More on Mr Limbunya

The TV news last night carried an extensive report on the tragic death of a Darwin boy who has been in a coma since he was hit by a falling limb in a schoolyard last week.
It didn't mention Mr Limbunya's death at all.
Enough said.
There are people who won't let it rest there.
Nawala's grandson, for one.
Matthew Bonson is a member of the Territory Assembly (our peanut Parliament).
He's written to the Health Minister asking for a full inquiry into what happened to his old uncle and the Health Minister says that's just what they'll do.
Matthew must know in his heart of hearts that they'll miss the point, though.
The real inquiry needs to be into how racism survives in Australia and how we can get rid of it.

Shame job

This is a shameful story.
It happened over a few days, starting with people gathering for celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the walk-off from Wave Hill - a landmark in the struggle for land rights.
People from all over Australia gathered at the communities of Daguragu and Kalkaringi for the event.
Ironic really, because our Federal Government has just gutted the Land Rights Act which owes much of its conception to the inspiration of Vincent Lingiari and the men and women who walked off Lord Vestey's Wave Hill Station.
Among the people who came for the celebrations was a blind and infirm elderly man, now known to be Mr Limbunya, who was dropped off at the Kalkaringi airstrip (about 750km south-west of Darwin) by a medical plane from Katherine.
When I say 'dropped off', I mean just that.
The plane left him at the airstrip.
It was 5km from Kalkaringi.
No-one was there to meet him because no-one knew he was coming back, although he was one of the few old people left from the time of the walk-off.
The plane took off and left him standing there.
What happened then is anyone's guess, but he probably tried to walk - he wasn't wearing any shoes - from the airstrip to either Daguragu, the neighbouring community he preferred, or maybe even to Limbunya, the place where he was born and whose name he bore.
No-one knew he was gone for three days.
Then the alarm was raised.
The search was called off on the weekend, but yesterday they found his body - nine days after he 'disappeared'.
Mr Limbunya's sister, Nawala, was one of the Stolen Generation.
Although they shared the same mother, his father was a proper way Gurindji man and Nawala's was the Irish station overseer.
She was taken to the Kahlin 'half-caste' children's home in Darwin before she turned 10 - a hard ride on horseback with the local policemen and then a lugger ride down the Victoria River and on across Joseph Bonaparte Gulf to Darwin - and didn't get back to see him until she was well into her 60s.
He couldn't see her, because he was already blind, but he knew her all right.
Nawala died in her 80s surrounded by family and she was mourned by both black and white people in Darwin.
There were upwards of 1500 people at her funeral service, many of them travelling to the graveside in an apparently endless stream of cars that were shepherded by police to the cemetery.
The Mill Sisters sang 'Arafura Pearl' to farewell her and, as the earth covered her coffin, a V-formation flight of pelicans wheeled over the paperbarks and flew away.
Mr Limbunya, on the other hand, died alone.
He'll have a big send-off, to be sure.
But he died away from family, and maybe his country too.
And what happened to him typfies for me what many of our fellow Australians think of the First Australians and it typifies how the current Government is dealing with them.
They're inconvenient, they're not worth treating with common decency and - ultimately - they're disposable.
There'll be an inquiry to find out how it happened.
But it's too late.
You just know it would never happen to a white man.
And you know why.
This is Australia in the year 2006.
God help us.

But wait! There's more!

Try this for size:
'The EsseNTial Learnings are developmentally mapped to achieve culminating outcomes. These outcomes are developed through the content of relevant Learning Areas and can be used as a strategy for curriculum integration. By their nature, the EsseNTial learnings are both part of the NTCF outcome structure and an enabler of inclusive needs-based program development. Schools need to create environments, programs and structures that present opportunities for learners to participate in a meangful way to ensure that these EsseNTial learnings are acquired.'
This appears in the Northern Territory's Curruculum Framework. What does it mean?
But don't you just lerve '...creating opportunities for ...meaningful participation...'? In other words, if you don't grab the 'opportunity', it's your fault!

