Blow-ins on the cold desert wind
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Kim Mahood
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Kim Mahood's biography and other articles by this writer
Each year I drive from my home near Canberra to the Tanami Desert and spend several months in an Aboriginal community that has become my other home. The trip takes a week or two, allowing for the incremental adjustments that make my arrival one of recognition, pleasure and ambivalence.
There was a year I did it differently, flying directly to Alice Springs and travelling the thousand kilometres of corrugated and sandy desert track squashed into the back of a troop carrier with nine or ten elderly Aboriginal artists. We arrived in the early hours of the morning, less than twenty-four hours after I had left Canberra. The vehicle headlights lit a disorderly world of damaged houses, broken cars, lean furtive dogs and accumulated rubbish. This was a number of years ago, when I was still sorting out the uneasiness of my relationship to the place and people, and I felt the rise of old anxieties and discomfort. It seemed that, having departed from the orderly, over-planned surrealism of the national capital, I had arrived at its sinister twin. As I helped to drag tattered foam mattresses and assorted bundles from the back of the troop carrier, I thought of the plans and policies manufactured in the tidy hill-fort of Parliament House, and imagined them on their trajectory across the nation encountering a zone of refraction somewhere in the upper atmosphere, arriving as a mess of shattered fragments on this windy plateau. This image has stayed with me, a visual metaphor for the sustained capacity of remote Aboriginal Australia to subvert the best intentions of successive state and federal governments.
One of the results of moving on a regular basis between predominantly white urban Australia and predominantly black remote Australia is an awareness of the gulf of perception between those people for whom Aboriginal Australia is a reality and those for whom it is an idea. An idea can tolerate a number of abstractions. Reality, on the other hand, must tolerate a number of contradictions. The way in which these contradictions are bridged by both white and black is largely through humour, irony and a well-honed sense of the absurd – qualities generally missing from any public representation of white and Aboriginal interactions.
THE WHITES WHO WORK AT THIS INTERFACE talk about Aboriginal people all the time. The trajectory of every conversation, no matter where it begins, ends up in the same place. These conversations are full of bafflement, hilarity, frustration, admiration and conjecture. They are an essential means of processing the contradictions with which one deals every day.
The Aboriginal people talk about the whites too, but I doubt that it is in the same sustained and obsessive way. I can't be sure of this, and it is something I will probably never know. What I do know is that the Western Desert word for white person, gardiya, runs like a subliminal refrain under the currents of ordinary conversation. No matter how much time one has spent or how strong one's relationships with Aboriginal people, the word follows you about like a bad smell. It is not intended as an insult; it is simply a verbal marker to underline the difference between us and them.
It becomes an insult, however, if one is Aboriginal. In the volatile world of family and community politics, it is the greatest insult that can be levelled at anyone who is suspected of harbouring gardiya aspirations and values. To take on any form of authority over your peers opens you to such an accusation, as does the refusal to share vehicles, money and possessions. People of mixed descent are continually reminded of their compromised status, and children with white blood are frequently referred to as gardiya.
To be white exempts you to some extent from the network of responsibilities and obligations. It is accepted that you belong to an inexplicably cold and selfish branch of the human family, and refusals to share what you have are accepted with equanimity. However, the boundaries become more difficult to hold as relationships deepen, and negotiating one's place in all of this is a continuing process.
By the standards of white Australian society, the life I lead is extremely provisional. I don't have a regular job, I don't own a home and my annual income is in the bracket that attracts a low-income rebate on my tax return. In the eyes of the Aboriginal people among whom I work, I own a reliable vehicle, I can buy fuel when I need it, I always have food in the house, I am allowed to run up an account at the store. These are indicators of wealth. Sometimes, as I weave my evasive course through a web of subtle and overt demands, carrying only small change in my pockets, walking instead of driving so my car is not commandeered as a taxi to ferry people home with their shopping, making continual small adjustments and compromises against my better judgement, I catch a glimpse of the truly provisional nature of people's lives. When I buy diesel at $2.20 a litre, when I pay $5 for a carton of soy milk that would cost me half that in a southern supermarket, I appreciate the mirage-like nature of money in this world. I understand why the fortnightly pension cheque is converted to cash and lost in a card game an hour later. Paul Virilio, in The Aesthetics of Disappearance (MIT Press, 1991), says "number games, like lotto or the lottery, with their disproportionate winnings, connote disobedience to society's laws, exemption from taxes, immediate redressment of poverty".
IF I WAS OF AN ACADEMIC TURN OF MIND, I would be tempted to pursue a thesis on the role and meaning of money in Aboriginal communities. There is no apparent logic to its availability. Acquiring it is a serious preoccupation, with none of the social prohibitions that disguise the same preoccupation in non-Aboriginal society. It is easy to become cynical at the manoeuvring to prove traditional links to mining land and thus access to royalties. It is easy to be appalled by the ruthlessness with which elderly painters are milked by their extended family, or to be exhausted by the relentless pursuit of payment for the smallest snippet of cultural knowledge.
These are the cross-cultural tensions nobody talks about, except in those gardiya enclaves within the communities, as one tries to find ways to dissipate the frustrations and misunderstandings. I found an explanation that took much of my own cultural distaste out of the equation when I made an analogy between hunting and gathering for food and hunting and gathering for money. It may not persuade others, but it works for me. One has only to listen to accounts of traditional itineraries to notice the preoccupation with food. Desert society evolved in the boom and bust economy of one of the hardest environments on the planet, and survival was predicated on the efficiency with which its resources could be utilised. My theory – not entirely frivolous – is that the same energy once spent on getting food is now spent on getting money.
To be white is to be seen to have mysterious access to money. Sometimes I think we are perceived by the Aboriginal people as money guards, standing at the door to vaults full of wealth and doling out pocket money to them while we take all we want for ourselves. The government supply lines that support remote communities are poorly understood by the recipients. In the tightening political environment, there is a growing emphasis on accountability and effective governance, with a number of training programs and workshops designed to assist communities. Earlier this year I was co-opted to assist in the trial of one such program.
"The Australian Governance Story" has been designed in response to a request from Aboriginal communities to explain how government works in Australia. Its purpose is to give the people an overview of where they fit into the larger structures of government, where the money that supports their existence comes from, and their rights and responsibilities in managing these funds and services.
Over the years of my involvement with the community, I have deliberately avoided the Gordian knot of bureaucracy, working instead on cultural mapping projects to record the stories and knowledge people still hold about their country. A fortuitous encounter with a deeply committed and imaginative public servant called Kerrie, one of those people without whom the really hard challenges would never be attempted, resulted in us throwing ideas around about how our different enterprises might assist one another. My brief assignment as a public servant was an experiment, to see whether my work could be married to the daily business of people learning to manage their communities effectively. My reasons for taking it on were self-interested. I try to spend several months of every year in this place, and it is a constant financial struggle to find ways of doing so.