Downunder Denial

Intellectuals and indigenes

Roger Sandall

Australia’s Sorry Day has come and gone. And while more than one opinion about the event is possible, those of us who have watched the nation’s Aboriginal policies for the last forty years will agree there is much to regret.

Back in 1970 I was making a documentary film northwest of Alice Springs. It was about black ‘stockmen’ (or cowboys) living in a desolate stretch of semi-desert that had once been their tribal land, and Coniston Muster strongly suggested that this land was their land, that it always had been, and that to rescue them from impoverished lives in wretched iron shacks their land should be now returned. Then they could run cattle and raise beef for themselves.

This was dishonest. Well before the film was in the can it was clear that running an Australian ‘cattle station’ (or ranch) was not just a matter of riding horses. It required reading, writing, and numeracy, and without these things the resident Aborigines would always depend on the white owner who, at roundup time at Coniston Station, briefly appeared to count the livestock, load them onto trucks, and send them to market. On its own, just handing back the land would achieve little. (For a wider discussion see Pastoral Romance and Indigenous Realities.)

There were other problems too. One night a young Aboriginal man came to my camper van and knocked on the door. He needed something because of the pain, and kept repeating the words “Ian Jackson”. There was no-one called Ian Jackson anywhere I knew so I asked him to come in and tell me more, but he wouldn’t—or couldn’t because of his discomfort. I felt bad: I probably said sorry.

Then the man went off into the darkness, driving his old truck over the sandy track to Mount Denison, and as I lay awake that night I realized he was trying to say “injection”. He needed antibiotics. I never saw him again.

The ‘stolen children’ report

At the time I felt sorry about Aboriginal education—or the lack of it—and still do. I feel sorrier still about the state of Aboriginal health. Most of all I feel sorry that in the nearly forty years since I made Coniston Muster things have got steadily worse. Health is worse. Alcoholism is worse. Literacy is worse. And some communities are plainly beyond repair.

But surprising though it may seem, that’s not why Australians were apologizing last February. That’s not what Sorry Day was about. This highly emotional event had little to do with the deplorable conditions prevailing in remote Aboriginal settlements today—the disease, the disorder, the crime.

Instead the nation was looking ruefully back into the past and apologizing for certain welfare policies between 1910 and 1970, a period when Aboriginal children were sometimes removed from their homes and parents for what was believed to be their own wellbeing, were taken elsewhere to be fostered or adopted, and were ‘brought up white’.

Excoriated in the 1997 government report Bringing Them Home, held up to public scorn in the film Rabbit Proof Fence, constantly denounced in the domestic media by those anxious for “reconciliation”, this policy had come to be seen as nothing less than a national scandal. And nothing less than a national apology could redeem Australia’s good name.

Bringing Them Home usefully brought to light a number of injustices, foolish mistakes, and unacceptable practices. Some children were both physically brutalised and sexually abused. Some may have been scarred for life. But the report was also highly tendentious, omitting, distorting, and going to extraordinary lengths to slur and denigrate those associated with the removal program.

Its critics pointed out that various forms of separation—some voluntary—were all described in the report as “forcible removal.” Highly emotional witness memories of distant events were not checked against existing documentary evidence. Candid descriptions of the circumstances justifying removal were suppressed; criminal behavior by those juveniles removed (or by their mothers) were unrecorded; those whose experiences of fostering were benign went largely unrepresented; and although it contained some tragic and moving statements by witnesses, on a range of important matters it failed to present any numerical summary data. Most provocatively, and absurdly, the report concluded that the removal policy constituted "genocide".

* * *

The Zeitgeist however proved more powerful than any criticism; reconciliation was deemed essential; and only a national apology could achieve that end. By the time a new Labor government had approved and ordained Australia’s Sorry Day in February 2008 it was clear that in the minds of the nation’s urban intelligentsia, nothing—absolutely nothing—was more despicable than removing Aboriginal children from even the worst domestic setting and sending them elsewhere to be educated, trained, and equipped for modern life.