Say what you mean

'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on. 'I do,' Alice hastily replied; 'at least - at least I mean what I say - that's the same thing, you know.' 'Not the same thing a bit! said the Hatter. 'Why, you might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see!"'
Lewis Carrol - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

I had a strange encounter with a voice recognition system a couple of weeks ago when I was in Canberra. The taxi company has changed over to a VR system for booking calls. It had no difficulties with the pick-up point at all. But it was another story when it came to my destination.
- I'd like to go to the Australian National University.
- You want to go to Murrumbateman. Is that correct?
- No. I want to go to the Australian National University.
- You want to go to Captain's Flat. Is that correct?
- No (getting irate and speaking through gritted teeth now). I don't want to go to Captain's Flat or fucking Murrumbateman. I want to go to the Australian National University.
- I don't understand. Please state your destination.
- Can I speak to a human being?
- I don't understand. Please state your destination.

It occurred to me that trying to talk (and listen to) bureaucrats and politicians offers a similar Alice in Wonderland experience. They seem to speak and (god forbid!) think in a language that appears to be English; but not only is it difficult to get a straight answer to a straight question, you also have difficulty interpreting precisely what particular words or groups of words mean.
You know the sort of thing: words like resources, issues, prioritising, deliverables, performance indicators and so on, which are strung together like fat beans on a string. They're used by an in-group among themselves and we assume that they all understand precisely what they're talking about - although the words in question are always ill-defined to the point of being ephemeral. So maybe they don't.
But then they go out into the real world and start talking in the same terms to people who speak and think in plain old English. And because we don't like to be thought of as stupid, or because we're too damn polite for our own good, we rarely stop them to ask what they mean by a particular turn of phrase. And then we start using them, too!
Why? Partly, I think, because we want to be seen to be part of a power elite and so we use the language of power whether we really understand it or not. And maybe partly because we're too tired to resist any more.
But you can't reach those dizzy heights without mastering the use of the passive voice - the ultimate in power tripping. People don't get together to do things. They're '...invited to participate...'.
As you can see, the term puts one group (the elite) in the position not just of 'inviting', but defining what it is that the other group (those without power) will 'participate' in. Whatever the result (the current fave is 'outcome'), it will be described as '..a meaningful (now there's a much misused word!) exercise in community involvement...'.
It's nothing of the sort, of course. It's one group of people getting another group to do something they've already defined and whose 'outcomes' they have already predicted.
If you're serious about people defining their destiny, then you don't 'invite them to participate' in anything. You ask them what they want to do and then make damn sure nothing stands in the way of them doing it. As long as it's a reasonable and negiotable ask, that is.
This misuse of the language is doubly damnable when bureaucrats try to use the language among people who don't have English as a first language. Not just Indigenous people, either; people from other countries who now live here. It's very easy to use the words to soothe people into believing someone cares about what they say, they're really listening and something is happening that they'll like - or at least something that will be good for them.
And then reality bites. Fine-sounding policy is revealed for what it is - generally a cynical exercise in avoiding responsibility - and the real people become at best exhausted and at worst embittered by the experience.
As a taxpayer, I don't think it's too much to ask of governments who say they want to serve the public good to make sure (ensure) its diverse servants (our servants) at least learn how to speak and - more importantly - how to listen - without turning everything into their own polysyllabic porridge.
To return to Alice ('Remember Alice? There's a song about Alice. Which shows my age, I think), say what you mean!

