Duffy Writes

Sorry

2008-02-13T14:06:00.002+09:30

Kevin Rudd got it absolutely right today.
His measured and genuine 'Sorry' to the Stolen Generations hit the spot and resonated throughout the land.
People I know who live with the legacy of those times are walking tall today and they're smiling from ear to ear after all the tears have been shed and shed again.
They've been waiting for this day for a long time, however hopeless it may often have seemed, particularly in the decade of obduracy and mean-spiritedness that characterised the Howard years.
Today's tears are tears of joy and pride and I think we all shed them.
I have to say I had my doubts about whether Kevin07 could pull it off.
Not any more.
Using no frills and no bullshit language - he spoke the language of the people, not politics or the bureaucracy - he told the story like it was, said the word 'sorry' and built the beginnings of a way out of the mess we've found ourselves in.
In contrast, Brendan Nelson and those of his Parliamentary colleagues who actually stayed away from the event showed very clearly that they still didn't get it.
Nelson pursued an ideological battle or two by clinging to the idea that somehow home ownership and mutual responsibility would bring change.
It just wasn't the day for it: his remarks were as inappropriate as his ideology is irrelevant to the task in hand.
Today was a beginning.
And what a beginning!

Who's including whom?

2008-02-13T06:08:00.000+09:30

Australia now has a Minister for Social Inclusion.
And what, pray, does that mean?
Good question.
To talk about social inclusion and what it means, I'm told you first need to think about social exclusion.
It's pretty clear who gets excluded from taking a full part in our society - the poor and the otherwise marginalised (Aboriginal people, refugees, people who have first languages other than English, the illiterate, the disabled and so on, who may also be impoverished anyway).
So SI is sort of about making sure they're all in and getting their share of the cake.
We hear the UK and Eire, among other EU countries, have been pursuing Social Inclusion policies and actually cutting the numbers of people below the poverty line, raising literacy levels an d generally doing a loaves and fishes act on social ills.
I don't want to condemn out of hand what is obviously a worthy goal.
But, to mix my metaphors, I still smell the odd rat in the woodpile.
I think it's a positive that we've chucked the patronising and exclusivist term 'tolerance' out the window.
It did, after all, smack of cultural supremacy.
But I think there's an inherent tension - and one that's very, very difficult to resolve - between a government's neurotic need to control the agenda and its desire to embrace social inclusion.
Can they resist the urge to be gatekeepers?
Can they stop being anally retentive?
And if inclusion is truly inclusive, are they able to learn from other people, other cultures and other ways of doing things?
There's another fundamental difficulty and that's the apparent inability of politicians and bureaucrats to talk about anything in simple terms that we can all understand.
Politicians favour windy and evasive language, while bureaucrats go for the impenetrable and the pompous every time.
I'd like to be charitable and propose that they may not realise it, but their use of language is nothing more than a form of exclusion.
Most of us don't talk, write or apparently even think in quite the same way as they do and we're in danger of being left out of the discourse entirely if we can't decipher what they're on about.
There's a classic case of this in the Territory recently.
The Department of Local Government sent out a Q and A several pages long on the impacts of amalgamating local councils.
I defy anyone of moderate educational ability to make sense of it.
It rates about 22 on a Gunning Fog Index test of reading comprehensibility, as against an ease of understanding score of NINE.
And it doesn't A the Qs it proposes anyway.
There's a long and honourable lineage of writers and thinkers - George Orwell and Don Watson spring readily to mind - who've tried vainly to point out the need to use Plain English if you want to communicate with the greatest number of people.
And it's in true Plain English that the clarity or otherwise and the intent of your message should come across loud and clear.
But perhaps telling people exactly what you mean is geting a bit too inclusive.
And yes, I understand that social inclusion ain't quite as simple as framing our messages to get to the greatest number.
But opening up the language of our daily discourse is as good a place as any to start, isn't it?

A New Year

2008-01-01T11:31:00.000+09:30

One of the nicest things I did last year was take a trip out bush, visiting some remote community schools. This is taken from 4000ft, out of the window of a little single-engined Cessna on the way to Galiwin'ku. It's one of the rivers that flow into Arnhem Bay and it's pretty typical coastal country in this part of the world - mangroves, mudflats, muddy great rivers and coastlines dribbling away into the sea.

I've been quiet for six months because it's been a funny sort of year.

The Intervention knocked me and a lot of other people for six. What can you say about a juggernaut that refuses to stop even though both of its creators have been dumped by the voters? Labor will have to come up with a different way of dealing with Aboriginal people; if it doesn't, it's condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past. 'Intervention' is a term that should pass out of the language. It's too butch, too condescending and decidedly not inclusive. I'd like to see people talking about 'support' instead. The premises on which it was based - allegations of widespread child abuse - have not been sustained and the net effect is that Aboriginal people have been damned as dysfunctional because the Australian media did not bother to question Howard's and Brough's assertions.

But back to the year which, like most years, was a curate's egg.

Highpoints:

1. The political demise of the mean-spirited and devious John Howard in a near-landslide election result. Not only did the little weasel lose power, he lost his seat. Good riddance to his negativity, his racism and his pathetic assertion that the Liberals were the only safe pair of hands for the future of Australia. At the same time the pathologically fixated Mal Brough - the White Knight of the Intervention - also lost his seat and faces a wonderful career selling hair products again. Instant Karma!

2. The unedifying spectacle of the Liberals publicly eviscerating each other as the putative leadership strutted their stuff in a grubby little pissing contest.

3. My resignation from working directly in the political sphere. While I was very happy with the change of government, I couldn't see myself continuing to work under the Labor Party's version of Mission Control. They're the sort of people who give anal retentives a bad name (an oldie but a goodie!). And political work is hardly family-friendly anyway, even when you do work from home.

4. Being present at the funeral celebrations for George Rrurambu Burrarrwanga, late of the Warumpi Band. It was moving, funny, humbling and edifying all at once. The very best of Yolngu showbiz in a melange of ceremony, rock and roll and Christian ritual. Ted Egan, our then Administrator, gave a short speech in Yolngu Matha and then sang one of George's songs, also in Yolngu Matha.

5. Pulling off Welcome to Country, a community identity building event at our school where Larrakia people welcomed all of us and the Arnhem Land clan we're named after - Wangurri people. We have a sister school relationship with Dhalinybuy School, the homeland school the Wangurri kids go to. Our kids talk to their kids via computer, using interactive distance learning technology. We broadcast the event - kids performing, speeches etc - into the Dhalinybuy using the same technology.

6. Becoming a freelance contractor again. My first gig is to work with remote community schools and build up skills among the parents in school governance and getting them working with teachers. I hope we can extend the Sister School concept as part of this project.

7. Going to two family weddings - one son, one daughter - in the one year and having a ball at both. Seeing all my kids together (five, count them, five!) and my two grandchildren, Otis and Inez, makes me feel really proud. They're a wonderful mob.

8. Getting to see Al - my oldest friend in Australia - twice in the one year, which is most unusual.

9. Discarding some negative stuff and speaking to my brother for the first time in nearly 10 years.

10. Continuing to negotiate a positive and loving relationship with my lovely Ellie.

11. Yoga.

12. Getting new CDs by Richard Thompson, Paul Kelly and Krishna Das.

13. Watching the little lads grow up and being fascinated with their articulateness, their literacy and the ingenuity of their explanations of the world around them.

14. The beginning of this year's Wet - 112mm of rain in one 24 hour stretch - and more on the way.

15. Reinventing my cooking thanks to Ellie, the new Weber and cookbooks from CSIRO and Jill Dupleix.

16. My continuing and growing friendship with a close schoolmate who I lost touch with for 40-odd years and with whomj I've now been yarning for seven years. Alan Vickers, here's to you!

And with a year like that, who wants to think about low points?

