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Sun - September 27, 2009The Irreconcilable Politics of SufferingAlmost ten years have passed since Peter Sutton
delivered the inaugural Berndt Foundation Biennial Address at the University of
Western Australia. In that speech he lamented the breakdown of well-being in
remote Aboriginal communities and decried the policies of self-determination and
welfare delivery that he believed had led to an intolerable status quo. Sutton,
who had by that time spent nearly three decades studying, living, and working
with the Wik people of Western Cape York, seems to have been energized by the
repeated loss of friends and adopted family members in and around Aurukun to
murder and suicide. Equally, the then-recent publication of Noel Pearson's
Our Right to Take Responsibility (Noel
Pearson and Associates, 2000) with its call to rejection of victimhood and
government handouts provided inspiration for some of his arguments with politics
as they played out in Cape York.
I first encountered Sutton's provocative thesis in its revised, published form as "The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia since the 1970s" in the journal Anthropological Forum (vol. 11, no. 2, 2001, pp. 125-173). I recall being doubly shocked by his article. It was the first extensive documentation I had seen of remote dysfunction; it was also the first blast at what I had thought until then as the unquestioned "liberal pieties" surrounding self-determination and the will to a renaissance of traditional Aboriginal culture and values. 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."I think Langton has caught the essence of Sutton's book in those four words. Most every review that I have read has brought out the intensely personal and emotional connection that fuels Sutton's despair and motivates him to seek a new answer, a "post-liberal" solution to the crisis in Aboriginal life. He marshals an impressive body of evidence for the failures both of successive governments and of Aboriginal communities. Many of his insights are keen, and if not original, still pertinent. He insists, for example, that during the last thirty years, governments implementing policies of self-determination have been far more interested in bureaucratic and fiscal accountability than they have in the quality of life on the ground (p. 49). He also unsparingly documents the history of and evidence for levels of violence in Aboriginal life that make those of us who hold liberal, Eurocentric values shudder (Chapter 4, "Violence, Ancient and Modern"). But time and again in the first half of the book, where he enlarges upon the evidence and themes he first presented in 2000-2001, Sutton's despair leads him into a sort of logical desperation. He speaks repeatedly of the "relatively benign" character of mission life at Aurukun prior to the liberalization of politics in the 1970s; I can only say that this seems quite at odds with evidence that has been put forth by others, including Nicolas Peterson in his summary of Donald Thompson's notes on life at the Aurukun Mission as presented in "A Biographical Sketch of Donald Thompson" in Donald Thompson in Arnhem Land (Miegunyah Press, revised edition, 2003): 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). Whatever the exact character of a place like Aurukun Mission, Sutton concedes that "the creation of holding and training institutions for Indigenous people under mission and government policies of the colonial era and afterwards ... was social engineering on a grand scale...." He goes on to agree "that it is unthinkable to argue for that kind of social engineering and intervention any more" (pp. 140-141). And yet a mere two pages later he formulates in its baldest expression the solution to dysfunction that runs through much of The Politics of Suffering. 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). This is the logic of the missions: it is too late to affect the behavior of the adults and thus intervention in the lives of the children is the only hope. If Sutton is not arguing for "social engineering on a grand scale," he does not explain quite what exactly he is arguing for. In the final chapters of The Politics of Suffering Sutton moves beyond the polemics of his early writings to take up a sort of anthropological and humanistic exploration of the two cultures and the disastrous results of their collision. He does not assign blame to colonial dispossession, government intervention, Aboriginal separatism, or passive dependence. Rather, Sutton argues persuasively that it is that collision of two very different views of the world, of the self, and of human relations that are the source and the fuel of the fire that is consuming Aboriginal Australia. In the chapters "Bodies Politic" and "Customs Not in Common" he examines the substantive differences between classical Aboriginal culture (admitting of significant variation between, for example, Yolngu and Pitjantjatjara) and the expectations of the modern European nation-state. I think it is fair to say that Sutton believes these differences to be fundamentally irreconcilable. In his penultimate chapter, Sutton takes an unexpected turn to examine "Unusual Couples." Here he chronicles some of the extraordinary pairs of Aboriginal and European men and women whose names and writings (at least the Europeans' writings) are nearly synonomous with Australian anthropology in the twentieth century: Makarrwalla and Lloyd Warner in Arnhem Land, Bambegan and Ursula McConnel in the Wik country where Sutton later worked, Durmugam and Bill Stanner. Although it seems at first a strange digression into anthropological history, this chapter functions to further two critical points for Sutton. The first of these points is that we will never know the exact nature of these extraordinary relationships, recorded as they were only from the anthropologist's point of view. Sutton even hesitates to use the word friendship to describe them. He goes on a series of interesting linguistic diversions to show that the concept of "friendship" may itself be entirely alien to the Aboriginal mind in which relationships are chiefly structured by concepts of kinship. The second point is that the possibility for the remediation of culture clash is never better than it is in such intimate interconnections as these "unusual couples" achieved. And thus, when Sutton returns in his final chapter, "On Feeling Reconciled," to the questions of politics that govern the suffering of his own Aboriginal relations, it is with a certain degree of pessimism about the possibility of political solutions. He concludes by offering a sort of personal salvation as an alternative to the political: it is only by establishing meaningful connections at the personal level between people who come from such disparate backgrounds that we can hope to work through the chaos and confusion that afflicts Aboriginal Australia. For Sutton to emerge from two hundred pages of a critique of liberal idealism and "rose-coloured expectations" to such an idealistic, personal, and individual severing of his Gordian Knot was both surprising and inevitable. Surprising because I can't remember another voice in the many arguments about rights and responsibilities, strategies and solutions, to bring the discussion down to this intimate a level. Inevitable, perhaps because Sutton's arguments all stem from his very personal sense of loss, rage, or despair over the violence that has undone the lives of his friends and relations in Aurukun. But politics is not about individual relationships, although they may be the foundations of life in the polis, the city. Politics works at the level of communities, and of cultures. And Sutton is right to recognize the perhaps irreconcilable differences between these two cultures. Like Tess Lea did in Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts, he zeroes in on the issue of repugnance: European repugnance at the place of violence in Aboriginal life, for example, and its converse, Aboriginal repugnance at the mutability of European laws on paper. Both attitudes are rooted in the respective culture's concept of what Europeans would call justice. If such a fundamental issue divides us, how can we achieve reconciliation, if reconciliation is ultimately about justice? Sadly, when Sutton recognizes the necessity of change, he presupposes the prerogatives of the modern nation state and sees no solution except that Aboriginal people change. In other words, he endorses the status quo. Posted at 12:05 PM Sat - September 5, 2009Health AffairsTess Lea has written a book of frightening import
and importance.
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).Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts is not another recitation of the parlous state of Indigenous health: that is almost an assumed premise. Rather, it is an attempt to understand how the government tries to cope with the task of organizing itself to address the issue, and how the people who make up the Territory Health Service (THS) cope with both the challenges and the stresses of the work. It examines how the structures and demands of the bureaucracy affect the people who work for it, how such structures influence solutions, and how the entire need to take action in itself generates what Lea describes as the self-replicating process of the need for further action. And yet the book is not simply a treatise of criticism Lea never loses sight of the earnest dedication and the idealism of the people who sacrifice so much of themselves to the Territory Health Service and its mission. With years of involvement in social policy and as a practicing anthropologist who has turned her gaze not on the exotic other but on the very institutions she herself works for, Lea undertakes the nearly impossible challenge of understanding how her own culture operates in its confluence with Aboriginal society. [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). For over a decade, Lea has been closely involved with THS, shadowing health workers on assignment in remote communities and in Health House, the Darwin central office and administrative soul of the organization. She has taken part in bush orientations in communities and on mudflats, often grueling exercises that test physical and emotion endurance. She has also participated in countless workshops aimed at defining problems, inventing solutions, and building esprit de corps amongst the workers. It is especially in these workshops that a picture of the bureaucracy emerges that evokes my assessment of "frightening." It is frightening because it is so familiar and rings so true. But Lea's portrait reveals how the necessary structures of any bureaucracy inevitably turn back upon themselves and threaten to strangle their intended outcomes. The workshops allow their participants to raise issues, to vent their emotions, to figure out what to do next. Participants in one workshop described early on in the book respond to their leader's call to verbalize their experiences; the leader (Bob) then summarizes their stories into bullet points on the communal whiteboard. One participant has this to say: 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: The requirements of reducing the complexity and chaos of everyday life to manageable bullet points, to the essence that can be captured and addressed by a program generic enough to be widely applicable, drains the life, the very reality out of the experience of these dedicated workers. Is it at all surprising then that programs born of such brainstorming sessions ultimately fall short of effective solutions to real world challenges? A few pages later Lea laments the way in which these exercises lead to "institutional self-perpetuation." 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). The gap, the difference between Aboriginal lives and bureaucratic imagination is a theme that Lea sounds repeatedly. Those who routinely enjoy good health,whose bodies are not sending out distress signals hourly and daily, can find it hard to incorporate (in its literal sense of "bringing into the body") the experience of chronic disease, no matter how good their intentions. On the other side, those who are forever sick are not impressed by statistics and health information. For health professionals, the overwhelming data about Indigenous ill-health sound an alarm that the sickly themselves may not be able to hear. 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). Ironically, attempts at cultural sensitivity can further widen the gap. Lea notes how rare it is for health workers to ever enter the homes of the people they seek to treat. Aboriginal visits to Visiting Officers' Quarters are often treated as intrusions to be quickly resolved. Instead the health officers meet with selected Aboriginal individuals, often those already most at ease with English and Western concepts of health and nutrition, in carefully selected, neutral, and largely whitefella physical spaces like clinics or community centres. And then there is the episode of the "cursed store" in Numbulwar. Nutritionists were eager to restart a program of healthy eating habits that had been waylaid when the community stored was closed after it was put under a curse by one of the elders. A new store was under construction; the old store stood closed and increasingly dilapidated. The nutritionists carefully avoided probing the sensitive backstory; instead of focusing on the "issues of all-consuming importance in the micro-politics of Aboriginal communities" (p. 166), they focused on menus, food groups, and binders full of laminated photographs of healthy tucker. The health professionals were respecting the privacy of their clients and refusing to invade what they clearly saw as private space. They probably could not do otherwise, but they also lacked any understanding of the reasons why the first store had been cursed and abandoned, the electricity shut off, the food still rotting in the disabled freezers. In this very respect for what Lea calls "the mystery of Aboriginal difference" lie the seeds of failure for those who wish to do things with Aboriginal people rather than for them, or worse, to them. The crippling legacy of colonialism overburdens bureaucrats whose hearts, in the best sense, bleed for their clients. And at the same time, the demands of the bureaucracy squeeze the life out of their experiences when it comes time to make policy. Much has been made recently of the failures of the last thirty years, the failure of policies of self-determination and passive welfare, of the liberal bleeding-heart consensus, of policing and regulation. Those who decry the social engineering of those failures suppose that now that they have recognized the futility of these regimes, the better way will shortly emerge or is indeed already apparent. Lea implicitly suggests that perhaps the next solution, grounded as it inevitably will be in the logic of intervention, is likely to fail just as miserably. Lea herself proposes no such solutions. Her aim here is to illuminate the logic we cannot see in the system that we are part of. She does not take sides; she critiques, but she does not condemn. 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) The special genius that Tess Lea brings to Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts is that, throughout, her focus is on "specific knowledge, of these particular people, their place, their contemporary context"; she looks clear-eyed at black and white, left and right. If abstraction is the enemy, the challenge is to construct ways of thinking that can function successfully in the structural and perhaps unavoidable straightjacket of institutional logic. In a pair of playful sub-heads to her final chapter, Lea acknowledges "I've met the state ... and she's an anthropologist." She exempts no-one, least of all herself, from the need to examine the issues unblinkered and focused on the concrete, the intimate, and the immediate. Posted at 12:39 PM Sun - August 9, 2009Social Archaeology and Aboriginal HistoryIn
