John Danalis's memoir, Riding the Black Cockatoo: a true story (Allen & Unwin, 2009) is a narrative of repatriation and reconciliation. The publisher is marketing it as a work of "young adult non-fiction," and while it will certainly make a good assignment in secondary schools, I think A&U sells Danalis a bit short in doing so. I suspect there are a good many adults, worldwide, who could take more than a few lessons away from this multi-leveled set of family histories.

The so-called "Close the Gap" strategy has been driven not by the principles of reconciliation, but by knee-jerk reactions to statistics. In particular, the Northern Territory Intervention has been a "one size fits all" response in an area where Aboriginal groups and researchers alike have pointed to the need for programs tailored community by community.

In spite of its claims to adhere to evidence-based policy, the Rudd Government has overlooked too much of the available evidence in the race to be seen to be doing something big — much like its predecessor.

There is little evidence, for example, of the efficacy of income management, yet this controversial aspect of the NT Intervention is shortly to be extended to all welfare recipients in the NT. The driver behind this expansion is not evidence that it works. Instead, it is driven by the government’s desire to evade international criticism of the intervention which currently breaches UN anti-discrimination covenants and has been exempted by the previous government from the Racial Discrimination Act. In other words, the amendments to the NT Intervention are simply a public relations exercise, with the costs to be borne by an ever broadening tranche of the population.

National Reconciliation Week is a fine time to recall just how far we've come in the last 10 years and perhaps think about the way ahead armed with the knowledge that the best outcomes are achieved by working together. It's that human interaction between black and white Australians that is fundamental to true reconciliation.

I have found myself uncomfortable in many ways. I have felt helpless, and confused by my helplessness; irrelevant and occasionally absurd. I have experienced shock and moral disorientation. Numb hopelessness followed, then a phase of toxic resignation. Later came a calmer state of acceptance, which left me open to encouragement; and now I maintain a poised refusal of acceptance (p. 214).

In short, to be the individual that market society and even CDEP expects, Western Arrernte must be prized from kin relatedness and from their emotional links to place. The violence that is readily seen in Western Arrernte life today is informed by the conditions of forced transition, but on the margins of market society--"forced" because the meaning and value of market society disorganize other regimes of values without quite delivering on modernity (p. 246).

There has been very little stepping back to gain a perspective on the state and society--or on a phenomenology of changing indigenous subjects. Either a bounded ethnographic model or consultation for the state has intervened in a more critical view of remote indigenous life.

...

Whatever the outcome of this intervention, the national discourse would be more discerning and less strident were opinion makers prepared to engage directly with remote communities in their own domain. The pundits would be less detached and possibly more able to support those who have hard decisions to make (p. 258).

And consider how Pwominga discovers that the best way to endure the visiting anthropologist is to teach him language. Pwominga instructs the anthro, whom the mob calls Wurruwataka (rat) that timurarra is the word for spear, and the dhooroo describes a big wind. Pwominga's not really fibbing, as the words mean "penis" and "fart" respectively, but the bush mob nearly piss themselves when they hear about it. Of course, the mission mob has never much tried to learn the lingo, so they're not offended when the anthro greets Father Macredie with Awana juruliwa ("Hello, pubic hair") or tells Sister Jerome that her lamb with gravy is the best kundiri (shit) he's ever eaten.

[T]he nuns at the Garden of Eden ...worked relentlessly to shape the unruly half-caste rabble into obedient and God-fearing servants of the muruntani. No rod was spared and no abductee spoilt in the process as the little coloured kids were repeatedly chastised and flayed until prayers and hymns and excerpts form the Bible were slowly absorbed by rote into every fibre of their being. And when they were eventually knocked into shape they were passed on to caring white families as domestics and the like because, let's face it, the mission mob knew these useless individuals would never amount ot anything else. In order to control them, many of the good Christian families duly followed in the incarcerators' lead by perpetuating the violence, sometimes throwing in a few more tortures for good measure like rape and mental abuse, because this was the only thing this half-caste lot understood. A few even had to be sent back to the mission because they just didn't seem to respond to the kindly ministration of their new families and kept trying to run away or told wild stories to people about their treatment.

It was sad really.

there was one thing they were certain of. They didn't have to die to go to hell because the mission had happily brought that with them when they'd arrived unasked on the fateful shores of the place that was their heaven all those years before.

The history of Aborigines and mining in Australia is far from simply a tale of rapacity, although that is a theme that resonates in every corner of the country. Arguably the most significant change in the recognition of Aboriginal rights in Australia, that of Native Title, stems directly from the Gove Dispute of the 1960s over the establishment of the bauxite mine near the mission at Yirrkala. The protests lodged by the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land, beginning with the famous Yirrkala Bark Petition, the ensuing legal case of Milirrpum v. Nabalco, the Woodward Decision, and the resulting drafting of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) 1976, have forever altered the relationships of Aboriginal people and the Australian government.

The key question the research sets out to address is whether major long-life extractive mines located on Aboriginal owned land and near Aboriginal communities have the capacity to fundamentally alter the marginal socioeconomic status of Indigenous Australian in a sustainable manner (p. 3).

