Pastoral Romance and Indigenous Realities

by Roger Sandall

Quadrant,July 2004

Great pictures

The pictures are splendid—handsome Aboriginal stockmen at Victoria River Downs in the 1940s, riders with neckerchiefs and their boots braced in the stirrups. Nearby other men with big Akubras squat on the dusty ground, strong faces, strong veined hands, while a third page shows a team at a bronco panel toppling a steer.

Paul Toohey himself probably had nothing to do with the sepia and silver tinting used to give these images an antique look in his article in The Weekend Australian Magazine for May 31-June 1 2003. But the self-conscious archaising is appropriate. What his article invites us to believe is that Phar Lap Dixon and friends, men who “plan to fence and stock their own land with cattle” and who “have waited too long for everyone from God to governments to deliver them from their problems” will be able to re-enact a pastoral era that has largely past.

Phar Lap looks to be approaching 70. A small picture of him is inserted into the old sepia photograph from sixty years ago on the title page. Together—like the article itself—they are meant to suggest, by imaginative confabulation, that yesterday's working cattle station and today's re-enactment both exist on the same plane of economic reality.

The writer knows our sympathy for the project is assured—though it’s going to be a struggle of course. Dixon and his mates will have to battle “two entrenched views” says Toohey, the first being “that all blackfellas are lazy”, the second being “that all Aborigines are instinctive communists who insist that a killed kangaroo be divided among a huge extended family; that no-one can make a move or a decision unless the whole tribe is included.” The author gets cagey here and doesn’t say whether he thinks this is rubbish or not, relying on overstatement to make his point.

As for the all-important question of managerial independence, he hopes that although formerly they “never managed themselves without some whitefella boss”, Phar Lap Dixon’s mob will make a new departure. Three parties can be seen to collude in this kind of optimistic aspirational text: first the journalist; second, a large well-wishing southern readership desperate to believe there’s a way for outback Aborigines to break free of booze and welfare; third, the black stockmen themselves. Together they feel that by invoking the Murranji Track, the Gurindji Strike, and a few lines from Ernestine Hill, we’ll go along for the ride.

We all did it

Though perhaps I shouldn’t be too hard on Mr Toohey: I did much the same thing myself thirty years ago. My 1970 film Coniston Muster has nothing at all to say about managerial practicalities, capabilities, or costs. It’s a cameraman’s film and mostly about riding dangerously through mulga, about rounding up scrub bulls, about branding and marking with the mass of Mt Leichardt rising up in blue splendour beyond. Admittedly the interviews suggest a darker side. The head stockman has been blinded in one eye by a splinter of mulga. He says he was “too busy” to do anything about it at the time, and we get a brief glimpse of the hardships of station life.

A muffled resentment emerges when notions of land ownership are discussed and the tribal rights of the Anmatjera are claimed. But my overall formula is scarcely distinguishable from Toohey’s piece in The Australian: Aboriginal pastoral enterprises in northern Australia are places where horses, cattle, and windmills arrange themselves picturesquely across a wide brown land, and black stockmen are proper and natural features of the scene. They belong there as much by historic right as by economic necessity. As for the unavoidable role of the white manager directing this theatre backstage—because of course there always has to be somebody who can read and write and keep the books—the less said about that the better. Which is pretty much what I did too.

A third version of this sort of thing can be seen in the R. M. Williams journal Outback. In the issue for October-November 2003 we read about Delta Downs, “a special kind of home” where the Kurtijar people have a cattle property in the Gulf Country 88km north of Normanton. This time the pictures are up-to-date. The usual mustering scene shows tawny grass and ant-hills and a mob of red Brahmans moving slowly along, but over the page are stockmen with baseball caps and heavy shades.

Managerial matters

Writer Fiona Lake also sounds a more realistic note when it comes to managerial matters. We see that running a cattle station involves rather more than Toohey’s “boys who have pastoral skills, have done some fencing and have some cattle and horse knowledge”. Many of Outback’s readers know quite a bit about profit and loss, and Ms Lake takes us through the organizational maze of the Kurtijar Land Trust and its 14 clans, an intermediary called Rural Management Partners, and the Morr Morr Pastoral Company to whom the Kurtijar Land Trust leases land which is then run “purely along business lines”.

There’s even a picture of the white manager at Delta Downs, John Geddes, a man surrounded by records, files, telephones, and computers, looking plugged into the outside world. Such a look is not necessarily an advantage in a magazine embodying the muscular pastoral mystique: it suggests something clerical. But it is a decided advance on the previous two examples above, neither of which dare suggest why the “whitefella boss” is indispensable. If we think of the entire enterprise in quasi-theatrical terms, then here for a brief moment we catch a glimpse of the ever-present stage director behind the scenes. Of course it’s only a small picture on page four, Outback’s priority being spacious visions of men and steers and sky.