Pots and kettles

2007-06-02T16:56:00.000+09:30

Here's a tale of bastardy on bastardy.
The Federal Government had been looking for a site to dump nuclear waste from our one nuclear reactor for some time.
They tried it on with South Australia, but the State Government - with an eye on the votes - wouldn't have it.
In fact no State wanted to be saddled with it.
They had a sort of evaluation by a committee of experts of 41 potential sites.
The six they chose as most likely were all in safe Government seats.
So they were canned in a hurry and suddenly the committee's conclusions became 'obsolete', according to a minder of the then Science Minister.
What to do?
Out of the blue they found three sites in the Northern Territory, all of them owned by the Defence Department and therefore unencumbered.
One of them - Fishers Ridge, near Katherine - had already been investigated by the experts and dismissed as 'unsuitable on hydrological grounds'.
The other two are in pretty remote parts of Central Australia.
But, like Fishers Ridge, they are close to people.
Mt Everard and Harts Range have small Aboriginal outstation communities; Fishers Ridge adjoins a pastoral property and is also near good freshwater fishing and fish breeding grounds.
All, it is said, will undergo rigorous scientific assessment.
Before the last Federal election in 2004, the Government's Senator for the Northern Territory - one Nigel Scullion, a former commercial fisherman with one of those sexual harasser moustaches - found some spine and said 'Not on my watch!'
The thing is, they chose the sites in the Territory because they can.
We're not a State yet and we don't have the Constitutional power to refuse a proposal for Federal land.
Once safely re-elected, Scullion's spine miraculously disappeared and he became an ardent supporter of the proposal.
And there the plot thickens.
Scullion apparently had some discussions with the Northern Land Council, the representative body under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 for Traditional Owners of Aboriginal land in the top half of the Territory.
He then comes up with an amendment to the forthcoming Radioactive Waste Management Bill that's before Parliament to make it possible for Traditional Owners - or anyone else for that matter - to nominate a site for consideration.
Remember the concept of rigorous scientific assessment?
The name Muckaty Station - north of Tennant Creek and in the remote scrub of the Barkly - hits the news and not for the first time.
In the 80s it was widely rumoured to be up for sale to Japanese interests.
It has since become Aboriginal land but, like a lot of cattle country in the Territory, it's pretty impoverished.
The Land Council denied Muckaty was the site they'd be proposing for a nuclear waste dump, but the rumours persisted.
One group of Traditional Owners gets duchessed to Lucas Heights to see how safe a nuclear reactor is and how harmless the waste would be once treated.
And another hits the trail to protest against the idea.
So at one stroke the Land Council - the body that's supposed to represent Aboriginal interests and which is bound by law to consider the wishes of all people affected by a development proposal - seems to have been very successful in engendering division.
It might be churlish, perhaps even libellous, to suggest that its enthusiasm for the site had something to do with the fact that the husband of one of the Traditional Owners was a member of the Land Council's executive.
But they've pursued it behind closed doors with a vigour.
Nigel Scullion, in the meantime, had got his reward: a junior Ministry in the Howard Government to replace a Queenslander who was accused of corruption (and no, that's not a tautology).
One observer was heard to remark, in paraphrase, 'The Scum Also Rises'.
Finally, last Friday week, the announcement came.
Part of Muckaty was to be proposed as a site for a nuclear waste dump.
In exchange, if the site were to be chosen, the Traditional Owners would receive $11 million to go into a trust fund for housing, transport, education and culture, according to an NLC media release.
A further $1 million was to be set aside for educational scholarships.
But if the rigorous scientific assessment proves Muckaty to be unsuitable, it's all pie in the sky.
Once again Aboriginal people have to offer to give up their traditional rights in the hope opf getting something they should have, like all other citizens, as a matter of right.
This time the Federal Government's agenda was aided and abetted by the body supposed to represent the interests of Aboriginal people.
And to add insult to injury, they gave Clare Martin, our Chief Minister a kicking for it because, their chairman said, she'd ignored a national responsibility in favour of short term political gain.
She had, he said, '...misled and failed Territorians and...Aboriginal groups who benefit from development and employment opportunities on their country'.
Of all the things you'd want to take Clare Martin to task for - and the list is legion - the last thing you'd have a go at her for is sticking to the will of the majority.
Yes, I know, it's probably a first, but you can't knock her for it, can you.
You can - and I do - knock the chairman of the NLC for a thoroughly grubby little performance.
Slagging off Clare Martin does not distract attention from the stunt the Land Council has pulled on all the people of the Northern Territory, not least among them the Traditional Owners of Muckaty Station.
I suspect he and the council did it for short-term political gain, since they're perennially on the nose with government.
The piety and self-righteousness of the man in his attempt to gild utter venality is enough to make a reasonable person vomit.
Pots and kettles?
Yes, but it takes us back to blankets and beads.

Plus ca change

2007-06-01T15:34:00.000+09:30

Our Productivity Commission regularly investigates Indigenous disadvantage as a social and economic cost to the nation.
Their latest report, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage gives the usual depressing rollcall of statistics - premature death rates, chronic diseases, imprisonment, overcrowding, low educational attainment and so on.
With little or no improvement in any of the social indicators.
Reaction from the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, the egregiously awful Mal Brough, was predictable.
First cab off the rank in the blame game was the defunct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), a representative body (fully-elected Board) which in 2004 finally died from the slow death of a thousand cuts it had been suffering from the day the Howard Government was first elected nearly 12 years ago.
Boofhead Mal said the government couldn't be blamed for the lack of progress.
It was all the fault of ATSIC.
I think my memory is in better shape than Mal's, because I recall one of the first acts of the Howard Government was to take responsibility for Indigenous health away from ATSIC and give it to the Federal Health Department.
ATSIC was never responsible for education, only for giving advice which the mainstream department largely ignored.
It was underfunded for housing and kept warning the Federal Government that it needed to spend $4 billion to clean up Indigenous housing nationwide.
Get the picture?
Then Mal said it was all the fault of Indigenous people anyway and if only they'd show a bit of personal responsibility all would be well.
The Productivity Commission offered four critical elements in making a way out of the mess:
• Cooperation between Aboriginal people and government and business;
• A bottom-up, rather than top-down approach;
• Good governance; and
• Continuing government support.
Most of these are self-evident and I won't go into them too much.
This government hasn’t cooperated, it hasn’t sought direction from Indigenous people, it’s failed to engage with them and it’s run by the ‘user pays’ mentality.
On the question of governance, the report said there were six indicators of good governance – governing institutions, leadership, self-determination, capacity building, cultural match and resources – all of which it says must be in play if success is to be sustained.
I think the government falls down on all of them.
And it certainly falls down heavily on the concept of a 'bottom-up' approach.
Mad Mal loves telling people what to do and he hates listening - a trait he has in common with most of the people who've held this portfolio.
They all know best.
The tragic thing about all this is that the profile of disadvantage the Productivity Commission lays out is not news: it's an update on what we already knew from other reports.
The only way the profile will change - in other words the only way Aboriginal people can have any expectation of decent lives - is when central government realises it can't get away any more with blaming and shaming or top-down policy.
They have to start listening to advice and acting on it.
And, above all, they have to have an elected representative structure (emphatically not Child of ATSIC) to help them do it.
Lapdog advisory bodies just don't cut it because (and this is being repeated in the Greenhouse debate) governments will always try to get away with what's least inconvenient.
And that's no longer good enough for Indigenous people and other Australians in the 21st Century.

Forty years on

2007-06-01T04:23:00.000+09:30

It was forty years ago today....
Sounds like a song.
And it was forty years ago this very day that the Beatles released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Can you remember what you were doing?
I was early in line at the record shop, rushed home with the truly amazing disc (yes, vinyl) tucked under my arm and couldn't wait to put it on our creaky little turntable.
In the days before pods, wav files, CDs even, the tinny little stereo could still blow your mind - with the right sounds.
Omigod, look at the cover.
Just look at those dope plants.
Who's that in the corner?
Did you hear that?
Did you hear that?
Shh.
Listen to this!
Twenty-two years old and full of shit and I wouldn't have missed it for quids.
Ah youth: where is thy sting?
And it's also forty years last Sunday since Australia struggled into the beginnings of a social and cultural transformation that is yet to be realised.
On May 27 1967 - I think it was the first time I voted - Australia voted in a Referendum to amend the Constitution to:
- allow Aborigine people for the first time to be counted in the national census; and
- to empower the Federal Government to assume responsibility for legislating for Aboriginal people over and above the States.
Astonishingly, a shade over 90 per cent of all voters said 'Yes' to the proposition.
And saying 'yes' to a referendum question is something Australians hardly ever do.
An earlier referendum on the question, in 1944, was defeated.
But that's probably because the central question of the referendum was to allow the federal Government to retain powers normally held by the States for the period of post-war reconstruction.
The fact that we did say 'yes' in 1967 is testimony to incredibly hard work done by a handful of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal campaigners, like the Queenslanders Faith Bandler (whose father, I think, was a ni-Vanuatu) and the poet and writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal; Jessie Street, a well-known social activist, one of whose sons later became Chief Justice of New South Wales; Victorian Bill Onus, whose son Lin became a leading Aboriginal artist; and countless other people from, as they say, all walks of life.
The feeling at the time was that it just had to be done and I think there was a lot of goodwill about the whole thing.
Certainly both parties supported it, which is increasingly a rarity these days.
And we all felt Aboriginal people had to be recognised as Australians and take their place in our society instead of being swept under the carpet, our treatment of them an embarrassment.
The campaigners built on the work of a handful of Aboriginal activists (although I doubt they'd have used the term then) in the 1930s, who petitioned the Government for Aboriginal representation.
One of them, William Cooper, made a heart-felt plea for recognition on the occasion of the 150th anniversary (or the Sesquicentennial, if you want to get pedantic) of the settlement at Port Jackson.
Bear in mind that at the time the authorities (funny old word, that) simply grabbed a group of blackfellas from missions and settlements in rural NSW, put them on trucks, drove them off to Sydney and kept them locked up in a camp before bringing them out in loincloths, waving spears, at the re-enactment of Capt Cook's landing - and his claiming the entire continent in the name of King George - at Botany Bay.
And then they trucked them back again into the obscurity of the Far West - out of sight, out of mind.
Caught in a flickering old black and white newsreel, Cooper nervously but unwaveringly asserts the right of Aboriginal people to be recognised and very generously offers to share their country with us.
In an early assertion of the right of Aboriginal peoples to share the economic wealth of the country with the rest of us, he says '...there's plenty of fish in our rivers for all to share...' or some such.
It is very moving to see it today and particularly moving when you consider all he was asking for was a seat at the table as an equal.
In legal terms the Referendum wasn't such a great change, as the eminent Aboriginal lawyer and academic Larissa Behrendt, who is Director of Research and Professor of Law and Indigenous Studies at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, pointed out on radio the other day.
It took five years for the Whitlam Government to actually set up a Department of Aboriginal Affairs, for instance.
But that little change was like a crack in the dam and it led to what might be described as big changes.
The forty years since have seen a roll-call of events, institutions and people: Nugget Coombs, Syd Jackson, Polly Farmer, Lionel Rose, the National Aboriginal Council, Gary Foley, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Marcia Langton, Noonkanbah, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory and other forms of Land Rights in the various States, the Tent Embassy, the Royal Commissions into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the Stolen Generations, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, the Mundines, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, Mr Djerrkura, Geoff Clark, the Krakouers, the Native Title Act, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Aiden Ridgeway, Yvonne Margarula, the late Murray Chapman, Kathy Freeman, Rover Thomas, John Mawundjul, John Bulun Bulun, Linda Birney, Marion Scrymgour, Barbara McCarthy, Alison Anderson, my friend Josie Crawshaw and so on.
(Without being facetious, and drawing the strands of this post somewhat together, the characters and events would have made a record cover to rival even Sergeant Pepper.)
And, in a simple illustration, forty years ago it would have been unthinkable for any official public gathering to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of whatever country the event is in; now it's unthinkable not to.
But Indigenous people are still dying early (average age of death some 17 years younger than for non-Indigenous people), are more likely to suffer preventable chronic diseases like diabetes, renal disease, tuberculosis; in remote areas are likely to be living in a house with as many as 30 other people, they are unlikely to finish school and and are highly likely to be unemployed.
That's not to say that the referendum itself was a failure.
It's successive governments that have failed in imagination, courage and determination.
It's governments who have shut out Indigenous people from a seat at the table.
Forty years on from expressing a national sense of purpose and unity on one of the burning questions of the age, we are now living under a government that is blaming Indigenous people for the conditions many of them live in and making them pay for services and infrastructure that people living in cities regard as theirs by right.
In 2007, we still have a long way to go and clearly a Constitutional change hasn't been enough to make serious change happen.
Perhaps it's time, once again, to say Treaty Now!