Yet it seems some Aborigines today disagree. Even as the nation was getting to its feet after Sorry Day—even as it was still rising from its knees—the Sydney Morning Herald, the most widely read serious paper in the land, ran a major feature about a community in Queensland with the headline "We Need to Get the Children Out of Here". On the front page of the issue for March 14, 2008, readers learnt that tribal elders at a place called Aurukun “are calling for children to be removed in the face of a comprehensive breakdown of social norms.” (The full article is provided in the Appendix below.)

Intellectual confusion

What explains this contradiction? And why does the realistic suggestion that indigenes break free from the sociopathic settlements where many of them are now trapped, and energetically seek new lives elsewhere, sound so shocking to educated Australians—so offensive to their most deeply held beliefs, so downright sacrilegious?

How can a national apology for removing Aboriginal children, in February, be so speedily followed in March by a request from outback Aborigines themselves—a plea given great prominence in the country’s leading paper—that their children should for their own safety be taken from their home communities and educated elsewhere? How can Aboriginal realities (“We need to get the children out of here”) be so deeply misunderstood by white bien pensants?

Beyond this is the matter of denial. How is it that at the very time when nothing remotely resembling traditional Aboriginal culture any longer exists at places like Aurukun, where the community has fallen into a cesspit of mutually reinforcing pathologies, the Australian intelligentsia adheres to a vision of indigenous culture that exists—if it exists at all—largely in the metaphysical realm?

* * *

The answers to these questions (and they are answers that would certainly have interested Marx) lie in an intractable ideology widely shared by those on the white and urban side of the racial divide—a hodgepodge of notions as intellectually confused and politically paralysing as anything to be found anywhere today.

The first involves the eschatology of the old millenarian Left. By the 1960s it finally sunk in that the proletariat had failed its historic mission and that revolution was off the agenda. For true believers (and Australia still has many) this was like announcing that Jesus had cancelled the Second Coming and that Heaven itself was in doubt. A gloomy black hole opened in the moral and emotional life of the socialist faithful.

What could fill it? Who could replace the “workers”? Where was there another social group that could be idealised as simultaneously virtuous, deserving, communal, and oppressed? The answer was obvious. In these fateful circumstances Aborigines inherited the sentimental hopes of many of the Australian Left. This was an awesome responsibility: from the 1960s on, lots of political emotion became involved in Aboriginal affairs for reasons having little to do with the actual lives or needs of indigenes themselves.

Soon our trendier middle classes came to share this vision. They’d always found the working class culture of the old Labor Party unappealing, with its Unions and beer and football and greasy chips. On bush excursions in their sparkling new SUVs, with exciting images of Crocodile Dundee in their minds, middle class liberationists felt hunting and gathering au naturel might be more their thing.

* * *

There was something else too. For all their passionate intensity, Australian intellectuals are alas not uniformly bright, and in the 1970s they got themselves in a muddle. Two new cults had appeared—the cult of authenticity and the cult of ethnicity—and they couldn’t decide which shrine to worship at. Both enthusiasms were similar (each valued freedom and self-realization) but there were also differences our thinkers somehow missed.

The cult of personal authenticity authorised “doing your own thing” as an end in itself—and this soon attracted followers. It favored self-expressing egos embarked on voyages of self-discovery; and when each voyage was complete, and each spirit purified, a new and more authentic identity was supposed to appear. Suddenly people were searching for themselves all over the place—in ashrams in India, in Katmandu, in rural communes, and last but not least among Aborigines themselves.

As far as the intellectuals could see, the cult of ethnicity meant much the same thing. It exalted cultural authenticity as an end in itself—once again something to be pursued for its own sake come what may. Aborigines wouldn’t need to read or write or learn modern skills. Doing their own thing on their own patch would suffice. As a political goal for indigenes, the cult of cultural authenticity would supposedly lead to self-determining ethnic collectivities freely expressing themselves in noble isolation from an uncaring world—fully supported by the state if need be.