“They really are natural stockmen and natural horsemen” says Geddes of the employees on Delta Downs, nearly all of them Kurtijar. “We get young fellas out here and they really do take to it pretty quickly. They’ve got their own ways of doings things and they get through the work. And they’re happy all the time. The blokes here just love their horses and cattle, and they love going out on camp.”

One reason they love going out on camp is the chance to get bush tucker, and they especially look forward to shifting cattle to Alligator Yards where mustering along the Gilbert River means a good feed of longneck turtles. Who of us wouldn’t enjoy such a life? I’m sure I would. And the overall picture presented could hardly be more benign: no grog, no violence, no educational problems—neither schools nor schooling nor literacy are mentioned in six pages of illustrated text—no problem of getting jobs done, and done properly, and on time. At Delta Downs it’s all about fat cows in well-watered pastures with everyone doing just fine.

Indigenous realities

This however is far from typical, and if the drift of my broader argument about romantic pastoralism is to be understood then another and unhappier picture must be shown. Yugul, an Arnhem Land Cattle Station (1982) is described by its author as “a study of the formation and collapse of the Yugul Cattle Company, an Aboriginal-owned pastoral company set up at Ngukurr in south-eastern Arnhem Land.” And though it was published twenty years ago much of the situation it depicts is little changed.

After writing this report Steven Thiele became disheartened by what he had seen and chose to quit the field of Aboriginal research. In a personal communication he says that settlements like the one he studied on the Roper River are

“places of great tragedy and human destruction, yet the book I wrote hardly touched on this, and I deeply regret my inability to explain the complex of forces at work that tear the human inhabitants to pieces—this is still a story to be told. Every initiative undertaken on settlements is opposed or undermined, openly, surreptitiously, or unknowingly, by a range of counter-tendencies. Of course, not many people want to hear about this, especially academics and government officials, but also those who live on settlements themselves.”

The underlying economic reasons for the failure of the Yugul Cattle Company are not my main concern, but like many other ill-fated endeavours in the Territory they include remoteness, difficulty of access, and unsuitable land. Beside these factors Thiele says the main cause of the company’s collapse was the absence of any traditional Aboriginal social structure, or new structure of their own devising, capable of exercising modern, effective, settlement-wide authority and control.

From about 1910 the Church Missionary Society had run everything, and up until 1968 the administrative authority of the CMS dominated local political life. During this period the system of highly segmented and competitive clan politics was superseded, suppressed, and in abeyance. Then in July 1968 the CMS left, and direct European control of the settlement came to an end.

The resulting change was dramatic, for the conflict between old-time Aboriginal political arrangements and modern organization was soon exposed. Thiele writes that “when European control is relinquished, the remaining traditional allegiances and authority structures, even if very weak, come to the fore . . .” At Ngukurr the earlier tribal alliances resurfaced “to undermine any attempts to set up and legitimize settlement-wide organizations” and fatally jeopardized the running of the cattle station.

Faction in the community

What politicians in Canberra blithely call “the community”, fondly imagining shared interests and common aims, was riddled by faction, clan rivalry, and personal animosities. In fact it had been largely the presence of its former white administrators which prevented these tendencies from tearing the place apart. In addition, the men who actually knew anything about stock work were old. The young men had little experience of working with cattle and although they all dressed as stockmen they had no serious interest in learning the trade and no stomach for its hours and hardships.

As usual, the hope of eventually escaping from white supervision was a leading motive for the Aborigines setting up their cattle company, but they had difficulty organizing work:

Few Aborigines at Ngukurr had authority or power to allocate tasks or to sanction workers who did not perform their tasks. The result was that work was usually carried out in a haphazard and inefficient manner, a point which the Aborigines realized.

Their inability to organize and delegate authority was a source of great frustration and annoyance to them. Many had worked on European-owned cattle stations and wanted to operate the Yugul Cattle Company in a similar fashion. While they were pleased that direct European control of Ngukurr was being rapidly phased out, they could not easily take control of the settlement since a legacy of that direct control was the absence of appropriate Aboriginal authority structures.

The leading men who took the initiative in establishing the Yugul Cattle Company understood what was needed and worked hard. Their contributions were positive, their commitment clear, and their personal sacrifices great. But however hard they worked there were others who didn’t, and who spent much of their energy challenging, subverting, or distracting those nominally in charge—who in turn lacked the authority to fire them.