What price dignity?

2007-05-24T10:56:00.001+09:30

As soon as Aboriginal people reject outright something the Government wants them to do, out come the weapons of mass distraction.
Town camps in Alice Springs - 20-odd small settlements housing about 3000 people - have long been regarded as a blight on the landscape.
A community-based organisation, Tangentyere Council, represents the separate housing associations, who've been doing the job no-one else wants do; for some years neither the Federal nor Territory Governments have shown any inclination to negotiate a better way.
Tangentyere (pron like: Tang - enjeera) has been running municipal and social services,designing, building and maintaining houses, which rapidly become overcrowded.
The camps are dilapidated and there's the things you might expect to see among the dispossessed and desperate.
But they've been under Aboriginal control for decades.
And they've been underfunded, so Tangentyere's work has been in the nature of a holding pattern.
Along comes a new Indigenous Affairs Minister who can see an instant solution.
There's $60 million on the table for repairs, new buildings and infrastructure.
Lots of talk about how this will help create a decent future for families.
We all know it's necessary.
The people of the town camps and their housing associations know exactly how much good it would do and they've been crying out for an injection of just this kind serious money for ages.
They don't actually want to live the way circumstances have left them living for the past few decades.
They want to see change as much as anyone else does.
But, as with everything that this Minister offers, he expects a quick turnaround for a decision.
he expects it to be done his way and no other way.
And he has price tag.
The $60 million comes at the cost of the housing associations relinquishing responsibility for managing the town camps; and they have to consider proposals for sub-leasing the land to make way for, among other things, private ownership.
Instead of managing their housing, they'd be represented on a new advisory Board, but the Territory Government would take over management.
The town campers walked away from the offer last weekend and they walked away from it again yesterday.
Clearly, they felt losing a sense of control over their lives was too high a price.
So there's no deal and the offer is withdrawn.
They should never have been put in that position, of course.
A 'take it or leave it' approach is not going to work.
Deadlines that don't allow for complex negotiations within the Aboriginal polity won't work.
There has to be room for people to walk away after sealing a deal with their dignity intact.
It looks like neither Mal Brough nor the Territory Government can see this.
Clare Martin is still trying to broker some compromise.
But Mal has brought out the weapons of mass distraction.
He fears for the children and warns of dire consequences - perhaps even murders - if the town camps don't get cleaned up.
Over the top?
Just a shade.
Shaming people after the event isn't going to help matters when people know you already have a history of trying to bully people into doing things you want, your way.
And he's got an answer to the age-old question: What price dignity?
It's not for sale.

She's only human, thank the Great Spirit

2007-05-23T17:39:00.000+09:30

'There are certain threshold issues that you get to and it causes you to confront who you are and what you are and I suppose the McArthur River issue was one that did cause a lot of anxiety within myself. As a Government Minister, what are some of the things that I should have been doing a bit more proactively? I’ve never hidden that fact from my caucus colleagues or others about what that had done on a personal level and it was my time to get away and to think about it. I am fully committed to the Labor party and our Government. There are times when we do, each one of us, it is a hard job. I don’t walk out of Parliament House or anywhere else and go home and wash my skin and the aboriginality disappears, that stays with me 24/7...I'm only human.'
Marion Scrymgour, Member for Arafura, Minister for Environment in the Northern Territory Government, proud Aboriginal woman, great human being, on radio this afternoon (ABC 105.7 FM, 23 May 2007).
Marion has been under fire from all sides since she declined to vote on the Macarthur River mine issue.
Rather than vote against the Bill - which woud have meant breaching the concept of Cabinet solidarity - she absented herself from the Chamber and took two weeks leave to think things through.
She's stood by what she did, in spite of Opposition attempts to try and wedge her.
And in doing so, she's highlighted a continuing dilemma for Aboriginal people who step across into mainstream politics: how do you reconcile being an Aboriginal person with the possibility that you may be called on to take a position that may be against the interests of either a specific group of Aboriginal people or against Aboriginal people generally?
We've created that dilemma with our narrow political systems, of course.
It's in the interests of a political party to have elected Aboriginal members and Labor has milked all it can from the fact that it has had the first ever Aboriginal Minister of the Crown (John Ah Kit) and the greatest number of elected Aboriginal members ever elected to an Australian parliament (six, of whom two are Ministers).
But we don't seem to be able to recognise Aboriginal politicians as first and foremost Aboriginal people.
First in the eyes of the government is Labor Party membership.
It's as if these Aboriginal members are divorced from the bulk of their constituency - which in all but one of these members is a majority Aboriginal constituency
So there's a continuing tension between the demands of the party and party system (conventions of Cabinet solidarity for one; party discipline for another) and people's identity - as there is for anyone of integrity who enters the political arena at this level.
It's especially tense for Aboriginal people, who are held to be role models/spokespeople for their people in whatever field they may succeed.
And that's because we apply our measures of success to the status they have won.
And if they become Members of Parliament, then we think they can't be - as they normally would be - bound by family and cultural ties to question decisions a government makes that may well be against the interests of their people.
We think they simply have to abide by the party platform and/or the fiat of the leader.
Which means in effect that, whenever it comes to the crunch and the interests of Aboriginal people are going to be subsumed by the needs of the majority - which means they are discarded - the Aboriginal members have to compromise their Aboriginality
People think Barbara McCarthy is flaky because she stood up for her relatives in the face of huge pressure from a multinational mining company and the party of government of which she is a member.
And the same goes for Alison Anderson and Karl Hampton, who stood by her and voted against the legislation.
Others think Marion Scrymgour is flaky because she was honest enough to admit to a deep-seated angst about the pressures on her to accept decisions that she knew - deep in her bones - were against the interests of her people.
The pressure we put on Aboriginal politicians who enter mainstream politics is the pressure to collude in their own opppression.
Thanks be to the Great Spirit that some of them - the truly human ones - have the guts to tell us that it's too much too bear, at least some of the time.
Thank you Marion, Barbara, Alison and Karl for the reality check.
If our system of government - particularly one that operates in Aboriginal country and relies on Aboriginal voters for its success - is to be truly inclusive, then we have to develop a new realpolitik that truly recognises and acts on the imperatives of other cultures.
If we can't do it, we don't belong in the 21 st century and we certainly don't deserve to govern.

Beware John Howard's wedgie

2007-05-20T18:59:00.002+09:30

Over recent weeks, the Prime Minister and his Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, have been making a series of increasingly bizarre pronouncements on education.
He's talked about what he calls 'political correctness' among schoolteachers.
And we know Howard has odd views on history and geography.
The teaching of these subjects ain't what it used to be in his day, he's been heard to say.
And he wasn't auditioning for a part in a Canberra version of the 'Four Yorkshiremen' sketch either.
More recently he and the lovely Julie have talked about the concept of performance pay for teachers and the automatic expulsion of school bullies.
There's a hidden wedge in every one, of course.
Best thing is to ignore the lot.
The real issue is senior politicians making deliberately ill-informed statements that either incite, or at least pander to, prejudice against public education.
And they do that at their peril.
Parents are voters, too.

