In Bluebeard’s Castles

Life and death on the reservation

Roger Sandall

Ten Canoes is a new Australian film everyone should see. Rarely has the mystical unity of Aboriginal land and culture and people been so persuasively portrayed. An award-winner at Cannes, directed by Rolf de Heer, and acted by men, women, and children in Arnhem Land, it’s a Dreamtime vision of Aboriginal life—hunting geese and gathering eggs, using bark canoes to navigate the northern swamps, camping in trees, laughing and joking, pairing and separating, all of this governed by clearly understood moral rules.

Nanette Rogers’ report from central Australia is something else. It is a report everyone should read, and presents a rather different picture. The Crown Prosecutor in Alice Springs, she describes the raping of infants by grown men while their mothers were too drunk to understand, babies sired on barely pubertal girls by their own fathers, and a girl, playing in a river, who is attacked by a deranged petrol-sniffing 18-year-old and simultaneously held under water and raped and drowned while her playmates watch—all of it governed by no moral rules whatever. (A full transcript of the ABC program about this report is provided as an Appendix below.)

The film Ten Canoes, or so it seems to me, is a truthful depiction of the old way of life at its best. The Crown Prosecutor’s evidence, as presented publicly in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Nightline television program last May, seems to me a truthful account of many Aboriginal reservations today—and of life at its worst. One might think that the testimony of Ms Rogers was an exceptional report about an exceptional situation, but apparently this isn’t so. In today’s Australian (September 18, 2006), 12 deaths at another reserve are reported where “the severed head of one victim, 30-year-old Elizabeth Badenock, was reportedly dragged by a dog through the township.”

People reading about the Nazi period in Germany often wonder how the most cultured nation in Europe could fall so low. But we might just as well ask how Aboriginal life has come to this, in 2006, in a humane democracy like Australia. Is there a perverse and deluded theory of social order, and of the moral requirements of Aboriginal life specifically, that explains why Australians are both paralysed by these horrors and quite unable to move on? Can there be a semi-official theory about Aborigines, land, and culture, along with a fixation on the past, that makes it difficult for policy-makers to conceive of necessary change?

Canadian parallels

This topic is so fraught that it might help if we approached it obliquely. So here’s a view from another country unlucky enough to have reservations of its own. On August 8^th the Canadian writer John Ibbitson made an unusual plea in the Toronto Globe and Mail. He was addressing Canada’s Indian Indigenes.

“If you’re an Indian in your 20s living on a reserve, you need to leave right now.

Pack your bags, say goodbye to your family and friends and get out of there. Move to Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal. Find a job, any job, then get yourself back in school.

This is the only chance you have to rescue what is about to become your wasted life.”

Ibbitson had been reading a study from a think tank called the Caledon Institute comparing the educational levels of Canadian Indians living on reserves with those living off them. The author found that while prospects for young Indians living off reserves have improved considerably in recent years, “the situation for those on reserves hasn’t improved at all.” In the Canadian population as a whole only 16 per cent of Canadians between 20 and 24 have failed to finish high school. For Indians living on reserves nearly 60 per cent have failed to finish.

Away from the reserve, young Indians have almost twice the high-school completion rates, and while their income is lower than that of the general population, in Toronto it is 80 per cent, and that’s better than the figure for recent immigrants to Canada. Ibbitson concluded his column with the following words:

It’s a big risk to leave a reserve, move to the city and start life all over again. Aboriginal urban poverty is a large problem, and anyone who has tried to get an education while holding down a job knows how tough that challenge is.

But for the great majority of young Indians living on a reserve, leaving is the only realistic choice. The state has failed them, the community has failed them, their parents have failed them, and (if they stay there) they will only fail themselves.

