Worlds apart (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Worlds apart

Australia's prime minister is sending in the army to tackle child abuse and
alcoholism in the Aboriginal homelands. But his aggressive campaign will
only make the situation worse, says Germaine Greer

Tuesday July 3, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/australia/story/0,,2117202,00.html

[photo inset - Aboriginal children in Kakadu National Park. Photograph: John
Van Hasselt/Sygma/Corbis]

Ever since white men set foot in Australia more than 200 years ago, they
have persecuted, harassed, tormented and tyrannised the people they found
there. The more cold-blooded decided that the most humane way of dealing
with a galaxy of peoples who would never be able to adapt to the
"whitefella" regime was to eliminate them as quickly as possible, so they
shot and poisoned them. Others believed that they owed it to their God to
rescue the benighted savage, strip him of his pagan culture, clothe his
nakedness, and teach him the value of work. Leaving the original
inhabitants alone was never an option; learning from them was beyond any
notion of what was right and proper. As far as the pink people were
concerned, black Australians were primitive peoples, survivors from the
stone age in a land that time forgot.

Any hopes that this attitude might have changed were dashed two weeks ago,
when Prime Minister John Howard announced a new crusade. Following a report
calling for action on child abuse in Aboriginal communities, he announced a
six-month ban on alcohol and pornography within the homelands, compulsory
medical checks for indigenous children and restrictions on welfare
payments. As commander-in-chief of an army of police, the Australian
Defence Force and hordes of doctors and nurses, he will storm the 70 or so
autonomous Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory. He can do this
because the Northern Territory, having failed in a recent, rather
half-hearted bid for statehood, is directly administered by the Australian
government. For Aboriginal people, Howard's edict is just another sudden
and draconian shift in the law as it relates to them; just another pillar
in a lifetime of being shoved from pillar to post.

It is hard not to view this as yet another attack on native title by the
white establishment. No sooner had Aboriginal peoples achieved, after a
tremendous expenditure of time, effort, expertise and money, freehold title
to bits and pieces of country under the 1976 Aboriginal Land Rights Act,
than there was an attempt to redefine freehold as it applied to Aboriginal
areas, so that they could be reclaimed if there should be a need - for
minerals, fossil fuels, foreign bases, tracking stations, whatever. New
laws in 1993 and 1998 sealed this flagrant violation. Now, having had such
resounding success in rescuing Iraq from tyranny, fanaticism and madness,
Howard claims to be riding to the rescue of Aboriginal children in
distress.

The prime minister of Australia should know, however, that most of the areas
under Aboriginal control in the Northern Territory are already dry. The
elders would have greater success in keeping them that way if Howard and
his Myrmidons would do the job they have been elected to do. Rather than
wresting nominal control of Aboriginal homelands to himself and so
undermining the authority of the elders still further, Howard could bring
the full force of the law to bear on the white bootleggers who bring grog
into dry Aboriginal communities by night and sell it at exorbitant prices.
Even in apparently successful communities such as Utopia, homeland of the
great painter Emily Kngwarreye, the bootleggers turn up almost every night.
I was staying there in 2000 when drunken hoodlums smashed up the health
centre in the small hours. The next day the senior law women sent the
offenders into the bush to live off the land for six months, as punishment.
My car had been searched when I arrived to make sure that I had brought no
alcohol with me; but next morning all the men I saw were either staggering
drunk or lying unconscious in the scrub.

Though the bootleggers drive unmistakable four-wheel-drive trucks with giant
balloon tyres that carry them over the roadless expanse, leaving a mile-long
dust plume easily visible from the sky, the federal authorities remain
curiously unable to intercept the traffic, even though the government is
missing out on significant revenue. Anyone who really cared about what
alcohol was doing to Aboriginal communities would surely have done
something to curb the illicit trade. Perhaps they would also have done
something about the fact that, in Alice Springs, as in most other frontier
towns, there are dozens of liquor outlets and hardly any shops selling
fresh foodstuffs, which, if you can find them, are crushingly expensive. If
your feet are bare, you are not allowed in the Alice Springs food mall at
all.

The name of the game, as usual, is bad faith. Everything Howard does is
calculated to win him votes. The suffering of Aboriginal women and children
at the hands of their deranged menfolk has been going on all Howard's life.
For most of that time whitefellas made a joke of it. At this late hour, on
the eve of a general election, he is suddenly taking it seriously. It is of
no consequence that what he is doing is illegal. His treatment of asylum
seekers and boat people is just as illegal, and it is widely admired by
Australians and people who should know better.