the
nineteenth century the Darwinian theory of evolution and the Victorian belief in
progress combined to place the Australian Aborigines firmly at the bottom of a
metaphysical ladder of human development in the minds of people around the
world. Early twentieth century fascination with the "primitive"--think
Picasso--helped to reinforce a sense that the outlying reaches of European
empires were temporally as well as geographically distant from the "modern"
world. Even ground-breaking and often sympathetic studies of Aboriginal culture
like those of Baldwin and Spencer were rooted in attempts to discover the
earliest forms of social culture: much of their work stemmed initially from a
desire to prove that group marriage, a somewhat indiscriminate form of
many-to-many relationships, not only preceded monogamy, but was still practiced
or discernible among groups like the Dieri of the South Australian
Desert.The notion that primitive cultures were static and unchanging was essential to the hope that the study of Aboriginal Australians would reveal truths about the origins of man and society. Added to that was the nearly universally accepted notion that hunting and gathering as a modus vivendi was but a precursor to the "rise" of agriculture, and that agriculture was the first step toward civilization as we know it. And finally, a pervasive and no less important myth was the notion that primitive, pre-agricultural man was largely at the mercy of the environment. Primitive social organization, culture, even survival were dominated by natural forces, and that any observed change in the prehistoric record--population increase or decrease, the invention of tool-kits, even art itself--was driven by humans' need to adapt to changes in climate on in the availability of food on the hoof or in the ground, changes over which humans themselves had no control. Put all of this together and you have a portrait of primitive man, of which the Aboriginal Australian has long been regarded as the exemplar, as passive and helpless, forced to expend all his energy on the simple yet dominating task of mere survival. Myths die hard. In scientific circles, a revolution in thought can take decades to gain acceptance within the academy, and decades form to work its way into the popular consciousness. Darwinian evolution itself is a prime example of this. Even today the misunderstanding that "man is descended from monkeys," as if my great-great.....great grandmother were a chimp, is widespread. Ironically, the persistence of the notion that my maternal forebear once lived exactly like an Aborigine persists as well, along with the notion that it is somehow a failure on the part of primitive peoples to evolve that keeps them "backward." The notion that early man's existence and culture was merely a set of responses to changes in the physical environment in which he lived has been the subject of intense debate among Australian archaeologists for over three decades now; indeed, the debate has sometimes been so intense that the notion's general overthrow has gotten lost in the shuffle. Because thanks to the work of Harry Lourandos, most archaeologists and anthropologists world-wide now accept the premise that, for instance, economic factors could lead to changes in, for instance, tool-making that were once believed to have been stimulated solely by changes in weather patterns or sea levels. And thanks to the Aboriginal Studies Press, we can now trace the history of Lourandos's ideas and their impact on the fields of anthropology and archaeology through the essays published in The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies (edited by Bruno David, Bryce Barker, and Ian J. McNiven, 2006). In 1980 Lourandos published a seminal article in World Archaeology entitled "Change of Stability?: Hunter-Gatherers and Population in Temperate Australia" (vol. 11, no 3, February 1980, pp. 245-264) in which he suggested population increase in southwestern Victoria after 3000 years BP (before the present) resulted from the ability of semi-sedentary people's ability to more efficiently harness energy (in this case, food) by developing technologies (weirs) that allowed them to exploit the local eel population. He went further to suggest that the increased energy yields were comparable to those obtained by agriculturalists in New Guinea at around the same time. In doing so, he indicated that there were parallel paths of resource exploitation among "hunter-gatherers" and "farmers," where conventional wisdom has assumed that farming represents an "advance" over gathering. Over the next two decades Lourandos marshaled evidence from across Australia in support of this process, known as "intensification," culminating in the 1997 publication of his monograph Continent of Hunter Gatherers: new perspectives in Australian prehistory (Cambridge University Press). The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies is divided into four major sections. The first of these is "The emergence of social archaeology in Australia." It functions as an introduction to the life and work of Lourandos, and includes an interview with him by the three editors of the volume, all archaeologists who have been profoundly influenced by Lourandos as well as having collaborated with him over the years. These three chapters provide a clear and comprehensible picture of the concepts and debates surrounding Lourandos's theories and make for a good introduction even to those who, like myself, knew nothing of the subject before opening the book. Part 2, "Tyranny of text" examines the ways in which conventional modes of thought and, especially, writing construct our understandings of evidence. The authors here want in part to pay homage to the revolutionary quality of Lourandos's thought and to defend him against those who are still unwilling to acknowledge his contributions to reshaping archaeological theory and practice in the late years of the twentieth century. They also aim to document the ways in which some of the myth-making I outlined at the start of this essay continues to marginalize Aboriginal people's place in both Australian history and Australian society. One of Lourandos's radical achievements was a great willingness to incorporate insights from ethnographic studies of recent Aboriginal societies into his explications of the archaeological record. As the authors of the essays in Part 2 acknowledge, every representation of the past is shaped and informed by the attitudes of the present, for good or ill. Lourandos scrupulously tried to enhance his interpretations of the physical record of Aboriginal societies in past millennia by means of inference not drawn solely from that record but also from recorded cultural practice. This use of anthropology in the service of archaeology, and the confluence of the two disciplines, is central to Part 3, "Anthropological approaches." The five essays in this third section cover a broad range of styles and approaches, from Marcia Langton's "social and spiritual construction of water in Aboriginal societies," to John Bradley's examination of the development of technologies for exploiting the normally toxic fruit of cycad palms for food, through Franca Tamisari and James Wallace's exploration of the theme of the transformation of neutrally-conceived "space" to highly charged "place." In this last mentioned essay, the importance of the Dreaming is foregrounded, which brought back memories of the very first book I discussed in this blog four years ago. That was Landscapes, Rock Art, and the Dreaming: an archaeology of preunderstanding (Leicester University Press, 2002) by Bruno David, one of the editors of this festschrift for Harry Lourandos. The essays of Part 4, "Late Holocene change," return the focus to strict archaeological studies ranging from excavations of burial sites in South Australia through Western Desert rock art (and language) on up to excavations of rock-shelters in the Torres Strait. I found these essays to be the most challenging in the collection, as I have little grounding in the vocabulary and methodology of archaeology and could easily lose the thread of an argument while searching for a concise definition of "Harris lines" and their significance in assessing diet and by extension climate. Once I grasped the convention of presenting raw data and only then following up with a discussion, I fared better; at first I felt hopelessly ignorant, but a little patience made these essays both comprehensible and rewarding. There is a fifth part to the book, a single chapter under the rubric of "Extending the boundaries." Although many of the essays in the earlier parts of the book do indeed extend the boundaries of Lourandos's work into new areas of research, Barbara Bender's final chapter also extends the book's geographical reach by demonstrating the influence of Lourandos's approaches on the reconstruction of a Bronze-Age site in England's Cornwall. Bender's essay is part memoir, part post-modernist reflection on the field, and part research report. In many ways it unifies the investigative strategies and theoretical stances that have been exposed throughout the preceding essays in The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies, including a focus on the unexpected ways in which archaeology can affect and be affected by the lives of the descendants of those it studies. In the end, such repercussions of how the past is reconstructed and the stories that we tell ourselves about our ancestors do indeed have significant impacts on modern societies. Sadly, in the case of Australia, the stories too often reinforce myths of Eurocentric sophistication and progress at the expense of Indigenous people. Ironically, the romanticizing twenty-first century eco-warrior/guardian movement that seeks to position the Australian Aborigine as uniquely in harmony with the natural world, environmentally aware and in balance, may in fact be unwittingly reiterating the primitivizing myth of an environmentally driven culture lacking in human agency. The Social Archaeology of Australian Indigenous Societies opened my eyes to a field of scientific investigation about which I knew almost nothing; I had no memory of hearing Harry Lourandos's name before reading the opening chapter. But this book also opened my eyes to a new understanding of social responsibility in scientific investigation while at the same time educating me to some of the fundamentals of that science, all of which made for a most rewarding experience. Posted at 11:17 AM Sun - July 26, 2009Understanding the GrogAmong scholars of Indigenous experiences with
alcohol and researchers of the effects of substance abuse more generally, Dr
Maggie Brady has no peer. Her studies of Aboriginal drinking and petrol
sniffing extend back thirty years and form the most broad-ranging and
comprehensive body of investigation and commentary by any single individual.
She has looked at the social history of alcohol, examined the habits of
non-drinkers and those who "gave away the grog," charted the ebb and flow of
petrol sniffing in remote communities, written on the Indigenous alcohol problem
from the perspective of actions undertaken by the Australian Government, and
discussed the impact of programs sponsored by the United Nations. Perhaps the
quickest way to obtain an overview of her prodigious output is a quick browse through Google
Books.
Most recently, Brady has produced a series of six short booklets collectively known as First Taste: how Indigenous Australians learned about grog (Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, 2008). At about twenty-five pages each, handsomely designed and beautifully illustrated, these pamphlets aim to dispel many of the myths about Aborigines and alcohol that have accumulated over the years. Brady's position is that these misconceptions have reinforced a too popular notion that Aboriginal people are victims of the grog, powerless in its grasp. The defeatist attitudes that are thus spawned among both people Aboriginal and white only do more harm in turn. Brady's intent in this series may be focused--to peel away just a few layers and instill the tiniest bit of hope--but perhaps, as we have all heard many times in other contexts, from little things big things grow. The first book, "Aims and Ideas," sets out the agenda for the series and presages some of the mythbusting that is to follow.
