In 1968, the Australian anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner had some things to say about Indigenous history in this country whose relevance I think has endured:
Stanner described this silence as ‘a cult of forgetfulness’ or ‘disremembering’ that has been ‘practised on a national scale’. Rejecting the possibility that ‘inattention on such a scale [could] be explained by absentmindedness’, he claimed that it was ‘a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape’. And, as well as there being a silence, there had been a silencing: ‘the great Australian silence’, Stanner argued, ‘reigns [over] the other side of a story’, an Aboriginal history, the telling of which, he recognised, ‘would have to be a world…away from the conventional histories of the coming and development of British civilisation’. As such, he chastised historians for ‘having given the Aborigines no place in our past except that of “a melancholy footnote”‘.
Stanner was describing this elision and this excision, this deliberate turning away from not just the Indigenous past but also the Indigenous present, a year after the 1967 referendum.
That anniversary, forty years ago on the 27th of May, is beginning to be discussed, with articles such as this one appearing:
THEY entered the world in the same week – and their parents hope and dream each will have a long and happy life.
But the hard truth is that these two healthy infant boys, born two days apart in Alice Springs hospital, are already divided by the colour of their skin.While each can assume better living standards than their parents’ generation, little Lachlan Williams, on the left, can expect to live to 77 years of age. Thane Sampson, the official statistics say, will be lucky to celebrate his 60th birthday.
Despite the approach of the 40th anniversary of the referendum that began the reconciliation process, little has changed in the life expectancy of the indigenous community. But there is a renewed political momentum to tackle the problems of indigenous disadvantage.
I doubt that’s entirely true. We’ve, after all, had a decade or more of “practical reconciliation”, accompanied by alarums and cultural wars, and a new great Australian silence about the link between cultural disposession and continued disadvantage. I think that silence is now bipartisan, with the ALP having adopted the same mantras, more or less, which originated with Howard.
I sometimes wonder if the great majority of people who now enter these debates even make the slightest attempt to think themselves into the position of a culture under grave challenge and attack. In this context, although he was reviewing a book about Native Americans, I found a lot of very powerful resonances in this piece by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor:
Radical Hope is first of all an analysis of what is involved when a culture dies. This has been the fate of many aboriginal peoples in the last couple of centuries. Jonathan Lear takes as the main subject of his study the Crow tribe of the western US, who were more or less pressured to give up their hunting way of life and enter a reservation near the end of the nineteenth century.
The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone. Lear takes as his basic text a statement by the tribe’s great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”
Lear concentrates on those last four words. What can they mean? Of course, they could be an expression of dejection, of depression. But he sets that aside for good reasons. He argues that if we interpret the statement psychologically, we are being “guided by our own sense of what is true” and ignoring the question of “Plenty Coups’s humanity” and the particular cultural circumstances in which he found himself. We have to take this expression more literally.
I think it’s this phenomenon that many people just refuse to recognise, and Taylor makes it eloquently plain:
A culture’s disappearing means that a people’s situation is so changed that the actions that had crucial significance are no longer possible in that radical sense. It is not just that you may be forbidden to try them and may be severely punished for attempting to do so; but worse, you can no longer even try them. You can’t draw lines or die while trying to defend them. You find yourself in a circumstance where, as Lear puts it, “the very acts themselves have ceased to make sense.”
This is the explanation of the lapidary statement of Plenty Coups: “After this nothing happened.” Nothing of significance could happen anymore. This is a terrible reality, and it is one that we have trouble understanding, but it is a fate that we in “advanced,” more “complex” societies have been imposing for many centuries on “indigenous” or “tribal” peoples.
We find it hard to grasp the full, devastating impact of this kind of culture death because of the differentiated and loosely articulated way of life that seems normal to us. Imagine that you are a smart, imaginative, and entrepreneurial computer designer, or a champion soccer player, or a virtuoso violinist. And then imagine that the entire world of computer design and manufacture, or the World Cup, or the world of classical music concerts, is removed from our lives by a sort of surgical strike—because of terrorist hackers, computers become too dangerous; or strikes by soccer players close the sport down; or classical music ceases to receive support from both the public and governments. It would now become radically impossible to do what really matters to you. But there would still remain many things you could meaningfully do. You could still be a spouse or lover; you might still be able to earn a lot of money; you could still be active in a movement or a church or a school. And success in all these other activities could be largely unrelated to success in what you did before. You would suffer a hard blow, but you could pick up and start again.
The situation is quite different in a society like that of the Crow. There are no alternative careers waiting for an ex-warrior; he probably has a wife and children, but what does it mean to be a father if you can’t hand on the skills of a warrior? If a relatively limited range of significant actions becomes impossible, how can a person find a meaningful life?
“Culture death”, as I read Taylor, isn’t a phrase designed to imply that the culture as a whole is gone – but that the practices and meanings which gave it life have been prohibited, and it’s been deeply wounded. Central to that wounding is the denial of cultural difference – the drive to inscribe assimilation on the subjugated and confined remnants of a once autonomous culture. There is no doubt in my mind whatsoever, and it’s interesting to observe here that Taylor as a Hegelian philosopher is a scholar of the importance of “recognition”, that refusal to acknowledge cultural difference, and also cultural survival, leaves very painful wounds.
But I have no confidence whatsoever in this election year that these issues will even be debated except within some sort of paternalistic “practical” frame.
Perhaps the anniversary of the 1967 referendum might at the very least get some people to try to think themselves into the position of those who were dispossessed. That may be a “radical hope”, in Lear’s terms, but anyway, it’s one that I think should be the absolute baseline of any real accounting of what’s transpired over the past couple of centuries, and what happens from here. Recognition of your interlocutor in their own uniqueness and difference is, after all, a precondition without which there can be no meaningful reconciliation whatsoever.
Is it too much to ask anyone who professes concern about the condition of Indigenous Australians to try to see what the world might look like from their point of view?
Unfortunately, in many cases, yes.
I suspect at least part of the problem is the idea that comes up in a lot of ‘minority issues’ discussion, where the voices of those actually affected are dismissed as ‘unobjective’. Which isn’t necessarily a fault in the concept of objectivity (that’s a whole other discussion again, which I don’t really want to get into), but is certainly a common fault in its implementation. It’s frustrating to have people express concern and treat what you’re going through as some kind of abstract intellectual exercise whilst patting you on the head and telling you you’re too invested in the issue to be objective. Of course, this pattern also tends to obscure the investment most of those dismissers have in retaining the narrative they have, obscuring the fact that often their detachment isn’t particularly objective either.
I put myself in the place of rioters in various places and feel good for a little while. Sort of a ‘Franz Fanon’ mind-trick. Burn-baby-burn.
Any class anytime can be revolutionary.
From a privileged white-dude perspective I ague for a law against holocaust denial here like they have in Europe. The sooner virulent racist Nazis like Keith Windshuttle are behind bars for a few years the better.
The ALP have really dropped the ball badly here and bought into wicked King Johns malign indifference. The long term answer to that is to leave them for more Greener, Libertarian socialist pastures. We all know this fish is rotting from the head down – give Mark L some credit. The ALP is rooted.
And there’s a reason why, of course: for many white Australians, such an assessment punctures their own little piece of mythical history – the plucky pioneers who struggled with this wide brown land to build the best little country on Earth. The idea that in the process they screwed over the culture that was already here doesn’t fit into that neat little story. And neither major party is prepared to risk the wrath of this collection of voters at the moment.
That said, let’s say some more enlightened future government acknowledges “yes, we screwed your people over. Sorry about that.” where does that leave us, then?
Whilst in Tassie recently I bought a book on local indigenous history [a gift for a friend]which strongly refuted the concept that the whites had wiped out the local Tasmanians.
It stated that such a claim denied the existence of the descendants of such and was just another way of ignoring the past and silencing the present.
There was much more in the book than that, but that discussion alone was enlightening for me.
When stone age meets modernity stone age will lose out every time. This is a fact of life and these cultures need to get over it. I.m not saying it couldn’t have been done better or they don’t need help but the cultural wallowing that is encouraged these days does nobody any good – least of all the next generation of the affected culture.
Taylors analogy with computer geeks or violinists is absurd. I am a computer programmer and if the whole thing disappeared the last thing I would do is to teach my children to wallow in misery of a lost world. I would encourage them to get on with life. Why should an ex warrior be any different? Sure it will be really hard on the warrior but why should it be so hard on his children? They come into the world without any cultural baggage at all and could do fine – except they aren’t allowed to. No – they must be the next representatives of a now dead way of life.
And Mark – who gives a shit if the cultural practices of say FGM, child sacrifice etc. being banned cause deep distress to these cultures? Do you really believe that if things had been different the Crow would still be wearing loin cloths and hunting on horseback?
Yes, lest we remember….
Or forget:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200705/s1915096.htm
Which cultural wallowing would that be? And what are you doing to assist those people you say need help?
On the issue of Aboriginal affairs, Labor has it all over the population.
And if vitriol was ever a political tool, Labor is a quantifiable expert. What we indoubatbly see today, is an unprecedented model of socio-political blackmail and hijacking perpetrated by Labor et al.
This is evidenced in the appauling statistics surrounding the indegenous populations in every state. Reports everywhere (national/international) spell out that the statisctics and the conditions are the worst ever, and comparable with any other forth-world living statndards.
In the NT, the Labor gang came into power proclaiming the solution to all aboriginal problems. Instead, the imprisonment rate skyrocketed, and health hit an all time low.
I would argue that Labor is so low, so incredibly corrupt, that it will blithely, aggregiously risk the life and welfare of its voting capital, in order to manipulate society into voting for Labor.
The objective is for Labor to take the Commonwealth at the coming elections. Shame on Labor, SHAME.
Gee, thanks, Gadget, for revealing the nature of Labor’s evil plot. We never would have guessed.
Those of us who have been in a position in mainstream advocacy organisation to “do something about it” have all too often failed (I’m not excluding myself here) because it’s bloody hard to work out what is the right way forward. We’ve wavered between strongly supporting self-determination and wanting to advocate and and have too often ended up on the sidelines making positive murmurs.
Where were our voices when ATSIC was being established, in crisis, or dismantled? I know I’ve never felt I had much authority or legitimacy to independently argue for particular responses to Indigenous poverty (other than to say “spend more money”) or land. But I also have a nagging knowledge that I too have been part of a culture of convenient forgetfulness.
We’ve place an awful weight of responsibility on the shoulders on Indigenous Australians to come up with their own solutions. And in saying that, I don’t demur from self-determination in any way.
zoot asked (with a very accusatory tone):
And what are you doing to assist those people you say need help?
You’ve been doing such a fine job zoot that I have left it entirely in your hands.
These cultures can’t survive, except as tourism, in the modern world. I say this as someone with a proudly indigenous parter who does the ‘whitefella’ job thing every day. It’s not fair. It’s not right. The Romans did it to Britain’s Celts. The Anglo-Saxons did it to Britains’ Romano-Celts. The Normans did it to all of them. Result: we all speak English where one in three of our words is derived from Latin, while only 7 words in modern English – apart from Celtic imports like ’shenanigans’ – are derived from Irish Gaelic. Among them are ‘den’ and ‘dale’, both Celtic in origin.
The way of the world. Not fair. Not right. But what happens. The SNP clobbers Labour in the Holyrood elections. More people speak Welsh now than ever did last century. Shakira writes pop anthems that combine Colombian, Arabic, Spanish and Hip-Hop styles. But she makes her living in the USA.
But we can’t go back. To do so is to pretend that we can somehow magically preserve lost cultures and languages in ways we have never been able to do in the past.
We are ourselves. Alone.
I for one would not care i the soccer world cup failed to exist. It is such a boring circus.
I don’t see where you’re coming from with this post, Mark, to be honest.
For 30 years there has been a bi-partisan commitment to land rights and self-determination. Yet things went horribly wrong somehow and we’ve seen all the indicators of morbidity going backwards during that time. The remote communities in Central Australia and elsewhere did not revert to a pre-European ‘idyll’ of hunter-gathering, as envisaged by Nugget Coombs. Thanks to sit-down money, they didn’t have to. The outlying communities around Alice come into town for food and grog or get it in Hermannsberg. There’s a bit of gathering, mainly among the women, for stuff like goannas, but that’s about it. The rest survive on welfare and royalties from licence fees for SUV access across Aboriginal lands. They gamble a lot of it away in Lasseter’s casino or in front of the old mission house on Todd Mall.