For lots of people these goals—the personal and the collective—were somewhat frivolously seen as “lifestyle choices”, and the consequences of muddling them together were never understood. Though perhaps they should have been: the personal hazards of the cult of authenticity are well known, and for the scions of the plutocracy in the 1970s they not uncommonly ended in tears. With more money than sense, and inclined to drugs and drink, their “own thing” could leave them dead in a week.

But what were the consequences for communal life at the bottom of the social scale? In situations where people had more welfare money than sense, unlimited alcohol, and nothing to do? What happened when Australian government agencies responsible for indigenes were staffed with people who believed that learning English and acquiring employable skills was unimportant, and who advised even the most desperately sick Aboriginal communities to relax and do their own thing too? What resulted, finally, when preserving “cultural identity” superseded all other considerations—health, literacy, moral order, sanity itself?

Needless to say the outcome was downright calamitous. For large numbers of outback indigenes whose traditional culture was in ruins, the recommendation that they should cling to those ruins whatever the consequences—“my culture, right or wrong”—had led by the year 2000 to previously unimagined levels of degradation and despair.

* * *

Finally there’s the intriguing fact that Australians are probably the world’s last great romantic fantasists. As such they believe in a dogma enshrined in a mystique. This holds that People, Land, and Culture are three sacred aspects of a single thing—ethnic identity. Supposedly indivisible in the past, People, Land, and Culture are expected to be indivisible for ever and ever, with every man and woman and child speaking their own language and doing their own tribal thing for… Well, would a thousand years be too long?

It is curious, therefore, since they like nothing better than solemn allusions to the Holocaust, that it seems never to have occurred to the nation’s leading academic commentators that an indivisible unity of One People (Volk), One Land (Reich), and One Culture (Kultur) sounds uncomfortably familiar. Anyway, what we see in our Great South Land suggestively resembles the spectacle of a historical European tragedy naively replayed as antipodean farce.

Serious changes are needed

But wait a minute… On second thoughts let me amend that. It is correct to describe the campus world in terms of comedy: the academic intelligentsia’s aversion to reality is truly a joke. But for the diseased and stricken Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia’s outback communities the result of these ideological fixations has been in the fullest sense a tragedy—one that has set them back fifty years.

In order to realise the goal of cultural apartheid, an enthusiastic army of thousands of people worked tirelessly to secure vast tracts of land for Aborigines to live on, and to settle them in desolate corners of deserts and bush-covered wastes, despite the hopelessness of those situations and the known absence of anything to do but drink. No wonder everything collapsed in a social, moral, and medical morass. Such an existence kills body and soul.

* * *

No, there’s no future in that whatever—and in fact there never was. The best chance of a good life for indigenes in Australia is to clear out of those sinkholes of despair, get educated, learn proper English, do your sums, and join the modern world. How best to accomplish this is a huge challenge. But it must be done.

Come to think of it, that’s what might have saved the young man who came to me forty years ago for antibiotics. What he needed was not a quasi-theatrical event in Canberra, with a ritualised display of complaint and apology enacted before weary citizens who only want to move on. What he needed were the language skills and commercial understanding that would have helped make his small trucking business a success.

Would an apologetic “sorry” thrown after him into the night have helped? I don’t think so. His real need was an ability to deal with the practicalities of the modern world. That’s what Aboriginal communities have needed for many years; that’s what they still need today. Only when they can cope with modern life will there be a change for the better.

But if there’s no change after the grand gesture of Sorry Day—no change a year from now, or in ten years, or another forty… Australia is going to be very sorry indeed.

[For an early prediction about the future ahead for outback Aborigines and the effects of social policy, see my 1973 Aborigines, Cattle Stations, and Culture. The later 2004 article Pastoral Romance and Indigenous Realities takes up similar themes.]