Posts revisited (2)

And this:


This post is a long one, because there's a story to be told and it has to be told right. It's a good news story, which is distinctly out of fashion these days. So if that doesn't appeal, go no further.
The trip to N.East Arnhem Land last week was good. Having spent time there over the years - including a year living in Yirrkala, on the Gulf coast - I wasn't expecting too many surprises. But I got one. I drove for about 250km on this dusty road, which took three hours each way and I passed five vehicles only on the entire round trip. Having just been graded after the Wet, it was in reasonable nick and without the usual washboard corrugations. And then I found myself at Donydji (pronounced Doh-inji). It's a tiny homeland of about 60 people, one of the places the current administration is examining 'to assess their viability'.
You'd have to ask by what measure they're assessing. Donydji is precisely the kind of small scale enterprise we should be supporting and learning from. In the midst of the shitrain of sensationalised revelations of Indigenous dysfunction, it's a pointer to ways out of the blind alleys. The larger towns - we know them by the misnomer 'communities' - exist for our convenience. We created them through government agencies or missions and we wonder why they have become human zoos of dysfunction, why the community government model doesn't work, why there's corruption, why, why and why....
Homelands exist because people want to live on their own country and avoid the humbug of pressure cooker town living. There's a different authority system, different ways of looking at how you avoid dysfunction. At Donydji, for instance, there's no grog, kava, ganja or gambling by the fiat of the senior traditional owner and with the support of all the people. Which means people are moving there from other places where these social blights flourish.
There's no heavy administrative superstructure, although the homeland gets services and support from Marthakal Homelands Association and Shepherdson College on Galiwin'ku. There's a water pumped from the river, a grass airstrip and a comms tower. I think there's a generator hidden away somewhere for power. A teacher flies in for three days a week and the school is filled with kids every day. The people built the school with funds from philanthropic organisations, channeled through Rotary in Melbourne, thanks to the persistence and foresight of a remarkable ngapaki (whitefella) who has been visiting the community since the 1970s. It wasn't supplied by the Government, although the Territory Government has now chipped in for a new school block.
The homeland people, with the help of this ngapaki, have pulled off another remarkable thing. Figuring it was quicker to circumvent the cumbersome and demanding (not to say over-bureaucratised) funding cycle, they went again to Rotary, who raised the funds for them to build a community workshop. In many places in the Territory, Government funds for this kind of infrastructure go straight into the pockets of ngapaki contractors, who fly or drive in, do the job and piss off again, leaving nothing but the building.
This was different. This white man got together a bunch of his mates with a varied collection of skills to come and work alongside young Yolngu men and show them on the job how to do it. And they did it for nothing. The mates are all Vietnam veterans, men of my age who were conscripted to fight in one of America's dirtiest little episodes in SE Asia in the late 60s.
Many of the brave young boys who went off to war as a great adventure have found in their middle age that they've not been travelling too well. But this mob lived under canvas next to the homeland's dirt airstrip for months, cooked on open fires, fished and hunted for mudcrab and bullshitted to each other around the campfire about who did the best job in Vietnam. And they've still found the energy to become part of that extended homeland family while they've passed on their skills. At the same time they've learned something about Yolngu and the Yolngu way of doing business. It's been an exchange between equals. Which is no small achievement.
They were there for the big day. Melbourne Rotary and representatives of the two philanthropic trusts arrived in a single-engined charter from Darwin - a three hour ride each way, which is impressive because it's not necessarily a particularly comfortable flight- and the vets hung back and made way for the homeland families, whose day it was. And it was a day of extraordinary good will and optimism. What we saw was a group of people who were proud that they'd realised an idea; and they were proud that their young people had learned something useful that they could all use. But really, they did the job when they decided to do things for themselves: starting with making serious decisions about the standards of conduct they expected of themselves; then working out what they wanted to do and where to go for support; and finally in doing the work and bringing it off.
The results of all of these? Apart from the workshop and what people are already doing in it, the people's very physical presence shows the clearest evidence of well being: shining skin, clear eyes, a steady gaze on the world; and they radiate a strong sense of being where they should be and owning where they are. This level of well being stops people getting sick. Pragmatically speaking, it means there's less of a demand on expensive primary health care, for one thing. And fewer 'encounters with the criminal justice system' for another (now there's a bureaucratic euphemism that would please your old Edinburgh auntie no end).
This is not promoting what the new Right commentators on Indigenous policy witheringly call museum culture. What it says to me is that people can pursue their own choices for living, given the right support and appropriate access to ways of doing things that are way beyond incessant government intervention. It tells me that bureaucrats and politicians need to understand that it is not their job to lead people, but to follow and support what people want to do. Policy frameworks that restrict and control by setting stringent conditions hobble and even strangle the lives of real people because they become their own raison d'etre. Partnerships and relationships, on the other hand (forget the buzz words: these are real words), operate from a basis of equality, trust and respect.
It would be far more cost-effective for policy-makers to be flexible enough to accommodate small scale solutions, rather than insisting that people have to follow what they dictate because we think we know what's best. Which is, of course, the most difficult thing for bureacrats and politicians who operate in the world of performance measures, KPIs and capital 'A' Accountability. Real life and real solutions just don't cut it in that world. But often thinking small leads to big results (or 'outcomes' as the bureaucrats love to say).
Donydji is not paradise, by any means. But it is a place where people are making their own destiny without being forced to conform to insulting Shared Responsibility Agreements, or to accept irrelevant 'access to the free market' through private home ownership and small business or succumb under the weight of official expectations of success. And that's surely a major achievement in anyone's language.
NB: There are two terms for whitefella widely used by speakers of Yolngu Matha (the Aboriginal languages of NE Arnhem Land). Balanda is a loan word from the Macassan trepang fishermen from Sulawesi who journeyed back and forth for several hundred years between Ujung Pandang and Marege (Australia) in one of the planet's truly epic trade routes which was also, interestingly, Australia's very first foray into international trade. They became a part of many Yolngu families and you can still see strong traces of Macassan descent in people's features today. The South Australian bureaucrats stopped this relationship early in the 20th Century by - you guessed it - trying to tax the boats and forcing them to carry whitefella skippers. The term is held to be a corruption of 'Hollander'.
The influx of colonial (does that come from colon?) and post-colonial bureaucrats and carpetbaggers has given rise to the use of ngapaki for whitefella. Ngapaki literally means flying fox, also known as the fruit bat. Although it's used in very matter-of-fact way, I infer there's an element of insult as it conjures up beings who fly in unannounced and uninvited, eat up all your resources, make a lot of noise, shit all over the place and then depart without due ceremony. Enough said?

