italics] about the degree to which and the pace at which they come to identify themselves with [Australian] society' (p. 4). To state that people should have a right to effective choice is admirable. Yet it is unfortunately true that what makes choice effective or ineffective has more to do with necessary preconditions than with civil rights. To pretend otherwise involves a kind of doctrinaire voluntarism.

If the choice of an illiterate stockman on a cattle station is to be made effective then education is a prerequisite. On this question Schapper's words are to the point.

"It would only be after Aborigines had become integrated into an Australian community that they could work on a station by deliberate choice, as do the station managers and white stockmen. Until then most station Aborigines are imprisoned within the sub-culture of pastoral life." (Schapper, 1970 : 40)

What educational proposals does the Gibb report contain to enable a stockman to escape this prison?

"Because most Aborigines in the Northern Territory will ultimately need to find employment outside the cattle industry, education achieves in our minds both an importance and an urgency which can hardly be exaggerated." (p. 54)

The importance of education

This is clear enough. The committee sees the inevitable need for employment off the stations, and one waits to see what curricular programme will be devised to fill this need. A minimum of white man's skills must be provided, so the curriculum includes primary education in basic English, arithmetic, social studies and manual arts.

At the same time 'the Aboriginal culture must be recognised and respected by all teachers and instructors'. More, we are told that 'the curriculum should be so designed as to demand no choice [my italics] between Anglo and Aboriginal worlds but to offer die chance to function well in both the Aboriginal traditional culture and the non-Aboriginal surrounding culture'.

Is this realistic? The committee is talking about job training, and whether or not the curriculum demands no choice employment does demand it. This is surely the reality behind the argument. Outside the artificial world of school and college other men eventually make their choices—to hire or not to hire—and to suggest that this day of reckoning can be indefinitely postponed is not helpful. It is to elevate temporizing into an educational principle.

Yet what the committee gives with one hand it seems to take away with the other. The theory that an Aboriginal child can have his traditional cake and eat it is found to involve practical difficulties.

"We have been struck that with respect to the inculcation of attitudes and values little is done to cope with the conflict between western values and those of the Aboriginal camp which face the learner at every turn. Not only are the physical conditions of the camps inimical to learning what is taught in the classroom, but they also provide a counter-learning situation which inculcates attitudes and values in opposition to those taught by the school teachers." (P. 57)

In response to this the committee recommends primary boarding schools for children at the age of seven which would separate them from the world of the camp. What this proposal does is to pre-empt the issue of choice by tacitly recognizing what the report is reluctant openly to avow, namely, that as soon as the contradictory 'at the same time' formulations of official policy are translated into practice, priorities must be established and decisions made.

Once more, as in the economic proposals, there is a deep underlying uncertainty as to the real goals of policy. Is it to help people help themselves, changing their culture where necessary, or is it to enable them to continue to 'be themselves' by perpetuating whatever culture they now have? And what does the voice of government mean when its policy statements and reports and press releases speak of 'culture'?

The concept of culture

The suspicious thing about culture in Australia is that everyone is for it. This makes sense in the case of humanistic culture because it is usually regarded as something good in itself—if not beyond good and evil. But what anthropologists call culture is not usually thought of as something one is for or against. It's an adaptive apparatus serving human needs, sometimes better and sometimes worse.

One of the curious things that has been happening in anthropological usage, and in government policy statements, is that the approving attitude common to humanistic usage has been extended to what anthropologists call culture as well. Culture in the anthropological sense instead of being considered instrumentally good is now constantly spoken of as if it were good in itself —and even beyond good and evil.

In a discussion of the Aboriginal community in Redfern during his George Judah Cohen Memorial Lecture for 1972 Dr H. C. Coombs often referred to culture in a way which seemed to give it its work-a-day anthropological meaning of a body of socially transmitted traditions. Consistent with this he went on to imply that these traditions can be lost. Urban Aborigines, he said, are bitter that the white man 'has stolen from them this heritage along with that of the land itself leaving them in a cultural void' (Coombs, 1972:21).

If man may have a culture and may lose a culture then logically there is such a thing as a culture-less state—the state of the people of Redfern. Yet when he speaks of the people of Bourke, so like the people of Redfern in their relation to tribal culture, Dr Coombs says that they have a culture—'the culture of poverty' (1972 : 16).

Does a man moving from Bourke to Redfem relinquish the culture of poverty as he moves into a cultural void? Or is the word culture being used in different senses? Further on we are told that the new and vigorous developments in urban Aboriginal writing, drama, and art are 'cultural developments which bear little relationship to the ceremonially based culture of the tribal Aboriginal' (1972 : 23).

Here there seems to be a mid-way shift of meaning when a proposition about humanistic culture is compared to another about anthropological culture. Or perhaps the speaker himself feels that anthropological culture too is really a matter of art and drama. The phrase 'ceremonially based' suggests such an interpretation.

To compare traditional ceremonies with contemporary drama is to give culture a meaning which is in both cases normative: it denotes special and perhaps unique achievement. To speak of the culture of poverty is to give it a meaning which is descriptive or positivistic: it denotes observable regularities of behaviour and little more. The normative or idealistic sense of culture belongs to the humanistic tradition concerned with qualities to which absolute values can be and are attached.