These ideas are explored in the remaining books of the series. "The First Taste of Alcohol" contains sections on indigenous fermentation along with two accounts--one a tale from a startling Aboriginal point of view--of encounters with alcohol in 1788. The story of alcohol prior to the arrival of Europeans is further developed in "Strong Spirits from SE Asia," which focuses primarily on the role of Makassan traders in bringing alcohol to Australian shores, but also looks at early alcohol use in the Torres Strait influenced by contact with the Philippines and Polynesia. "Learning to Drink form the English" first examines the culture of alcohol use in England prior to the departure of the First Fleet and then takes up the story of Bennelong and Bungaree before concluding with a survey of bush drinking in the Victorian goldfields. I was fascinated by the fourth book in the series, "The story of the bottle," an examination of the impact of glass bottles on Indigneous material culture over two centuries: the "bottle" of its title being a literal, not a metaphorical, reference to the containers that alcohol arrived in. Brady examines the archaeological record that reveals how the concave bases of bottles were incorporated into the Aboriginal toolkit as axes and scrapers and square-faced gin bottles were flaked to form highly-prized spear points. She follows this with an engrossing look at the bottle in contemporary artistic expression, from its use as decoration on graves, to its incorporation and depiction in the works of artists like Joanne Currie and Joan Stokes, to the woven bottles of Ramingining, before concluding with a look at how depiction of alcohol use in European illustration has influenced attitudes towards Aborigines in a more general fashion. The final book in the series, "Struggles Over Drinking Rights," looks at both sides of the issue, at attempts to win equality before the law as well as attempts to build an Indigenous temperance movement to battle the ills brought with the grog. In this chapter of her examination as in each of the preceding, Brady is at pains to be non-judgmental and to simply present facts and dispel misconceptions. These are educational materials, not polemics. Useful bibliographies supplement each essay, and the clear, simple language makes them appropriate to a wide variety of readers from young students to health workers in Indigenous communities. The set is available from the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation for most reasonable prices: a single copy is free; additional sets cost only A$11.00 each. While doing a little background research for this post I came across this wonderful video presentation, Maggie Brady: History and Culture in Indigenous Alcohol Use from the ABC. In it, Brady delivers a lecture based on First Taste at ANU's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. You can download the program (from ABC's Fora.tv series) to your iPod as well as watch it online. Brady is joined in this presentation by Robin Room, who responds to Brady's remarks and examines the problems of alcohol abuse from a broader perspective of current government policy, initiatives, and culture change. Although the entire presentation is nearly an hour long, a "table of contents" feature allows you to view it in brief chapters of just a few minutes each. Posted at 11:24 AM Sun - July 19, 2009Making Business WorkIf you have the time or inclination to read only
one book on Aboriginal affairs this year, I would strongly suggest that you pick
up Kim Christen's Aboriginal Business: alliances in a remote Australian
town (SAR Press, 2008/Aboriginal Studies Press,
2009).
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.In Aboriginal Business, she expands the scope of her investigations enormously, which is one reason to make this your top choice for this year's reading list. In addition to addressing the "culture work" of the archives and cultural centre and the story of the production of a commercial CD of Warumungu women's songs, Christen offers a history of settler-Indigenous relations and interactions in the Tennant Creek region, focusing especially on the time since it became the center of the last major gold rush in Australian history during the 1930s. Part of what makes this such a fascinating story is the nature of the settlements at Tennant Creek. Established during the building of the Overland Telegraph in the 1870s, it is relatively remote, 500 km north of Alice Springs and 1000 south of Darwin, with little in the way of European settlement nearby. In 2001, approximately a third of the town's population of 3,000 was Indigenous. Thus, it shares traits of a white settler town and a remote Aboriginal community, largely Warumungu but with a Warlpiri, Alyawarr, and Kaytetye presence as well. Christen details the story of conflicting land claims on both sides and talks about the succession of "mobs" that have tried to manage them: miners, government bureaucrats, lawyers, and throughout, Aboriginal families. She looks at the roles the Central Land Council, ATSIC, the Giants Reef mining company, the Federal, Territory, and town governments, and the railway companies have played in Tennant Creek. Each of her six thematic chapters looks at a different aspect of Aboriginal business in the town: land claims; Aboriginal organizations; mining; railways; cultural transmission in an age of digital technology; and the Nyinkka Nyunyu Cultural Centre. The unifying theme that runs throughout these varied enterprises is announced in the book's subtitle and treated in the first, preliminary chapter: the making of alliances. By focusing on the work, the business of negotiation, contestation, and compromise, Christen is able to chart a history of Warumungu agency in Tennant Creek, its ups and its downs, but above all its persistence. This is a story about how people engage with their country and with those others who have come to occupy it with them. In her portrait of the Warumungu, they are neither passive victims nor activists, but rather women and men engaged in the business of living, with all their aspirations, disappointments, conflicts, and solutions. That is not to say that Christen does not fully acknowledge the disadvantage under which the Warumungu labor. In the early chapters of the book she skillfully weaves together two narratives. The first is of the original dispossession as first the Overland Telegraph and then the gold mines brought waves of outsiders to the Barkly, intent upon taking over the land and pushing aside the Indigenous populace. The second is the effects of government policy in the last thirty years, culminating in Howard's Intervention. The philosophy of the Howard Government, with its emphasis on "practical reconciliation" and the "mainstreaming" of Aboriginal affairs into a broader Australian nation, stands as a metaphor for the logic of whitefella business that operates to exclude Aboriginal participation and agency. In contrast, and perhaps to a degree in consequence, "Aboriginal business" has come to focus on the work of forging alliances, of harnessing willing partners and forcing unwilling collaborators into arrangements that provide options and choice for the Warumungu and allow them to assert their own position in the management of their lives and their country. The historical sweep of Christen's narrative shows how these strategies have changed over time, all the while remaining focused on retaining control. Christen deftly skewers the gazetting of country around Tennant Creek, describing how the map making and marking of early white settlers was irrelevant to the Warumungu who remained as ignorant of the "power" of such pronouncements as the settlers were of the marking of country by the Dreaming tracks of the Warumungu ancestors. She demonstrates how in later years the Warumungu exploited the resources of missions and cattle stations and made those settlements the locus of their own social interactions: how the business of alliance-making among Aboriginal families was made necassary by whitefella settlement and at the same time forced negotiations between Aboriginal and settler. When the historical trends of dispossession stood a chance of reversal in the wake of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (ALRA) and the opening of legal negotiations in the 70s and 80s, the Warumungu developed new tactics for doing business with lawyers, pastoralists, and miners. Christen treats the effects of these changes with subtlety, noting, for example, how Aboriginal men may have chosen at times to say no to certain deals simply to exercise a long-denied prerogative, and at other times to impress upon potential partners the seriousness of taking care of country; they may also have said yes in order to open up economic opportunities. In her chapter on collaborations with mining companies, Christen describes the dynamic in the wake of the ALRA: 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:The choices are not endless (p. 144, emphasis in the original). The blunt set of options outlined by the CLC, with its pragmatic conclusion, "make an agreement," sums up the story of recent Warumungu history as presented in Aboriginal Business. The chapter on the completion of the Darwin-to-Alice leg of the transcontinental railway offers an example of ways in which alliances work two ways. Working with representatives from ADrail, Warumungu people helped to chart a course for the laying of track through their country and to identify resources (like gravel) that would be required by the rail company to complete the portions of the track that ran through country around Tennant Creek. These exploratory journeys also facilitated the Warumungu's ability to care for country by providing transportation out to country that would otherwise be difficult to visit while at the same time introducing that country to the railway's officers. The naming of two locomotives the Purnu (which appropriately means "carrier") and the Aboriginal Stockman added the element of "symbolic" reconciliation to the practical business of building a railroad, thus acknowledging the importance of recognizing Indigenous history in a way that John Howard was at the time vociferously denying. The names, one in Warumungu and one in English, acknowledge pre- and post-contact history, and so comprehend both Dreaming tracks and track of cast steel. 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). These are but a few examples drawn from the riches of Christen's book to illustrate the ways in which Tennant Creek's Aboriginal people conduct their business both within their own communities and with the larger Australian state. Through them, she effectively and marvelously obliterates the tension between continuity and change, between tradition and modernity. For the Warumungu, there is no choice between living in the past and living with the modern state; there is only the option of living. Although Christen's work has been ongoing and this book itself been in preparation for several years now, its appearance at this moment seems particularly timely in the wake of the July 2 release of Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2009, which has been the subject of much media commentary this month. For example, Fred Chaney was quoted in The Australian recently as saying, "The really important thing is to get permanent gains, not to waste the money. Those permanent gains will be best obtained if the Aboriginal people are strongly involved ... and that takes time. ... I would like to see more attention being paid not to speed of action, but on the effectiveness of action ("Engage Aborigines to solve race problems, Rudd urged," July 11, 2009). Christen's book demonstrates the wisdom of following Chaney's advice. Just this week, Nicolas Rothwell praised the upsurge in local, grass-roots organizations that are wresting solutions from the welfare-era government bureaucracies ("The local road to recovery," The Australian, July 18, 2009). Christen's work shows rather how those old bureaucracies made possible new local solutions by providing a model for local organization; it also demonstrates that such local initiatives are anything but new. Aboriginal Business offers welcome and timely insights into both historical issues and contemporary social concerns. Encompassing government, law, the arts, and industry, it likewise provides an appreciation of the sweep of concerns the Warumungu are acting upon. In her synthesis of the diachronic and the synchronic perspectives on life in this corner of the Barkly Tableland, Kim Christen offers an analysis that is at once timely and timeless. For another look at Aboriginal Business in Tennant Creek, check out Christen's photos of the book launch there last Monday on Flickr. Postscript: Kim has just written an eloquent, moving, and heartfelt post on the book launch and its effect on her and the people of Tennant Creek on her blog, Long Road . It says far more than I ever could about what this book truly means. Posted at 12:20 PM Sat - July 11, 2009Tennant Creek BusinessIf you happen to be in Tennant Creek this coming
Monday, you won't want to miss the launch of Kim
Christen's new publication from Aboriginal Studies Press, Aboriginal Business: Alliances in a Remote Australian
Town. It was published some months ago in the US by SAR Press; I'm about 75 pages from the end of it
right now and all I can say so far is that it's bloody brilliant. Look for a
more extensive review here
soon.