And drinking of course is a whole other issue. Interestingly the most effective inroads are being made where the communities and camps themselves are going ‘dry’ and are taking the responsibility upon themselves.
Traditional Aboriginal culture became non-viable the moment the Europeans established a permanent presence here. In the Centre the Arrunte were losing their traditions after only a generation of contact with the Europeans. Anthropologists like Strehlow recorded their lore and their songs so we at least have a record of them but these are not living traditions any more. It’s sad and uncomfortable but it is true.
Yes, their dispossession was real but it was also permanent. There is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Feeling bad about it isn’t going to do anybody any good.
It depends how you define “culture”. Your average modern anthropologist would describe culture as a continuum. Something that can’t be “extinguished.” THere’s much more to culture than language or where you live.
You are wrong about the Welsh bit. I’ll concede that more people speak it in the open now. I’m the first generation in my family to have English as a first language. My parents were beaten at school for speaking Welsh and forced to speak English. My Nain (grandmother) never stopped thinking in Welsh, despite speaking English. Speaking English doesn’t make you English.
A good summary of the disaster of the Coombs experiment can be found here:
Anybody who still supports this policy in any form what-so-ever (including the bureaucracy) should be ashamed of themselves.
Ahh yes, the ‘Welsh Knot = not’. More here. For those with no Welsh (or Latin), it involved Welsh speakers being forced to wear an identifying mark (a ‘knot’, or board around the neck) identifying them as Welsh speakers. They were flogged for their pains. Welsh is a wonderfully productive language for dyslexics (I am one) because the relationship between sound and speech is so pure (in a linguistic sense).
But cultural preservation swings awfully close to the boys in the Shire who didn’t like their lifesavers being dissed. In this, there is no difference between black, or white, or brindle, and hearts have been falling down to the ground for generations. And the broken have made their enemies (as perceived) bleed, too, whenever given the chance. Listen to System of a Down about the Armenians. Or The Hand that Signed the Paper for the Ukrainians. And so on. It doesn’t get any better, or righter, except to say that the project of preserving cultures is like trapping the mosquito in amber.
Beautiful, but frozen.
As Peter quite succinctly stated above, maybe I, as an Aboriginal person, should just ‘get over it’!
And why not? He’s comments aren’t that much different to how the majority of our Australian society thinks. Believe me, I know! I’m confronted with it on a daily basis, just because of the colour of my skin and the shape of my nose.
And because these Peters of the world are far more intelligent and smarter than me and the rest of my Aboriginal elders, cousins, brothers and sisters, as well as being far more worldly and knowledgable about other ancient civilisations that have been extinguished over the past few centuries, well, maybe I should do what is stereotypically expected of me, and tuck my tail between my legs and go walkabout, and like he says, just ‘get over it!’.
But that’s okay. As the article above says, in 1967 a referendum was held which gave Aboriginal people the right to vote. Of course, if you remember back before then, we weren’t really considered to be even human. We were known as the ‘Noble Savages’ of this continent, and previous Governments, state and federal, had a tendency to class us under the ‘Natural Flora and Fauna Acts’.
Again, maybe I shouldn’t be so emotive of past policies and decisions made on behalf of my descendence. I mean, back then, Indigenous people made up less than 2% of the national Australian population. And today the Indigenous peoples only make up approximately 3% of the total Australian population. So in an election year, it really means absolutely nothing. Maybe we should put this in the ‘too hard’ basket, and we can all just ‘get over it!’.
Oh well, 40 years on, and I wonder what has really changed.
As a proud 46 year old Aboriginal man, who statistically should live to the ripe old age of 55 – 60 (fingers crossed), I still have faith and work towards the fact that Aboriginal Australia will somehow preserve its ancient traditions and culture, and will in time embrace and participate in mainstream Australia.
As to comments like ‘Get over it’ etc. Well, I’ll just leave that to the more privileged and more intellectual elements of our society, and in the brief time I have available to me, continue to try and make a difference towards reconciliation.
In English. This history is by no means unique to Aborigines, something that shocked and surprised my partner when we lived in Scotland and Wales.
Read the post, please, Rob, I’m not asking people to “feel bad”. That’s a ridiculous frame for the tedious culture wars debates – as if it is all about how “we” feel. Stuff that. Just another way of denying Indigenous people any agency and making it all about “us”.
I’m asking people to put themselves in the position of the dispossessed – a task seemingly beyond most, as I suspected. I’d hoped that some degree of empathy and imagination might lead us away from the stereotypical (and largely paternalistic) terms in which these debates are conducted. As Angharad comments – it’s not about us whitefellas working out “how to go forward”. And I don’t believe that self-determination ever got a go – it was far more a process of co-optation and incorporation into a whitefella bureaucratic logic.
Angharad’s precisely right – and the mindset that sees things in this frame is also the same one that has led to ineffectual native title law which makes the same fundamentally paternalist and anthropologising assumption that there is no culture if it’s not what was “recorded” by the anthropologists or missionaries. The voice of actually existing Indigenous culture is totally silenced.
In answer to Robert’s very good question:
I’d suggest that it takes more than the apology called for for so long, and secondly, I think the whole point Lear is making in the book which Taylor reviews (I’m going to order it and look forward to reading it) is that “radical hope” is precisely the opening up of unforeseen possibilities. I think it’s pretty clear that neither the traditional Labor approach nor the new “practical reconciliation” approach have entailed either much change or anything other than lip service to the fundaments of the issue.
Sadly, I think Michael is right on this:
On the Welsh issue, there’s a fascinating article in the New Statesman I’ve just been reading in the print version by Niall Griffiths:
http://newstatesman.com/200704230027
I think he gets to the heart of many of the issues we’ve been discussing.
Incidentally, I hadn’t heard of the Welsh knot before I’d read this piece (a bit of synchronicity in the air today) and I was interested to learn that the numbers who speak Welsh have gone from 1 in 30 at the start of the 20th century to 1 in 5 in the 21st.
If there is an argument for a global lingua franca, it should be Welsh (‘Cymraeg’, pronounced ‘kimraig’). A wonderfully expressive yet simple language which can be – at a fundamental level – learnt in 3 months and mastered in 12. It obviates dyslexia (the only world language that does do) and is structured logically, rhythmically and even beautifully. It has a wonderfully expressively literature (Angharad will know more on this) and a predictable structure. It is easy to speak yet requires native speakers to open their mouths, so is very good for deaf people as it facilitates lip-reading.
How’s that, SL?
By the way, one of the points I was trying to bring out in the post (and perhaps should have made more explicit) is that this tale is indeed characteristic of cultures all over the world – hence the parallels that occurred to me about the story (and subsequent non-story) of the Crow and the Australian Indigenous peoples – something Taylor observes. But, also, it’s very clearly part of the dynamic of colonisation more generally, though perhaps at its extreme with regard to Indigenous populations.
Michael, there is no earthly reason to doubt that it can and should be so.
Yet the rhetoric of the past 30 years as been towards separatism and self-determination. Assimilation has been decried as a kind of second-order genocide (check out some of the displays at the National Museum for this). Ken Parish wrote some months back at Troppo that (if I remember correctly) there probably never was a workable alternative to assimilation. It doesn’t entail Aboriginals abandoning their culture; but the Coombs vision had them abandoning modernity in pursuit of an unrecoverable past, and that’s what went so horribly wrong, at least for the remote communities.
Really? What else could “assimilation” possibly be about?
No doubt you’ll say that Indigenous people can get ejumacated, wear ties and get jobs in the Commonwealth bureaucracy and keep their customs in some sort of private sphere. Well, that’s been the drive for 40 years now. What have the results been? When a culture is built around connections to specific country, how can “assimilation” do other than erase it?
And rightly so. Because it is.
Welsh is the only language where a single ’sound’ in the written language equals a single ’sound’ in the spoken language. It is therefore ‘phonetically consistent’. Dyslexics (of which I am one) cannot learn differential patterns in language through pattern recognition, only through memory.
I have a fabulous memory so have gotten my head around Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Italian and German. I make spelling errors in all of them, however. My Welsh used to be fluent but alas is no longer (something I plan to remedy in the UK later this year). Most dyslexics cannot do this, however, and so need Welsh (or Italian, despite the confusing vowel structure) in order to be able to exercise true control over expression.
Dyslexics without outstanding memories are stuck with Welsh or Italian, and Welsh is clearly better in that its grammatic structure is more logical (long years of Roman occupation have linked it to Latin, and Latin grammar, which moves away from spelling to clear diction). Rhythm and suffixes are far more effective in Welsh than an English grammar that depends on an intuitive understanding of syntax. Note the difference between ‘man bites dog’ and ‘dog bites man’ in English. Both Welsh and Latin have a wonderfully efficient solution to this conundrum.
It’s worth recalling that assimilation was the position that progressive people took a couple of generations ago in preference to the old, repulsive stereotype that held Aboriginals were savages who could be tamed but not civilised. Assimilation implied that they were entitled as of right to an equal place at the Australian table. Why it has become a dishonourable epithet is a mystery to me. Maybe we should call it ‘integration’, or ‘acculturation’.
Traditional Aboriginal culture, if preserved in the manner touted by many political progressives, will become a vehicle for tourism, but nothing more. There is a difference between language and culture, and preserving culture may not be feasible, while preserving language only takes effort. Too many things about traditional Aboriginal culture (the ‘magical thingking’ I discussed on the religion thread) stand in the way of it being worthwhile in an empirical sense.
But the languages are a different matter. Surely there is a language besides Welsh that frees many disabled people from perpetual muteness. Maybe one of the Aboriginal languages holds the key. There are many hundreds of them, and research on this point is a matter or urgency.
Art was once held out as a vehicle for cultural restitution and it has worked to an extent. But Papunya was going down the tubes when I left Alice early this year, and not everyone can be an artist.
Accepting Angharad’s p.o.v. that culture is a continuum then this 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum means little other than a date and an affirmation, much as the Harbour Bridge reconciliation march of 2003? or the demise of ATSIC. It will go on during all our lives causing much angst, but there are gains.
For example the official military historians now accept that the colonies and territories were by definition in a state of guerilla warfare during much of the 19th century. It ought to be possible to formalise this conflict in retrospect and, post Howard, make some decent gesture of compensation.
By way of a modern illustration I saw the proclamation of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area as being interpreted as a plus by indigenous groups.
Public information sessions for non-indigenes were sparsely attended but large numbers showed up for various non-metropolitan meetings aimed specifically at indigenous groups. To my mind this is an example of the cultural continuum that settler Australians will largely be unaware of.
These folk were staking a claim, albeit symbolically, to a largely untouched past that even we european descendents recognise as worth preserving.
This post has been playing on my mind all day, and I don’t know what to say about most of the arguments put forward here.
However, in response to Mark’s stated goal:
I’d say that the work of Jane “Blue Eyes Brown Eyes” Elliott gives us an example of one technique that may be effective.
Irritatingly and unjustly, any project that asks non-indigenous Australian people to empathise with indigenous peoples for the cultural destruction they have endured has to take into account the defensive reaction that Peter has so splendidly displayed for us.
Sorry, SL, but what does “in an empirical sense” mean?
And again, I don’t see that it’s up to whitefellas to decide whether or not Indigenous culture is “worth preserving”.
What constitutes an “equal place”? On whose terms? How does the language of equality work to deny cultural difference and cultural priority? Who after all is setting the table?
Just because something was thought to be progressive forty years ago doesn’t mean it should constrain our ideas now. The “White Australia Policy”, as people like Mr Windschuttle are determined to remind us (and it’s very worthwile to remember), was also “thought to be progressive”.
What we need is to rethink, relearn and most importantly learn to accord recognition and to listen.
Excellent link to the New Statesman article Mark, thanks.
SL – I can’t claim my parents as ever having worn a not, both of them being born in the 20th Century and all.
I worked in ATSIC at the time of its creation in 1989. It was an Aboriginal guy I met there who pointed out to me the similarity of Welsh & Aboriginal histories.
No probs, Angharad, it appears to have prompted quite a bit of reaction judging by a search on the NS website. NS tends to come out here a few weeks late and I prefer the paper version to their website, so I’m yet to read what’s been written in response.
“What we need is to rethink, relearn and most importantly learn to accord recognition and to listen.”
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We should listen to the Aboriginals who are telling us that alcohol are destroying their communities. We should listen to Noel Pearson (not popular here for reasons I can’t fathom) about the corrosive condition of welfare dependency. We need these new, fresh voices. We should rethink the 30 years of self-determination that have achieved nothing beyond non-sustainable Hobbesian dysfunctional enclaves, and recognise that the remote communities are trapped in a downward spiral of violence and abuse as a consequence of well-meaning but ill thought-out prescriptions from the past.