An unholy sociological trinity

Now a lot of what Ibbitson says about aboriginal Canadians on reservations broadly applies to aboriginal Australians living on reserves. Not everything—but a lot. For the majority of Australia’s Aborigines, living in the poisonous sinks of depravity that some of these places have become, leaving is also the only realistic choice. Especially if you are a woman. But what interests me most is why the natural and sensible suggestion “pack your bags, leave the reservation right now, don’t wait”, will sound so embarrassing and offensive to many Australian ears. If it’s “unheard of” (and I have certainly never heard it suggested locally) what is it that Australians do not want to hear?

To make sense of this one needs to confront a dogma enshrined in a mystique. The dogma is one I shall call the “unholy trinity”. This states that People, Land, and Culture are three sacred aspects of a single thing—ethnic identity—and that they are One and Indivisible. It is a rigidly static dogma holding that people, land, and culture were one and indivisible in the past, are one and indivisible today, and shall be one and indivisible forever. Otherwise, it is said, a people’s “identity” will inevitably crumble away. The enshrining mystique (embodied in Rolf de Heer’s film) powerfully suggests that this applies above all and uniquely to Australia’s Aboriginal people, thus ensuring that the dogma is never questioned. Most Australians complacently assume that it doesn’t apply to themselves. But in ethnic affairs this is regarded as deep wisdom—there is no deeper wisdom.

Not only are all Australian Aborigines encouraged to believe it, it goes without saying that every anthropologist, and every member of every movement concerned with cultural survival and the welfare of Indigenes also believes it. An entire industry staffed with thousands of people is devoted to securing vast tracts of land for tribal Aborigines to live on, and placing them in desolate corners of arid deserts and bush-covered wastes, despite the hopelessness of their condition and the known absence of anything whatever for them to do.

But perhaps you can see why John Ibbitson’s call to “pack your bags and get off the reservation now” would be offensive: it threatens the deepest assumption of present policy, and one in which the whole nation has a deep investment—the assumption that a people and its “country” are inseparable, that a defined tract of land is “home”, and that it always should be.

Let us move on to the next item—that a people and its culture are just as inseparable. Ibbitson’s call is equally threatening here too. “Move to Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal. Find a job, any job, then get yourself back in school. This is the only chance you have to rescue what is about to become your wasted life.” Transposing this to Australia this would mean recommending that the girl who is bound sooner or later to be raped, the youth whose destiny is petrol-sniffing and an early grave, should decide to put this miserable world behind them, move into town, learn to speak good English, do some math, get a job, and join the modern world. This advice collides slap bang with the assumption that without your traditional “culture” (no matter how sick and self-destructive) you will lose your “identity”.

Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Kultur

What is the end result of all this? It ensures that if anyone claims that he and his tribe are an indissoluble human group that has lived forever on a given patch of ground (between the Rhine and the Elbe, the Indus and the Ganges, the Orinoco and the Amazon, wherever) there won’t be a dry eye in the house. If he goes on to claim that his tribe has roots in the soil, and that it would be false to try and distinguish the people and the land they live on—a sigh of heartfelt approval will be heard. And if it is further claimed that his identity and his very being is inseparable from his culture; that his culture is inseparable from his land; that his land is inseparable from his blood, his race, his ancestors—awed citizens will bow their heads in respect.

But so what? Why call this dogma unholy? Firstly, because its most haunting ideological incarnation was in Germany between 1930 and 1945. And in the politico-ethnic ideal of One People, One Land, One Culture there is a decidedly unholy echo of ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer. Indeed, the two ideals are coeval, and spring from the same romantic, emotional, and intellectual roots. Secondly, because none of us live like that any more, and we haven’t for a very long time. It’s a backward-looking Germanic fantasy with little relation to modern social and economic life.

Modern men and women live with whom they wish and marry whoever they wish. They may join people like those they grew up with or they may not. It doesn’t matter, because the solidary exclusiveness of “ein Volk” is an atavistic and unacceptable racist rule. It was racist when the Nazis embraced it, and it is equally racist now. We come from various places and human groups, we move about looking for jobs, we no longer live on patches of ground primordially “ours”. To be tied to land is unacceptable. It was for medieval serfs compelled to live on their lord’s estates; it should be equally unacceptable today for Aborigines whose disease, ignorance, and illiteracy compels them to live and prematurely die in the dreadful places many “reserves” have become.