Too many men were engaged, too little work was done, good horses were ridden into the ground instead of spelled, while mustering was cursory and often casually set aside for other things. A case can be made that the European management of the cattle station was deficient in several ways (a white manager was there throughout), but it is hard to see that this did more than aggravate a wide range of misunderstandings, unhelpful behaviour, and self-defeating conflicts among the people themselves.

The main rationale

Ultimately, the main rationale for the project was non-economic. It had to do with jobs and morale. The Yugul Cattle Company was launched because some of the older men back in the 1970s had worked in the pastoral industry and yearned for a period in their lives when they still had something useful to do; because re-enacting the old days might help them rediscover an identity they valued and sorely missed; and because even though the young men had no serious interest, “stockwork had a glamorous appeal, for the image of a well-dressed stockman riding a high spirited horse was a most attractive one”, while “many aspects of station life, especially dress and music”, had long been valued by the people as a whole.

That those involved in the project “neither understood, nor did they often even know about, the financial, organizational and cultural factors underlying the operations of a cattle enterprise” was not regarded as important.

That was then. This is now. Over twenty years have passed since Thiele wrote about the fate of the Yugul Cattle Company in 1980. What is the situation today? It seems the people he wrote about still entertain hopes of collectively running cattle, and by a happy coincidence a new feasibility study exists. Senior author Don Fuller, Head of the School of Business Economics at Flinders University, is someone who knows the north, who clearly regards the improvement of Aboriginal life there as a personal mission, and I am grateful to him for allowing me to profit from his team’s research.

The SWOT analysis it produced (examining strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats) provides much valuable detail. But though optimistic in foreseeing substantial revenues down the track, the usual cultural/educational gap casts a long shadow over this projection: “When coupled with a lack of financial and managerial training, Indigenous Australians have found it particularly difficult to value the economic concepts central to a market based system, such as saving, investment, capital accumulation and profit” . . . Higher levels of “Indigenous human capital investment in the skills associated with developing, operating and managing small businesses” are required.

Clan loyalties still seriously jeopardize effective work: “The enterprise could benefit by having two or three experienced Aboriginal and/or European workers from outside the community and from outside the clan.” But the man most likely to have managerial responsibilities is standing firm: he has said that his clansmen cannot be dismissed despite the fact that there aren’t enough of them to do their work properly, efficiently, or on time.

Confabulation

In psychiatry the term confabulation describes a condition where past and present, fact and fiction, are imaginatively confused. According to one account “the patient misconstrues an actual event in his or her life or creates a wholly fictitious narrative about life, in which they play the starring role in another identity.”

In many cases the cause is neurological, usually in the form of accidental damage to the patient’s frontal lobes. Broken heads produce broken selves in which bits and pieces of the past, some recollected, some dreamed or fantasized, are patched together to construct or fabricate a coherent identity with a meaningful place in the world. Todd E. Feinberg writes in Altered Egos that

“Under conditions of stress and disorganization, anomie, alienation, estrangement, and depersonalization caused by the catastrophic situation of brain dysfunction, the narrative produced by confabulation as an explanation for the current situation takes on a greater reality than the actual circumstances in which the patients find themselves.”

It is much the same with society. Broken cultures therapeutically confabulate, mythologise former ways of life, and fight off meaninglessness by shoring up crumbling identities. Something like this, perhaps, underlies the periodic attempts to revive cattle stations in the ruined and dysfunctional communities of the north. But the general phenomenon is familiar globally, because rural traditions underlie the traditional forms of life we all have lost.

The cabin on the prairie swept aside by combine harvesters, the Indian village potter displaced into the slums of Bombay, the craftsmen depicted in George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop—even the farmers of the EU whose political leverage perpetuates an agriculture impossible to economically defend—are all aspects of a single and continuing evolutionary process.

The pathos of rural life

Unlike industrial obsolescence, the decline and eclipse of country life is saturated with pathos: fed by the western imagination for centuries, its literary sources reach back to Virgil and beyond. Resolutely committed to living in the past, pastoral romance is a tradition to which both Paul Toohey’s article about Phar Lap Dixon and my own little 1970 film might be seen as trivial footnotes.

Nowhere is the pathos of this tradition felt more keenly than in the post-colonial world. There the displacement of tribal peoples gave a huge emotional push to romantic primitivism—the idealizing of the harsh and unforgiving world of the hunters who had been swept aside, a sentimental transfiguration which for Australia’s urban middle classes is perhaps the greatest single impediment to understanding Aboriginal life today.

And in both Australia and the USA the equally popular cult of romantic pastoralism may be seen as a sentimental variation on a similar theme. Psychologically, both are symptoms of modernization and its discontents. Each look back to a preindustrial era when a man’s best friend was his horse—or some other mute witness to lonely pioneering days.