Posts revisited (1)

In my earlier post on my family blogI wrote at some length about a visit I made to a small and remote community. I also quoted extensively from the opening of an address by anthropologist David Martin. I'm inserting them here in the interestes of discussion.
Feel free.

David Martin, an anthropologist with many years' experience of working with Aboriginal people, had this* to say recently: ‘Much of the support for the new policies is predicated on the assumption that Aboriginal people naturally desire the lifestyle and values which correlate with economic integration… if they don’t, a carrot and stick approach… can be used to achieve it. ‘However the evidence… shows that while many… do indeed seek to take advantage of better economic opportunities, and while cultural change is a feature of all societies… there is a widespread resistance amongst Aboriginal people to what they see as attempts to assimilate them into the dominant society, economically and socially.’ ‘…my unease is because the debate is conducted with such a vitriolic and unnecessary demonisation of what has gone before… with a complete disregard for what I would see as the lessons of history in Aboriginal affairs; and most importantly with an all too common disregard for the diverse views, values and aspirations of the Aboriginal people at whom the new policy apparatus and its ideological underpinnings are directed. ‘Except when the latest instance of horrific dysfunctionality in the Aboriginal world is brought forward to illustrate the need for profound change, or when the views of the new Aboriginal political elite are given prominence in the legitimizing discourse around proposed policy directions, Aboriginal people themselves are conspicuously absent from the discussion… ‘They are essentially empty vessels, or rather chipped and cracked ones, into which the new array of more socially functional values is to be poured.’ *David Martin, Why the ‘New Direction’ in Federal Indigenous Affairs Policy is as Likely to ‘Fail’ as the Old Directions, CAEPR (10 May 2006). Worth thinking about.