Native title is also a very legally fragile form of property right. Its existence depends upon continuing adherence by the native title holders to the laws and customs from which their native title derives. Post-determination socio-cultural changes--including indeed those which would logically result from the positive impacts of engagement with the mining industry--could result in a government seek to have the determination that native title exists revoked, on the basis that the particular groups' laws and customs are no longer traditional (p. 109).

All three agreements are considered best practice by the mining industry, the state and select Indigenous leaders, for their perceived capacity to deliver substantial and sustainable benefits to Indigenous people. However a combination of the scale of Indigenous disadvantage and the mainstream development parameters of the agreements themselves limit the attainment of sustainable outcomes for Indigenous people associated with all three agreements. ...[A] fundamental limitation of these mining agreements is their incapacity to engage with and augment the diverse livelihood objectives of Indigenous people (p. 171).

'If mining payments are used to pay for basic social services [that are citizenship rights] then opportunity' ... to utilise a significant economic asset cannot be utilised to overcome economic disadvantage. A case can be made that the development of these homelands has been an example of 'substitution funding', whereby the expenditure from mining payments has substituted for government funds that were spent elsewhere. The result is no net increase in spending on services in these communities (pp. 158-159, emphasis added).

It is primarily the latter theme, the failure of liberal ideals (signaled by the change in the subtitle from article to book) that Sutton focuses on in the monograph that has grown out of the 2001 article and a series of other speeches and writings he has delivered in the past decade. The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus (Melbourne University Press, 2009) can still shock, even after years of exposés in The Australian, the publication of Little Children are Sacred, and the Northern Territory Emergency Response. The new book is aptly described in the cover blurb by Marcia Langton as "incandescent, emotional, tragic and challenging."

For many years, indeed into the 1960s, Aurukun was controlled with a rod of iron by a superintendent of long standing. Under his regime and by his hand Aboriginal people were summarily punished by complete or partial head shaving, flogging, chaining, and imprisonment. The prison was a galvanized iron building, seven by twelve feet, divided into two compartments and containing as many a six adult prisoners at one time. For such a trivial offence as late delivery of the milk to the white staff's holiday camp on Archer Bay, miles from the mission, an Aboriginal man, Billy Blowhard, was threatened with goal. Worst of all, in Thomson's eyes, was the power of the superintendent to have people exiled for life to Palm Island simply on his own word, and without any trial (Peterson, p. 6).

The evidence is heavily stacked against the rose-coloured expectation that Aboriginal people with a traditional orientation will simply adopt foreign causal theories, living conditions and health practices with alacrity, on the basis that they are good for their health. So it is not realistic to assume that the kind of cultural change I refer to here is going to occur quickly and simply as a result of education or persuasion of adults. The cycle of childhood socialisation needs to be re-geared if the specific behaviours to do with things like hygiene and sanitation, the legitimation of violence, the degree of priority placed on physical wellbeing itself, and openness to preventative health measures, are to change more quickly (Sutton, p. 143, emphasis added).

Despite its subtitle, Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous health in northern Australia (UNSW Press, 2009) is not so much a direct examination of the state of Indigenous health affairs in the Northern Territory as it is an ethnography of those who are charged with "ending Aboriginal disadvantage in the frontier north of Australia." Lea herself is the Director of the School for Social and Policy Research at Charles Darwin University, previously co-author Learning Lessons: an independent inquiry into Aboriginal education in the Northern Territory (1999) and co-editor Moving Anthropology: critical Indigenous studies (2006).

[It] would not have been enough for me to describe the faults of governmental policies. This is a book about the existence of the state with the self and the self within the state. My subject has not been the artifice of bureaucratic constructions but their social life, and how they are brought to life by social beings. This is art and artisanry, artifice and facticity, coalescing into powerful systems of cultural reproduction that come together in the orchestral work of upholding the developmental state. A sense of wonderment is called for, even if the cultural mastery at play here remains uncelebrated within anthropology, which only sees a non-fantastic rationality in need of correction (pp. 235-36).

I feel frustrated being seen as a service deliverer, as a doctor first, there only to see sick people. All I see are people with pus, with sores. As a visitor I cannot spend time with people working on more chronic issues.

Bob writes:

>> inability to work up programs

And the trauma for [our] families is unreal. I take it out on my kids ... abuse them for being so privileged. I really coped very badly. I couldn't talk to my husband for at least the first hour after I got back. I would have to take myself out of the house, go for a walk, go to the gym, something .... It was so hard.

Bob writes:

>> lack of debriefing opportunities (pp. 89-91).

It is here, I want to argue, here within the selection of hardships to relate (in the well-proportioned anecdote and the emotions attested, in the sympathetic reception and the confirming responses of other), that the complex regulation of the 'romance of raw experience' is accomplished. It is here that the genesis of institutional self-perpetuation and its obscuring from itself can be located. The trick is to recognise the heavy-handed stamp of the ordinary in the extraordinary public health professional. And further to see that these constraints arise out of the close inspection and recuperation of failure.... (pp. 94-95).