Nature, cultures and snouts in the trough

2007-05-20T15:08:00.000+09:30

Walking along the Esplanade early yesterday morning, I heard a barking owl in the bush behind Lameroo cliffs.
And then I saw it in the gloom, perched on a branch and repeating its cry: woof woof.
I'm not kidding.
That's why they're called barking owls.
Underneath the trees, orange-footed scrub fowl witter about like avian extras in a Monty Python movie.
This is little more than 100m from a large international hotel, a cocooned and air-conditioned haven that protects the moderately well-off visitor from the world around them; from the world they travelled thousands of kilometres to experience.
It may well be a sign that nature is holding its own in our city.
But for how long?
Cranes are on the skyline, big holes are in the ground and the real estate agents are grinning voraciously.
Well might they.
They and their mates in the land development world, among them the unbelievably wealthy Sultan of Brunei, have transformed Darwin with a plethora of apartment buildings.
Now, the population ain't growing and I'm not sure who's buying them, or more importantly living in them, but there's another new building every time you turn around, it seems.
So there has to be a heap of money in it.
For the few.
Last month the Government sponsored a planning forum to 'develop a vision for Darwin'.
Nice idea.
But it's about 20 years too late.
What Darwin used to be is gone.
It's been ripped up and knocked flat, to be replaced by a collection of buildings of neither wit nor style and without a shred of environmental sensibility.
In other words they're not just ugly; they don't take advantage of the balmy breezes above Darwin Harbour and their reliance on airconditioning makes them energy-expensive.
So I think the exercise is called 'shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted'.
The planning forum was attended by invited stakeholders - the industry and government - only.
It seems that the people - the ones who work, live or shop in the city, even (or especially) the people who sleep in the parks - don't really count.
True, there was a public forum late in the day.
The people of Darwin were allowed to ask four questions.
Meanwhile the people whose snouts have always been in the trough have got carte blanche to keep them there.
And get rich in the process.
I'm not just worried about this on aesthetic grounds.
The people who get invited to planning forums of this nature will tell you that the kind of development we will continue to experience is necessary to give Darwin a proper image to cater for visitors, people from overseas and interstate, and investors.
In other words you take a place that has its own unique attraction and turn it into an andoyne replica of everywhere else in the world.
Meretricious kitsch (probably a tautology) replaces the real and the lived-in.
Welcome to the new Singapore.
It seems to me that it also involves a more or less deliberate attempt to obliterate history, culture and a sense of place.
There is no place for these in the airbrushed, sanitised vision of who we are and where we live.
There is no place for tangible reminders of Darwin's history, like blackfellas freely wandering the streets as if they owned the place.
Well, some of them - Larrakia people - do, actually.
But the 'antisocial behaviour' of some - living their lives in public places - makes them all unwelcome.
There is still an Aboriginal town, a black skin, underpinning the white town that tourists and transient whitefella residents think is the real Darwin.
Aboriginal people - some from Larrakia families, others from all parts of the Territory and many of them from the Stolen Generations - don't just live and work here.
They are a network that supports the greater part of the city's sporting, social and cultural life
If the transient whitefellas can't see this and don't know about it, however, it doesn't exist.
For the time being, the black town is still there.
But, like the barking owl and the scrub fowl, I wonder for how much longer.
It's an inconvenient intrusion on the seamless vision of a brave new world of pastel-coloured buildings and and clean, happy punters with their soy lattes and dhukka on pide.
Where I live in the Northern Suburbs, I walk my dogs in the early dawn along a beach that is washed by the Timor Sea.
Within coo-ee of the University, the hospital and Darwin's only big shopping mall, Aboriginal people are camped on the beach under the casuarina trees.
Fires are smouldering.
The sand is littered with shellfish - clams and long bums.
As it has been for thousands of years.
Here at least there will be none of the development that has poxed the city.
The coastal reserve protects mangrove swamp, paperbarks, remnant monsoon vine forest and tropical woodland, replete with pandanus - all behind the dunes - as it shelters the people who use it is a temporary home..
If you're lucky, some mornings you'll see white-breasted sea eagles and osprey or curlews, whimbrels and dotterels.
In the monsoon forest you might catch a glimpse of the azure flash that is a rainbow pitta's wing panel.
Or on the boardwalk through the mangroves you'll catch the fleeting edge of a threat from a fiddler crab's waving claw as it disappears down its hole in the mud.
I hope it will still be there when my children are old.
And it should be, as long as the smart money doesn't find it.

Some things just aren't for sale

2007-05-18T12:07:00.000+09:30

Our Federal Government is upping the ante in its push to bring Aboriginal people the dubious benefits of the free market.
It's increasing its efforts to privatise their land.
A senior bureaucrat in the Northern Territory Government gave them the key to making it work.
Starting with the land on which there are townships - known with some irony as 'communities' - he proposed it be leased in its entirety to a Government-run entity for 99 years.
This entity would in turn arrange for sub-leases to outsiders for business and to Aboriginal people from within the town.
The argument goes that offering up a long-term lease as a security would make it easier for outside business to want to invest their capital and it would enable Aboriginal people to start up businesses or use the lease as security for getting the finance to buy their own homes.
For those of you who don't live in Australia, home ownership is the Great Australian Dream, the national sacred cow and the sine qua non of suburban existence.
And what relevance does it have to Aboriginal people, I hear you ask?
Precious little.
Except that Government wants it to be relevant to them so they can be just like all other Australians - whatever that might look like.
So they're peddling this dubious bill of goods wherever and whenever they can
The Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister held a meeting yesterday at Nguiu, on Bathurst Island, to dicker with traditional owners of the town land over how they might join in this scheme.
The clincher is the offer of serious bucks from the Commonwealth - $5 million down now and lots more to come.
It was a closed meeting of Tiwi Land Council members and Mr Brough claimed they had been identified as Traditional Owners of the land in question with anthropological certainty .
And these, the bombastic little twerp told reporters, were the only people he was going to talk to.
Once again he was talking through his arse.
The Tiwi Land Council, the Traditional Owners' representative body, never did the anthropological groundwork done by the two mainland Land Councils, as required under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act to underpin land claims and negotiations for land use proposals.
So Mr Brough's statement gives us some grounds for inferring that he doesn't understand either the Act - the basis of the Aboriginal freehold title the Islands are held under - or the complex nature of traditional ownership.
Traditional ownership is rarely expressed as the kind of single entity ownership - person or body corporate - that we understand in our culture.
It's usually hedged around by checks and balances, like certain people from another clan (in some areas the clan into which the landowning clan marries) taking the role of 'managers', in the sense that they have the cultural right to vet and then approve or veto anything to do the land in question.
So the managers need to in on the consult too.
As do, according to the Act, any people living in the area who might be affected by big changes to the landholding regime.
The egregiously aggressive Minister brushed this aside, but did hold an open meeting later in the day so Aboriginal residents could listen to what was being offered and have their say.
The trouble is, it's difficult to see precisely what direction this whole thing is going.

But it's important to understand a couple of things here.

Bathurst Island is one of two main islands - the other is Melville and both are named after colonial aristos - that are the home of a culturally and linguistically homogenous group, the Tiwi.

It's a short (20-30 minutes) plane ride from Darwin and its international airport, has hundreds of kilometres of unspoilt beach and some of the best fishing to be found in a region that is known as an angler's paradise.

Hoteliers, resort developers and tourism operators have been eyeing it off for the past couple of decades at least.

Get the picture?

Now it seems clear to me that two things are going on: the land is being privatised for the benefit of business; and the process involves the removal of cultural constraints to the acts of privatisation.

If an outside entity takes control of traditional land for 99 years, it weakens Aboriginal control.
If it assumes the power to offer, vary or transfer subleases on that land without any reference to the Traditional Owners, it further weakens Aboriginal control.
If a business owner and staff are exempted from the usual requirements to apply for a permit to be on Aboriginal land - simply because the power over the land has been taken over by an entity - than that weakens Aboriginal control too.
An important part of land ownership in Aboriginal cultures is the landowner's ability to make decisions about it, to enforce those decisions according to Aboriginal Law and to pass on to his or her children the stories about the land that reinforce the clan's identity and its right to claim ownership of the land and the stories and ceremonies associated with that land.
A 99 year lease will irrevocably damage a traditional landowning family's hold on a piece of land because it will erode the intergenerational transfer of knowledge based on that land.
This is not museum stuff we're talking about: it's the here and now and it's right there in people's lives.
Just because we can't always see it or describe it in terms that make sense to us, it doesn't mean it isn't there.
And it doesn't mean that $5 million sweeteners and other such ephemera will make people walk away from it happily.
This might come as a shock to the people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing, but some things just aren't for sale.
And if we insist on trying to buy them, which means single-handedly determining the nature and pace of change to suit our needs alone and not the needs of Aboriginal people, then we do untold damage.
And it's damage piled on top of the damage that's already there: disease, premature death, dysfunction.
All in the name of the free market.

I kept my pants on

2007-05-06T15:37:00.000+09:30

I didn't have to take my pants off - the spin doctors came good as I predicted (see post below).
But in another piece of bastardy I almost didn't notice, the government inserted a clause into the legislation making it impossible for Aboriginal people - and anyone else for that matter - to challenge this mine.
And they buried Barbara's brother on the weekend.

Now for a rambling tale about a movie, the point of which is not entirely unrelated.
'Ten Canoes' is an unusual film.
The actors are all Yolngu, the dilaogue is entirely in their language (Ganalbingu), it's shot entirely on location in the Arafura Swamp and it's a story within a story within a story about ancestral ways.
Rolf de Heer, the Dutch-Australian filmmaker (Bad Boy Bubby, Dingo, The Tracker etc etc) went out to Ramingining and took the time to develop the story, find the cast and shoot the movie.
The storyline owes its beginnings to a wetplate black and white photo taken in the 1930s by anthropologist Donald Thomson.
Thomson traveled through Arnhem Land with his dogs and his camera and took a marvellous photographic record of the rich lives of the Yolngu.
This particular pic shows ten goose hunters, standing in their canoes, at a point in the Arafura Swamp and its ia s starting point for the story in the film.
'Ten Canoes' has been very successful in critical and commercial terms.
In The Weekend Australian this weekend, de Heer writes about trying to tell one of his co-producers, Ramingining man Peter Djigirr, about an award they'd just won.
'Djigirr! You've won an award!.
'Right...what's that thing?'
'Like a prize.'
'A prize?'
'You know, recognition for doing good with the film.'
'Oh yeah...a prize.' Djigirr pauses. 'Any money?'
'Er, not sure about this one. Probably a piece of plastic.'
A long pause. 'Plastic?'
'Yeah, like a statue or something.'
'Ahh...what do I do with it?'
'Take it home, put it on a shelf.'
There's another pause, as Djigirr tries to digest the lunacy of everything I'm saying.
'I haven't got a shelf.'
This short piece of text, describing a conversation between two men who have managed the complex task of making a movie across a great cultural divide and who obviously have great affecton and respect for each other, is full of cultural dissonances.
Try as hard as he can to do otherwise, de Heer started the conversation with a series of assumptions about the extent of Djigirr understandingss about things that he himself takes for granted.
But understanding, even of the small things that pepper a conversation like the one above, is contingent on Djigirr having the sort of cultural capital that he obviously doesn't have.
So the talk is full of misunderstandings, of question and answers that only half clear up what is going on.
And note, de Heer is intellectually and emotionally honest enough to admit that what he is trying to do is 'lunacy' as he realises he's enmired himself in a swamp of his own making.
This kind of dissonance is not at all unusual for people who work in Aboriginal domains.
I've dropped myself in it repeatedly, as have most of the people I know.
But imagine how much greater the dissonance when you can't even hear what Aboriginal people are saying about their feelings for a river, say, that your sense of what's right - socially, culturally, economically and environmentally - says can and should be dammed, drained and diverted, all for what you determine to be the common good.
As de Heer might remark, how can we expect Aboriginal peope to grasp the lunacy of it all?