Posted at 01:53 PM Sat - July 4, 2009Doom and SurvivalI
 was
totally unprepared for Vivienne Cleven's second novel, Her Sister's Eye (University of Queensland
Press, 2002).Cleven's first novel, Bitin' Back (UQP, 2001), was a genial farce. In describing it so, I do not wish to denigrate its inventiveness, much less to downplay to the fundamental seriousness of its concern for the difficulties that beset Indigenous people--indeed, any of us--in molding an identity in the modern world. But Cleven's profound message lay under a cladding of outrageous humor and startling language that made the novel slip past your defenses in a spirit of delightful diversion. Her Sister's Eye is another matter. Cleven is still as serious as a heart attack, but the lightness of tone has vanished. The language is as startling in its originality, its idiosyncratic flavor, and its metaphor, but the crack of laughter has been replaced by the crack of a whip. I hesitate to wander down the path of hyperbole, but this book brought to mind the world of William Faulkner's novels more often than anything else. The dense narrative, the temporal dislocations, the shifting points of view, and the bending of language to the experience of whichever character holds the stage of consciousness at any given moment left me slack-mouthed in surprise over and over again. Set in a rural river town called Mundra, Her Sister's Eye is the story of families in collision, of catastrophes of all sorts, and above all the injuries that those collisions inflict. At the book's heart are two sisters, hinged together despite all their differences. Murilla Salte is a large, dark, serious, no-nonsense, pragmatic pillar of strength and determination who occupies a pivotal space between black and white in the town. Her younger sister Sofie is white-haired at the age of twenty-eight, but her mind is that of a child, capable of intense emotional attachments but bereft of any logic except that driven by those emotions. The dynastic Drysdale family dominates the whitefella population of the town, or at least it did in years gone by. Now though, the family matriarch, Caroline, is an old woman, house-bound, cared for by Murilla, living more in her mind than in the family homestead. She incarnates the novel's multi-layered, shifting chronology. She also incarnates Faulkner's famous aphorism, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." She struggles with insults paid out years ago, and in response, Sofie's innocent loyalty to her, "the old one," is one of the major drivers of the novel's action. Sofie tends to the cares of Caroline's mind, as Murilla tends to her physical needs. And whereas Murilla tries to prevent Caroline from paying heeds to remembered insults, Sofie cannot help but to feel them herself. She reacts instinctively, not quite understanding what has gone wrong, but sure of her need to pay back when Caroline is incapable of vengeance. Archie Corella is another linchpin of mystery and temporal dislocation, wandering in and out of the town and the lives of its citizens, always on the fringes, hard to locate both in space and time. Arriving in the first chapter seeking work, he is referred to the Drysdales, and briefly takes up as a gardener for them. He has a deep and somewhat mysterious bond of spiritual kinship with Sofie and a more pragmatic if embattled one with Murilla. His horrible physical disfigurement is an objective correlative of sorts with Sofie's damaged psyche. For certain, both of them are somehow bound to the river that runs through the town and as a focal point through the book's narrative. The minor characters in the novel, the Drysdale men, the "Red Rose" ladies of the town, social matriarchs against whom Caroline and Sofie rage, bring a bit of Cleven's caustic wit into play. But they are all so toxic in themselves that it is hard to really laugh at them. The weakest strand in the novel is embodied in the characters of Doris and Nana. Doris wants to understand the history of the town; old Nana is reluctant at first to reveal it, but eventually gives in and recounts large slabs of the backstory that begins to explain who the main characters really are, and how their histories are the history of the town's hatreds and misery. These sections of the novel struck me as slightly false. They are like the speeches offered at the beginning of a Shakespearean play that set the scene and name the players, but that lack the drama and the presentation or action (rather than bald retelling) that should form the core of the action. However, having deployed this narrative intrusion to unlock some of the secrets of the past, Cleven lets the action play itself out in a satisfying and truly dramatic conclusion. Her Sister's Eye is a story of doom (or fate) and survival: the two sides of the human condition. The Drysdales and the Red Rose ladies are trapped in a mean, harsh environment, dusty on the one hand, dominated by the dangerous and implacable waters of the river on the other. They live on the land, in the country, without truly inhabiting it. The Indigenous people, the Saltes, the Gees, Doris and Nana, are denizens: they belong in this land, but their proper place has been usurped. They cling to their country, but like Murilla's ramshackle home, they are in constant danger of being bulldozed out of the way. Ultimately their fundamental connection allows them to survive, and like Sofie's mysterious ability to navigate the hazards of the river, to hold their own, however miserably, in the face of danger and brutality. I would have said that Bitin' Back established Vivienne Cleven as a major force to be reckoned with in contemporary Australian, Aboriginal, and Queenslander fiction. But I would have been wrong by half. Her Sister's Eye takes Cleven straight to the top. Posted at 11:00 AM Sun - June 7, 2009Stolen, Again (and Again)I've been continuing to work my way through the
The
Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature at a slow pace,
and am continually delighted by what I'm finding there. The early emphasis on
documentary history has given way, towards the middle of the twentieth century,
to hefty doses of "literature" in the sense of fiction, poetry, and drama. I
continue, also, to be amazed by the variety of styles, genres and subgenres, and
the mixture of the sweet and the useful found in these literary
explorations.
While 
I was reading Gillian Cowlishaw's The City's Outback, I came to an excerpt
from a novel in the Anthology that resonated powerfully with the stories
of removal and family disruption Cowlishaw was reproducing, and decided to
pursue the novel and read it in its entirety. The work in question was Monica
Clare's Karobran: the story of an Aboriginal girl,
originally published in 1978, a few years after the author's death, and
reprinted in 2008 by the Alternative Publishing Cooperative
Limited.Clare was born in 1924 to an Aboriginal father and an English mother, and was sent with her younger brother from her home country in Queensland to Sydney at the age of six following her mother's death. The children spent a short but apparently idyllic time on a farm near Spencer in New South Wales before being separated from one another and sent to government homes. Later in life Clare became active in Aboriginal politics, working especially hard to improve housing conditions and with her husband, Les Clare, in Labor circles. Karobran was unfinished at the time of Clare's death in 1973. She had brought the manuscript to the offices of FCAATSI, where a team of sympathetic editors later picked it and made final revisions. Like many first novels, Karobran is heavily autobiographical and draws on the first half of the author's life, from childhood through early adult independence. It is narrated in the third person, but always strictly from the point of view of Isabelle, who is seven years old in the opening chapter. The story begins the day of her mother's death and the confusion and fear she experiences. This incident sets up not only the pervasive sense of loss that will haunt Isabelle's life throughout the novel, but also her fierce loyalty to the remnants of her family, her father Dave, and her younger brother Morris. It also adumbrates the plight of workers, particularly Aboriginal workers, during the years of the Great Depression as Dave sets off with the children in search of work. In the later chapters of the novel, when she is separated from first her father and later her brother, the sense of community that Isabelle finds in the struggles of working folk will sustain her and drive her forward in life, just as the hope that she can connect again with her family does. Isabelle finds another early and tantalizing sense of community when the family is briefly taken in to the hospitable circle of an Aboriginal camp. But the stay there is brief as Dave sets off again looking for work. Sadly, their journey takes them next into the orbit of Tom Wall, a cruel, racist drunkard. Mrs Wall is barely able to defend herself, let alone the children, and at the end of this episode, the Welfare comes to take the children away as Dave goes off in search of a livelihood once more. What follows next is the most idyllic chapter of the young girl's life (and the section of the book that is excerpted in the Anthology). Isabelle and Morris are sent to live with the Manbury's on a farm in New South Wales, and these kindly people provide the children not just a home, but a sense of connection to a countryside that stays with Isabelle long after the state intervenes once again and removes the children to an institutional home. Although brother and sister maintain a loose connection in the city, the bond between them attenuates too. Isabelle leaves the home and finds work; she also finds a sympathetic white man named Bill who leads her into an awareness of larger issues of social justice, and more importantly, finally leads her out west to be reunited with members of a displaced Aboriginal community. There she finally achieves a spiritual reconnection with her father's people. She finds a measure of peace, although it is one that is permanently tinged with the unforgettable loss of her father and brother. Karobran is a remarkable novel. Less than one hundred pages long, told in simple, clear prose, it nonetheless illuminates history in remarkable ways. It is a story of removal and loss, of the Stolen Generation embodied in a single life. It is likewise a novel of a distinct social consciousness, the story of labor in the Depression, of rural New South Wales, of the removal of whole communities from the country that had sustained them for generations. With its focused point of view, it never becomes didactic. It is a journey of discovery and wonder as much as it is a tale of loss told without a trace of self-pity. Isabelle, in her quiet and understated way, is one of the great heroines of Australian literature. Posted at 12:30 PM Sun - May 24, 2009City LifeWith
 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.None of this will come as a surprise to readers of Cowlishaw's earlier books; indeed, the subtitle of Rednecks, Eggheads, and Blackfellas, her study of life on a cattle station in the far north, at Bulman, just south of Arnhem Land, might serve equally well for The City's Outback: "a study of racial power and intimacy in Australia. The title of her more recent monograph, Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race (2004), is apt in the current context as well. The City's Outback proceeds from the latter work, in that it picks up the story of people and family she worked with in rural Bourke, NSW. Only now, her locus of investigation is the western suburbs of Sydney, in Mt. Druitt. Here there is a substantial Aboriginal population, many of them connected to families Cowlishaw knew in Bourke, but the concept of an Aboriginal "community" remains more elusive. It lacks the geographical or social coherence of an isolated township, or of an cohesive community within a larger one. And so, in addition to being a locus for studying a suburban Aboriginal culture, it becomes a ground for questioning the very concept of Aboriginal culture itself. Not that Cowlishaw denies that there is such a thing as Aboriginal culture, rather she wants to look at it from a new vantage point. When culture is often aligned with tradition, when community is defined by distance, and when both of those critical elements are lacking in the western suburbs of Sydney, what does it mean to be Aboriginal, and how does that state of affairs influence the people themselves, the Australian state, and the interactions between them? This is but one of the goals that Cowlishaw pursues in a book whose clear-cut prose and straightforward narrative structure disguises the complexity of its intellectual agenda. Cowlishaw also seeks to illuminate the nature of fieldwork in such circumstances and, by extension, to cast light on the intricacies and problems of the classic anthropological role of participant-observer. The fieldworker must abandon even the pretense of strict objectivity in developing social relationships with the people she is working with; at the same time she must subject her own methodology and involvement to a degree of scrutiny that can withstand the objective assessment of her own intellect and those of her peers. Cowlishaw manages to do this without floundering in a mess of theory. She makes reference to the "reflexive" nature of anthropological study and writing that has dominated the discipline for the last twenty-five years, but does so only to put her inquiry into context. She assumes that the reader has a basic understanding of the issues (or can pursue them via references in the extensive and excellent bibliography). She manages, rather, to portray the dilemma of the fieldworker by foregrounding her own reactions to what she sees and hears, and allowing herself and her readers to examine the feelings of both sympathy and repugnance, of curiosity and boredom that she experiences in the course of her conversations in Mt Druitt. Her fieldwork in that suburb consisted largely of interviewing the friends and relatives of her main informant, Frank Doolan, a man she knew from the period of her research in Bourke that she wrote about in Blackfellas, Whitefellas, and the Hidden Injuries of Race. Frank is an articulate, passionate man, keenly aware of injustice and equally aware of the mistrust that continues to founder the cause of meaningful dialogue between the races or the communities. The closing paragraph of The City's Outback sums up Frank's position with an art that it seems impossible to improve upon. 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). While Cowlishaw's research project involved, at Frank's urging, taping and transcribing the life stories of those he introduced her to, and returning those stories to their narrators as a means of assuring them that the stories had been heard and attended to, The City's Outback is not a compilation of those stories, a publication of them for our edification, or as the subjects of academic analysis. Or, at least, it is not those things alone. Cowlishaw acknowledges that far more work needs to be done to extract the full meaning, to conduct the extensive evaluation of what she has been told. But the stories themselves are powerful and among the most moving and startling episodes in the narrative that Cowlishaw weaves. The overwhelming theme that emerges from these stories is the trauma of separation. Here is the story of the Stolen Generations written on a personal scale: Annie, for instance, who feels the sharpness of never having known her mother's love and thus finds herself ignorant of the ability to love her own children. She desperately wants Cowlishaw to arrange to have her imprisoned brother moved from Queensland to New South Wales where she can visit him, but cannot understand the love that such a desire demonstrates. She does not engage in blame, except possibly of herself: this is simply the life story she has been dealt. Tina's children were taken away from her and Tina herself is confounded by the bureaucracy, by her poverty, and perhaps most of all by her inability to reconnect with those she has lost, even when they come back to her in Sydney. Vera and Gary, teenaged parents, know that there are courses that the state runs to provide them with the skills to survive in modern society, but lack all context in which to make sense of those skills. Through all these stories the themes of misery, violence, incomprehension, and anger rumble like thunder. Mutual incomprehension threatens to strangle these lives and even threatens to overwhelm Cowlishaw herself. She is repulsed by the casual acceptance of violence, and understands that repulsion to stem from the very alien nature of a culture that accepts mayhem as an inevitable component of daily life. Her informants see the police as enemies, incapable of any action that is not inherently antagonistic. Even Frank, who understands the role the police must play, and wants to encourage tolerance and respect, is ground down by the apparent endlessness of the cycle everyone seems to be trapped in. And Cowlishaw knows that to the citizens of Mt Druitt, she is a figure equally alien and incomprehensible, a white woman from the university, privileged, intermittent in her presence, governed by a code that has no meaning in their daily lives. The disjuncture between those lives and government policy, between Annie's anguish over her self-perceived inability to love her children and the public's growing appreciation of the fate of the "Stolen Generations" is the predicament Cowlishaw wants ultimately to address. 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). Cowlishaw's encounters in Mt Druitt took place in 2000, in the days when the sting of Bringing Them Home was still fresh, and in the year when thousands marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Those were events that were acknowledged in Mt Druitt, but seem to have had little impact there. Cowlishaw is now writing in the shadow of the sex-and-violence media scandals that led to the Intervention in 2007, and in the shadow of the Intervention itself, again events that might cast a shadow in the suburbs without altering daily life. The City's Outback is a guidebook, not to the depressed enclaves of the city and their dysfunctions, but to the habits of thought that keep the lives that are lived there in eclipse.  Google Map showing the location of Mt Druit (upper left) Posted at 10:19 AM Sun - May 3, 2009A Stanner RetrospectiveIn over a decade of intensive reading on
Aboriginal art and culture, I have encountered a handful of books that have
suddenly opened up vast new terrains of knowledge and understanding for me.