Completely agree.
Some people better off, no-one worse off. The consequentialist test. Many indigenous cultures are brutally sexist, and so (to this economist and utilitarian) should be modified on those grounds alone. Apart from that, many of their adherents believe in nostrums that are destined to shorten their lives, not lengthen them.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t another Welsh in there somewhere.
Part of that rethinking should include a questioning as to whether there ever was self-determination, except as a slogan and a set of bureaucratic protocols. ATSIC was dysfunctional in part because it was just an incorporation of Indigenous people into our bureaucratic structures, with real power always residing elsewhere. It’s interesting to note that the UN conventions on self-determination, as an Indigenous colleague of mine recently pointed out, derive from the rights accorded to nation states – in the Wilsonian post Great War dispensation. It’s a fundamentally liberal logic, and always (in terms of jurisprudence as well as politics and policy) requires people to efface their difference to participate as part of a putatively democratic system which only recognises them as individuals and not communally.
As to Pearson, my colleague and other Indigenous people with whom I’ve worked are highly critical of him but their voices are apparently not heard in the public debate.
It’s worthwhile pointing out that the majority of Indigenous Australians – indeed, a large majority – do not live in remote communities. Pearson’s Blairite prescription of moralistic communitarianism with big sticks is something opposed by many even from his own people, but again, that’s not something we read about.
In any case, I wanted to avoid these sort of stereotypes – for the reasons I’ve articulated in the post, because they tend to lead nowhere, unless they lead to yet another whitefella left/right stoush which reduces the objects of the discussion to just that, and dance around the fundamental question which is the degree to which we are able to even consider how we’d look at the whitefella world if we were in the position in which Indigenous peoples find themselves.
I note Rob has shown no signs of addressing that question.
SL, thanks for clarifying, but I’d question the universality of such logics.
I’m intrigued by your vision for a post-Patriarchal world. Which culture is next on your chopping block, on the basis of it including embedded sexism?
“It’s worthwhile pointing out that the majority of Indigenous Australians – indeed, a large majority – do not live in remote communities.”
Yes, that’s true, and I don’t believe the same conditions pertain for that majority (nor does self-determination).
“I note Rob has shown no signs of addressing that question.”
Also true. I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at. I mean, from what perspective? That of the Australians who experienced the first contact, or a camp-dweller in the Todd River, or what?
Mu universality is not driven by natural law and natural rights, Mark, but by simple consequentialism (read utilitarianism). Cultures and values are not worth preserving because they are pretty, or make people feel good about themselves, but because they materially improve some peoples lives without making anyone else worse off. To engage in preservationism without the consequentialist test is to engage in Rousseauian primitivism.
My rights based arguments are strictly consequentialist: Davis Hicks is worth treating appropriately not because of any potential loss to US prestige, but because treating him appropriately is likely to result in a net gain for all. (Memo to W on that score).
Both Aboriginal and Celtic cultures contain much that is beautiful. Both, however, give an unhealthy place to the resolution of conflicts by violence (as my partner commented, a good Wandandian man with W’s powers would have simply nuked Mecca). Aboriginal culture – even allowing for its varied permutations – is very hard on women.
What matters is what works. Otherwise our decendents will rightly point out that, despite all our knowledge, we allowed yet another civilisation to die.
Use your imagination, Rob! That’s the whole point.
That’s a very materialist argument, SL. Possibly why I don’t find it an attractive rule of thumb.
However, I think there’s a false dichotomy there. Two in fact.
The first is that there’s an excluded middle term – Indigenous culture has in fact changed and continues to change, and that’s both recognised and celebrated by many Indigenous people. Whether or not there are aspects about which one could be critical – for instance the place of women, it’s nonetheless the case that those Indigenous women who are arguing their own case are themselves drawing on their own cultural resources. Just as I wouldn’t want to see our own culture judged by the yardstick of its worst aspects (of which there are a lot – and this is, let’s not forget, the “white armband” argument) so too I don’t see it as particularly just or valid to stigmatise Indigenous culture generally.
Secondly, who enforces this principle? It appears to ignore the wishes and indeed the value judgements of the cultures which are not thought (by whom?) to reach those yardsticks. Again, it seems to me that the application of these principles has the effect, unintended or otherwise, of adopting and assuming a position whereby we become the judges and Indigenous people’s voice is muffled or silenced.
And precisely the same points could have been made about English culture in, say, the seventeenth century. There’s a danger in the essentialising of cultural formations which are ongoing and evoving, and it seems to me to be significant that most of the forms of judgement in fashion in our culture end up giving us the tick and others are consigned to the scrap heap of history. It is a liberal doctrine in that sense, in any case. Very far from a conservative doctrine. But I’m much more interested in what would change were we to actually acknowledge that a different set of values to our own prevails among Indigenous people.
I can’t imagine myself into the mind-world of a Todd River camp-dweller. If you’d seen them, I doubt you could either.
I realise that’s a limited and singular paradigm, but it’s the one uppermost in my mind from my own recent experience and observation.
Well, I won’t get into some of my partner’s more radical prescriptions for ’saving’ his people
– they’re pretty fierce. Yes, there are a different set of values, but for most indigenous people, there’s also a significant admixture of European and Islander values (where some of my family come from – and they’re even more inclined to fire and brimstone, as well as being bigger Biblical literalists than FaceLift).
Many of the women among my partner’s people are explicit about calling on ‘gubba’ views of women in admixture with their own. It’s one of the reasons why my father-in-law didn’t drink for the last 10 years of his life. The gubba poison made him hit his missus, but the gubba way also made her strong enough to go to the coppers and tell on him for what he did.
So he booted the booze, and she stopped yakkaing back. That was the deal.
I can’t. I’m sorry, Mark, I simply can’t. Aboriginal traditional culture is simply too foreign, too complex, too different from the paradigms and structures of Western culture. I don’t mean that in a perjorative sense, of course. But there are just no points of connection that I can see.
In any event, whose position am I supposed to think myself into? There is, as far as I can see, as great a diversity of life experiences in the Aboriginal community as in the non-indigenous community. Some live life on their own terms in the bush; some achieve great success in urban professions or sport; some become bureaucrats or politicians or academics; some live miserable and dysfunctional lives. Just as much diversity of experiences as for the rest of us, surely?
The survival or death of Aboriginal traditional culture is firmly in their hands (just as with indigenous people everywhere). All governments can do is concentrate on the boring, but very necessary, utilitarian issues of health, education, law and order, and so on. That’s why it has become, as you pointed out, effectively a bipartisan policy: there’s just no other alternative.
Peter wrote:
Nice.
Here’s a clue for free: the aboriginal community isn’t a big amorphous blob. It’s easy to see it that way if you don’t come into contact with aboriginals all that often though.
There are plenty of successful aboriginals who’ve managed to steer a course between the demands of their traditional communities and the demands of the modern one. It ought to be recognized far more often than it is. Sure, they’ve got problems (including some real issues with corruption in the last vestiges of self determination that exist), but the situation should never be regarded as hopeless. Nobody writes the caucasians off when they see a bikie gang, with all the problems they have with violence and crime.
Sadly I don’t have a glib answer like Peter as to how we should approach the problem, but I suspect the answers are with the communities themselves rather than dirtbags like Tony Abbott calling for a new paternalism.
Like Rob, I can’t figure what this post is about. It strikes me as nebulous nonsense that will not help a single Aboriginal or promote “reconciliation’.
It is also ludicrous to talk about empathy for the dispossesed indigenous person as if dispossession happened yesterday rather than two centuries ago.
As to culture, it is what people do.
It is the Aboriginal guy I saw in Victoria Street Richmond tonight, pissed as a parrot, surrounded by an air of menace and yelling stuff about “Gooks”.
It is the Aboriginal who sat a few seats away from me on the tram the other day. The one who kept telling his 8-10 year old daughter that he wants to kill someone, just anyone. No “edumajation” for her- he’d taken her out of school for the week.
It is the unkempt collection of ne’er-do-wells who collect in Smith Street, Collingwood most afternoons with flagons of cheap plonk and annoy the passers by.
It is the Aboriginal men in the settlements in Western Australia who collect sit-down money rather than get a job in mines.
The old culture died generations ago. Many so-called indigenous Australians have bred with white lumpenproles and to apply the term “indigenous” to them is a nonsense. To call the likes of Geoff Clarke and Michael Mansell indigenous is a bleeding joke.
My partner and many other Vietnamese experienced hunger, death of family and terrible hardship in Vietnam. Yet they came here and have “assimilated” and they do not expect anyone to put on a black armband and weep for them. No-one in that community says, oh I’m poor because I am Asian and white Australians are racist.
The only help you can give the suffering is practical help. Part of that means and end to the nonsese about preserving a culture that is hopelessly dysfunctional and downright brutal towards its children and women in particular.
All else is froth’n'bubble.
When people talk of the social disfunctions of Aboriginal society without acknowldedging the variety of lived experience in the midst of such social probs and how culture can work around and through such disadvantage, then empathy becomes difficult. There is danger in denying the elasticity of Aboriginal communities which are consistently able to create life, love and laughter in the midst of such disfunction. Funny, just like white culture can. Such a refusal to enter into the rich complexity of Aboriginal culture still functioning through its problems, as opposed to sinking under its weight, simply works as a reinvestment of the culture of denialism to which Stanner alluded all those years ago.
Disfunctions which get racialised and presented as evidence that Aboriginal society doesnt work or is “brutally sexist” or “hard on women”, and on and on create a simplistic vision of Aboriginal cultures as dis-eased. Well, this works beautifully for the “survival of the fittest” brigade. However, it would be helpful to remember that this also serves a political purpose and the truth is that white men bash white women and that white men and white women drink to excess (binge drinking is a particular prob for white australian culture)and that white womeon abandon their kids too, and teenage mums who are white abound, …but that these issues are not racialised, therefore are not ‘white’ problems but social problems.
Would I prove my point further if I mentioned, the white community is in an pathological state because of these social probs and I should know because I have white relatives who hit women? Certainly not. Such pronouncements render a vision of Aboriginal cultures as hopelessly interrupted and ignore the mutable, dynamic resilience of black culture in Australia. Gillian Cowlishaw’s work in Bourke is an extemely helpful remedy to these two dimensional visions of race and racialising of the social. She suggests these ideas which pop up regularly in the media often ignore the “wisdom, wickedness and wit” of Aboriginal people.
Charming, melaleuca.
I judge all Anglo people on the basis of how homeless drunks behave in city streets.
It did. It’s a process, not a once and for all event.
I wonder how closely you’re really looking at the homeless, melaleuca. Nobody’s bought wine in flagons in Australia for a decade or more.
I don’t, Mark.
I realised after I hit the post button that I should’ve put in something like:
“it (Aboriginal culture) is also the people who worked along side me in the APS and who appeared to live happy, functional lives.”
You are not helping Aboriginal people at all if you tell them they have a culture that is incommensurable with the one that 180 odd nationalities from all parts of the globe participate in here in Australia.
A part-Aboriginal person living in Melbourne who speaks no language other than English and whose knowledge of his/her indigenous ancestor’s culture could fit on one page is not in any real sense dispossessed.
They do in Rocky, Devil Drink! Mind you, there’s a lot of bimber sold in this town, even in legit. bottle shops. Bimber being privately distilled spirits that the locals sell because Qld is on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve when it comes to taxes on booze (and general availability).
Really? What brands, and what volumes, do you know offhand? I thought they’d all been phased out in favour of 2L/4L casks because of the high cost of breakages.
With all due respect to The Devil Drink (and he’s been a fine companion on and off for a few decades), I wouldn’t want this debate to get sidetracked into a discussion of alcoholism. Let me just point out though, that there’s data to suggest that Indigenous people in cities and towns (where 67% of them reside) have a higher rate of total abstinence from drink than the non-Indigenous population, and that Indigenous drinkers drink less often (though more when they do).
http://www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/html/html_health/specific_aspects/other_aspects/substance_use/alcohol_use2.htm
I don’t think that Mark is arguing for the preservation or restoration of pre-invasion Aboriginal culture.
While I have some sympathy with scepticlawyer’s warning that non-indigenous culture should not be idealised, and that it does indeed have negative and even toxic aspects, those problems will not be solved by white people.