La Passionara rides again

2007-05-04T06:28:00.000+09:30

Well, they did it.
Three of the Aboriginal Members of the Assembly crossed the floor and voted against the Macarthur River Mine legislation.
Barbara McCarthy, in a passionate speech, told the House that it was shameful the legislation was rushed through while the people of Borroloola were still in 'Sorry Business' (extensive mortuary rites following a death, still widely practised by Aboriginal people despite the fact that the deaths come thick and fast these days).
Of course the Yanyuwa and Mara people are the last on Clare Martin's list of people to listen to.
Xstrata, yes.
The mining lobby, yes.
One's own parliamentary colleagues, as long as they don't say anything she doesn't want to hear.
But blackfellas?
Forget it.
The Martin Government prides itself on the fact that it has six Aboriginal members out of a team of 19.
No other Parliament has ever been able to make the same claim and some have no Aboriginal members at all.
But it's not much good when you expect Aboriginal people to help you legitimise actions that are against the interests of particular groups of Aboriginal people, which means you're asking them to collude in their own oppression.
These three have had enough of that, plainly.
But watch out for the spin doctors.
They'll present it that crossing the floor didn't mean they disagreed with the legislation.
It meant they were acting oout of a sense of shame at the offence towards the dead person and those in mourning - of whom Barbara McCarthy is one.
And I'll bare my bum in Smith St if it ain't so.

In other Aboriginal news to hand this hour (isn't that an appalling expression?), Federal Inidgenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough was out bush yesterday signing up the first happy punters to his private home ownership scheme.
The idea is that you get Aboriginal people to embrace privatisation and the joys of capitalism by taking them out of public housing and into the Great Australian Dream.
And how do you do it?
You spend huge - and unspecified - amounts of taxpayers' money building houses out in the bush (this one's 300-odd km from Darwin).
Then you tell the punters they have to pay the rent faithfully for two years.
OK, no drama.
Keep the house and yard clean and tidy.
Hm.
And send their kids to school (which is 40km away in this case) every day.
I kid you not.
If you were trying to get white public housing tenants to buy their own homes, you might insist on the first of these conditions as a prerequisite.
But any reasonable person might find the other conditions grossly intrusive and perhaps a contravention of human rights.
But because these tenants are black and the Government is just trying to help them see the light, it's OK?
Oy vey! That's Australia under John Howard for you.

More on 'First there is a river'

2007-05-03T07:18:00.000+09:30

The Macarthur River mine deal looked set in concrete.
And then the wheels came off and it looked for while there as if the Government had stuffed up big time.
In the Government's hurry to bend over for Xstrata's plans to divert the river and expand to an open-cut operation, the Mines Minister - a former sports administrator and living embodiment of the Peter Principle - overstepped the mark.
He apparently didn't follow due process and approved the mine plan under a deficient part of the Mining Act.
Work on the mine stopped when the Supreme Court found they'd stuffed up.
Not to be deterred, our Chief Minister - the redoubtable Clare Martin - stepped in to rescue boofhead and simply said she would change the legislation overnight to regularise the process retrospectively.
So mining will continue.
Swift and decisive action to save the Territory economy?
Maybe.
But it's more like being bluffed into submission by the company threatening to pack up their shovels and tents and piss off somewhere else.
And the benefit to our economy is dubious.
The company gets $100 million year in various subsidies.
That's taxpayers' dollars.
It pays no royalties.
Most of its fly-in-fly-out workforce lives anywhere in Australia but the Territory.
And the traditional owners of the country who still vehemently oppose the deal and who were behind the Supreme Court challenge?
'I'm sure they'll understand,' says our Clare.
Sure.
One of the TOs who led the opposition to the mine died recently.
He was 42.
Go figure.
And what about the views of the Aboriginal members of the Assembly?
Will they collude with this desperation play?
I don't think they'll be taking this one lying down.
Not this time.
And not ever again.
Government for all Territorians?
I hope so.
At last.
watch this space.

All together now...

2007-04-23T21:22:00.000+09:30

I was in Alice Springs a couple of weeks or so and witnessed episodes of what they're coyly referring to as 'anti-social behaviour'.
It was generally harmless - the odd drunk humbugging for money.
But I did watch a couple of kids (black and white;14 y.o?) wind themselves up to have a fight with a German tourist.
Lots of loud and bad language.
Windmilling arms.
Ostentatious taking off of shirts.
Preparing for a fight.
It looked ugly, but didn't go much further than that.
A few days before there'd been a 'riot'.
Self-appointed vigiliantes took to the streets, but overweight men with red faces don't scare pumped-up kids who can run a lot faster.
Not much.
A few days later there were a couple of fatal stabbings.
And then the Chief Minister was in town for a regional sittingCabinet meeting of our town council sized and grandiosely -named 'Parliament'.
She copped a fair amount of abuse from people who were 'scared to go out', 'sick and tired of violence' and 'waiting for something to be done'.
The something?
More police.
Less tolerance.
Laura Norder.
But they're not yet prepared to see Alice Springs become a dry town (no public drinking whatsoever).
That's bad for business.
It's about what you'd expect, really.
No-one's prepared to look at the whys and wherefores, though.
Like, why is it happening?
I got a clue sitting in restaurant one night.
There was party of white people across the room.
Lots of wine and loud voices.
One stood out: 'The thing you have to realise about Alice Springs is that nobody comes from here; we're all from somewhere else'.
It's bullshit, of course.
It's not even true of white people: several families have been around the Centre for a few generations now; and I have friends of middle age who were born there and whose parents were born there.
But it says a lot about how some - many - whites view blacks.
They're interlopers who don't belong in a whitefella tourist-fuelled economic wet dream that only exists in this arid, but long-peopled landscape, because their culture lives and tourists want to experience it before it too dies.
Forget about the Mparntwe people, the custodians of Yeperenye, the Caterpillar Dreaming.
Forget about the fact that you're as likely to hear Arrernte on the radio as you are English.
To the nouveau Alice Springs resident, they're invisible.
Marginalised.
And what is the last desperate resort of marginalised people?
All together now....

Travelling North: On the Road

2007-04-16T07:28:00.000+09:30

The term 'desert' doesn't do justice to the amazing variety of micro-environments that pattern the arid inland of Australia.

Think about the complexity in so-called 'dot' painting, then look at Google Earth's view of the Centre from the sky.

I travelled both south and north in a round trip of more than 8000km last month.

We drove to Melbourne for my eldest son's wedding and then I drove back solo, accompanied only by Warren Zevon, The Chieftains, Lyle Lovett, JS Bach, WA Mozart, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Alison Krauss and Guy Clark.

This is one of the amazing views from the road - the top end of a large complex of salt lakes in the country to the south-west of Woomera.

Day 1 I drove from just out of Melbourne to Burra, in mid-north south Aust, via Mildura, Renmark and Morgan.

Day 2 was Burra to Coober Pedy via Horrocks Gap into Port Augusta.

Day 3 Coober Pedy to Alice Springs.

Day 4 Alice Springs to the Highway Inn.

And Day 5 Highway Inn to Darwin.

See more pics on our web album.

Vale Kurt Vonnegut

2007-04-16T07:23:00.000+09:30

Dry insights, mordant wit and spare prose: his writing shone in my youth, although I felt that in his later years, which were marked by depression, he tended to lapse into self-parody.
Now old Kurt has been swallowed up by the great chronosynclastic infundibulum in the sky.
So it goes.
Poot-tee-wheet

It might be neat and tidy, but is it democratic?

2007-04-10T17:26:00.000+09:30

Back in the bad old days of serious machine politics in the various state Labor parties, the numbers men exhorted the faithful to 'vote early and vote often'.
In some wards, the dead rose from their graves to vote repeatedly at different polling booths.
That was then.
We've since got an independent statutory body - the Australian Electoral Commission - which oversees elections at every level.
Our elections - apart from the extremely rare occurrence of missing ballot boxes in some organisational elections - are usually straight.
We have a formal electoral roll and what used to be a pretty straightforward enrolment process with a reasonable period for enrolment after elections are called.
But that's changing as of 16 April this year.
For the rest of this week, you can enrol by giving name, address, citizenship status and birthdate and getting someone who is already on the roll to witness your signature.
Next week, you'll have to provide full ID and choose from a small menu of authorised people to both view your ID and witness your enrolment application.
If you're in prison, you now lose the right to vote.
Forget about internationally-recognised civil and political rights.
Cons will not be able to exercise them
And if they called an election tomorrow, you'd have until 8pm the same day to register if you'd forgotten to do it beforehand.
In a literate society, this should not be a problem.
But what about in remote areas, where many Aboriginal people - particularly the young - are barely literate?
Many simply do not carry their own documentation, leaving banks, stores and health clinics to look after ATM cards, Medicare cards and the like.
In order to enrol, they'd have to round up their ID, then find one of the authorised people and then fill out the form - or get someone to do it for them.
If they live on an outstation, they might not hear about an election being called.
So if they haven't enrolled, the chances of rounding up the ID, getting an authorised person to witness the form and then faxing it off to the Electoral Commission in time are pretty slim.
There's a big enrolment drive on in the territory at the moment, to try and make sure that Aboriginal people aren't disenfranchised by the move.
Funnily enough, not that many of them are likely to vote for the current government, whose Indigenous policies derive their intellectual foundations from the philosophy of assimilation.
They're also pretty good at blaming the victim, too.
The Chairman of the Joint Parliamentary Standing Committee on Electoral Matters - a member of the governing party - said, without going into specifics, that the changes would stop the 'deluge of last-minute enrolments', which increased the scope for fraud and manipulation of electoral roll.
But as one of the activists who run the GetUp website pointed out, new technology should make voting easier and if the the government wanted the roll to be accurate and up to date, they should be allowing people to enrol.
Not making it harder and harder for them.
But no, they pushed the legislation through Parliament last year and it's sat there waiting for deadline - pretty well unnoticed by all but a few.
I took part in a survey by my union - the Media Alliance - and was asked if I was aware of the coming changes to the Electoral Act.
I think I surprised the interviewer with the extent of my knowledge.
She told me after the interview that only one in 30 members - yes folks, about three per cent - of the membership were aware of what was happening.
So if the media doesn't know, how are the punters going to find out?
Unnoticed changes might make the process neater.
But are they democratic?