Fred Myers' Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: settlement, place and
politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Smithsonian Institution
Press, 1986) was the first and most fundamental of these for its insights into
social organization and custom. Tim Rowse's White Flour, White Power: from rations to citizenship in
Central Australia (Cambridge University Press, 2002) revealed the
territory of contact history to me; Gillian Cowlishaw's Blackfellas, Whitefellas and the Hidden Injuries of
Race (Blackwell, 2004) did the same for race relations; Deborah
Bird Rose's Reports from a Wild Country: ethics for
decolonisation (UNSW Press, 2004) brought questions of colonialism
and the environment to my consideration. (Truth, reading those last three in
the space of a year was among the significant inspirations for starting this
blog.) But no single book has knocked me on my ear quite the way that W. E. H.
Stanner's White Man Got No Dreaming: essays 1938-1973
(Australian National University Press, 1979) did. In part this was because of
the sheer breadth of its subject matter; in part it was because of the
extraordinary degree of sympathy Stanner evinced for the Aboriginal people and
his uncanny ability to present the humanity, the aspirations and despair of
Indigenous Australians. I remain convinced to this day that no one could read
these essays and remain unmoved by
them.
I had earlier read the famous ABC Boyer lectures, After the Dreaming (ABC Books, 1968), which was the only one of Stanner's works still in print a decade ago, and been bowled over by the manner in which he placed Aboriginal affairs in the context of the broader Australian state. I had scavenged articles published over the years in Oceania and puzzled over On Aboriginal Religion (University of Sydney, 1966). But during the summer in which I finally put my hands on a copy of White Man Got No Dreaming and immersed myself in Stanner's reflections on the Dreaming, on social change in the Daly River region, on the vast implications of the Yirrkala Land Rights Case, on justice and injustice in Aboriginal Australia, I felt myself emerging from a chrysalis of platitude and commonplace into a bright and altered vision that nothing has since quite equaled. It is now thirty years since the publication of White Man Got No Dreaming, and time has clearly come for an assessment of Stanner's contributions. Black Inc. Agenda has recently brought out The Dreaming and Other Essays, which I presume reprints the earlier collection; I haven't seen a copy of it yet and the few reviews I've read have left it unclear what points of overlap exist between the two books. But whatever it contains, that new publication will bring Stanner's elegant prose back into the limelight. Indeed, it is the eloquence of Stanner's voice as much as the piercing quality of his insights that make him worth reading. But there  is
even more rejoicing to be had in the appearance of a superb collection of
critical essays on Stanner's life and work, An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal
Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008), edited by Melinda
Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett. My appetite for a book of this sort had been
whetted a few years back when I read Inga Clenndinen's
"The Power to Frustrate Good Intentions: or, the revenge of the Aborigines,"
published in the journal Common Knowledge (vol. 11, no. 3, 2005, pp.
410-431), in which she examined Stanner's famous biographical essay on
"Durmugam: a Nangiomeri." After having spent many years in a somewhat solitary
communion with Stanner's thought, I found having another's perspective on a
familiar piece of his writing both surprising and invigorating.
How much richer, then, to have fifteen of the finest writers on Aboriginal issues address Stanner's legacy in this current volume. The table of contents lists a vertiable who's who of the finest scholars writing today. In addition to the estimable editors, contributors to An Appreciation of Difference include Geoffrey Gray, John Mulvaney, Barrie Dexter, Peter Sutton, Ian Keen, Howard Morphy, Alberto Furlan, Nicolas Peterson, Nancy Williams, John Taylor, Ann Curthoys, Tim Rowse, and Jon Altman! One could construct an entire semester's university seminar on contemporary scholarship in Aboriginal studies from the newly republished essays, On Aboriginal Religion, and the essays in this volume. A particular strength of this collection is the variety of approaches that the authors bring to Stanner's life and work. Following the editors' excellent introductory essay, the first section of the book treats largely with the varied aspects of Stanner's career: his multiple assignments during the Second World War, his post-war appointment to the London-based East African Institute of Social Research, his role in the founding of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies, his tenure at the Australian National University, and his work with Nugget Coombs and Barrie Dexter on the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. What emerges from these essays on Stanner's career in "Diverse Fields" is the picture of a complicated man, the details of whose life surprised me, as my chief impressions of him had been formed from his writings. To begin with, I hadn't realized how little he had published over the course of this varied career, and how much of his work remains in manuscript form and as raw notes. The combination of rigorous attention to his civil career and responsibilities was partially the cause for this restricted output; equally, it seems, his high personal standards for his writing kept his work in progress perpetually in progress. The grace of his prose in print no doubt stems from that will to perfection. The portrait of Stanner painted here also reveals a man of a surprisingly conservative political bent. A soldier who felt his highest distinction might be "a chance to be of some use to my country," a servant of almost Victorian rectitude whose impeccable grooming might give a clue to his moral probity, the Stanner we meet in these pages seems to be an unlikely candidate to champion the rights of a people largely regarded as primitive and uncivilized. And yet, perhaps that sense of decorum and that high moral character is not so surprising after all, for it bespeaks a set of principles that the environment of thoughtless prejudice that often surrounded him could not compromise. The second part of the collection is entitled "In Pursuit of Transcendent Value" and offers the most engaging and diverse set of essays in An Appreciation of Difference. It begins with a pair of essays by editors Beckett and Hinkson that examine some of Stanner's fieldwork, focusing on his encounter with Durmugam and his explorations of rock art sites along the Fitzmaurice River. Beckett's offering, incisevely subtitled "Stanner's Durmugam," suggests, as Clendinnen's early piece on the subject did, how much of Stanner's own personality is reflected in his portrait of the man from Daly River. Similarly, Hinkson's tale of the grueling quest for the discovery of rock art reveals Stanner's almost single-minded devotion to and absorption in the task; he pushes himself and his guides relentlessly and almost cruelly, absorbed as he is by the mystery he seeks to unveil. Peter Sutton and Ian Keen next seek to deconstruct the mind that took the raw materials of these early fieldwork investigations and produced from them the startling insights on On Aboriginal Religion. When I first read the essays that comprise that small monograph, I was awed by their ingenuity, by the synthetic mind that could discern a universal theme of sacrifice, a theme that resonated with Christian tradition, in the rituals of the Murrin-patha people. I was also slightly uneasy with the parallels, for although Stanner argued convincingly against the degrading characterization of such rituals as magic and superstition that had been the legacy of early scholars like Sir James Frazier, I felt that there might be too much of the author and too little of the Aboriginal in his exposition. Sutton and Keen probe these matters sensitively and demonstrate how Stanner's conclusions were indeed an attempt to move beyond his own intellectual tradition and expose the intellect and the spirit behind Aboriginal practice: surely the most important contribution of this (or any) phase of Stanner's work. The last two essays in this section, by Howard Morphy and Alberto Furlan, move beyond Stanner's writings to examine, respectively, Yolngu mortuary rituals and contemporary song-writing in Wadeye in light of Stanner's work. These original essays demonstrate in themselves the profound impact that Stanner's "appreciation of difference" have had on scholars who followed him, and provide exemplary proof of the importance of his intuitions and perceptions. The importance of land and of people's connections to it, in a variety of ways, is the thread that unites the essays in the third portion of An Appreciation of Difference. The essays of White Man Got No Dreaming are arranged in chronological order, and most of those that follow the publication of After the Dreaming build to a crescendo around the theme of land and land rights: "Industrial Justice in the Never-Never;" "No, no Sir James: Polyphemus, not Goliath;" "The Yirrkala Land Case: Dress-rehearsal;" "Fictions, Nettles and Freedoms." The essays in this current critical collection gathered under the rubric "Land and People," like those in the previous section, try to tease out some of the apparent contradictions between Stanner's attitudes and methods and the conclusions presented in his writings. In particular, Nancy Williams' essay on Stanner and the Yirrkala case illuminates a major and most important principle: "Stanner's appreciation of Aborigines as intelligent and rational individuals" (p. 211). In all aspects of his analysis, whether or land tenure, social organization, or religious belief, that appreciation is at the core of Stanner's thinking and his achievement. The concluding section of the book treats of Stanner as "A Public Intellectual" and focuses on the philosophy revealed by After the Dreaming. Ann Curthoys looks, somewhat defensively, at Stanner's assessments of historians in the Boyer Lectures. Tim Rowse reads the lectures to illuminate Stanner as social critic, and Jon Altman mines them for their impact of Stanner's later career in Indigenous policy, primarily during the Whitlam era and beyond. Altman examines the implications of Stanner's career in light of contemporary controversies leading up to and following the Howard government's intervention into the Northern Territory, which is certainly the most devastating turn of events in the Territory since the excision of land for the Nabalco lease, the event that shaped the final decades of Stanner's life. One of the most important of the essays collected in White Man Got No Dreaming was the 1958 Presidential Address to Section F (Anthropology) of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled "Continuity and Change among the Aborigines." In this essay, Stanner wrote of a fundamental contrast between the white man's teleological orientation and that of the black man "whose 'future' differentiates itself only as a kind of extended present, whose principle is to be continuously at one with the past" (Stanner, 1979, p. 58)--a theme that Deborah Bird Rose developed brilliantly in Reports from a Wild State. But more importantly, Stanner strove to demonstrate how the nineteenth-century vision of "primitives" and "tradition" as static entities was flawed, and how in fact Aboriginal society is characterized by both continuity and change. The achievement of the authors who have contributed to An Appreciation of Difference is to demonstrate how the principles of continuity and change apply equally to the life and work of this great public intellectual, W. E. H. Stanner, himself. Postscript: Thanks to David Nash for pointing me to information on the Symposium to mark the centenary of the birth of W. E. H. Stanner, held at the Australian National University in 2005, which led to this book. My only regret now is the discovery that there are a few papers from that Symposium that didn't make it into the pages of this volume! Posted at 12:40 PM Sun - April 12, 2009Stranger Among the MartuMaureen Helen's memoir, Other People's Country: a woman's journey from suburbia to
life as a remote area nurse (ABC Books, 2008) tells the story of
a woman who, in late middle age, leaves an empty nest in Perth to undertake
service in the remote Western Australia settlement of Jigalong. Like Mary Ellen
Jordan's Balanda: my year in Arnhem Land (Allen &
Unwin, 2005) and Paula Shaw's Seven Seasons in Aurukun: my unforgettable time at a
remote Aboriginal school (Allen & Unwin, 2009), Other
People's Country records the culture shock the author experienced, the
mixture of idealism and ignorance she brought to the job, and the victories and
defeats that come with immersion in an alien and unsignposted
culture.