I’m sure that if I were Aboriginal, I would resent such criticism if made by a white person I did not know or trust – no matter how true.
I think that gaining that trust would be impossible without a willingness to make the sort of acknowlegement that Mark talks about in the original article.
It’s clear that the only way forward for Aboriginal culture is to learn to cope with and embrace the modern world. However, I have no doubt that the many Aboriginal people without access to modern facilities would ask me just how I think they should do that.
I believe that there are Aboriginal leaders who are working hard to stop the toxic behaviour they see around them. At a rally I went to last year, I heard this man give a speech in which he mentioned giving up alcohol (2.55) and heroin (5.30).
Both times the crowd applauded him warmly. It seemed clear to me that the crowd understood and acknowledged that to do these things is both hard, and vitally necessary.
What this demonstrated to me is that there are Aboriginal people committed to getting rid of the toxic elements that dog their culture. I think that the best thing that non-Aboriginal people of goodwill can do is to stand ready to help when asked – and to ask what we can do.
Unless we see something so bad that we genuinely cannot remain silent, perhaps while we help, it’s a good idea to let Aboriginal people take the lead and to keep our own counsel, at least at first. This is not the same as falsely assuming that because Aboriginal people are oppressed, they are above criticism, it is about building trust and rapport and understanding the most effective time and place to speak.
You can hear the speech here: http://tinyurl.com/2r5jv8
Be warned that the speech talks about the brutal nature of his conception, which some people may find distressing.
Unless structural racism that hangs over from disposession makes it very hard for him or her to get a job, a taxi, or a fair shake from the cops.
Thanks, David, no I’m not, as I’ve emphasised in a number of comments. That seems, as I said, to be one of the dichotomies that structure these debates, and it’s one – as with the operation of native title law – that itself works to the detriment of the rights and recognition of Indigenous people.
We’ve seen that a number of times on this thread – with Rob, for instance, suggesting assimilation to be the only alternative to some sort of impossible return to the days before dispossession. It’s a pernicious dichotomy, because it only works to further entrench the lack of recognition of Indigenous culture as dynamic and alive, and accords a hearing only to those who’ll advocate measures which are based on notions (for instance about “mutual obligation”) which are themselves assimilated from aspects of non-Indigenous culture.
And generally the sentiments you express in your comment accord well with what I learned from working with Murri people in the Queensland land rights struggles of the late 80s and early 90s.
Good post Mark
Keeping Indigneous cultures genuinely alive as part of modern Australia is hellishly hard, but we could least try to help – starting with trying to see the perspective of an Indigenous Australian, and maybe even giving more of them a chance to have their views heard.
As Mark’s original post makes clear, keeping cultures alive is not some feelgood thing, it is pivotal to many people’s sense of self. Our national disremembering is truly staggering – perhaps it helps us to get by without own sense of self – but surely it must be less than uplifting for many Indigenous people having to live in amongst this total lack of awareness/interest of the reality of the recent past and how it has shaped the here and now.
It may well be unavoidable that much has been or will be lost, but I don’t think we should just accept this as a modern version of the ‘dying race’ belief of not that long ago.
I was interested to read SL’s mention of the role/power/value of language.
I heard a good speech recently which mentioned the impact of losing language. I was intellectually aware that many Australian languages were disappearing, but for some reason I had never thought what it must be like to be the last native speaker of a language, and how their immediate descendants might feel. I guess they should just get over it.
(I did a short post about it here)
Of course, on one level they have no option but to get over it, but the lack of acknowledgement, interest, awareness, care, concern, empathy etc hardly helps that task.
Indeed, Andrew, and perhaps empathy or even the disposition to be empathetic is a precondition for understanding.
Andrew Bartlet – I don’t think you really appreciate just how much you are part of the problem rather than the solution. You said:
As Mark’s original post makes clear, keeping cultures alive is not some feelgood thing, it is pivotal to many people’s sense of self
This is precisely a ‘feelgood’ thing. Encouraging people to have a sense of self by what culture they belong to rather than, say, what they do, is doing these people – wherever they are – no favors at all. You may call that empathy – I call it a fraud. You even admit at the end that they really do have no choice – but me pointing that out somehow makes me unaware, have a lack of interest, or even acknowledge their plight. Or that I don’t ‘care’. Well FU. You and your mates are doing such a good job empathising, caring, concerning, awaring and being ‘interested’ that a subsection of this culture now live in some of the worst conditions on earth. With their children having no prospects at all. Nice.
Nice, indeed.
It’s a fascinating lesson in politics to see how even the mildest discussion of the problems Aboriginal face will usually inspire this sort of reaction. Blaming people like Senator Bartlett for the plight of Aboriginal people, rather than examining exactly how Aboriginal people have been treated over the last two centuries, is not an argument, but an avoidance tactic.
This avoidance is probably subconscious and automatic rather than deliberately malignant in many cases, but it is a huge barrier to gaining support for assistance to Aboriginal people.
I’d say this is one of the few areas where white activists do need to take the lead, because it’s a question of dealing with our own society.
One tactic I use now and again is to make clear the difference between guilt and responsibility. I don’t feel guilty for disposession, oppression or racism – I can’t help the fact that I was born here, and my ancestors came to Australia so early that I can’t get a European passport. I’ve got no-where else to go. That’s not my fault.
But I do feel a sense of responsibility. I have directly benefited from the destruction of Aboriginal culture and society – simply by the fact that I live in a house that is on land that Aboriginal people once used to live their life.
And if arguments about fairness and responsibility don’t move you, perhaps you’re the sort of person to whom a national security argument might be meaningful. Is it wise for a small country in a region where there are many large countries, who may at some stage be our rivals or enemies, to let Aborigines think that they might be able to get a better deal under some regime other than ours?
Whether they would or not get such a better deal is irrelevant – what is relevant is that they might think they can. Wise conquerers don’t let loose threads like that go hanging.
Jesus David, so now me pointing out that the sort of ‘help’ these once proud people have been getting is:
probably subconscious and automatic rather than deliberately malignant in many cases, but it is a huge barrier to gaining support for assistance to Aboriginal people.
I said right in my first post that it was done badly and they could do with some help. However, some (a lot of) people really should look in the mirror and ask themselves if what they are doing ‘for’ these people isn’t really just doing something ‘to’ them. Apparently mentioning this makes me unsympathetic and uncaring.
Peter, in your first post you mentioned “the cultural wallowing”, clearly implying that that is what you think Mark is indulging in.
And yet after my post where I clearly said that Aboriginal people are not above criticism, and that there is toxic behaviour in their communities that they need (and I think, are trying) to solve, you attacked Senator Bartlett – who said, among other things:
And yet you sitll come out with your reactionary claim that Senator Bartlett is part of the problem.
Yes, you are involved in avoidance. Seems to me that the whole argument advanced here is that white activists need to be doing things ‘with’ Aboriginal people, not ‘for’ or ‘to them. You’ve ignored most of what has been said and refused to engage with the arguments.
If you were actually concerned with helping, you’d come up with some suggestions or let us know how you think assistance to Aboriginal people ought to be delivered. Instead, you sneer at people who are trying to understand the best way forward, instead of engaging with their arguments and trying to help.
David,
Mr Bartlet and others, including yourself, clearly implied that because I pointed out the disasterous consequences of the sort of ‘awarness’ and ‘caring’ that has been going on for a long time now made ‘me’ the uncaring, unaware, unsympathetic one. I had every right to have a go back.
And now you say I am ’sneering’. What is it with you people?
This has been a very interesting discussion, and well said Mark and David and others.
What I will never understand is the typical over reaction and denigration that is the hallmark of those who seemingly cannot cope with any discussion of issues related to our Aboriginal population. Peter is a good example of this and he neatly encapsulates the whole denialist mind set with the trite phrase – ‘Get over it’.
Australia is a prosperous, supposedly highly educated country, and it is beyond reason that this problem has been allowed to fester for so long.
Let me guess Adrian – you’re a ‘white’ activist too. Heaven help us.
No, Peter, but if you find it helpful to label people, go ahead.
I’m not going to get into the discussions going on here in the comments, but thanks Mark for the post. Taylor’s emphasis on recognition is interesting. As a response I would suggest Elizabeth Povinelli’s ‘The Cunning of Recognition’: you may find yourself in disagreement with it, but it’s an interesting perspective on the cultural politics of recognition. She hasn’t been given a fair hearing in Australian academia, in my opinion. Another book that I found interesting, particularly in relation to questions about public opinion and Aboriginal issues, is Murray Goot & Tim Rowse’s new one, ‘A Divided Nation?’.
Otherwise, I think that the sort of thought-experiment that you propose – of trying to take up an indigenous perspective – is a valuable one for white Australians. There is one very simple way that I can suggest to do this, and that is to read some of the ever-growing body of work by Aboriginal authors. Just from what I’ve read recently, I would suggest Kim Scott & Hazel Brown’s Kayang & Me, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ Up To The White Woman, Tara June Winch’s debut novel, and just about any of Tony Birch’s essays.
I think Peter is getting a bit of a raw deal here. He has made some excellent points for discussion.
The question must be asked: Do we actively support traditional life, knowing that the life expectancy and general health of the people will be less than the average Australian?
If we do allow it, should we subsequently feel guilty about this shorter lifespan?
And, yes, I know this is a rephrasing of the argument for the policy which made the Stolen Generation.
Great comments and post.
Adam, Talkin’ up to the white woman is a great book, isn’t it? Moreton-Robinson just demolished so many practiced arguments with ease.
Harry, I think you’re buying into the false dichotomy Mark mentioned earlier. I don’t think anyone is really proposing to support ‘traditional’ life – which after all would basically be an impossibility, anyway, so much as supporting a notion of aboriginal life, as such defined and pursued by indigenous people themselves, with broad support.
Sorry if I’m putting words in your mouth, Mark!
Patrick, I think you are right about Moreton-Robinson’s work in that it amounts to a successful demolition of certain arguments – and thus to a genuine opportunity to be challenged for white scholars and critics. I have a few reservations, not with the arguments, but in terms of their potential uses and about how we might respond to them. For example, I wouldn’t want Talkin’ Up to be used as a reason for white men to take anti-feminist positions.
No need to apologise, patrickg!
That’s exactly what I’m trying to get at, David.
Adam,
I agree very much. I did find those arguments very valuable however, as illustrating how complicated gender relations can be when tied in with cultural values as well. Like you, I think it would be a sad thing if those multi-layered arguments were distilled into easy soundbites for misogynists.
I certainly found the book to be a challenge, and I loved it for that. I got a lot out of it.
I’m observant.
That’s an excellent suggestion, btw, Adam. Talking to Indigenous people is another one folks might like to explore!
“Harry, I think you’re buying into the false dichotomy Mark mentioned earlier. I don’t think anyone is really proposing to support ‘traditional’ life”
I don’t think it’s a dichotomy: surely it’s a sliding scale with traditional life at one end and full integration into mainstream society where Aborigines are as integrated as Italians, Chinese, Greeks etc etc
Such integration will only permit the retention of a certain amount of culture (as the Italians, Chinese, Greeks etc have found). Surely what gets preserved is whatever the community itself chooses to retain. This is where Peter’s “wallowing” comes into it: Aboriginal culture cannot be preserved as some theme-parklike bubble within society.
“There are no alternative careers waiting for an ex-warrior; he probably has a wife and children, but what does it mean to be a father if you can’t hand on the skills of a warrior? If a relatively limited range of significant actions becomes impossible, how can a person find a meaningful life?”
This is wallowing.
How is this any different from a man who refuses to accept feminism? Such a man receives no sympathy here at LP, that’s for sure.
That’s an entirely false analogy, harry. What Lear is writing about is the confinement of all people from a particular culture within a reserve where very few, if any, of the cultural practices which accorded meaning to life are any longer feasible. Anti-feminism is a perfectly acceptable cultural option for men in the dominant Australian culture. Indeed (whether consciously or unconsciously) it’s obviously the cultural standard – hence the continuation of patriarchy and sexism. Nobody is confining anti-feminist men on reserves.
The other fundamental difference which you ignore is that Italian or Greek people chose to come to this country. Indigenous people didn’t – they were here first, and we came along. There’s also far more commonality between European and even Asian cultures and the dominant Australian culture.
You might choose to think about how the cultural logic of “choice” functions differently across these cultural domains.
I don’t think you’re thinking through the arguments at all – which is perhaps signalled by your claim that I’m “wallowing”. Whatever that might mean.
