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?