Not for nothing did Howard single out the best-known Aboriginal community in
Australia, Mutitjulu, home of the traditional owners of Uluru, visited by
500,000 tourists a year, to begin his campaign against child abuse in
Aboriginal communities. The papers call it paedophilia; to someone standing
closer it looks less like a sexual perversion than a hideous extension of
demented self-destructiveness. It is part of a continuum that includes the
tragically high rates of suicide in Aboriginal communities. In 2005,
suicide accounted for 4.3% of Aboriginal deaths, compared with 1.6% of
other Australians. As whitefellas tear their country apart, blackfellas are
tearing themselves apart.

For years, the extinction of the Australian Aborigine has been eagerly
looked forward to and repeatedly described as imminent. In fact, there are
probably more Aboriginal people alive in Australia today than there were
when Captain Cook planted the British flag at Botany Bay in 1770. But while
their numbers are growing, so is their unending suffering. Aboriginal people
are tough, and it is the fate of the toughest to suffer longest and hardest.

A year ago, the government stripped Mutitjulu of its annual funding of A$3m
(£1m) and installed a white man from Perth as adminstrator to the council.
Two weeks ago the federal court ruled the appointment invalid. The elders
rejoiced. Then Howard announced his coup d'etat. Until then tourists
couldn't get to see Mutitjulu, because no one could get in without a
permit. Simply walking in could get you a fine of A$1,000. Now Howard has
swept away the right of Aboriginal freeholders to keep interlopers off
their land; the permit system is to be abolished and tourists will be able
to add Aboriginal dysfunction to the sights they go to see. Boundaries are
important to Aboriginal peoples, who have always respected each other's
space and have suffered acutely whenever disparate groups have been forced
to occupy the same space. Land confers identity; failing to protect the
integrity of one's land is tantamount to annihilation.

The police, who are even now marching towards Aboriginal settlements under
Howard's banner, have had so little success in dealing with urban
Aboriginal people that there were anti-police riots in Sydney's inner
suburb of Redfern in January 2004. The unfortunates who are sent to enforce
Howard's bans will have no special training in dealing with rural tribal
peoples and will probably find themselves in real danger.

The situation is complex. Lately, British newspapers have been hearing about
Wadeye (pronounced Wa-de-ye), otherwise known as Port Keats. Like many
Aboriginal communities, Wadeye had its beginnings as a mission, in this
case a Catholic mission founded in 1935 at the request of the federal
government. The Bishop of Darwin appointed a missionary of the Sacred
Heart, West Australian Richard Docherty, to set up the suggested mission at
a place called Werntek Nganayi, where he was to establish a garden and teach
the Aborigines to grow their food rather than gathering it. The mission also
ran a cattle station in the Daly River reserve. In 1975, however, the
federal government recognised Aboriginal claims to the reserve and it
therefore became inalienable freehold land vested in the Daly River/Port
Keats Aboriginal Trust. Aborigines were happier working with a stock whip
than a hoe, but even so, when they managed to redeem the land from the
pastoralists who had employed them, they usually ate the cattle and allowed
the land to recover. There being no game to hunt any more, they now usually
live on rotisserie chicken and frozen mutton chops from the local store.

Though they see no point in working nine-to-five, Aboriginal people find as
little satisfaction in doing nothing as anyone else. Their lives used to be
full of activity - not only finding food, preparing and eating it, but
interpreting the places they were travelling through and the time they were
in, and how all things came to be as they are. If I take a four-wheel-drive
to visit friends at the Anmatyerre women's camp at Atangkere, on what used
to be Utopia Station, further south in the Northern Territory, the women
will grab their crowbars and axes and pile in, making me drive 50 miles
into the bush so we can go hunting for goanna (monitor lizards). People who
seem too idle and dispirited to do anything will walk for whole days in
search of bush tucker. Nothing is brought back from such a foray; the
hunter-gatherer way is to make a fire, cook the food, and eat it on the
spot.

Father Docherty's first choice of site was mistaken. The sea encroached in
the rainy season and turned the surface water to salt, so the mission moved
south to Port Keats. The indigenous people who were driven off their land to
end up at Wadeye came from 23 clans who would normally have hunted and
gathered on their own traditional lands; between them they spoke seven
languages. The land at Wadeye belonged to the Kardu Diminin, who spoke
Murrinh-Patha; no one asked them how they felt about having to accommodate
outsiders and no one asked the outsiders how they felt about having
Murrinh-Patha taught to their children along with Catholic doctrine.
Officialdom has never made any attempt to cope with the multiplicity and
complexity of Aboriginal culture. For groups who have jealously guarded
their distinctness and carefully managed their intercommunal negotiations
for 40,000 years, enforced togetherness brings intense psychological
stress. For six months of the year the disparate clans of Wadeye cannot get
out of each other's way, as they are hemmed in by the wet, with neither
roads nor runways usable.