There seems to be an implicit assumption from opponents of self-determination that things were good and then self-determination came along and things got bad. That’s not the case. Things were bad, really bad and things have got a little better, but by nowhere near as much.
Have we? I can’t see any morbidity statitics but as far as mortality goes, infant mortality has more than halved, and life expectancy has increased by about 10 years.
Mark, the point is it has nothing at all to do with being confined to a reservation. The moment that first ship appeared on the horizon most of the:
cultural practices which accorded meaning to life are any longer feasible
They were no longer feasible because in that instant literally everything about their world changed. Not just some of it – pretty well all of it. Current and past mistreatment only made it worse – but it didn’t change that fact. That’s why I said they had to get over it. Trite as it is.
I’m confused.
Was it “literally everything” or “pretty well all of it”?
The analogy holds, Mark. A non-feminist man sees the role of the man to (a) father children, (b) be the bread winner (c) keep order in the house and (d) be head of the house.
Complaining that in order to accept our modern world he has to give up these roles is wallowing.
Same for the chief.
You can’t throw up your hands and lead your tribe in mourning the past for the rest of their lives and the lives of their children and their children’s children. You simply can’t do it. Irrespective of how that past way of life came to end, it is wrong to lead your people in such a way.
“Anti-feminism is a perfectly acceptable cultural option for men in the dominant Australian culture.”
Not when what gives their live’s meaning (which is what the author was saying) is based on a non-feminist society. To choose feminism is to change how they give life to their meaning.
The answer to such a problem from you is, effectively, “Get over it”. It’s my answer too. They simply have to get over it.
Someone who loses the love of their life in a tragic accident can’t spend the rest of their lives mourning. At some point a friend is going to tell them they have to get over it. Can anyone really appreciate this person’s loss? No. But they still have to live their life after the fact.
I was wrong in saying Aboriginal culture couldn’t live on as a theme-parked bubble – it can. Chinatowns around Australia are testament that an identifiable culture can set up a community in Australia. There is no reason that Murritown or Kooritown couldn’t exist.
“The other fundamental difference which you ignore is that Italian or Greek people chose to come to this country. Indigenous people didn’t – they were here first, and we came along.”
# So what? If you’re not going to support the establishment of traditional lifestyles again, why does this matter?
Surely to achieve reconciliation….
Woah. Hang on a tick. What is reconciliation supposed to achieve?
If it for everyone to accept that Aborigines were here first and we invaded, then that’s a case of telling people who can’t accept this (ie the truth) to get over it.
From reconciliation.org.au “Reconciliation involves symbolic recognition of the honoured place of the first Australians, as well as practical measures to address the disadvantage experienced by Indigenous people in health, employment, education and general opportunity.”
Part 1: symbolic recognition. Easy.
Part 2: fix disadvantage. Hard. But Part2 doesn’t have anything to do with Part1.
Another poor analogy.
A large part of the energies of Aborigines’ organisations is for the restitution of their property, as as much of it as can be restored by virtue of the Australian legal system.
It is well known that firms and individuals often grapple with each other in Australian courts of law for decades over issues of property. Perhaps these litigants too would be wisely advised to “get over it”. But they don’t.
These litigants aren’t “mourning” in any real sense. The worst that can be said of them is that they are seeking to take revenge. The best that can be said of them is that they are driven by a sense of outraged justice.
Why should Aborigines be judged by a different set of criteria to these litigants?
One thing I rarely see acknowledged was that due to lobbying from the mining companies, pastoralists and sections of the community, it was more or less guaranteed that native title, where given, would be on marginal land. One of the defining issues in Native Title, in WA at least, was Nookanbah. At the time the Court Government was doing its best to get oil exploration done over the wishes of the aboriginals in the area. In one of those little ironies of life they found water instead of oil. The community now run a 5000 head cattle station and have recently been given native title to the land (apparently that’s what they wanted). What impressed me was how illustrative of the story from Dickey Cox – born on the Fitzroy River in 1944 – was of the continuum and retention of culture theme that’s been running through here.
Been enjoying the thread, nice work Mark and David especially.
Am I right in assuming that those who so blithely counsel others ‘to get over it’ have never really had anything to ‘get over’ in their own cosseted little lives?
Otherwise they would think twice before making such idiotic statements.
There already exist Kooritowns and their equivalent in every Australian capital, harry. Whether they’re a good thing or a bad thing is rather dependent on your own preconceptions: I quite like Redfern and hope it keeps its identifiable Aboriginality, though not its poverty, in to the future, while Frank Sartor wants everyone out.
To take on your analogy, which as a seafaring bloke I appreciate: the histories of Chinatowns around the Pacific rim, where they’ve existed for centuries, suggest that any such thing as ‘preservation of traditional culture’ is never an option. A Chinatown district in Malaysia is a very different place to a Chinatown district in California, and both would be fairly foreign places to visitors from China. They’re hardly insulated bubbles.
Your argument:
Overly identifies an imagined ‘traditionalism’ with poverty. Nobody, for instance, complains about Jews congregating in Bondi or St. Kilda, or Vietnamese in Fairfield or Richmond—yet how integrated into your imagined ‘Australian mainstream’ society is an ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher or a ninety year-old Vietnamese grandmother?
What you object to, I hope, is structural poverty, not a lack of integration: get over it.
You should qualify that with a “nobody who isn’t a fuckwit….” but yeah I agree. The point of difference (apart from abject poverty, alcoholism and violence) might be that Aboriginal food sucks pretty bad. I’m not just being mischievous here – I really think that if indigenous culture brought us bagels or pork and prawn dumplings then broad acceptance of indigenous communities would be easier. For fuckwits.
Such joylessness on this thread. No mention or understanding of connection between culture and nature.
White man got no dreaming. No wonder he sick.
Of course, showing empathy with Aboriginal people does not mean that white people have to abase themselves with reactionary, self-hating nonsense that alleges we have no culture.
There is a world of difference between that, and recognising wrongs that have been done.
Your empathy is patronising and unwanted. It is a form of assimilationism. You should view Aboriginal culture as the indigenous other. For so it is.
Does anyone else find it interesting and symptomatic of the whole, that the one post by an aboriginal has elicited one response but then the discussion has quickly moved to celtic and gaelic dispossesiona and thence to a dialectical discussion that not only does not adress the issue, in this the fortieth anniversary of the granting of the most basic of rights to the original inhabitants, but moves it on into areas best left the preserve of priviliged undergraduates.
Michael’s post was of import and insight and I tried to acknowledge that. I’m happy to embrace and work for this principle–
“Am I right in assuming that those who so blithely counsel others ‘to get over it’ have never really had anything to ‘get over’ in their own cosseted little lives?”
Aha, I see the problem. To borrow from Adrian’s excellent example of Yungngora People: they haven’t taken the line that their lives are without meaning because they’ve lost their land and thence cultural connection. They went and bought it back and set up again with a mixture of traditional and new (Christianity) elements.
This is not what the Crow chief did.
That’s my whole point about wallowing (oh, and Mark, the chief is wallowing, not you) and “getting over it”.
The Yungngora are now, would you agree?, part of Australian society. And they can be used as a positive example for everyone.
People such as the Cadigal (this is assuming there are any left…) from the Sydney area have a bigger problem in that they will never be able to get their land back either by a title claim or by buying it.
They have two options (a) sit back and say that since their land is gone, their culture is gone and therefore their lives have meaning; or (b) raise a middle finger and collect as much of their culture as possible and construct a new meaning for their lives.
Katz, “Perhaps these litigants too would be wisely advised to “get over itâ€?. But they don’t.”
That’s not what I mean. They haven’t sat back and said “our lives have no meaning”. They are fighting. Ergo they have gotten over the idea that since they have lost their land they have lost their culture.
The Crow chief gave up. These litigants haven’t.
There are any number of North American leaders who lead groups of their people out of the Reserves to fight running battles with government troops sent in to clear them from their land again. Some fought for several years before being forced to surrender or being killed. These guys are considered in much the same way as we treat the ANZACS: doomed, but noble.
Fiasco: “yet how integrated into your imagined ‘Australian mainstream’ society is an ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher or a ninety year-old Vietnamese grandmother?
What you object to, I hope, is structural poverty, not a lack of integration: get over it.”
# Points taken, but by integration surely the acid test is whether an Aborigine walking down the street ellicits as much of a response as an ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher or a ninety year-old Vietnamese grandmother, yes? I don’t think it’s a problem that the Lubavitcher or Vietnamese grandmother aren’t integrated. The thing with Chinatowns is that strong aspects of Chinese culture are on display (restaurants, schools, churches, specialty shops, decoration etc etc)and this surely combats ignorance that breeds discrimination.
bridie, you wrote “You should view Aboriginal culture as the indigenous other. For so it is.”
Bridie:
Well, perhaps a discussion of the vast empty forgetting of Aboriginal culture shouldn’t really be a joyful thing.
Not much mention, maybe, but that’s precisely because it’s so well understood. You think because it’s not stated we all believe Aboriginal culture derives from communion with space octopuses? Or is it just that you need us to describe Aboriginal culture from scratch every time it’s discussed? How boring.
What DJ said. Not sure where you got the quote, but it’s a perfectly clear case of misunderstanding a culture by looking at it through an inappropriate frame, and judging it on that basis. How’s your hypocrisy?
Perhaps rather than a catch-all label, Aboriginal culture should be seen for (and referred to as) what it actually is. It is a current thing, a nebulous thing, a thing that touches and is touched by the cultures around it, not some (really fucking patronising, this) piece of historical flotsam. Elements of “indigenous other”, elements of the modern, elements of dysfunction, elements of beauty and hope.
In cultural landscape terms, the different way Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people experience a particular place or landscape means they are, in effect, different places or landscapes. But heritage is a highly contested field and no surprises about which groups have the most chance of having their story, interpretation, perspective commemorated as history or, perhaps more significantly, imbued with culturally and socially specific values.
Building cultural identity and restoring self pride are key to enabling Aboriginal people to overcome some of their other issues.
It is not commonly understood that Aboriginal belief systems involve no distinction between nature and all its processes and culture and it is certainly not how most non-indigenous peoples view culture.
The term was made popular by anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, after an Aboriginal man had told him “white man got no Dreaming”, which Stanner subsequently titled one of his books.
It’s been a bog-standard trope in Australian literary and left political circles since at least the 60s and taught in Anthropology 101.
For me this post confirms something I’ve long held, that indigenous Australia is right out there as the most interesting, most torturous and most continuing blind spots for anyone with a sense of themselves and their place in Australia. Peter Read in ‘Belonging’ is recommended reading.
I once tried to elicit interest in memorialising black resistance to European invasion, as now formally recognised in military annals as a continuous guerilla conflict. While you can argue as Rob has that conflict began (and culture ended) as the first fleet arrived, I took my reference point as where open skirmishing brought the response from the colonial governor of posting a British garrison. Within the initial 19 counties where settlement was permitted, but of course openly flouted, this led to troopers going to Maitland, Bathurst and Camden/Appin. A triumverate of plaques (or post- modern borra grounds) was my plea, in time to mark the 10th anniversary of the High Court’s Terra nullius or Mabo decision of 1992.
Needless to say, no one was interested, which in terms of this thread suggests it was too silly, too archaic, too black armbandish.
Fast forward then to Hawkie and his off the cuff “we’ll have a treaty” statement at Coronation Hill. The response after it was determined too hard or too controversial was reconciliation. The rest is history and we’re still living it. Even Howard who claimed he wanted to do something for aboriginees after winning in 1999 could not get past mainstreaming.
For those more traditional indigenees living distant lives from Canberra, what comes out of ‘government country’ by way of policy must seem very strange indeed.
Quite so, harry, but as you can see, questions of migrants’ or Indigenous people’s integration is always one asked from the point of view of the observer, not the subject.
How integrated are you or I into Vietnamese culture or Hasidic Judaism, or for that matter, any sense of Indigenous Australianness?
I think this would be an excellent idea. It would make it possible to turn the ‘teaching Australian history’ wedge around, it would show indigenous people as something other than passive victims and it would be about war, so you might just be able to get teenage boys (for a start) interested.
It is so very revealing isn’t it the way people glibly speak of “cultural death” or, slightly more generously, but no less insidiously, cultural “survival” when speaking about Aboriginal or other indigenous peoples, as if these cultures are indeed finite historical artefacts, yet don’t make the same differentiation when estimating the changes wrought, by the passage of time and common historical processes, within and upon other national or ethnic cultures.