In other words, the work of enunciating the further work that still needs to be done is itself an endpoint.... It is through talking that specially chosen words are bestowed with their magical ability to 'make a difference on the ground'. It is through talk work that professionals create shared grammars of both complaint and diagnosis in parades of collective analysis which are immersions in techniques for recuperating past failure into the need to do more of the same (p. 107)

It is the avalanche of catastrophe and opportunity that animates health statistics, and which convinces health professionals that a key requirement of betterment is that Aboriginal people know how sick they are through an appropriately alarming rendition of the statistics. ... Our own cultural fascinations are held to fascinate others, and not for the first time (pp. 132-33).

Amidst the intense factionalism about approach and political commitment, there is a tremendous standardisation in the logic which explains the need for our interventions, for our very positioning as concerned helpers. It is, as we have seen, such a readily ... generalisable logic that it can be inserted into any situation, with out the need for specific knowledge, of these particular people, their place, their contemporary context, specific histories or intimate local concerns (p.210)

It is a metaphysic which cannot for a moment entertain an order of socio-economic co-existence with Aboriginal people that excludes institutional intervention; a metaphysic which would ask, as pre-emptory response to even this critique, but what else would you have us do? For doing nothing has now become unimaginable (p. 212).

• Aboriginal people traditionally had no alcohol
• Alcohol use started in 1788 at Botany Bay with the First Fleet
• Outsiders always used alcohol to exploit Aboriginal people
• Aboriginal people were the passive recipients of alcohol
• Alcohol abuse is determined more by biology than by social and cultural environment

Christen has been working with the Warumungu traditional owners around Tennant Creek for almost fifteen years now. She has helped them build the digital Mukurtu Archive of their history and culture, and was active in the planning and construction of the Nyinkka Nyunyu Cultural Centre. I was able to hear her lecture about both of these activities at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in April 2008, and at the time she impressed me with her energy, enthusiasm, and multi-leveled appreciation for the lives and work of her Warumungu friends.

Mining has been, out of necessity, a joint venture; various parties negotiate deals, sign contracts, and share royalties. Aboriginal people rely on mining companies to run explorations, buy equipment, hire workers (Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal), and produce profits. Aboriginal consent, guaranteed by the ALRA, does not mean total control; it is a means to alter the parameters of engagement within the industry and shift some benefits back to Aboriginal individuals and communities. A large sign in the Tennant Creek branch of the CLC offices makes Aboriginal land-based opportunities clear:

EXPLORATION COMPANY WANTS TO LOOK AROUND YOUR COUNTRY? WHAT YOU CAN DO:
1) DO NOTHING
2) TRY TO BLOCK IT
3) MAKE AN AGREEMENT

The choices are not endless (p. 144, emphasis in the original).

The community of responsible Warumungu leaders brought their territorial knowledge to bear on this project in a way that married ancestral need with contemporary economic goals. ... Taking railway workers out to sites of significance and negotiating the benefits for their own communities, these Warumungu leaders situated country obligations in a new constellation of responsibility, in which railway officials and construction companies became secondary agents in the oversight and care of Aboriginal country. Defining aspects of their country for the railway companies meant inviting them to see the land and their partnerships differently. It also gave the Warumungu people a change to conduct their own country business (p. 181).

With The City's Outback (UNSW Press, 2009), Gillian Cowlishaw has written a haunting book. Not only will the stories she tells here remain with you long after you have put it aside, the book is wraithlike in the way it seems to change shape from chapter to chapter, page to page. And like any revenant worth it's name, it can pack a hard and unsuspected punch quite at odds with its transparent character. It works superbly at all of its many levels, as urban or suburban documentary, as anthropological investigation, both of Aboriginal culture and of race relations, as reflexive meditation on the practice of social science, or as instruction manual on the rigors and challenges of fieldwork.

On Police Remembrance Day in November 2006 he walked into the police station in Dubbo and asked the nervous young officer at the desk for 'one of them ribbons' that are worn on this day to mourn officers who have died in the line of duty. He wore the chequered ribbon all day saying, 'If we want them to respect our pain and our rituals we have to show that we respect theirs' (p. 228).

This fieldwork brought me to the heart of a dilemma that is not mine so much as that of the nation, the dilemma attendant upon being part of the hegemonic culture. The liberal impulse to solve problems through appeals to governments has led Aboriginal activist discourses into a trap. They have to identify specific social injustices linked to a specific set of grievances. We see that subaltern groups--immigrants, Aborigines, women, foreign-looking youth--have a subordinate position in the world and we take this to be immoral, unjust, ill-ordered, and lied about. Social scientists, whether or not they belong to such groups, put themselves on the subalterns' side, trying to find the real source of their problems ... which must have escaped others, particularly governments. But, if we bypass the spokespersons or representatives, who are the ones listened to because they speak the language of governments, and get close to these marginal people, their conditions become more complex and baffling. One reason is that some characteristic differences arouse distaste or pity. The ability to live with violence, to ignore contempt and to laugh at insult, or to display aggression towards elusive sources of injury, are disturbing to outsiders. But further, these problematic qualities that we want to explain as consequences of subordination, and therefore remediable, may be valued as elements of a normal environment, a familiar homely style of interaction, a habitus (pp. 213-214).

Google Map showing the location of Mt Druit (upper left)