These  must
be extraordinarily difficult books to write, and in Helen's case, she waited
fifteen years before attempting to sort out in prose the adventure she
experienced in 1990-91. What is remarkable is that the story is no less vivid
for being recollected in tranquility; indeed her prose is brilliant, affecting,
transparent. She has a genius for storytelling worthy of a novelist. Her
pacing is impeccable, her construction of the narrative skillful. She knows how
to use tiny details (for example, the small silver charm in the form of a snail
that she wears around her neck) to thematically unite incidents across the pages
of the book and across years of time. When she is tired and lonely, she speaks
of her desire to spend an evening alone with a novel for solace, and it is clear
that she has absorbed much of her craft that way. But the story rings true, and
she has a generosity of spirit that extends both to herself and to the Martu
people.Helen spends roughly the first half of the book detailing the first few weeks in Jigalong, weeks she spent feeling frightened, abandoned, lacking in self-confidence, and almost always overwhelmed. Motivated by a yearning for adventure and a belief that she ought to put principles into practice, Helen had applied for a position at Coonanna, on the Nullarbor. The application was rejected, and months passed before she was unexpectedly offered work as a remote area nurse in Jigalong. Perhaps it was the surprise that led her to accept almost without reflection; it was certainly the abruptness of the decision that contributed to her bewilderment on arrival. For once she is on the ground in Jigalong, she discovers that she has two days of orientation with the other nurse in the community before she is to be left alone to face the challenges of administering to the locals. The confusion and isolation increase when her colleague's planned two-week absence stretches into six. But after those first two weeks, the demands of the job overwhelm almost everything else, even (almost) the sense of being overwhelmed. She manages to survive by enlisting help from every quarter. Joannie and PW, the Aboriginal nursing assistants, give her a grounding in the routines of the clinic. The telephone is a lifeline that connects her to medical advice in the nearest town of Newman and in Port Hedland, and sometimes to moral support from a friend back home in Perth. The Royal Flying Doctor Service comes through heroically time after time. Perhaps most crucially, she learns how to hold her balance. She overcomes both her shyness and her sense of duty to make friends with others in the community and to relax with them, shoring up reserves of strength. She begins to learn slowly from the example of the Martu themselves, coming to understand that her notions of schedules and appointed times, of "must" rather than "can" do not serve her as well as being-in-the-moment. And so the tribulations of her early days give way to a growing sense of ease; she begins to behave adventurously rather than seeking adventure. She beings to negotiate risk into opportunity and to recognize, if only very slightly, that the Martu operate on a different scale of values. Surprisingly, she becomes comfortable with that recognition, even as it foregrounds her lack of understanding of those values. She can accept uncertainty and unknowing. Unknowing still generates moments of terror, though. As she grows more relaxed, she wanders--literally--further afield from her own backyard. Pursuing photographs of an expanse of Sturt's Desert Pea in bloom, she strays off the track. When she returns to find a group of women waiting for her at the clinic, she immediately recognizes that something is seriously wrong. She has strayed onto men's country. Her horror at the revelation of this transgression is compounded of equal parts of fear of retribution and anger at the slipshod orientation that failed to put into her hands the extant written instructions that would have prevented her mistake. And so while she has grown comfortable giving rides in the ambulance to the Martu going to or from Newman, and has stiffened her courage to take part in a nocturnal kangaroo-hunting expedition, a note of danger has been sounded. And it is danger that permeates, in many forms, the final quarter of the story Helen has to tell. Men's business is afoot, and in one way or another, it destabilizes the balance that Helen has begun to achieve. Her aides and closest friends among the Martu, Joannie and PW, must absent themselves from the clinic, compounding the isolation she experiences when Margaret, the other nurse, leaves again. The men's business brings also more people in from the outstations. The very fact of these visitors' mobility complicates life in the settlement, for suddenly there is grog coming in from Newman, and escalating violence in its wake. The visitors are a rougher lot in other ways, less used to whitefella ways, and so they stretch the fragile new accommodation to Martu ways that Helen has begun to develop. In the end, though, it is a medical emergency that provides the occasion of Helen's undoing, as a young mother presents at the clinic with a desperately iill new-born. Everything conspires to defeat Helen. A cyclone off the coast grounds the Flying Doctor. The baby's acute dehydration means that mother and child cannot be left alone for the night in the clinic. Helen reluctantly and in exhaustion brings them home to her tiny living quarters, but cannot bring herself to grant a further intrusion on her sense of privacy by allowing the young woman to have a friend sleep with her that night. When Helen realizes in the morning the cruelty of that decision, she is deeply distressed. And her distress only deepens when mother and child disappear as Helen showers. Eventually, with the aid of one of her Martu neighbors, she is able to locate the baby and call in the Flying Doctor. But the mother has left Jigalong for sorry business at another camp. Helen comes to appreciate the awful choice the mother had to make: bound to attend the funeral, she was forced to leave her baby behind, for taking the infant along would have led to its certain death. In another paradox, Helen's moment of insight into the mother's dilemma illuminates the paucity of her understanding of her clients' lives and triggers her realization that it is time to leave Jigalong. In a finely wrought epilogue, a mere three pages record an encounter with another young mother on a train in Perth a decade later in which Helen superbly knits up her story. This concluding parable of reconciliation once more demonstrates her storyteller's art, dramatizing rather than moralizing, summing up her lessons learned in a toddler's embrace. Along the way, there are many other finely told tales. There are a couple of nights of terrifying violence full of shouts and spears played out over the soundtrack of screeching tires and the crash of bullbars against walls of community housing. There is an equally terrifying tale of two tiny girls, eighteen and thirty-six months old, caught in a web of the Welfare and Health Departments, foster homes in Newman, their mother's alcoholism, and the Jigalong elders who hope to raise the girls Martu web. The shocking paralysis of so many good intentions totally at odds with each other is a theater of the absurd, with a tragic denouement. If Helen tries to draw an explicit moral from her time at Jigalong, it is this: It will take many decades and enormous goodwill on both side to work out what the partnership between the Martu people and the wider Australian society should look like, but a good start would be the recognition of, and respect for, the vibrant culture which underpins the lives of the people, and an attempt at dialogue that seeks to understand the Martu viewpoint (p. 243). Other People's Country is a story suffused with courage and pity and perhaps even desperation. It is a most welcome addition to the literature that describes the ongoing contact and adjustment between black and white in remote Australia. Posted at 08:20 AM Sun - March 15, 2009Uncovering Aboriginal LiteratureAs an undergraduate literature major, I developed
an allergy to anthologies. Poetry? Let me sink my teeth into Eliot's Four
Quartets and move on from there to the study of poets to whom Eliot owed
debts. Short stories? Please, can I have a novel,
sir?
