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.