A deep contradiction

The descriptive or positivist sense of culture belongs to the anthropological tradition concerned with quantities to which only an instrumental and relative value can be attached. The reason it is suspicious that Australians so unanimously approve of culture is that you can't be consistently 'for' culture in both the absolute and the relative senses of the word. It is only possible if the relative sense is suppressed—which in this case is the anthropological meaning according to which culture is only instrumentally good.

The consequences of this suppression are both ethical and practical, for the social goals a man advocates are very much a matter of whether he thinks certain customs good in themselves or good in their consequences. Arguments about Aboriginal policy which employ both meanings interchangeably in successive sentences always end in self-contradiction. If something like the custom of abandoning the house of the deceased is said to be maladaptive the initial response may be that this is indeed so.

Should one then intervene to bring about culture change? Not necessarily, one is told. Then as the implications sink in, one may be told, emphatically not. It soon appears that while one man was talking about culture as a relative value the other was talking about it as something beyond good and evil. In arguments of this sort the attitudes appropriate to the second absolute sense of cultural value are invoked to forestall the practical consequences of the first.

This pattern of intellectual and practical self-contradiction can be studied in a number of contemporary reports beside that of the Gibb Committee. In Socio-Cultural Factors in Health Among the Pitjantjara (Hamilton, 1971) we read that 'it is only by understanding some of the cultural beliefs and practices of the people … that practical methods of improving matters can be found' (P. 1).

This sounds commendably clear: science (understanding the culture) plus technology (practical methods) will lead to progress (improving matters)—a formulation which appears to assume that culture is an adaptive apparatus serving human purposes, and that its standards of service can be improved.

Culture and pathogeny

What then follows is a list of health-impairing activities hard to distinguish from contemporary Pitjantjara culture as a whole, an inventory which is today more pathogenic than not. By any utilitarian criterion this culture defeats the people it should serve. Yet at the end of the report the author recommends a strategy which 'allows the Aborigines to be themselves at least for the present, until they themselves wish to bring about changes' (p. 19).

She is led to this because the idea of culture as good per se contains also the idea that it allows the expression of the individual self, of a man's distinctive and peculiar identity, and this is related to the subjective notion that a culture good in itself should be embodied in the lives of men being themselves.

Thus it is that the practical methods announced at the beginning of the report and waited for with such anticipation through page after page of distressing evidence lead back, inexorably, to the proposition that it is better to be oneself than to be healthy.

The line of thought described above in involves the gradual personalization of culture. This is a process which has as its inevitable result the blurring of traditional distinctions between culture and personality, if not the actual usurpation of culture by personality in the name of 'identity'. And it is because of the ethical implications of this process that culture has been transformed from a means into an end.

As long as it is thought of as external machinery it can be evaluated according to empirical criteria of usefulness or failure. But once it is regarded as an inseparable part of the individual, as an intrinsic feature of his identity, then logic and morality insist that culture be placed beyond the reach of evaluation: for individual men and their feelings are ends in themselves.

The present confusion of meaning has therefore two main sources. One is the language favoured in the corridors of power: from this source comes the vague elision of culture as art and culture as all learned and customary behaviour. The other is the language employed on behalf of the powerless: from this source comes the reductive equation of culture and identity.

Whether or not the confusions of current usage are being deliberately exploited is hard to say, though it seems likely that they will end by making culture, as a term, scientifically meaningless. Increasingly its principal use is in the sort of amiable political parlance which asks no more of a word than that it mean all things to all men.

The likely consequences

If this is the general climate of opinion and attitudes in which policies affecting Aboriginal life are being discussed and formulated, one wonders what lies ahead. Not, one hopes, more research, though the Gibb Committee as usual recommends it. The relevant facts are well known. What is lacking is the capacity to define goals and design policies likely to achieve them.

Present policies lean rather too heavily on hoped-for grammatical solutions in which phrases like 'at the same time' are supposed to reconcile all their contradictions and ill-assorted ideas. A division widens between the culture is good per se school of thinkers and those like Schapper who claim that although an Aborigine may live in a creek bed he cannot, without irony, be said to have chosen to live this way. The question of choice adds an additional twist to the proposition that culture is intrinsically good by asserting that free will is good even when the options are unknown, the resources needed to realize choice are unavailable and the will, inevitably, is both helpless and blind.

In her review of Schapper's Aboriginal Advancement to Integration L. Lippman dismisses his plans for improvement with the remark: 'the only way forward is to listen to what Aborigines want' (Lippman, 1972:236). Few would deny the importance of listening to what Aborigines want, but it would be misleading to suggest that even the most exhaustive list of subjective wants will either comprehend or supersede objective needs.

It seems to me that the effect of the existing contradictions in policy and practice will be to ensure that most cattle station communities in the Northern Territory continue to live much as they do now. If we hold this firmly in mind, putting aside those hallucinatory visions of self-sufficient villages of Aborigines in sandy wildernesses where neither Aborigines nor anyone else can make a go of it, we should be more be more realistically prepared for the outback world of tomorrow.

Coombs, H. C. 1972. The Future of the Australian Aboriginal. University of Sydney.

Hamilton, A. 1971. Socio-Cultural Factors in Health Among the Pitjantjara: A Preliminary Report (Roneo).

Lippmann, L. 1972. Review of Schapper, 1971, Mankind, Vol. 8, No. 3, p. 236.

Schapper, H. P. 1971. Aboriginal Advancement to Integration. Australian National University.