I kept my pants on

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

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'

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.