As for scores of Aboriginal communities across the north, from the Gulf to the Kimberleys, cattle work long ago displaced hunting and gathering as the way of life most familiar to them, the activity which gave life purpose day by day, and the one which provided Aboriginal men with a modern—and masculine—identity. Is it any wonder that they too feel nostalgic about the world they have lost?

Certainly white pastoral families do. In the modern era of instant histrionic reprise some rural activities have barely faded from the scene before being turned into Disneyland scripts for re-enactment, a striking example in 2002 being the Great Outback Cattle Drive. This touristic adventure saw 600 head of cattle moved from Birdsville to Marree on a drive lasting six weeks. About a thousand riders took part in an equestrian saga involving 80 staff, 170 horses, water trucks, transported firewood, portable showers and toilets, a doctor, several cooks, an attendant plane to fly out injuries, and three concerts where Lee Kernaghan, Slim Dusty and John Williamson performed.

According to the organizer “They all had the time of their lives”. But nostalgic mimesis of this kind can be a bit misleading. This is droving with all the nasties removed—no eyes blinded by twigs of mulga, no cattle rush at 3.00am which takes out the stock camp as it crashes through, no broken legs far from medical help, and with a squad of professional cooks you can be sure that dinner was more than damper and golden syrup. And then of course there’s the weather:

"If wet weather comes on and timber of the right sort is not handy for cutting then things become very awkward. Wet weather while droving can be bad enough with well-rigged tents, but without that its hardships are indescribable. Every man gets either wet through or very nearly so while doing his watch, and comes off watch with feet and fingers numbed with cold. If there is a good tent where he can change into dry clothes and roll into dry blankets then that is a big help, but there is nothing worse than to come into a sagging tent rigged on leather surcingles between two trees with everything wet." (H. M. Barker in Glen McLaren’s Big Mobs)

The theatrical imagination

Historically, the theatrical imagination has often come to the creative assistance of romantic pastoralism, and while the Great Outback Cattle Drive represents this in a dynamic and active form, more contemplative versions have been around for centuries. The English aristocracy with their great houses and great parks arranged ornamental herds of livestock in attractive settings of oaks and elms, all of them safely beyond the “ha-ha” which provided the structural equivalent of the proscenium arch.

If this form of pastoral theatre has long been available to the white world’s Higher Leisure Class, the Sackvilles and their like, why shouldn’t our Lower Leisure Class of unemployed Aborigines play games with the pastoral mystique too? Not all confabulation is dysfunctional—or so at least it might be argued. If the result tends to resemble a kind of publicly financed dude ranch in the Never-Never more than a going concern, does it really matter? It’s their land: 15.7 percent of the Australian continent and nearly half the 90-odd pastoral properties in the Kimberley is soon expected to be under Indigenous ownership, management, or control.

Shouldn’t we encourage all and every activity which breaks the cycle of booze and mayhem? And in these far locations what other useful work do they have to do? Granted that prettily tinted old album pictures from Victoria River Downs in 1940 are unlikely to provide a realistic economic scenario for 2003, don’t we nonetheless owe it to them to support this make-believe?

Indigenous welfare estates

There are two possible answers to this. First, if it is clearly understood that this isn’t for real and never will be, and all the implications are fully digested, then fine. It’s therapeutic theatre, taking place on what might best be called Indigenous Welfare Estates—and everyone knows that theatre is a world of make-believe. If on the other hand it is meant to seriously propose a way of life in the modern world, then we have to candidly face a number of things. A measureless human tragedy has been unfolding in northern Australia for thirty years, and at its centre is the crisis in black education. Without fixing this there’s no chance of fixing the rest, and the “whitefella boss” will always have to be there.

The kindest service to Australia’s northern Aborigines which journalists of any seriousness writing for weekend papers can do is to avoid encouraging still more false hopes, especially among the well-intentioned southern middle-classes who read their stuff; and the notion that anyone can find a place in today’s Australia—on or off a cattle station—without literacy, numeracy, and a full mastery of English is simply untrue.

So is the assumption that plant, vehicles, and buildings can be maintained without personal responsibility being taken for their condition and repair. So is the belief that clan nepotism may safely be allowed to override responsible management. So is the idea that an unresisting enthusiasm for communal obligations is compatible with modern enterprise.

It is all very well to show us Phar Lap Dixon and his mates in the context of pictures from Victoria River Downs over sixty years ago. But this is not 1940, and what we want to know is whether the next generation can move a step nearer the autonomy and responsible self-management always used politically to justify such ventures. These are matters Paul Toohey might perhaps usefully look at in a follow-up article about Phar Lap Dixon’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren in 2004. How will they be doing then? We would like to know.