Like most of its ilk, the Wadeye mission combined indoctrination with forced
labour. The natives lived in dormitories and had no choice but to attend
school every day or put in the hours working. There are now 800 children of
school age in Wadeye but only 57 of them can be relied on to turn up at
school every day. That is partly because in 2004, after a tremendous drive
to force parents to get their children to school under threat of withdrawal
of welfare, the school facilities were found to be hopelessly inadequate,
with neither teachers nor space for the number of children. In 2005, the
Thamarrur regional council, which now governs Wadeye, took legal advice on
their chances of suing the federal government for violation of their civil
rights by not providing basic education; the complaint was finally lodged a
month ago. As there are no employment opportunities, education has no
obvious point. All but about 50 of Wadeye's indigenous population of 2,700
live on "sit-down" money, as welfare payments are known.

For years, some of the elders at Wadeye have dreamed of returning to their
homelands, or "outstations", but depression and stress have sapped their
energy. Catholic education replaced the discipline of "learning country"
and preparing for initiation, so young men are now incapable of living off
the land. Men who know how to bag magpie geese, track and bring down
introduced feral pigs and native kangaroos, find barramundi, catfish,
dugong and turtles, may still command respect, but too many of the senior
men with the necessary skills are no longer living in Wadeye. Why? Because
Wadeye is dry. The missing men have moved to Darwin, where they can drink.

Howard's latest spasm of concern for the people of the Northern Territory
could result in a double irony. Already, areas where the liquor ban has
been effective are suffering because adult men are moving to urban areas
where they can drink; a more effective imposition of the ban by
non-Aboriginal authorities is likely to intensify this trend. Behaviour
that is now shame-faced could soon be seen as defiant and assertive.
Petrol-sniffing used to be a problem, but now petrol has been rendered
unsniffable. The drug of choice for young men in Wadeye is marijuana, known
to them as gunja. Meanwhile, Wadeye has grown to be the sixth biggest town
in the Northern Territory, yet it has only 154 houses, 33 of which are
derelict and should be demolished. In the others, occupancy stands at
between five and six people per bedroom, a common state of affairs in the
homelands. Dislocation, dispersion, rounding up and regimentation were
followed, as usual, by neglect.

In 2001, a vast gas field, christened Blacktip, was discovered 70 miles
offshore from Wadeye. Development of this priceless resource is now well
under way. The gas from the Blacktip field will be piped to Yeltherr beach,
just south of Wadeye, where an onshore gas plant will be constructed and the
gas piped east to Ban Ban Springs on the Adelaide River to supply Darwin.
Work on the pipeline began a few weeks ago and is expected to be complete
by next August; 130 Northern Territory companies will be involved in the
works, including the construction of the pipelines, the oil wells, the
offshore platform and the onshore gas plant, but not one word has been said
about the involvement of the inhabitants of Wadeye. As most of them have not
completed primary education, and can neither read nor write nor speak
English, it is hard to see how they could be involved. An earlier deal that
would have provided Aboriginal groups with equity of $250m in recognition of
the pipeline crossing their land was abandoned, when the client, the
aluminium giant Alcan, found a cheaper supplier in Papua New Guinea.

Perhaps it was the increasing attention paid to Wadeye by the international
community during the negotiations for the development of the gasfield that
prompted the arrival of a GP for Wadeye, where for years there had been no
doctor. When Pat Rebgetz arrived at the beginning of 2006, he was horrified
by what he found and by the inadequacy of the resources. He had been in
place only six months when gang warfare exploded, which occasioned an
earlier threat from Howard to deploy the army against his own citizens. In
the immediate aftermath of the mayhem, Mal Brough, minister for families,
communities and indigenous affairs, came to town. Instead of being appalled
at the evidence of criminal neglect on the part of the authorities whom he
represented, he laid into the inhabitants, ordering them to clean the
graffiti off their walls, collect the rubbish littering the streets, and
get their kids to the school that wasn't big enough to hold them, on pain
of having their funding frozen. The people responded badly, saying they
were not "going to bloody fall down in a heap just because some clown like
Brough comes along and wants to bounce us". As one citizen told a reporter,
"I won't do it, because of him asking me."