No, Minister

2007-04-09T11:11:00.000+09:30

It's months since I've posted.
Christmas intervened and then it got harder and harder to sit down and write something.
But I'm back!

The state of education has hit the news recently; more specifically the low levels of literacy and numeracy recorded in the Northern Territory as compared with other States and Territories.
We know we don't perform as well because the national benchmarking Multilevel Assessment Program tests (the MAP tests) say so.
What the MAP tests actually show is that the performance in urban and regional schools compares favourably with Down South.
It's the remote schools in Aboriginal communities, however, that show very poor returns: in some cases only around 30 per cent of kids actually perform at benchmark level.
And that's a terrific opportunity for talkback radio to get into the whys and wherefores.
So they wheel out the Minister for Education for an explanation.
A practised politician, he has no difficulty - nor hesitation - in fluently repeating the advice his Department has given him.
Kids in remote Aboriginal schools don't perform as well because they don't attend school.
All we have to do is attend regularly and everything will be hunky-dory.
Right.
The reality is a bit more complex than that.
What we're talking about - remote schooling - is still essentially a colonialist enterprise.
It's a valiant attempt to impart Western values and styles of knowledge that blithely ignores the complexities of working across languages and cultures.
In this context, it's not simply enough to provide schools and teachers and expect kids will automatically turn up.
You have to give them a reason for being there.
You have to bend your pedagogy and then your curriculum to accommodate cross-cultural, multilingual contexts, such as schools where kids may speak up to five languages and may speak Aboriginal English or Kriol as a sixth, but they don't speak, read or write a more formal English.
You have to make sure your teachers are fully trained, sensitive and mature enough to meet the demands; not simply recruit warm bodies to front a classroom and emerge at the end of the day more or less sane.
You have to work out the conditions that are necessary to keep teachers out bush, so that you've got continuity in people and programs.
And you have to have consistent and sustained support from your department.
Blaming kids can't hide the fact that the department is doing none of the above.
But it's what many people in the Territory want to hear.
It's yet more 'proof' that blackfellas are to lazy to get off their arses and make sure their kids go to school so they can get the benefits that we're supposedly offering.
That the assertion doesn't stand up to intelligent scrutiny doesn't stop the department running the line.
Fortunately, I was interviewed as a representative of the school councils' combined organisation and I got a good response to my suggestion that we needed to look at our own performance - as I've listed above - before we start blaming kids for their failure to perform at level.
I was followed by a senior bureaucrat who stuck to the line, which by then had become slightly modified to: 'well kids who do attend school have no problems with their literacy'.
No, Minister, this simply ain't good enough.
Aboriginal kids are the fastest-growing cohort in our schools and unless we tailor the system to meet their complex needs, they're missing out.
Dealing with this is not just a matter of equity.
It ought to be, to use a classic piece of modern bureaucratic cant, 'core business'.

First there is a river, then there is no river...

2006-10-29T14:05:00.000+09:30

My apologies to Donovan, folks.
This is a story about a river and the place of that river in an Aboriginal culture, but it's also a story about mining.
But first a wee bit of history. More than forty years ago, a Swiss mining company - one of the then giants of the world bauxite trade - bulldozed its way into the consciousness of Yolngu people of North East Arnhem Land when surveyors found substantial deposits of the mineral under clan estates.
The Yolngu leaders tried everything to stop the mine, including legal action and an appeal to Parliament that revealed the legal title deeds to those estates in the form of a composite bark painting that showed the clan stories.
All to no avail. The Australian Government of the day issued the licence and they got a mine. They got a town. And they got a pub.
In the process, they saw the authority of their leaders disregarded, their lands alienated and their sacred sites desecrated. One celebrated photograph shows a senior man sitting by helplessly as a big D9 Cat rips into a sacred tree near his camp. It's arguable whether the Yolngu have ever recovered from the psychic shock of the rape.
Throughout their ownership of the mine, which ended a few years ago, Alusuisse continued to treat local landowners with the same disdain.
Small wonder when, as I discovered only within the past five years or so, Alusuisse assumed its leading position in the industry on the backs of slave labour - Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, displaced people from throughout Europe - supplied to their mates by the Nazis from their concentration camps. Nice people, eh?
And now another Swiss-owned mining company - Xstrata - is about to do another act that will desecrate a sacred place, with the inevitable cultural fall-out.
Xstrata has been mining various minerals at a mine on the Macarthur River, a few hundred kilometres from Darwin and in the floodplain country that stretches north to the Gulf of Carpenteria.
It wants to extend the mine and open up a huge open cut operation. That in itself is environmentally dodgy. One Wet a couple of years ago, the mine site had nearly TWO METRES of rain in a week. But the really dodgy thing about this operation is that they want to divert the river for about five kilometres.
Yes. Divert a river.
Shades of the 1950s? The can-do philosophy that made America what it is? (Q: What is America? Rasta answer - Babylon; Muslim answer - The Great Shaitan. Ask people in Chile and Nicaragua. Or Vietnam. Or Panama. Or Palestine. Take your pick.)
Whichever it is, it's an act of wilful cultural vandalism rather than an engineering miracle. The Macarthur River is the Rainbow Serpent and where they want to divert it is a particularly sacred part of the story.
So did the Swiss back off?
Not on your life. Sensing that they were operating on questionable ground, they threatened the Northern Territory government that they'd withdraw the entire operation - which they claimed meant the NT losing millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs - if the government refused to let them divert the river.
Their argument has been revealed as somewhat piss-weak: most of the jobs on site are filled by fly-in fly-out workers from other States; and they haven't paid any money over to the NT anyway.
Nonetheless, the NT government caved in and the Mines Minister announced the other day that the mine and the river diversion would go ahead. As far as we know, there's yet to be an acceptable package of compensation for the Aboriginal people of the region. Y
anyuwa traditional owners from the region came to Darwin to protect, but the dirty deed was done. They looked the parliament in the eye, though, and not a few on the padded benches flinched.
One who didn't was herself a Yanyuwa woman - Barbara McCarthy, a former journalist who won the local seat of Arnhem at our last elections for the ruling Labor Party. Barbara was painted up by her elders with ochre and she wore the paint proudly as she stood up and questioned the deal.
Predictably, her motives were questioned, since she accepted party discipline until the deed was done and spoke up only after the event. I think she did a brave and honest thing, the right thing by her people.
The company, equally predictably, tried to play down what she'd been saying. They continue to insist that they've got the traditional owners on side and they have a really good package to hand to them.
Previous experience with overseas mining companies in the bad old days suggests that this is so much old cobblers. They might well have talked to the very few people who were likely to agree with them. They might have offered inducements to those few. But they sure as hell don't have the agreement of the real custodians of that country and its stories.
And it all makes me wonder what's happened to a Labor Party that behaves much like the Tories we revile.
In the bad old days of conservative rule in the Territory, you could count on blackfellas getting the rough end of the pineapple every time. I didn't expect to see it done so blatantly - and so consistently - under a Labor government.
Perhaps that's why people don't trust politicians any more. Social democracy is not worth shit if the underdogs keep losing.

It's a conspiracy!