And  so
I confess that I brought home a copy of The Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal
Literature (edited by Anita Heiss and Peter Minter, Allen &
Unwin, 2008) more out of a sense of obligation than with any real relish for the
task of pushing my way through it. Now that I have begun, I am still taking it
in very small doses; I've learned that to rush through collections like this
does an injustice to the anthologized. But my attitude has changed, and I am
quite relishing every moment of the
experience.Indeed, the first few pages of the book have proven so stimulating that I've decided to make a few comments now, rather than attempting to summarize my reactions after completing the lot. And truth, it might be many months before I reach its final pages. So in the meantime, I hope that you will acquire a copy for your own bedside or commuter backpack and enjoy its treasures along with me. Any anthology necessarily attempts to select for its pages works that are both representative and superlative. And a browse through the table of contents reveals a roster of familiar authors of political, historical, and literary importance, as well as generous sampling of names unknown to me until now. But the first thing a reader must not overlook, and well might underestimate in this chronicle of the best of two centuries and more of Aboriginal authorship, is the introductory essay, "Aboriginal Literature," by editors Heiss and Minter. This short piece deserves to be placed alongside all the other accomplishments gathered together in the volume. It is a superb piece of critical writing, offering a concise history of Aboriginal writing in English that is itself a model of style, clarity and insight. If, like me, you tend to skip prefatory material when approaching anthologies, don't make that mistake this time. Although limiting their selection to works composed in English, Heiss and Minter have broadly defined "Aboriginal literature" to include not just belles lettres, but personal correspondence, journalism, political writing, critical essays, and popular song. To some extent this decision was forced upon them, else they would have had a mere half-century's output to work with. But it was nonetheless an inspired decision, as the first pages of the anthology make abundantly clear. The first selection is the famous letter written by the premier Indigenous celebrity, Bennelong, to Governor Phillip after his return from England in 1796. Often reproduced, this epistle deserves its pride of place as the earliest recorded example of English composition by an Indigenous Australian. But it is with the second selection in the anthology that things start to get really interesting. Thomas Brune wrote the Flinders Island Chronicle in the late 1830s while under the protection of George Robinson, the controversial Englishman who either rescued or detained the remnants of the Tasmanian population on Flinders Island before moving on to exploits on the mainland at the fledgling colony around Port Philip. It is one thing to know that Robinson was a preacher, and that he sought to Christianize the Indigenous people he led, but it is quite another to hear Brune describe him in terms that have a decided echo of the Old and New Testaments about them: Now my friends you see that the commandant is so kind to you he gives you every thing that you want when you were in the bush the commandant had to leave his friends and go into the bush and he brought you out of the bush because he felt for you.... [17th November 1837] Did Robinson encouraging this deistic vision of himself? Was there an indigenous identification of two "bosses", one Scriptural, one close at hand? I can only be sure that, with these questions in mind, I will read accounts of Robinson's career differently in the future. Nor is this the only question that my reading of a mere thirty pages of this remarkable anthology has raised so far. Did Mary Ann Arthur of Tasmania (c.1819-1871) or her husband Walter (c.1820-1861) ever receive relief from the hard treatment they separately complained of at the hands of superintendent Henry Jeanneret on Flinders Island? And where did Walter Arthur absorb his sophisticated understanding of English law and justice? And what of Kitty Brangy (c. 1859-1918) writing from Wahgunyah to her sister Edith at Coranderrk? Her distress at never being able to raise the funds required to travel to Coranderrk to visit Edith--indeed she barely has enough to eat--is made all the more plaintive when she tells of friends and family who have died and ends, pitifully, "My dear sister I have not seen our dear Father since last year. I do not know where he has got to. I should like to know very much" (p. 14). I should very much like to know whether Kitty and Edith were ever reunited. I presume that these questions remain unanswered because of the sparse and discontinuous nature of the surviving correspondence and documentation. But perhaps in a future edition of the anthology, the editors may be able to expand the critical apparatus that supports the primary material to provide more context. Sometimes, though, the critical apparatus itself is a revelation. Consider these two paragraphs from the biographical information given about William Ferguson (1882-1950) and John Patten (1905-1957), authors of the pamphlet "Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights!" and co-organizes with William Cooper of the 1938 Day of Mourning for which it was prepared: Trade unionist and ... activist William Ferguson was born in Darlinghurst Point in the Riverina, NSW, and worked as a shearer from 1896, becoming shed organiser for the Australian Workers' Union. In 1916 he settled with his family in Gulgargambone, where he reformed the local branch of the Australian Labor Party and was its secretary for two years. He moved to Dubbo in 1933, where he launched the ... Progressive Association (APA) on 27 June 1938. The three ellipses in the quotation above mark where I have excised the words "Aborigines" or "Aboriginal" from the text; I have made no other changes. As reproduced above, these paragraphs might have been lifted directly from a source like the Australian Dictionary of Biography without anyone ever thinking that they refer to Indigenous rather than white Australians. And yet the pamphlet that they wrote and even its title ("Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights!") show how wide was the gulf between the treatment accorded black and white Australians by the time of the sesquicentennial. It is equally telling that the first 30 pages of the Anthology cover 150 years of Aboriginal writing, while another 200 pages are needed to encompass the last 70 years. Although most of what is contained in those 200 pages retains the political and personal qualities of the early entries, aesthetic considerations--literature as art--grow in importance. The editors handle the mix of politics and art in Aboriginal literature with aplomb throughout. Galarrwuy Yunupingu gives voice to pure politics to in the text of the Barunga Statement. A few pages later, Mandawuy Yunupingu's lyrics to the Yothu Yindi hit song "Treaty" address the same issues, using the blend of English and Yolngu matha to make the point about reconciliation and two-way culture formally as well as polemically. Meanwhile, Jennifer Martiniello's short lyric poem "Uluru by Champagne" tangles up the personal and political, the tourist and the indigene, the politically correct and incorrect, all in a few short stanzas spoken in an individualized, particular voice. As you can see from these last examples, I haven't been able to resist leaping from page to page to sample the treasure, despite my desire to read through the selections with an eye to the chronological and historical education they promise. Rest assured that however you elect to experience its delights, the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature will reward you in ways that you will not have expected. Posted at 11:42 AM Sun - March 8, 2009Yuendumu NightsIn Yuendumu Everyday: contemporary life in remote Aboriginal
Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008) author Yasmine
Musharbash deploys modest investigative techniques to tackle a range of issues
about life in Yuendumu. She explores deep-seated Warlpiri modes of thought and
social beliefs, the confrontation of those modes with Western expectations, and
the manner in which private lives and government programs--especially for
housing--meet, attract, and repel.
Although 
this is an academic monograph, growing out of the author's Ph.D. thesis and
reliant on Heideggerian theoretical underpinnings, it is deeply rooted in
personal experience, both her own and those of the Yuendumu women whose lives
she has shared. It is thus an entirely accessible look at everyday life: it
fills out the rounds of daily activities with detail and understanding. And
although much of the research on which the book relies took place nearly a
decade ago, its conclusions are still relevant in light of the ongoing debates
about the need for and the nature of housing in remote Aboriginal communities
today.Indeed, there is a delightful topical coincidence to the event that Musharbash uses to frame her investigations into these questions. One night, the women she camps with are settled down watching Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? after their evening meal outside the Western-style house that is their domestic locus. Asked what she would do with a million dollars, Tamsin, an adolescent girl, fantasizes about a mansion of many rooms, each filled with luxuries including fluffy beds, televisions, and stereos, of which she would be the sole occupant and to which she alone held the keys. This fantasy is so totally at odds with the realities of shared intimacy that govern everyday life in Yuendumu that Musharbash sets herself to explore its power and appeal. She begins with Heidegger's triad of building-dwelling-thinking, looking at the ways in which those three concepts interrelate and inform one another in Western thought. Heidegger asserts that all three words stem from the same root in Germanic languages, and reveal "multidirectional connectivity between the physical structures in which people live (building), their social practices (exemplified through their practices of dwelling) and their world view (thinking)" (p. 4). Against this she poses the Warlpiri ngurra, "a conceptual term of profound depth" (p.5). For the Warlpiri ngurra encompasses ideas of country, home, family, and the twenty-four hour period that encompasses "a day," or a unit of living. Musharbash counterposes a Warlpiri triad to Heidegger's, that of mobility, immediacy, and intimacy. These three concepts as expressed in Warlpiri life in Yuendumu today stand in sharp contrast to qualities inherent in Western houses. The house, and its corollary of home ownership, is the antithesis of the mobility that characterized pre-contact Aboriginal living and is still an important feature of life in Yuendumu today. The future orientation of home ownership with its attendant mortgages, maintenance, and inheritance laws is at odds with the immediacy of Warlpiri concerns for food and firewood. Finally, the division of the Western house into private rooms with distinct functions and proprietorship (a bedroom belongs to one person, or perhaps is shared by a very few) is at odds with the Warlpiri emphasis on physical and psychological intimacy. In the central chapters in her book Musharbash examines each of these three Warlpiri principles in the context of the jilimi, the single-women's camp, and the lives of the women who form her domestic cohort in Yuendumu. Examining mobility, she looks at the shifting patterns of residence in the jilimi and in the building with its verandah and its yard where the women sleep and eat, as well as spend the daytime hours not engaged by hunting, visiting, or working. Although the house is thought to "belong" to certain of its occupants, this belonging is itself fluid, and Musharbash notes that it "belonged" to entirely different women in the years prior and subsequent to the period of her primary fieldwork. On any given night, a constantly shifting roster of women and children other than the "owners" slept there, and the allocation of spaces in the house's rooms, verandah, and yard changed nightly as well. These nocturnal changes reflect events of the daylight hours: who is visiting from another community, whose children are there while a parent is traveling, who has quarreled, who has come to share a meal. Both residence and patterns of use within the residence are dynamic, not pre-ordained, and most assuredly mutable from night to night. These changing patterns are indices of immediacy. They are both to a degree spontaneous while also the product of subtle and usually unspoken negotiations among the residents. Musharbash kept detailed records of sleeping arrangements in the jilimi, of the ways in which residents nightly regrouped themselves in a yunta, or row of swags, in which one to two dozen women and children subdividied their numbers into smaller groups each evening. (The yunta reflects earlier camping arrangements in which a small number of individuals aligned themselves behind a windbreak and between sleeping fires each night; groups of yunta constitute the jilimi's geography each evening.) Weather conditions also play their part in these arrangements as the women cluster inside the house or on the verandah during periods of cold or heavy rain, although the preference is still for sleeping away from the structure as much as possible. Whatever the particular arrangement on a given night, there is intimacy expressed in these sleeping arrangements. The notion of sleeping alone, or of a single person in the jilimi occupying a single room, is one that would strike these women as unnatural. Where "privacy" might be an important governing principle in the Western home--either the privacy of the nuclear family insulated from its neighbors or the concept as expressed in a "private" room, the concept of marlpa governs Warlpiri habitation. Company and companionship carry a high positive value to the degree that forgoing such marlpa is nearly inconceivable and would almost certainly constitute suspect behavior. After examining expressions of mobility, immediacy, and intimacy through sleeping arrangements, Musharbash turns her attention to daytime activities and briefly surveys these concepts in diurnal movements. A frequent complaint in ethnographic writing and even more so in the stories of whitefellas who live and work in Aboriginal communities is the frustration experienced in organizing even the simplest of expeditions: hunting, visiting, shopping. The distance between point of origin and destination is measured in circuits and redundancies, not in straight lines. The composition of any group thus engaged is likewise highly variable in the period of time, often extended, which elapses between the decision to go and the final departure for the destination. Musharbash brilliantly deconstructs one such expedition in search of yams by documenting the "hither-and-thithering" involved in preparing for it. She diagrams (p. 130) the fifteen separate stops within the center of Yuendumu and chronicles the shifting cast of characters and the amount of time required to prepare for the trip. In doing so, she lays bare the logic that determines this multi-stage agenda: the need for consultation with the owners of the country where the yams are to be sought, the decisions about who should appropriately take part, the need to accommodate the wishes of the travelers and their relatives. These expressions of intimacy and the attendance upon the protocols required by such intimacy result in a great deal of movement and change: mobility. That mobility is wrapped up in immediacy as well, as chance encounters along the fifteen stops lead individuals to alter plans and re-evaluate decisions. In turn, these changes in plans can result in further rounds in the camp before a group coalesces and takes off in search of the yams that will be cooked and eaten around the evening campfire in the jilimi in a meal that may determine sleeping arrangements for the night. In her concluding chapter, Musharbash returns to Tamsin's fantasy house and sees in it an expression of the Warlpiri desire, not to vitiate marlpa, to abandon immediacy and intimacy, but to exert a degree of control over the circumstances of daily life. Such control is made difficult by the confrontation of traditional Warlpiri values with the exigencies of twenty-first century life in a community that incorporates significant elements of non-Warlpiri culture. Stores and houses foreground the alien elements that have become part of daily life for these people. The television itself brings the outside world into the community, and along with fantasies of being a millionaire, also reinforces the marginal status of the Warlpiri as Australian citizens. In a socio-political climate intolerant of difference, the desire for houses is a desire for sanctuary from public, policy, and political disregard for alternative practices of dwelling and thinking. Wishing for a house is to use a metaphor that Westerners can understand. Wishing for a house expresses a desire for acceptance by the large and powerful encompassing society, as represented in the first instance by the state. This is not, I believe, a wish to be what is considered normal (live within the Western sense of building-dwelling-thinking) but a desire to be considered normal. Furthermore, houses, because of their great metaphoric potency, also stand for those things that non-Indigenous Australians have and that Warlpiri people lack: good health, low mortality rates, good education, good incomes and so forth .... the desire for a house here symbolises a desire for equality (pp. 156-157). It is something of a truism that good ethnographies illuminate the differences between societies as well as the common humanity that binds them. Yuendumu Everyday delivers on both accounts. Musharbash offers a rich exposition of profound details of daily life and a respectful gloss on their meanings. She helps us to see both the Warlpiri's view of themselves and our perceptions of them. But best of all, she succeeds in bringing those two perspectives into closer alignment. Posted at 11:38 AM Sun - March 1, 2009Aurukun DaysWhen the daily headlines offer scraps of
information about the parlous state of education in Aboriginal communities,
about the threats posed by violence and poor health care, and about the
persistent problems of housing, there is a greater need for more informed news
from inside those communities. Luckily, there is a superb new book that offers
insights into the dailiness of life in a contemporary Aboriginal community that
has been in the news of late. It is a personal memoir, the story of a young
white teacher in a black community school. Better yet, it offers a compelling
look at the background of some of these important political issues without
having a political agenda itself.