Brough just didn't get it. He thought the Wadeye people recognised his
authority, but they didn't. The people of Wadeye will take government money
as part payment for what the whitefellas took away from them, namely,
everything, including their natural gas, but they simply don't see that
that gives the whitefellas the right to tell them what to do. Their
recalcitrance is not stupidity or wickedness but resistance - eternal,
implacable, self-destructive resistance. When Howard takes over the
policing of the Aboriginal communities he can expect more of the same. He
will never defeat the Aboriginal peoples, but he will surely increase the
bitterness of their suffering.

White settlers have never truly understood the Aborigines. By the time the
newcomers registered the fact that the Aboriginal peoples belonged to
something like 700 language groups, many of those groups consisted of only
a handful of people. What had not been thought of even as a nation was a
ramified commonwealth with an elaborate diplomacy, in which envoys were
dispatched to negotiate terms for crossing disparate territories, sharing
particular resources, righting wrongs.

The Aboriginal peoples reacted to contact in different ways. Some were used
to foreigners visiting their land. Most assumed that the newcomers would
adapt to their way of life, and offered to help them find food and show
them how to survive by studying and venerating country. Even when diseases
brought by the Europeans reduced thriving communities to a handful of
traumatised survivors, there was no concerted attempt to drive the
interlopers away. By the time the Aboriginal peoples realised that the
newcomers had laid claim to the whole country and everything in it, it was
too late.

It did not occur to Aboriginal Australians that the newcomers did not
consider them fully human; they were outraged when they saw men whipped for
insubordination. A man who offended against tribal law was to be speared;
whether he was speared in a vital organ or not was a measure of the gravity
of the offence, but he was not to be beaten like a dog. The crushing blow
that destroyed Aboriginal self-esteem was the gradual realisation that the
strangers they had accepted as human like themselves did not reciprocate
their respect.

Because Aboriginal people had few visible possessions, their culture seemed
simple. In terms of invisible possessions such as language, spirituality
and relationships, it was actually astonishingly complex, and this
complexity still hampers interaction with the de facto rulers of Australia.
Rebgetz told Barbara McMahon of the Observer: "There's a lot of cultural
stuff about kinship that means you are obliged to feed a family member if
he comes in and says he's hungry or give him somewhere to stay ..." This
"cultural stuff", a problem for white administrators ever since welfare
began, will not go away. Whether whitey likes it or not, this is what
matters to many Aboriginal people; it is why two days after they have
collected their "kid money" they are broke. Likewise, when white
administrators have offered Aboriginal people "decent housing" they have
seen it wrecked and even burned down, yet it does not occur to them that
the three-bedroom brick veneer is not what Aboriginal people can use. Many
live in segregated camps, or would if they could. Indeed, the problem of
child abuse would be mitigated if they went back to the tradition of men's
camps and camps for women and children.

My Yolngu friends at Yirrkala tend to live on the verandahs of their houses,
where they lie in heaps on bare mattresses for most of the day. They are
more likely to light a fire in the front garden than grow flowers in it. If
people have been hunting on the foreshore, there will be oysters roasted on
the fire, and the shells thrown in a heap. Some of the shell middens in
Australia are thousands of years old. Aboriginal people could decide to
clean up their oyster shells, but as things stand it is far more important
that they don't. The insignia of consumer society can be found in heaps
around every Aboriginal settlement: discarded clothes, rotting bedding,
broken ghetto-blasters, burned-out cars.

You will find versions of this behaviour wherever you find self-regulating
Aboriginal people. Hunter-gatherer morality does not permit the
accumulation of possessions and the hunter-gatherer lifestyle does not
recognise the (utterly notional) value of money. Emily Kngwarreye once
asked one of her patrons for a car for her nephew in payment for one of her
paintings. The car was supplied, Kngwarreye gave it to her nephew and a few
weeks later her patron was annoyed to learn that the nephew had sold the
new car for A$300. "Why did he sell the car, a new car, for just A$300?" he
asked. "Because he only needed A$300," said Kngwarreye. Capitalism simply
doesn't know how to deal with people like this, except perhaps to make
money out of them. Nowadays you'd need more than the price of a car if you
wanted to buy an Emily painting, but she chose to live out her last months
of life on her iron bedstead under a tarpaulin, far from the comforts of
consumer society, in her own country.