2006-10-14T17:59:00.000+09:30

How's this for a conspiracy theory:
'Bureaucrats imported from draconian southern states are trying to destroy the Northern Territory's unique lifestyle and heritage. They come to Darwin for a few miserable years with no intention of staying or making innovative and intelligent decisions. Their aim is to implement the laws that have already been imposed on states that have no relationship or understanding of our truly unique part of Australia.'
So what's the burning issue? What's the infringement of our civil liberties? What's threatening to destroy our 'unique lifestyle and heritage'?
Never in your wildest dreams would you guess that it's simply a proposal to impose a speed limit on the Stuart Highway, all 1900 kms of road that stretches from Darwin to the South Australian border.
The reason?
We have a road toll that's out of all proportion to our population of 200,000-odd; 34 people (that's 17 in every 100,000) have died on our roads since Jan 1 and countless people have been injured.
Speed and booze are major contributors, but the state of the roads and the skill of drivers play a part too.
The highway has no speed limit outside built-up areas.
Theoretically, you can drive at any speed you like.
The police have a caveat - 'safest' speed - which enables them to prosecute the more outrageous speedsters for dangerous driving.
The Government is now floating the idea that we should have a a maximum speed limit of 11okm/h - just like everywhere else in Australia.
It's probably a requirement for more Commonwealth road funding, which we desperately need, particularly for remote Aboriginal communities.
Surprise surprise there's already a protest website - www.nospeedlimit.com - to complement the outpouring of outrage from the petrolheads.
I had a look at the website today and I have to say it's a professional job, which leads me to believe this isn't just a grassroots effort.
The articles on motor-racing and the puff piece for the new Camry are a dead give away.
Someone's interests are obviously being threatened and it ain't those of the average punter behind the wheel
I couldn't find the above quote verbatim on the site.
That comes courtesy of our Northern Territory News, the daily rag that devotes lots of column inches to crocodile stories and even more to our 'unique lifestyle and heritage'.
I'm taking it to be an accurate quote because the paper is owned by Rupert Murdoch and you can always trust a media baron's local outlets to tell the truth, can't you?
And according to NTN, the site also says that tourists and unlicensed drivers, mostly from Aboriginal communities, contribute more to road deaths than driving at 140km/h on the open road.
Oh yes, if I hadn't already pricked up my ears at the words 'lifestyle' and 'heritage', I think I just heard a dogwhistle.
Lifestyle and heritage in the territory context refer to something that is dear to the heart - in this case the so-called right to drive at any speed you want and bugger the rest of the world.
And I don't notice them lobbying for more road funding for communities - mainly Aboriginal - that are serviced by dirt roads.
There's a peculiar identity problem at the centre of this and it's called being a Territorian.
People who come here to live like to think they're different and, unfortunately, they also like to think that they shouldn't be subject to the norms of civilised behaviour, let alone the law, because they've chosen to live in what they fondly imagine to be a regulation-free environment.
So being 'Territorian' is, in the words of our home-grown political party, being 'Strong, Independent and Free'.
Wow.
Very few white people were actually born in the Northern Territory and live here for all of their adult lives.
Most of us come from the 'draconion' southern states and many only stay a couple of years, so it's a waystation on a career path rather than a serious life choice.
Quite a few of us have some sense of responsibility towards our fellow human beings.
And some of us even believe that being a resident of the NT doesn't entitle anyone to special privileges, particularly the hide to claim dangerous driving as a 'unique lifestyle and heritage'
A speed limit isn't much of a concession to make if you stand a better chance of not being hit by some junior racer who can't control a powerful car at the speeds it's engineered to do on roads that aren't designed as racetracks.
But our heavily-sponsored website has all the answers.
'NT residents who regularly drive from Alice to Darwin at anything under 120kmh complain that they get drowsy and are less alert than at the 140kmh speed that they travel at.'
Right.
I think flying is the most reasonable option.

Liberal?

2006-10-13T06:01:00.000+09:30

We've had more than 10 years of government by a Liberal-National Party coalition.
10 years of John Howard.
10 years of ruthless ideological war by a gang of conservatives who are hell bent on extinguishing any shred of evidence that we ever had so-called social democratic government under Labor.
It's been a nasty, mean-spirited time.
The political discourse has changed dramatically and self-interest rules even more obviously than before.
Any sense of corporate responsibility - not to say compassion - for the wrongs done to Aboriginal Australians in our short history has been written off as a 'Black armband' or bleeding heart view of our country.
Contemporary Aboriginal life throughout the nation is now overseen by a gang of zealots in the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination under Mal the boofhead, instead of by a flawed attempt at Aboriginal self-determination.
The tax system has been largely replaced by a Goods and Services Tax regime and the rich are getting richer.
Any sense of international obligation towards refugees was thrown overboard when the first razor-wire detention camps for 'illegal immigrants'.
Any sense of common decency and politeness in the public discourse is scorned as 'political correctness'; but it is now politically correct to be a rude bastard and be indifferent to the effects of your actions on other people.
Any sense of industrial justice went by the board when Howard's toadies sidelined the concept of collective bargaining and replaced it with a system of individual contracts that needs to be propped up by a new and expanded array of agencies to replace the one-stop shop at the old Conciliation and Arbitration Commission.
Media ownership is just about to be thrown open to the robber barons; telecommunications is about to go entirely into private ownership, with none of the service guarantees for remote and regional Australia that public ownership demanded.
And the coalition is still looking for 'socialist' shibboleths to demolish and bogey men to demonise.
Now they've turned their attention on State and Territory governments, all of which are under majority Labor administration.
Latest target is education, traditionally a State preserve although it's heavily funded by the Commonwealth.
Successive Federal Education Ministers have had a go at standards of literacy and numeracy, but they were just the opening salvoes in the campaign.
The incumbent is making heavy noises about taking over curriculum from the States and territories because they look as if they've been designed by Maoist ideologues and they're teaching values and interpretations instead of 'facts'. History as a school subject, of course, is under the gun.
Yes, the accusations are loopy.
But the real worry is their increasing tendency to attempt to micro-manage every aspect of our lives and every detail of the policy landscape.
And the fact that they are so terribly fucking self-righteous in their assumptions.
But so much for small government.
I guess this campaign of vilification says a lot about the moral and intellectual status of the coalition.
If they're still governed by fear and loathing of Labor, then they're on the shakiest ground just when they seem to be at their most powerful.
Or is that too Zen for you?

Stinking fish

2006-09-24T20:48:00.000+09:30

There's always a stench about politics.
But there's something particularly putrescent about the current crusade against Islam.
One of our national newspapers devoted many column inches over the weekend to a solemn explanation of how terrorism may be justified in the teachings of this fine human creed.
Islam, therefore, stands condemned as explicitly condoning violence.
Right.
Given that Islam postdates Christianity and Judaism both, but shares some of the same scriptures, let's unpack that one a bit.
The teachings of Christianity have been used to justify:
the ruthless extirpation of old religions by the burning of 'witches' and the torture of infidels and pagans;
the Crusades
the protection of orthodoxy by the painful execution of heretics and the damning of 'free' thought - Galileo and company;
pogroms against the Jews in Poland, Russia and - yes - the excrescences of Nazi Germany at Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Oswiecim and the countless prisons of the regime;
the spread of imperialism and capitalism, with the cross following the sword and the cash register to bring 'civilisation' to the world; and
institutionalised racism in contemporary America, Australia and other countries.
The New Testament isn't quite all airy-fairy sweetness and light, but it pales beside the blood asnd thunder of the Old.
The moral of the story is that people in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones or demonising.
In Australia, this kind of demonisation has taken on a new twist.
The discovery of child sexual abuse in Aboriginal 'communities' (places set up for the administrative convenience of government and religion) has opened the way for the more rabid of our conservative politicians and their lickspittle kommentariat to condemn Aboriginal cultures as condoning it.
This has opened the way for a power grab and a return to paternalism; stricter controls on accountability and restrictions on funding.
You set up zoos which have no relation to the way Aboriginal people want to live and then blame them for behaving worse than animals
It's one of the smellier episodes in our contemporary politicial life, consistent with our conservatives accusing illegal immigrants of throwing their children overboard from refugee boats to prop up an unconscionably inhumane immigration policy.
Yes, there's something very smelly around our political scene.
And it's not just rotting fish.
The very cheapest populism rules and it ain't OK, particualrly when they 'find' a basis in religion to support it.

Donkey votes

2006-09-24T15:12:00.000+09:30

For the benefit of overseas visitors to this blog, Australia has a preferential voting system at all elections and it's compulsory.
You have to cast a vote for every candidate in order of preference by nunbering every square on your ballot paper.
Every political party hands out How to Vote cards with their preferred order of candidates.
It's supposed to be fairer than first past the post. But it means someone who doesn't get the most first preference votes can still squeeze through if they get enough preferences from other candidates.
Some ballot papers show the person voting cast their votes in numerical order from top to bottom. That's called a donkey vote.
But I never thought I'd see it so literally!

On the campaign trail

2006-09-24T15:00:00.000+09:30

Last week I was out bush helping with mobile polling in the southern part of the Victoria River District.
As voting is compulsory in Australia, everyone has to be seen to be given the chance to vote.
So the Australian Electoral Commission sends out teams to collect votes in every remote community in the Territory.
And each political party sends out workers to hand out how to vote cards and soothe theircandidates
Where it's really remote, they come in by helicopter.
We went on a roadshow - 1900 km in three days.
Here's some pics of what it was like.
From top to bottom:
Two Labor MPs, Barbara McCarthy, Member for Arnhem (left) and Marion Scrymgour. Member for Arafura and Minister for Environment and Heritage, among other things, with a very tall punter who was keen to have his pic taken with them. Basketball (or in Kriol basgitbol) anyone?.
Brolgas can't vote. But that didn't deter this tame brolga (or Native Compantion, one of Australia's two true cranes) from hanging round the polling booth at Pigeon Hole.
The polling booth at Kalkaringi.
And at Daguragu, voting bush style.