Do the right whistle...and some dog's listening

I don't know if we invented the term 'dogwhistle politics', but it fits what happens every day in the interaction between the people and the bureaucratic machine in Australia.
If you don't quite get the meaning of the term, think about what a dogwhistle is - a stimulus that is imperceptible to many, but which arouses a sharp reaction in the intended target.
It's highly evident in Indigenous policy.
Take the recent tinkering with the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. The Tories have had their eye on the Act since one of their number - Malcolm Fraser (known during his post-Prime Minister career as Comrade Malcolm in the early days in Zimbabwe) - actually passed the Act that Gough Whitlam had framed (see Modern Australian Political History 101) and gave Aboriginal people in the Territory alone the right to claim back their own countries.
One of the central amendments now makes it possible for Aboriginal people living in Aboriginal towns to lease a block of land for 99 years. The theory is that if they can lease land, they can build (and own) their own houses and raise capital for setting up a business.
It presumes, of course, that you can unravel complex systems of land tenure to identify the sole owner of a particular parcel of land as one person who may enter a transaction that involves them in surrendering guardianship of that land until their grandchildren are long dead. It also ignores the fact that a group of owners might have obligations to people in other clans who may have a managerial responsibility and accompanying rights for that piece of land.
It also presumes that people want to run businesses.
All this they wave aside in their haste to tamper with the Act. The problem has always been that many whitefellas can't come at the idea that Aboriginal people can close their land to outsiders and live largely as they choose. Australians haven't quite got the fact that Aboriginal land rerally does - belong to Aboriginal people and always has(well, at least for the last 40,000-odd years).
The accompanying rhetoric is stunning: '...this will allow Aboriginal people access to the free market'; and:'...why should Aboriginal people be denied the right of all Australians to be homeowners?....etc etc'. These quotes are what is actually being said.
On the face of it, innocuous statements all.
Right.
Got your dog ears tuned in? The real meaning of all of this is: why should they have a different system of land tenure? why can't we use their land if we want to? why should Aboriginal people be different? The answer to the first is: because they have. To the second: you can if they want you to. And to the third: because they are.

And I think that last is the key to it all. We don't like people to be different. We can't cope with other cultures. And the greatest compliment we can offer is try and make other people just like us.

Assimilation is the name of the game. Let's go back to 'access to the free market', for instance. If you're living on your own country in remote Northern Australia, you don't have access to any market without an economy and generally - apart from the money generated by a robust art industry and distributed through extended families - there just ain't anything like a free-standing local economy.

There used to be, of course, and there are still remnants of it today. But before whitefellas arrived it was solely based on the appropriate distribution of what could be hunted and gathered; and it was implicit in the relationships the people built and extended along trade routes, which saw stone implements, ochre, salt, information and ceremonies travel the length and breadth of the continent. It worked, but it doesn't suit our purposes any more.

Like I said, assimilation...just whistle and you'll find it.

Why a blog? Why a duck?

I started this blog because my political raves were beginning to take over our family blog www.harperduffy.blogspot.com. Not that there isn't room for politics on family websites - far from it - but I think my farflung and long-suffering family need a bit of breathing space.
So here goes.
As you can see from the intro and my profile, I have a special interest in the way whitefellas deal with a minority blackfella population. I make no claim to having all the answers. I have, however, got a number of questions and a perspective on the issues that comes from living in Northern Australia for the best part of 20 years.
As this blog rolls on, I'll be asking those questions and offering my perspectives. If you have anything you'd like to add, please do.
I should warn you that I have little patience with the porridge-like language beloved of politicians and bureaucrats. I promise to work hard to make my own contributions succinct and understandable and if you write me porridge in response, be prepared to be sent up unmercifully.
See ya!