Accepting and celebrating that we are awash in a sea of otherness is the beginning of wisdom I think. I do agree with the philosophers who insist we should discover the joy in this chaotic, confusing, glorious otherness. The alternative is the monopolistic, barren, ethical, repetitively dead boring failure exhibited by some commentators above.
The main existential challenge today is not that facing Aboriginal people, but non-Aboriginal Australia. The disease, the dysfunctionality, is primarily ours, rather than theirs, and the chronic unconcern, the sheer indifference, if not hostility (so well showcased on this thread) with which perhaps most Australians deal with this issue, is one of its symptoms.
Yet, poignantly, the challenge, now more than ever, is how do the rest of us become conscious of ourselves, of our ways of being in relation to the best of Aboriginal cultural memory, knowledge and practice, past and present, and its way of being human, and how do we translate that knowledge, that praxis, into action that is vital for ecological and species survival.
Ahhh, so indigeneity emerges as the cure for our ills, the realisation of a new, better relationship to the land? While I agree with your anti-essentialist conception of culture, Bridie, I struggle with the appropriative implications of your conclusion.
If you read the post and the comments, bridie, people have been arguing strongly against the notion that “these cultures are indeed finite historical artefacts”. I’m not sure who you’re arguing against, but I think the views you’re targetting aren’t held by any of the actual participants on this thread.
Many Indigenous people see this sort of thing as yet more neo-colonialist cultural appropriation.
I’m not meaning to be offensive, I’m just asking you to think.
About what, precisely?
While I do not wish ill of anybody, I confidently declare that I have no interest in aboriginal or “indigenous” culture. For every book I read about ‘facing up to white women’ or whatever, there is one less book by Aeshylus, Juvenal, Shakespeare, Swift, or film by Ang Lee I get to enjoy.
Let’s face it, indigenous culture is overwhelming a warning of what could happen if we get culturally complacent and allow our culture to implode.
There is an unhealthy addiction to Designer Tribalism being flaunted on this thread.
David J: (12:51)
I don’t think that Mark is arguing for the preservation or restoration of pre-invasion Aboriginal culture.
Mark B: 1.45
Thanks, David, no I’m not, as I’ve emphasised in a number of comments.
Aboriginal cultural heritage is both pre- and post-colonisation. To wipe off the map pre-colonisation cultural heritage and deny it is worth preserving, as both these white boys do above, is among other comments exactly what I was referring to.
Don’t call me a ‘white boy’, thanks Bridie, it’s offensive.
If you think it is possible to restore the culture that Aboriginal society enjoyed before white invasion, why don’t you explain how it can be done?
It’s not a question of it being ‘worth’ preserving or not, but of recognising the obvious fact that massive, irreversible cultural disruption has occured. In my opinion, white people of good will need to ask what they can do to help indigenous people build the lives they want in the modern world – as I have said clearly.
The whole argument has been that white people need to stand ready to assist indigenous people to determine their own lives, and live their own culture, as they see fit.
For you to turn that into some statement that I (and Mark) want to ‘wipe it off the map’ is just so far off the mark that I can only assume you come to this argument with a bucket-load of badwill.
I am not going to fill myself with the pathological cultural self-hatred that you invite me to. That helps no-one, while making it harder for activists to do useful things.
Since you state at 6.19pm today that you do not identify as indigenous (“The disease, the dysfunctionality, is primarily ours, rather than theirs” – my emphasis), I’ll take my guidance from the indigenous people I meet through my politics, rather than from you.
You’re not white? If you are, then why is saying you are, offensive? Or, if you are not, why is it offensive to say you are?
The plot thickens.
That’s an absurd and completely wrong (and offensive) mischaracterisation of what I’ve been saying.
You seem to enjoy taking a self-righteous moral stance, on many threads in which you intervene, Bridie, but you’d be more convincing if you read for meaning, didn’t read in assumptions and assumed good faith in what others are saying occasionally.
A-freaking-men.
If you came to this argument with any desire to see someone else’s point of view, Bridie, it would be obvious.
‘Boy’ is, of course, the offensive part. As I’m sure you know, it has been in the past the practise of white men to call black men ‘boy’, in an effort to belittle and de-masculinise them.
Therefore I find ‘White boy’ an offensive and belittling term, just as most women on this site would find it offensive and belittling if I referred to them using words that mean ‘young, physically immature human female’, or ‘baby hen’, whether or not I also referred to their skin colour.
Perhaps you think it’s a good thing for political discourse to be carried out using offensive and belitting terms, but I don’t. Do you want to give white men a licence to use terms like the one you did, but aimed in the opposite direction?
Culture is not ‘worth’ by definition. Culture is a set of assumptions with which we approach the rest of the people in our universe, inherently dynamic.
For instance, Bridie, I’m sure you wouldn’t want to resurrect ‘traditional’ Portuguese culture, which depended on thorough looting of the East coast of India and both African coasts for spices and slaves.
I think ‘white boy’ is perfectly acceptable as a self-description, however. Except that it could be seen as a bit of misguided self-effacement in the vein of ‘I don’t know any better, I’m just a…’
“Let’s face it, indigenous culture is overwhelming a warning of what could happen if we get culturally complacent and allow our culture to implode.”
Well, that’s about as sophisticated a reading as we would expect from someone who’s head is so deep in the canon as that of JG.
Aeschylus even
Harry – that was me with the quote (I’m not normally picky but it was my one thoughtful post for the month).
I think you’ve slightly missed the point of the quote by making it all a bit pat. They got shut out of their land and then they were villified by the state government and significant portions of the community for their sacred sites and attachment to the land. They’ve made their way back and they’ve been given native title of the land and much of this has come about through government assistance and recognition. It’s a complex history and it’s defined by the land, by their own attitudes and those of the rest of the Australian community. This isn’t a case of forgetting about it and getting on with their lives, it’s a case of not forgetting about and it working with a network of support.
So
Should be: they’ve taken the line that their lives were (in significant ways) without meaning if they lost their land and thence their cultural connection.
They always have been, and yes they can.
[anecdote] I’ve got a good friend who manages the finances and development for aboriginal communities. It’s doesn’t seem easiest job in the world but I don’t get postcards with “Exterminate all the brutes” on them. I use that as a rough guide. [/anecdote]
Just stumbled across, this Peter Yu interview which is well worth a read.
JG, you needn’t interrupt your umpteenth viewing of The Hulk.
“Many Indigenous people see this sort of thing as yet more neo-colonialist cultural appropriation.”
Right, Kim. Or, to put it another way, a re-colonisation of Aboriginality in the service of a vague, feel-good New Ageism.
Ah, the usual LP grab-bag of non-arguments, ad hominems, moral meltdowns and reflexive stereotypes.
I sure some would see such strategic objectives as “new age” Kim and Rob. If you do, it says more about you than anything else much.
On the other hand, such an approach is current government policy in NSW. Check out, for example, the Macquarie Marshes and other protective wetland and water management projects undertaken by scientists and cultural heritage practitioners in collaboration with Aboriginal community members and traditional landowners — all funded by our taxes, I am pleased to report.
While you continue to occupy your high moral ground, Bridie, which you’ve reached by clambering over distortions of our arguments?
So? Not opposing that, but it doesn’t come with the mystical sense you apparently give to Indigenous pre-invasion culture which conveniently ables you to ignore actually existing Indigenous people and cheer on whitefellas who, like you, think it capable of being frozen in aspic.
I said pre-invasion Aboriginal culture exists and is worth preserving, unlike Mark and Rob above, for example, who wrote that it wasn’t.
Kim, you really need to get up to speed in understanding what Aboriginal cultural heritage incorporates. It is really a lot more complex that your theme park understanding of it.
Bridie, again, it would help if you weren’t so condescending in your responses.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with one of the key Indigenous critiques of native title law – which is precisely that because the legislation and jurisprudence requires proof by claimants that “traditional” customary law continues to be practised, this in effect puts a large hurdle in the way of many successful claims as it treats Indigenous society as if (a) it hasn’t been affected by dispossession, and (b) it isn’t a dynamic and changing and alive tradition. This is compounded because the Western legal system prefers written evidence to oral tradition and unwritten custom, and the comparator is usually the evidence drawn from white officials, anthropologists and missionaries – whose intent and accuracy goes relatively unquestioned and often trumps the testimony of Indigenous people themselves.
If you care to read the critiques of the legislation and jurisprudence from Indigenous scholars and activists, I think you’ll find this point made again and again.
The colleague to whom I referred in an earlier comment was most emphatic in a guest lecture he gave in one of my courses last week that from his viewpoint as an Indigenous person, it was insulting and just wrong to suggest that Indigenous culture was or should be frozen in time. Obviously there’s much continuity but the politics of asserting that “pre-invasion Aboriginal culture exists” is deeply problematic and from a historical and anthropological view, just wrong. My colleague’s argument is one I’ve heard again and again from Indigenous people to whom I’ve spoken about these issues, and from the late 1980s onwards, I’ve personally been very involved both initially in the land rights struggle in Queensland and subsequently within academia in working closely with Indigenous colleagues to ensure that university curricula recognise Indigenous society, history and politics and ways of knowing.
I really wish you wouldn’t assume that you are the only person who is in good faith on controversial questions, and that you could be less dogmatic and more prepared to support your views with argument as opposed to moral assertion.
I would agree with the obvious point that Indigenous culture is not and cannot be “frozen in time”. No wonder I think you and Kim argue in bad faith. Where did I ever say, or suggest, the ridiculous notion that “indigenous culture should be frozen in time”? You and Kim are the only people who keep repeating these words.
I do say, for the third time, Aboriginal cultural heritage that existed prior to invasion can, should and is being preserved, conserved, interpreted and protected.
Here is my definition (actually the NSW government’s – they own the copyright):
“Aboriginal cultural heritage is the value Aboriginal people have given to items through their associations with those items. Manifestations of [pre-and post-invasion] Aboriginal cultural heritage values may be non-physical and/or physical and include, but are not limited to, cultural practices, knowledge, songs, stories, art, buildings, paths, and human remains. When natural elements of the landscape acquire meaning for a particular group, they may become cultural heritage. These may include landforms, flora, fauna and minerals.�
In the 1970s, the NSW government, in conjunction with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies famously undertook an Aboriginal-led sacred sites survey program across the state. Many non-Aboriginal people at the time were of the opinion there were no Aboriginal sacred sites in NSW and that any that did exist would not be significant to the Aboriginal people today.
The work of the survey team proved these views wrong. Many Aboriginal people, elders particularly, were concerned about the protection of their special places and agreed for the first time to share information about these and their associated stories and ceremonies.
The team recorded nearly 600 sites of spiritual or ceremonial significance to Aboriginal people across NSW, including many sites associated with mountains. They found that, not only are the coastline and plains dotted with evidence of Aboriginal occupation, but that Aboriginal people moved across the landscape and into mountain areas for ceremonial purposes and to collect wild resources.
Today, ancient rock art, stone implements, to name two types of “pre-invasion� Aboriginal cultural heritage, are being discovered or reported to the NSW government all the time, along with new evidence of Aboriginal habitation in places previously unrecorded, e.g Wollemi National Park. This cultural heritage has meaning for Aboriginal people today and is accessed and used by them in many ways, not least to educate younger generations.
Aboriginal peoples cultural heritage knowledge, which dates back millenia, will also, I hope, increasingly be used as part of climate change and other environmental protection programs.
Adam Gall
You bet my head is in the canon. I am currently reading Herodotus and Aeschylus following my recent viewing of the film 300. Absolutely fascinating eye-opener to just how shoddy Edward Said’s scholarship was.
Over the weekend I spent a few joyful hours reading Dylan Thomas’ “Under milk Wood” once more and John Betjeman’s poems. I adore “Subaltern’s Love Song”, don’t you? As I was getting ready to go to the cinema and then clubbing, I cranked up ACDC’s “Back and Black.”
Not a dot painting in sight.
As I said, no one is denying that and no one is suggesting that material culture should not be preserved. The entire debate has been about lived culture, and we all naturally assumed that was what you were talking about. As it turns out, there’s probably no argument here, but you persist in being rude and condescending.
Why exactly do you think I’m “arguing in bad faith”?
And would it kill you to respond politely for once?
Fiasco,
“Quite so, harry, but as you can see, questions of migrants’ or Indigenous people’s integration is always one asked from the point of view of the observer, not the subject.”
# Er, no they’re not. There are any number of articles/stories etc about migrants preserving their culture whilst trying to integrate.