Appendix

We need to get the children out of here

By John van Tiggelen

[Feature article on front page of the Sydney Morning Herald for March 14 2008]

Elders from a Far North Queensland community are calling for children to be removed in the face of a comprehensive breakdown of social norms.

Several members of Aurukun's community justice group, led by Martha Koowarta, widow of a local land rights hero, are urging outsiders to take children from age nine from the community for their safety and education.

Justice, education and child safety standards in Aurukun, Cape York, have collapsed. Last financial year, 763 defendants—including repeat offenders—from the 1000-strong township faced the circuit court.

"We need to get the children out of here, especially the girls, because it is not safe," Ms Koowarta said.

"Closing the school [in favour of boarding schools] is a good idea. So that when they come back from the city, they can talk and read English as well as Wik Mungkan (Aurukun’s lingua franca).

"I was put in a mission dormitory when I was eight, nine. I cried for two nights; then I was right with the rest of those kids. We weren't stolen; our family was there. It was a good system. Or a better system than now. At least my generation learnt to read and write properly."

Jonathon Korkaktain, an Aurukun shire councillor, said his community had been abandoned "to run itself into a hole". Mr Korkaktain would like to see all Aurukun children, except those with special needs, educated in outside schools from the age of nine so they learnt to have "one foot in both worlds".

He proposes the school's senior year levels be closed, ideally from grade 5, with all children sent to boarding schools around the state, returning to Aurukun for holidays and, eventually, real jobs. "Shortly there will be a [bauxite] mine here, with lots of opportunities, but right now our kids can't grab them."

Elders say life in Aurukun has deteriorated so much that many see jail as an escape. Recidivism rates for teenage boys run at 90 per cent, some having served up to eight terms for offences from stealing cars to assault by the time they are 15. Close to a tenth of the community's adults and teenagers are either on parole, a suspended sentence or community service orders, but the latter are rarely enforced. Another tenth is revolving through jail or juvenile detention.

One in three children are not enrolled at the school, which notionally teaches to year 10 level. Of those who are, they attend two days a week on average. Nine in 10 children do not turn up on a Friday, regarded by most parents as a holiday set aside for gambling the week's "sweat money" (work-for-the-dole payments) and "child money" (family tax benefits).

Aurukun was the focus of nationwide outrage last year when a judge declined to send three men and six boys to jail for the statutory rape of a 10-year-old girl because she "probably" agreed to sex. The sentences are under appeal.

A former teacher, Paula Shaw, taught up to six of the nine men and boys. "These were kids who, if you added up all the days they'd been in school, they'd have one, two, maybe three years of school behind them," she said.

"They couldn't read or write. I had year 8 kids who couldn't speak English, who needed local teacher aides to translate what I was saying into Wik Mungkan."

There have been two alcohol-driven street riots this year, involving 50 people or more armed with iron bars, knives and hammers, on top of three last year. The past week has seen an influx of sly grog (illicit liquor) by sea, a stabbing, nightly assaults and the near-sacking of the chief executive officer for his efforts to apply general administrative standards to council business.

Tomorrow's local government election is largely being fought over the community's "right to drink" in the face of recent restrictions on the serving of alcohol at the local tavern by the Liquor Licensing Board.

Aurukun is one of four Cape York pilot communities taking part in Noel Pearson's Cape York Institute's welfare reform project. The crux of the reforms, the establishment of a local Family Responsibilities Commission, was passed in Queensland Parliament this week.

From July 1, parents who neglect, abuse or fail to send their children to school can be brought before the commission, made up of a legal figure and community elders. The commission can censure and direct them to support services, but its teeth will be its powers to quarantine welfare income for rent and food, or to sequester money for responsible others to look after the children.

Mr Korkaktain thinks it is a "bloody good idea", but doubts it can work in Aurukun.

"Our people are too lazy to work with the people who want to work with us," he said.

"But it is not too late for the younger ones."

Martha Koowarta, whose shell of a home houses up to 11 people, fears elders no longer have the respect required for such a commission to function.

April 2008