Paula Shaw's Seven Seasons in Aurukun: my unforgettable time at a remote Aboriginal school (Allen & Unwin, 2009) was a runner-up for the Iremonger Award for Writing on Public Issues. Part of a growing genre of memoirs of idealistic Austrlaians who have chosen to somehow test their mettle among the most disadvantaged of their fellow citizens, this book offers a unique perspective. For Shaw's story is first and foremost her story: it is a memoir of a young woman's education and experiences. Although that story is set in Aurukun, and revolves around the joys and hazards of her life as a teacher there: it does not set out to be a commentary on the community. Seven  Seasons
begins with Shaw's arrival in Aurukun and her overwhelming sense of strangeness
and isolation there, a feeling that never quite vanished through the eight terms
she taught in the school. The story she tells is frequently set in the
classroom, at extra-curricular school functions, or on field trips that she
organizes to reward both her students and herself. But it is also set in the
homes Paula share with other teachers, at social functions, and on solitary
walks out bush.The book chronicles parts of Shaw's personal life: searching for friends, falling in love, enduring broken dreams, coping with the strangeness of shuttling back to Brisbane or Cairns during school holidays. She celebrates birthdays with her fellow teachers and suffers pangs of jealousy when her sister Natasha seems to fall effortlessly into a position at the arts centre and picks up the rhythms of the community with far greater ease than Paula can adapt to the school. She falls in love with the country, too, the swamps and rivers and beaches that offer her escape, respite, solitude, but also communion. She struggles at times with discouragement, if not hopelessness. Feeling alien and alone, she finds it hard to devise lesson plans that will make her nine-year-old students embrace literacy and numeracy. Every day seems a Sisyphean struggle to connect these fundamentals of Western education to the lives of children, where they seem almost utterly meaningless and without daily utility. Her task is not made any easier by the fact that instruction takes place in English. And Shaw's own attempts to engage in learning Wik Mungkan are equally frustrating. At times it seems almost as if the locals don't want her to learn their language, that incomprehensibility is one of the last defenses left to them against control by the whitefella regime. Of course, there are students who respond, and the reward for these students is a bittersweet one for Shaw, for these are the students who are usually selected to attend boarding schools in Cairns or Weipa. Thus her successes are measured in loss. And another measure of sharp edge of these achievements is revealed when Shaw has occasion to visit some of her former charges in their far-away dormitory schools. She discovers them (like herself in Aurukun) to be shrouded in the loneliness in an alien culture, often one of only a pair of students who speak Wik Mungkan at the boarding school. These youngsters demonstrate their ingenuity by hopping fences and hitchiking back to Aurukun, or by getting into trouble bad enough to get themselves expelled and sent home. The price of education is too high for them to pay by themselves. These stories, like almost every other incident that Shaw recounts, are told dispassionately, almost with a journalistic objectivity, despite the intensely personal voice of her memoir. She seeks neither heroes nor villains, looks for no grand social theories or solutions. She is simply telling her story and allowing us to make of it what we will. And so she records the triumphs, like the dance routines she helps her students to choreograph, costume, and present for the annual Mackenzie Night performance. The opportunity to participate in these performances brings students back into the classroom in anticipation of a moment to shine on the stage, and that brings the whole community together in celebration. Equally successful are the trips out bush. The thrill of these trips is that, rather turning out to be the expected chance for children to reconnect with country, or to learn the lore of the elders, they come off more as larking adventures, filled with the delight of children loosed from walls for a romp in the wild and a swim in the river. When she must confront the seamier side of life in Aurukun, Shaw does not flinch. There are problems with petrol sniffers: she recoils from the fumes that accompany a student into her classroom, and offers him a pencil to allow him to participate in the classroom activity. The hoons who have stolen trucks and speed through the town's eight blocks to do doughnuts outside her window in the middle of the night are no favorites of hers for keeping her awake, but she passes no judgments on them otherwise. It is only at the very end of the book, when she knows that she is leaving, that she has reached the point of exhaustion where her efforts can produce no more good, that she allows herself a bit of commentary. The stoned young man who boards a school bus, intent on stealing it, wielding a machete, convinces her that the decision to leave now was the right one. And when he explains that his girlfriend made him so mad that he had no alternative to express his rage that to embark on this sword-swinging expedition of theft, Shaw at last owns up to her exasperation that women seemed to be blamed for everything that goes wrong in this community. But throughout, she knows that she is in no position to judge; her isolation teaches her that she does not know the lives of these people well enough to understand, to approve, or to condemn. She strains for empathy with her students; she focuses her efforts on being able to reach them somehow and to offer them the meager gifts of letters and numbers that she brings with her. In one of the final, and touching, vignettes in the book, she tells how she contracted head lice. The head lice really was my own stupid fault. I'd been letting the kids see what they'd look like with long straight hair, by leaning my head right in close and draping my hair over their heads while another kid took their photo. It was good entertainment, but at a a cost. That horrible stinky flea shampoo I used to try to get rid of them made me feel particularly punished (pp. 245-246). She concludes "I'd be a pretty cantankerous kid if I was itchy all the time," just as she recognizes that the hunger these children suffer in their poverty makes it hard for them to concentrate on lessons. She knows that if she herself is tired after a night of listening to the hoons making doughnuts under her windows, her students are tired for just the same reason. Shaw never takes herself too seriously. As she prepares for her first day of class, she calms herself with thoughts of lessons and strategies like "get to know you games. We'll learn a song, we'll do some origami, some yoga: it will be fine. One day at a time." This is followed immediately on the next page by the title of Chapter 2: "Ugly face f*ckin' *rseh*le slut," a transition that is comic as well as sad. But if she doesn't take herself seriously, Paula Shaw has nonetheless written a very serious, and loving, book. Nothing takes place in these pages that is nearly as dramatic as the riots allegedly involving 300 people that ripped the town apart fifteen months ago and rang in The Australian's headlines for weeks. Indeed, disagreements in the tavern spill out into the streets and brawls erupt in both the book and the newspaper stories. But Paula Shaw's Seven Seasons in Aurukun is a full length portrait to a newspaper's caricature, a portrait worthy of its own version of an Archibald. ***
Message Stick is featuring the Aurukun community school now in a two-part documentary called Voices from the Cape. Part 1 can be seen on the Message Stick website now; Part 2 will be repeated on ABC2 Monday at 5 p.m. and again on ABC1 Friday at 6 p.m. and should be available online soon. Posted at 12:51 PM Sun - February 15, 2009Queens of Comedy"Queensland" and "comedy" aren't concepts that
usually lie side-by-side in my mind, except for the old joke that runs something
like "XXXX: how Queensland spells beer." But they will be strange bedfellows no
more now that I've had the pleasure of being introduced to the work of Vivienne
Cleven and Gayle Kennedy.
Cleven's Bitin' Back (University of Queensland Press, 2001) is a hallucinatory romp through gender confusion, maternal devotion, boxing tents, family history, and disorganized crime. (That description alone ought to be enough to make you close your laptop and head for the library to borrow a copy, don't you think?) Cleven, who was born in 1968 and raised in western Queensland, won the David Unaipon Award for best unpublished manuscript with Bitin' Back in 2000; she has since published a second novel Her Sister's Eye (UQP, 2002). Bitin' Back begins as Mavis, who tells the story, tries to rouse her son Nevil from bed one morning. ‘Jesus Christ! Get outta friggin bed will ya! … Come on, Nevie, love’ I soften my voice to a low crawly tone. ‘Mum’s got bingo. Might hit the jackpot, eh?’ Mavis, understandably, panics. And things get worse as Nevil does indeed procure a frock, and make-up. Mavis doesn't understand what's happened to her boy, and isn't sure if someone can just wake up one morning.....gay!....but her determination to get to the bottom of whatever Nevil's up to is matched only be her determination to protect her boy at all costs from exposure, ridicule, and worse. Of course, the whole town seems to conspire against her. Nevil's football team, the Blackouts, are depending on him for the championship game that's coming up shortly. Her brother Booty can't be kept in the dark without keeping him out of the house. And how can she explain this to her best friend Gwen (who herself wears a "white, sweat-stained n beetroot-splattered dress that's tight to her body like gladwrap round a sandwich")? Things get more complicated when Nev's city mate Trevor shows up, and Mavis fears the worst when she sees the fellow wearing....sandals! And keeping a secret from neighbor Missus Warby is just about impossible, especially as the old lady spends most of her day perched on a kerosene tin, leaning over the backyard fence with a pair of binoculars around her neck. Not unexpectedly, the misunderstandings come to a head when the coppers mistake the ruckus at Mavis and Nevil's home for hostage crisis, resulting in a farce of Shakespearean proportions in which tiny Missus Warby threatens to come to the rescue with a shotgun. And yet underneath all this there is a serious attempt to explore the vexations of identity, to ask what it means to be a white woman novelist, or a black male football champion. Or both. To say more would be to give away too much of a delicious plot, so I'll leave you there, on your way to the library. And while you're there, pick up another Unaipon prize winner from UQP: Gayle Kennedy's Me, Antman, and Fleabag (2008). Kennedy has given us a collection of tales, family portraits, and observations about how the races get along in modern Australia, out bush and in the cities, that is by turns riotous, laugh-out-loud funny, sombre, and touching. Much of the book's charm and vitality stem from the author's unabashed exuberant delight in language as well as in her fellow humans. The stories are all quite short, some a mere page, and therefore just the kind of yarns you might hear around the campfire, over a glass in a pub, or when bouncing down a country road. As a reader, I had the constant urge to run into the next room shouting, "Listen to this one!" As befits their oral character, these are stories that want to be told, not read. The only hitch was that I often found myself reduced to hapless giggling and guffawing that spoiled the delivery. Perhaps with practice. Many of these tales would make superb monologues for the stage and in fact Kennedy has a sideline in lectures and radio broadcasts. I can't resist sharing at least part of one of these stories, just to give the flavor of the irreverent joy they brim with. The very first tale in the collection, "How ta drink in the park," won me over instantly, and thus seems a good choice. Kennedy's storyteller alter ego is a bush girl from the NSW desert; Antman's mob are "river people." But they're both living in Sydney, and the copper's don't take to blackfullas drinking out of doors. Luckily, Antman's cuz, Damien, is a lawyer with a solution. The quest for "respectability" begins with getting Fleabag a collar (in the Koori colors) and a bath, and.... Then we got an esky and a couple of fancy bottles of wine. Damien reckons no casks or flagons. Besides, the bottles got twist tops now, so once ya finished, ya fill em up with cheap stuff for next time. We pack a nice blanket and a picnic. Nothing fancy; bread, cold meat, tomatoes, a big old lamb bone for Fleabag. We pile in Damien's car and head to Balmain. Damien lives there. Posted at 05:45 PM |
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