“How integrated are you or I into Vietnamese culture or Hasidic Judaism, or for that matter, any sense of Indigenous Australianness?”
# Not at all, but we don’t live in such cultures. If I lived in Vietnam then I’d try to integrate. Our sense of Indigenous Australianness is surely going to remain very limited – telling stories to kids about bunyips; listening and watching as Aboriginal art influences Australian art as a whole; eating bush food; being a tourist and interpretting the landscape along Aboriginal lines.
It’s hard to see what else… but that is an admission of ignorance.
Ok, say I’m at a campfire out in the bush and an Aborigine approaches I’m going to stay facing away from him until he sits at the fire, rather than facing him as I would with anyone else. This isn’t integration of any sort. It’s no different to not touching an Arab with your left hand or showing the soles of your feet to pretty much anyone.
Aboriginal women can’t really walk around Sydney topless, now, can they?
Perhaps I’m completely missing your point.
You still don’t understand. It IS lived culture. But I give up. It is like talking to a wilfully ignorant brick wall.
Anthony,
Sorry for calling you Adrian.
My point was to compare the Yungngora with the Crow. The Yungngora actively retrieved as much of their culture as they could. The Crow did nothing.
Now, how long do I feel sympathetic for the Crow? Eventually it will run out, and I’m going to say “get over it” and give them an article about the Yungngora.
Now, sure, they may (will) be some Crow who can’t get out it. I can’t do anything to help them. What am I meant to do now that I’ve finished feeling sorry for them?
The point of this thread is this: “and a new great Australian silence about the link between cultural disposession and continued disadvantage”
Mark, what do you want us to do about it? I’ve acknowledged the link. Now what? I can’t repossess them culturally. So I’m sort of stuck at that point. And this point is, as you suggest, a vicious cycle. The only people who can break the cycle are the Aborigines themselves saying that cultural dispossession will no longer be a reason for disadvantage.
The dead loved one is the closest analogy I can come up with for white western Australia because a loved one is the only thing anyone says gives their life meaning. At some point I tell my friend he has to get over his greif. He can, however, embrace his greif and withdraw from the world, mourning til the day he dies. There is nothing I can do for him in this case.
Yes, that’s very true.
Actually, it is worse than ignorant. Your position is objectively reactionary in its denial of Aboriginal cultural heritage and its lived experience today. It is assimilationist politics.
That’s an absurd charge based on a total misinterpretation.
I’ll repeat what I said before:
Very obviously, there are some Indigenous peoples who have preserved more traditional culture and law and relation to material heritage and country than others – because of dispossession. That’s precisely why Mabo and subsequent Native Title Acts are so flawed – because they refuse to recognise the shifts in culture. But Indigenous people I’ve spoken to do not claim that there has been no change in culture – and have said that to see things in this way is to repeat the very same errors that whitefella law and the anthropological “othering” of Indigenous culture makes.
I resent the claim that the argument I’m making is “objectively reactionary” and “assimilationist politics”. The whole point of my argument and my political and academic engagement with Indigenous people and issues is to counter assimilationism. You seem very comfortable making reckless charges against others without according any respect to what we actually say. That’s your right I suppose, but I wish you’d do it elsewhere.
I’m sorry, JG, but Herodotus is a notoriously unreliable source on postcolonial theory. Show me the bit where Thucydides disproves Edward Said and you might have an argument.
AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’, on the other, hand pretty much proves any argument you want to make, but I’ve got to be listening to it with about six beers in me for that to work properly.
or ‘other hand’ even (minus the comma)…
You really are arguing with a strawman. Contemporary cutting edge Aboriginal cultural heritage theory and practice, including in the area I work, which is the major leader in the field (and is quite separate from native title work), staffed mainly by Aboriginal people, under pressure from Aboriginal communities and with the support of multisciplinary field practitioners and academics, has moved way beyond the simple anthropological emphasis of identifying and putting “fences around middens”. I did allude to this in talking about cultural landscapes and the work being done around this, and natural resources, land and water management, etc., programs with CMAs, government and private landholders.
Your static and outmoded view, in fact, it is patently clear, limits and distorts your understanding of the living continuity, multi-dimensionality and ecological and spiritual richness of Aboriginal cultural heritage today and in the past. We are all still learning about it and time is precious.
And, Mark, if you didn’t always assume, and give the impression, quite wrongly in this case, that you know better than everyone else on all subjects you post on, you might not invite such defiant reactions when people point out your (and others here much more objectionable which as usual went through to the keeper) errors. Which in this case are quite significant.
You’re in adult education are you??
Again, Bridie, I was unclear from the way in which your comments were worded that you were talking about cultural heritage theory and practice, which I freely admit I am not knowledgeable about. However, as has been emphasised several times, the context of the entire thread refers to the effects of dispossession and law on culture, and no one was every contesting your assertions about the particular field which you have now clarified that you’re talking about. Perhaps an acknowledgement of that would be appropriate.
Again, you might try reading what’s on this site. My professional qualifications and affilations are stated in the bio on the side bar. I am, among other things, a lecturer in sociology at Griffith University.
It is certainly never my intention to give such an impression, and I’m always more than happy to accept correction and respond to argument. However, in this instance, as you haven’t actually engaged with what I’ve actually been saying, but have preferred to engage with what you mistakenly think I’m saying, I’m still unclear as to the objections which you have to my argument and point of view, as it seems to me that your characterisation of it is in fact misdirected.
No one is perfect, and I am more than happy to apologise where I’ve caused any offence or made an error. That doesn’t appear to be a practice of conversation which you uphold, as it’s just a fact that you’ve never apologised to those whom you’ve personally offended, including in this instance, me.
Since you don’t in my opinion address what people actually say and refuse to engage civilly, I don’t wish to continue the conversation with you. I’d further suggest that if you think that people on LP don’t live up to your expectations of dialogue, that there are many other places where you can discuss these matters. Perhaps you’ll find one where your views are deferred to.
Best wishes.
Depends, harry, you seem to be imagining a monolithic Australian mainstream. If you live in Bondi or Fairfield, the culture you live in is a lot different to Ramsay Street, Erinsborough VIC, ie. it’s probably got Jews and Vietnamese in it.
This is my point that you’re missing. You’re imagining an ‘integration’ that works one way, as an obligation that guests owe to national hosts. Apart from being demonstrably unworkable in the case of migrants, it’s a very strange obligation to impose on an Indigenous population.
John Greenfield, you should try listening to AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ before you hit the town, I find it lends a peculiar insight into the failure of traditional Marxist analysis in the 1980s historikerstreit on war-revisionism in West Germany.
…Thun-dah… Nananananananaaaaanah… Thun-dah…
Fiasco
Thanks for the tip! Darn, I can’t get that Thun..da….Thun DA out of my head. (I just can’t get it out of my head…) I am sitting here at the computer head-banging like I am back at the old Comb and Cutter in Blacktown! Except sampling Kylie also na-na-na na-na-na-na.
Your brilliant suggestion has thrown my whole weekend schedule out of whack. You see, I already have a play-list to get me pumped before going tom-catting this weekend. I had planned to go Old Skool, focusing on Bon Scott, starting with High Voltage before moving onto a little Dirty Deeds, and as I shall be washing AND conditioning my hair, I though I’d finish with the Prologue and Crunchy Granola from Side 1 of Neil Diamond’s “Hot August Night.” And maybe some Lightning Seeds as I dress.
Decisions, decisions…
I second Adam’s recommendation of the work of Tony Birch, and would also suggest a reading of Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria and even more so her fabulous essay (on how she wrote the novel) in the current issue of HEAT, for anyone who wants to know more about ‘the living continuity, multi-dimensionality and ecological and spiritual richness of Aboriginal cultural heritage today and in the past’ — from an Indigenous person (as Wright identifies herself), and without being condescended to or trashed.
Thanks for the tip on that essay, Pav’s Cat. I’m about a third of the way through Carpentaria at the moment, but it’s on hold for some thesis related reading.
“Depends, harry, you seem to be imagining a monolithic Australian mainstream. If you live in Bondi or Fairfield, the culture you live in is a lot different to Ramsay Street, Erinsborough VIC”
# Nah, not a monolith. The mainstream (I really shouldn’t use the term ‘mainstream’ as that suggests whitebread WASPs only, eh?) currently encompasses any number of groups eg Jeish and Vietnamese people. I lived in Strathfield for a year which is a Korean quarter, but I didn’t start listening to Korean pop or get a Korean girlfriend. That’s not what I’m saying Aborigines should do to integrate.
“You’re imagining an ‘integration’ that works one way, as an obligation that guests owe to national hosts. Apart from being demonstrably unworkable in the case of migrants, it’s a very strange obligation to impose on an Indigenous population.”
# I’m not suggesting it’s obligation: just simple maths. There is a dominant culture (which, yes, gets altered by waves of immigration) which supplies the law, economy, school system etc. That’s what makes it one way. Maths.
The migrants are free to bring whatever culture they want with them _providing_ it is acceptable to the social norms. Things that are unacceptable include polygamy, preventing girls from going to school, slaughtering animals in your backyard, incessant religious harrassment. Chinese New Year is starting to make inroads into non-Chinese parts of society.
Current Australian society has the potential to have more impact on Aboriginal society than vice versa simple because there are more adherents to current Australian society.
There’s no legislative reason why we can’t all periodically go walkabout. I can image the spiritual underpinnings of going walkabout starting to infuse the ‘rite of passage’ that many people see as backpacking around parts of the world.
Adam Gall
Please never insult me again by suggesting I am engaging with “postcolonial theory.” And please do not waste valuable cyberspace by pitching it to me. I am concerned here with that fraud Edward Said and his shocking “Orientalism.”
Herodotus is essential reading here for two reasons”
1. Said situates the genesis of his misunderstaning of Orientalism in ancient Greece, indeed in The Iliad. Said explicitly implicates Aeschylus and Euripides. However his readings of all three are so amateurish that sophomoric would be flattery and tendentious an ambition.
2. He does not discuss Herodotus. Why? Because Herodotus’ Histories is the most effortless, yet devastating, of bitchslaps for “Orientalism.”
The really sad thing is that a generation of university students have been denied an education due to the two bit ideological pamphleteering of Said’s “Orientalism” and the bovine luvvie humanities junior academics who peddle it.
That’s an interesting argument to apply to a criminal colony made up significantly of nineteenth Welsh, Irish and Scots, and a post-1945 society based on mass-migration from arse-out-of-pants Code Napoleon countries. On schooling, the structure (if not scale) of Australian primary and secondary schooling has barely changed since the 1870s: it’s still a compromise between State Governments and the Catholic Church. I’d suggest replacing “dominant culture” with “ruling class” and “gets altered by” with “is occasionally forced to accomodate”.
Yes, I’m a structuralist at heart, and if you’ve a problem with that kind of Manning Clark history, in the immortal phrase, you can suck my balls.
And I doubt whether Sam Ward will ever be integrated anywhere else but the bogan backwoods of WA and Perth’s dodgy nightclub district, but there you go. It seems we’re agreed that opportunity and the lack of relative inequality are more important than individuals’ behaviour, non?
*waits for other shoe to drop*
*crickets*
John Greenfield,
I guess a joke can’t be taken as such when the sacred canon is at stake. Of course by criticising Said, you are engaging with postcolonial theory. I wouldn’t dream of trying to convince you of it’s merits, however. After all, here I am down amongst the lumpen-intellegentsia on the bovine luvvie left, and there you are upon a pedestal taking your cues from the golden age of human thought and action.
Here I was thinking that ‘Orientalism’ was primarily concerned with the C19th and C20th, and was primarily of use in understanding colonial and imperial history. Aeschylus et al belong to the “imaginative field” that the more specific discipline of Orientalism draws upon, is in dialogue with, but they cannot be reduced to the historical era in which these representations take on extra significance through their relationship to colonial and imperial expansion. It is small wonder that Said devotes little time to your beloved Greeks: it is neither his purpose nor his concern to engage them. The idea that Said has discouraged students from reading them is laughable.
Five words for harry: Hopelessly out of your depth.
Two more: Sinking fast
Adrian: I think the words you’re looking for are “Is this a private fight or can anyone join in”?
To give harry credit, he had an important point about the common courtesies of everyday life. If there’s one regretful thing about the late 1990s gang-tackle on multiculturalism, it’s that it gave a pretext for public fuckwits to act like fuckwits in public.