Rewriting history, and then some

2006-09-23T14:32:00.000+09:30

I've just come back from the twin communities of Daguragu and Kalkaringi, about 750km south-west of Darwin, the home of the Gurindji people, whose country extends an hour's drive to the east and a little further west.
More about why I was there in another post.
It's beautiful rolling savannah, emphasised by a few low hills and rocky ridges and outcrops.
One of these ridges - Wave Hill - gave its name to the cattle station whose stockmen were Gurindji.
And their struggle, which gave birth to the land rights movement in Australia, is what put it into the history books.
The station was selected in the late 1880s by old man Buchanan and up until the 1950s ran on largely unpaid Aboriginal labour.
From about the time of the First World War it was owned by the British Lord Vestey, a hugely wealthy absentee landlord.
Anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt were hired by Vesteys in the late 1940s to investigate how Vestey's couild recruit more Aboriginal people into the industry.
That investigation turned into a damning report on industrial and living conditions on the Vestey stations that was shelved for more than 40 years.
It was finally published as 'End of an Era' in the early 90s.
The report, in sparse prose, related how Vesteys cruelly exploited Aboriginal workers, who were little more than slaves, working for rations - soup bones, offal, salt beef flour, sugar, tea and tobacco - and clothes.
Boys as young as 11 started in the industry and worked til they dropped.
Their health was poor and injuries went untreated.
While it is true the stations took care of dependants, they all had to do some work about the place for their short rations - children, the aged and the infirm
Many old men gimp around with broken hips, a common injury when you're on horseback around cattle.
From about the 1950s, there was a minimum wage and for many of the older men it was the first time they'd seen real money.
For others, who had worked for the Army during World War 2, it was back to the good old days.
In the 1960s the labour movement - mainly the wharfies and the North Australian Workers Union - began to agitate seriously for equal pay for Aboriginal stockmen.
The pastoralists argued vehemently against it, pointing out thaty Aboriginal stockmen weren't worth as much as whites.
And yet the industry had relied on their labour for more than half a century.
The Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission eventually handed down its decision in 1966, proposing a gradual intriduction of equal wages over the following three years.
But the Wave Hill stockment had already had enough.
Led by Vincent Lingiari (that's his grave at the top of this post), they walked off Wave Hill station - men, women and children - and four days later camped at Wattie Creek.
It wasn't an arbitrary choice of camp.
Apart from having good water year-round, Wattie Creek is also Lawi - dreaming place for the Rainbow Serpent.
The significance of that escaped me until I visited the place last week, but it's now clear to me that a people who were believed to be fringe dwellers with no culture had all along nurtured it away from prying eyes.
Where else to go when you're turning your back on oppression?
The story of the strike is told in Frank Hardy's Unlucky Australians, a book that's as much about Frank as about the Gurindji.
Some of the srtikers went south and told of their conditions at union meetings.
Lupgna Giari, a Mudpura man, was questioned by journalists.
Surely stockmen got more than salt beef and flour? Oh yes, sometimes they bin put more salt on the beef.
But somewhere along the line, it emerged that striking for equal pay was only the tip of the iceberg, to use a geographically inappropriate metaphor.
What the Gurindji really wanted was their own land back.
The company and the government of the day tried everything to get them to go back to work.
Govenrment money eventually paid for housing at Kalkaringi, the site of the present-day community and then site then of the old Welfare rations depot.
But they sat it out.
Eventually Gough Whitlam came and poured the famous handful of sand into Vincent Lingiari's hand as he handed over the lease to the land.
They built another community at Daguragu, close to Lawi.
Early this month the Gurindji and their friends - among them Frank Hardy's son and granddaughter - joyfully celebrated the 40th anniversary of the walk-off.
There was a couple of sour notes, however.
One was the death of an old man from Daguragu.
And the other was the emergence of a revisionist history of the cattle days that asserted that the station owners were deeply saddened by the Wave Hill walk-off and all the other walk-offs that happened across Northern Australia.
They hadn't been in the interests of Aboriginal people and had forced the pastoralists into modernising their practices and employing fewer people.
That's a bit like blaming African Americans for getting equal rights and ending tghe colour bar.
But one of the the few surviving strikers had the last word.
Old and frail Hoppy Mick Rangiari - another one bearing the broken hip as a legacy of his days on the catttle - got up from his wheelchair and told the people at the celebrations; 'That Bestey been treat we like dogs'.
I'm with Hoppy Mick.
I trust the history that is in people's bones.

Reds under the bed

2006-09-22T10:17:00.000+09:30

Many Aboriginal towns operate under some sort of local government scheme.
But it's for our convenience, not theirs.
To try and accommodate crazy whitefella ideas and get the funding they need to run the towns, build the houses and so on, they try to make the councils work in a way that allows for some expression of Aboriginal ways of doing things.
In some places, it's making sure that every clan is represented on the council.
That way the benefits are more likely to be shared equally - new houses, sewerage, council positions.
It doesn't quite work to the satisfaction of the beancounters, but it generally passes muster.
Except for our boofhead Federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, that is.
Mal the Mouth was heard to rant at a conference of policemen recently that clan-based community councils were nothing more than 'communist collectives'.
I kid you not.
Mal pretends to be unaware that the only member of the Marx family to have any impact on Aboriginal people was Groucho.
And he should know that the most widely-read book in Aboriginal domains is the Bible.
Emphatically not Das Kapital.
So why the rant?
One of my earlier blogs mentioned dogwhistle politics and this is a classic example: the subtext says these communist collectives are un-Australian, so the normal rules don't apply.
The Government is within its rights to subject them to scrutiny and cut off their funding if there's a sniff of suspect practices.
Which of course the government will find.
It's always easier in politics to demonise people.
It worked for George Bush.
But I don't think even he would return to the Cold War era to find a justification for reactionary and repressive policies.

I'd thought reds under the bed existed only in the febrile imagination of ratbag conservatives in the 60s.

It seems I was wrong.

John Howard and his gang strike again with Back to the Future.

That's the true measure of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of this government.

Maningrida (or Manayingkarrira)

2006-09-10T08:24:00.000+09:30

Two giants of European contemporary art flank an emerging giant of the art world in posters on a wall in Basel, Switzerland. John Mawurndjul is from Maningrida, a community of 2000-odd at the mouth of a river in Central Arnhem Land. Mawurndjul was on the cover of Time magazine earlier this year and is one of a half-dozen Aboriginal artists from various parts of Australia who have contributed work to the interior design of the Musee de Quai Branly in Paris. He painted a supporting column and part of the ceiling.

The 'rarrk' in the poster refers to the cross-hatching and other devices in bark and body paintings that bury the real meaning of the story that's been painted. An Aboriginal painting in these domains is not simply a work of art; it's also a statement of identity, inheritance and right - right of ownership of land or to a ceremonial story that confers responsibilities for land, resources or family. That true story is closed to people who are not entitled to know it, but they may be told an abridged and simplified version - the 'outside' story - while the real one - the 'inside' story' - remains safe and secure in plain sight.

I'm flying out there tomorrow on a work visit, looking at how the community is managing on the Community Development Employment Project. It's a program through which people voluntarily work for their legal entitlement to unemployment benefits. The program is under attack from the Federal Government, which wants Aboriginal people everywhere to have 'access to the free market' and embrace capitalism. Both of these are difficult concepts for people like Mawurndjul, whose apparently considerable income from painting supports an extended family.

Violence

2006-09-05T06:00:00.000+09:30

Last week I was interviewed on ABC Radio's morning program as Vice President of the Northern Territory Council of Government School Organisations.
Dopy Dave had jumped on unrest about juvenile crime and organised a 'community forum' with the sole intention of gaining a bit of political capital.
He'd invited the Federal Minister for Justice along and this Minister made the astounding suggestion that we go back to hitting kids at school to help solve the problem.
I couldn't believe it and I said so: was he seriously advocating common assault as an element of our educational philosophy?
The interviewer, playing devil's advocate, asked me if I'd been subjected to corporal punishment at school, and whether it made me behave.
I went to a boarding school on England which, pace the late David Sandison, I will call St Onan's.
I was caned on the backside and on the hand with wooden and bamboo canes, beaten with gym slippers (what we used to call 'Trainers', dear) and was the target of blackboard dusters or viciously thrown pieces of chalk.
Old Thos, the woodwork teacher, would hurl a lump of wood at innocently daydreaming kids and accompany the 'thunk' of it hitting your head with the declamation: 'behold thy fairy godmother', delivered in a South Yorkshire accent.
I was also imprisoned (school detentions on weekends), I was bullied (made to do repetitive and degrading drills) stood over and sexually assaulted. And that was just by teachers.
The conservative response is to say '...and it never did me any harm'.
Bullshit.
Violence begets violence and assaults of this nature are psychologically damaging even if all they engender is a deep-rooted belief that violence is an acceptable solution.
I didn't behave. I was humiliated and resentful of my personal space being invaded so intimately and with such ease.
People who don't think things through particularly well always come back to a violence-based discipline approach (behavior management, they call it these days) as THE answer.
They also tend to blame schools for kids running riot, when it is essentially a social problem.
And if society can't or won't deal with it, there's little point demanding that schools accept the entire responsibility and empowering them to assault into the bargain.
I'm raising this here because I've been thinking about the way Aboriginal people are mystified by our culture's ability to perpetrate an atrocity like the Stolen Generations, a psychic as well as physical wound which reverberates down through succeeding generations.
'How could you do it to children?' they ask.
'After all the stuff you talk about families, how could you take children away from their mothers?'
The asking, I think, carries an implicit assumption that there may be something, some answer, that will explain everything.
There is no logic to it.
But you can gain some insights into how it happened by looking at the way many among us are prepared to treat children from our own culture - particularly the children of the marginalised, who are themselves marginalised educationally and who are likely to carry on what have become family traditions of being economically marginalised.
I was a smart working class boy and my teachers were generally of a middle class educated elite.
Much of what I went through may well be described dispassionately as rites of passage.
But they did it because they could get away with it - and they did.
And, clearly, there are still people in power who think it's OK to advocate violence against children as a panacea for social ills.

Test post

2006-09-04T22:16:00.000+09:30

This is a test post to instal Technorati. Ma bilin!

Technorati Profile

More on Mr Limbunya

2006-08-30T11:13:00.000+09:30

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

2006-08-29T15:52:00.000+09:30

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!

2006-08-24T17:59:00.000+09:30

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

2006-08-24T16:23:00.000+09:30

'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)

2006-08-23T15:13:00.000+09:30

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)

2006-08-23T15:08:00.000+09:30

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

2006-08-23T10:20:00.000+09:30

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?

2006-08-21T09:22:00.000+09:30

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!