Australia’s Bluebeard castles

Aboriginal reserves in outback Australia were designed for generally benevolent reasons to provide refuges at a time of confusion and distress. And also, in some cases, of actual starvation. It was hoped they would serve as a way station where people could decide how far and how fast they wished to modernise, and how much of their old-time culture they wanted to keep.

It is dramatically obvious that many no longer serve this purpose. What media folk and politicians blithely describe as “Aboriginal communities” are today a collection of Bluebeard Castles in which unspeakable acts are routinely performed, are concealed as far as the participants are able to hide them, are kept secret by families and clans, and go largely unreported. The social pathologies rife in such places equal the worst to be found elsewhere on the planet, including the Congo, where there is a notorious market in child sex-slaves, and Darfur. Those seeking further enlightenment should read Nanette Rogers’ testimony in the Appendix below.

In the old fairy tale there was a locked room full of cadavers, inside a castle, inside a moat. In Australia’s new Bluebeard Castles the battlements are defended by an entrenched and obfuscatory welfare bureaucracy; the locked rooms are the impenetrable closed worlds of family and clan; the protective moat is the wet and weepy regiment of well-meaning white middle-class bien-pensants who insist that something called “traditional culture” not only exists and persists down on the reservation, but that this travesty of tradition—this travesty of any social order of any kind—should be protected from outside interference and “sustained”. Meanwhile the toll of dead and damaged mounts.

* * *

The director of Ten Canoes should be congratulated. His film successfully shows what the old way of life looked like, and quite possibly sounded like too. The men and women I remember in Arnhem Land were likeable, funny, and wise, and the film’s humor and laughter rang true to me from my own experiences. It is to be hoped that someone with serious anthropological credentials will write a commentary on various aspects of the film’s story. They would be doing its audiences a service: Ten Canoes will I’m sure be widely seen in the years ahead.

I might add that such a service is needed because Rolf de Heer’s film as it stands is a bit misleading. It shows a tangible material world with attractive people in attractive natural settings doing physically tangible things. But the metaphysical world was also an important dimension of Aboriginal experience—perhaps more important—and except for sorcery there’s little to suggest the pervasive realm of ghosts and spirits that in earlier times was every bit as real. At the same time the invisible underlying social structures determining everyday life are not even glimpsed.

How one wishes this were all that needed to be said! But within the wider context of debate over Aboriginal policy Ten Canoes will inevitably be seen as justifying attempts to revive and restore the past. It will be used to reinforce the futile policies of romantic primitivism—and that is in fact the director’s public intention. Ten Canoes argues the virtues of reservations at the very moment they have collapsed into horror—while the white academic caste who work steadily to excuse the inexcusable are guilty of yet another trahison des clercs. That their theories of indivisibility have also “excused” Indigenes from being able to join the modern world is the cruellest twist of the knife.

Get out now!

The first step in finding a cure for present ills requires that politicians and policy-makers finally awake from the Dreamtime so beguilingly presented in Ten Canoes. They must recognise that a people and its land and culture are not only separable, but there are times when they should and must be divided. If you’re an Aborigine it may be the only way of saving your life—of having any future at all. People are more important than land, and if your home becomes a human disaster zone then you must leave. People are more important than culture, and if your culture becomes deadly poisonous you have to get out.

John Ibbitson’s words, intended for Canada’s Indians, should be painted in giant illuminated letters and displayed on a big sign outside every Bluebeard Castle in Australia: “Get out right now if you can. Don’t wait. Move into town. Find a job, any job, then get yourself back in school. This is the only chance you have to rescue what is about to become your wasted life.”

Note: Also at this site, What Native Peoples Deserve, about Indian reservations in Brazil. For more about Australia’s Indigenes, see Aboriginal Policy.