One thing over looked here is that most Aboriginals themselves don’t appear that interested in holding onto much of their culture. For example:
-Many Aboriginal languages are now spoken by only a handful of old folk. The young have no interest in learning them.
-Young folk ignoring the traditional respect for wildlife and going on shooting sprees. This has been widely reported in Kakadu for example.
-The death of traditions and extinguishment of cultural knowledge like building bark canoes, being able to identify and prepare bush foods, because no-one is willing to teach and/or learn them.
The above phenomena are about choices indigenous people are making. It isn’t something foisted upon Aboriginals by the oppressive dominat culture.
As to the “spiritual richness of Aboriginal cultural heritage today”, it would be fair to say that it isn’t rich at all. Take this for example: “There were 238 Indigenous persons counted in Queensland in the 2001 Census who reported that they practised an Australian Aboriginal traditional religion. Non-Indigenous people accounted for 23.5% of the total number of persons practicing a traditional Indigenous religion.” http://www.oesr.qld.gov.au/queensland-by-theme/demography/indigenous-people/bulletins/atsi-qld-c01/atsi-qld-c01.shtml#Language
That’s right, 238 Aboriginal traditional religion followers in the whole of Queensland!
I’ve now located the 2001 census figure for Aboriginal traditional religion adherence in NSW. It is 5,224. In 1996 it was 7,359. This represents a decline of 29% in just 5 years.
BTW, please do not misconstrue my negative comments above as a criticism of Aboriginal people as such. My annoyance is with lefties who refuse to acknowledge that much of Aboriginal “lived culture” is destructive and dysfunctional to such an extent that some indigenous communities probably lack the resources to themselves up by their own bootstraps.
Anyway, read Louis Nowra. Like him I found time spent in the Hieronymous Bosch like hell-hole of Alice Springs a real eye opener.
Me too, mel.
The religion question on the census is notoriously a tricky one to go by, melaleuca, and I can think of a lot of reasons why in this instance it would be more so than usual – for instance, many aspects of traditional Indigenous culture aren’t “religious” in our sense at all – it’s more of a worldview – the reason why many of the very many Indigenous Christians acculturise Christianity to their own mythos and practices.
Mark,
You answer does not explain why the arse has fallen out of the number of Aboriginals saying in the census that they practice an Aboriginal Traditional Religion between 1996 abnd 2001.
BTW, I forgot the NSW census figures link. Here it is: http://www.crc.nsw.gov.au/statistics/Sect1/Table1p06Aust.pdf
I don’t know, melaleuca, but I’d be wary of building too much on it.
Mark says:
“Is it too much to ask anyone who professes concern about the condition of Indigenous Australians to try to see what the world might look like from their point of view?”
Louis Nowra did and here’s what he found:
“IN 2005 I spent several days in the Alice Springs hospital after falling ill while attending a friend’s wedding. I shared a ward with a middle-aged Aboriginal man who was quite proud that he had raped a 13-year-old girl. As he said, “She wouldn’t say yes, so I f—ed her hard.”
It did not surprise me. A few years before, I was in Alice Springs talking to two Aboriginal men in their early 70s. They were preparing to go into town to buy plastic toy dinosaurs. This was to pay a 12-year-old girl for having sex with both of them at the same time.
What amazed me was their lack of shame or even simple embarrassment. What disturbed me even more was that the most common sight in the hospital was Aboriginal women and girls with severe injuries suffered during domestic violence. Some of their faces looked as though an incompetent butcher had conducted plastic surgery with a hammer and saw. The fear in their eyes reminded me of dogs whipped into cringing submission. ”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20876,21275620-25132,00.html
The Great Australian Silence is the willingness to tell tall tales about a past that never was whilst closing our eyes to a present that is utterly ghastly and that will require firm and resiolute action on our part, patronising though it may be, if it is to any time soon.
Sorry,
… if it is to END anytime soon.
Well, firm and resolute action is not what we’ve had from the Minister, Mal Brough. Just posturing and authoritarianism.
What we should be doing is supporting is the Indigenous women who are fighting on these issues. That’s more productive than giving Nowra a medal, or saying that “we” should be the ones taking action. You know full well, mel, that we’ve had these debates on this blog, and that there’s no “great Australian silence” on those issues here.
The second point I’d make is that all these pathologies stem from dispossession and poverty. In many instances, what we are seeing is bastardisation of traditional custom (according to Indigenous women who’ve spoken out on the issue) – and what we see is the sort of pathology that cultural destruction causes.
Lastly, both you and Rob show a continual inclination to generalise from Alice Springs to the whole of Indigenous Australia. Anglo Aussie culture wouldn’t look too pretty if we assumed all of it was like that of Macquarie Fields.
Mark says:
“The second point I’d make is that all these pathologies stem from dispossession and poverty”
Does the pathology stem from the poverty or does the pathology cause the poverty? I suspect it is a two way flow but it is more of the latter.
I was in Vietnam in the late 80s. That was before the country opened up to the West. Most of the people I saw there would have been in awe of the comparative wealth of the average Aboriginal welfare recipient. Yet I didn’t see street fights, drunken mobs, glue sniffing and women and children wandering about with hollow eyes and broken souls as per the NT (not only Alice Springs).
But you are right about Aboriginal women being central to the solution of both poverty and pathology. This has been demonstrated elsewhere, by schemes like micro-credit, that focus on women in impoverished patriachal cultures. Although it will require patronising whites to get such schemes up and running.
BTW, definitive proof of Aboriginal cultural dysfunction pre-colonisation is the case of the Tasmanian Aboriginal. These people were sliding into the Stone Age, for example they lost fishing and cloth making skills, BEFORE whites arrived.
And one more thing.
In Victoria, Child Welfare workers are under instructions not to take action in cases involving Aboriginal children UNLESS the situation is diabolical. So Aboriginal children are left in homes that no white child or Asian child would ever be left in.
To my way of thinking this is a crime, and it is the product of the sort of happy-clapper Lefty thinking that dominates this thread:
“Hey, little Kylie may be raped by Uncle Ben and her arm may broken and her eyes blackened, but it would be patronising and imperialistic to intervene, so we won’t. And heh, at least she still enjoys an otherwise rich cultural life. ”
This rather sad fact has been confirmed by my “social worker-on-the-inside”, as well as having been reported in the Melbourne local papers.
I hadn’t noticed that the Vietnamese were reduced to a tiny minority on colonisation by the French, nor that their culture was overwhelmed by white settlers.
You’re grasping at straws, and argument by anecdote and worst case scenario. What your motive in doing so is I have no way of knowing. But the whole point of the post is to criticise the past approach of Labor governments as well precisely for not genuinely devolving responsibility and making self-determination real, and to abjure the idiocy of whitefella partisan shitfights over these issues in favour of actually listening to and empathising with Indigenous people. You appear not to want to do that.
If you thought about that for a moment outside your preconceptions, you’d realise that’s nonsense. But that comment says it all really. It’s not worth engaging with you on these issues.
My motive is to end the disgrace of Aboriginal disadvantage. What’s yours?
“If you thought about that for a moment outside your preconceptions, you’d realise that’s nonsense.”
Rubbish. You must have your eyes and ears closed. Let’s take one example. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen microcredit, which has helped millions of people escape poverty in Bangladesh and elsewhere, is a middle class economist. He was an oustider and he developed the initiative in toto. It fits perfectly into the “patronising and practical frame” that you poo-poo.
Again I must ask what is your motive?
It’s evident from the post.
And the way to do that is through repeating belittling stereotypes?
He’s a “patronising white”, is he?
The whole point of microcredit is the empowerment of people on the ground. That’s what I’d like to see happening, not shrill pronouncements from “patronising whites”.
Via the brisneyland livejournal group http://community.livejournal.com/brisneyland/627337.html, there is an exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal art by the Lockhardt River Gang at the University of Queensland St Lucia until Sunday.
Mark
I am alarmed that you would relativize “oral” evidence and culture against written evidence. Do you allow such evidence to underpin your students’ essays?
John, the point is that there is only one type of written evidence about traditional Indigenous culture pre-dispossession and that is the view of the missionaries, government officials and colonisers generally. I don’t know whether you know anything about cultural anthropology, but it would seem to me in any case pretty straightforward to recognise that such evidence isn’t neutral, and that attending to the evidence of the peoples themselves is a vital part of any attempt to understand.
Mark
Well given that those “dispossessed” are long dead, the point is surely moot? I think your position would be greatly advanced if you could clarify what you mean by “dispossession.” Clearly this idea underpins your entire point, so some clarity would be helpful.
As to cultural anthropology, further up the thread you inveighed against “anthropologizing.”
Also, I am not persuaded that oral evidence would shine any truth on the issues, ipso facto.
Perhaps that was a poor choice of words. I’ll substitute “othering”.
The issue is one of native title law, John. Dispossession occurs when forms of leasehold or freehold title either extinguish native title rights in part or absolutely. Native title law requires Indigenous claimaints to prove a “continuing connection with the land” and that traditional custom is observed. The difficulty with this is that the observation of traditional custom is clearly impeded either by being removed from the land, or from falling under the supervision and control of missionaries and/or government officers. The Act fails to recognise this, and effectively freezes culture in time, and prioritises, as I’ve said, the written evidence of the colonisers from many years ago (often quite inadequate as anthropological evidence) over oral continuing tradition and customary law. Thus, native title is difficult to claim because of the results of dispossession.
There is no such thing as “customary law” for the purposes of this discussion if “dispossession” took place after the Native Title Act. And I fail to understand why the red-herring of “colonizers” is interjected here. It is meaningless
The people who took Indigenous land were colonisers.
And please, for once, talk about something after trying to learn about it. You might care to study the High Court’s decision in Mabo no. 2.
“Perhaps that was a poor choice of words. I’ll substitute “otheringâ€?.”
Nah, you were a lot better off when you were choosing real words from the actual English language, not these kooky made-up ones.
Mark
Just for once? Hmmmm…I have not been made aware of any discussion we have had where I have displayed such a want of learning. Perhaps if you had inserted a warning in the thread title that only those who had read and deconstructed “Mabo. 2″ were welcome on this thread…
Either way, Mabo 2 is not relevant to the issue of the validity of oral evidence versus written evidence. Again, think of your students. Nor does it shine any light on your own rhetoric re “colonizers” and “dispossession.”
You know Mark, continually redrawing the parameters of a discussion will ultimately result in a very lonely discussion; one that will mean three-fifths of fuck all to the people you are allegedly advocating for.
John, it’s very simple, and I’ve explained it a number of times.
In order for native title to be recognised, the claimants have to establish a “connection with the land”.
This has been interpreted to mean that they need to show that traditional custom has continued unbroken.
This was an issue last year with the claim over Perth foreshores, as you might recall, where the Federal Court found against the claimants.
In order to provide evidence of traditional customary law, a comparison has to be made with the customs which were practiced before the land was alienated. For this, the only evidence available from the point of view of Indigenous people themselves is oral tradition. The written evidence (usually dating from the nineteenth century) was not collected with a view to a scientific description of customary law, but for other purposes, and often relies on observation of people whose language wasn’t understood, and whose customs were seen in terms of various then prevalent views.
I’d make the further point that you could hardly do anthropological fieldwork at all if you were to insist that only written evidence be taken cognisance of. In cultures that lack writing, if you want to understand the way they view their own culture, you very clearly cannot rely on written sources.
It isn’t difficult to grasp.
Mark
In the context of Australia there is no such thing as “cultures that lack writing.” So, if oral history is all the evidence they have, it must be subject to the same standards of validation as any other evidence.
Those standards may differ among the courts, history writing, social science, etc. but critiqued they must be. It does not surprise me one bit that oral history alone is dismissed as lacking credibility.
But we do not need the High Court or professors of Anthropology to tell us this. Perfectly sophisticated and sound reasons can be given by any first year Psychology student or barely competent barrister.
Obviously, John, traditional Indigenous cultures did not write down their law before contact with white settlers. Therefore the only evidence of what that law is, and what their customs were, which is the key legal issue, is oral tradition.
If you’re happy to support a system of jurisprudence which effectively renders most native title claims impossible, just say so. You don’t have a methodological point to make.
Since you refer to barely competent barristers, you might also look at the degree to which oral evidence is given weight by courts in general matters over written evidence. It is, in many instances, because it can be interrogated and cross examined, and also, in many instances, because it is the only evidence available.
Mark’s right. If the courts relied exclusively on written evidence rather than oral testimony, 90% of non-white collar crime would go unpunished.
What are you on about JG?