After consensus - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 21: Hidden Queensland
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Peter Sutton
THE EVIDENCE HAS BEEN BUILDING FOR SOME YEARS. At the Remote Communities Futures Conference in Townsville in 1990, where the CYLC had been born, Judy Atkinson, Rick Streatfield, Gracelyn Smallwood, Joe Reser and others relayed to us the dire state of the communities, in some cases giving statistical evidence of a rapid decline since the '70s. But this meeting was essentially in-house.
Then Noel Pearson broke the log-jam of public discourse about community dysfunction in several hard-hitting papers published in 1999 and 2000. Those critical months can now be seen as a watershed, and the key events happened in Queensland. Pearson's publications had been stimulated by some searing journalism written by a fearless Tony Koch in Brisbane's Courier-Mail in 1999. Koch exposed the then dire state of several Cape York Peninsula Aboriginal communities. Pearson took the issues to a national audience, and his Aboriginality guaranteed that many more people listened to him and were prepared to agree with him than would otherwise have been the case.
The fact that Pearson was from Cape York also mattered. He began his reform agenda that year, confronting one by one the more questionable planks of past practice and systematically proposing new directions, careful to speak only for his own region. The once unmentionable became debatable. Many more joined the increasingly raw debates over where to go next. As it had been in the past, Queensland was again the crucible of new directions in Indigenous political life.
Debates over Indigenous policy in the previous two decades had been muted, largely between friends. Now they became muscular and public and could once again, create enemies, as they did in the previous changeover phase from1968-74. The new ideas of that time had vanquished the old ideas and become the new orthodoxy, but by 2005 they lay in pieces. Indigenous policy had again become serious politics, without significant electoral implications.
If we take the bourgeois vantage point that diversity in and of itself is a good thing, then living in an age of policy incoherence, without intellectual consensus and direction, should not be too disturbing. But diversity is no longer the idol that it once was. Concern for social and cultural cohesiveness, which had become a little démodé in more secure times, is back in business. But Australian opinion and policy talk about Indigenous affairs, after three decades of relative consensus, had to have some disarray. Prominent Aboriginal spokespersons, pundits and journalists took up different or even diametrically opposed positions from week to week in the new century. Reactions to the Northern Territory Intervention of 2007-08 were symptomatic of the spill and divided prominent commentators. The painful chemistry was better than an unquestioned status quo.
At first it was journalists, politicians and community spokespersons, rather than academics, who played a central role in the public development of these issues, and in disseminating a newly widened variety of opinions. Think-tanks also engaged with the issues and one at least – the Bennelong Society – was set up purely to deal with Indigenous policy.
This spill was no gradual development. Around 2001-02, the old consensus was gutted almost overnight. More and more people felt free from the past, and there was a massive chain reaction. Email played a part in the rapid networking of new positions, written critiques and confessional epistles. I received a swag of them from all over the country. There was a fair amount of catharsis, a crying game. There was also an overwhelming question for many activist Baby Boomers: had they spent or misspent their adult lives, to some extent at least, chasing moonbeams?
But it took longer for policy-makers, bureaucrats and academics to begin to respond positively to the situation that was now out in the public arena. The media discovered ‘Aboriginal community dysfunction' in 2001, and then apparently rediscovered it in 2005-06. Media memory can be short. In the interim, however, a lot had happened.
Several issues became intertwined in the debates and furores that came in wave upon wave, driven strongly by media revelations and commentary, supported by bureaucratic and political pronouncements, plus some academic noises off. The issues now included welfare dependency, community autonomy, organisational corruption, the future of ATSIC, frontier history wars, racially differential morbidity and life expectancy, poor school attendance, declining literacy and numeracy, substance abuse, violence against women, child sexual abuse, customary law as a criminal defence, staying in versus leaving versus orbiting in and out of the ‘ghettos', service mainstreaming, gang warfare and public rioting, the entry permit system and restrictions on media access, the future of funding for remote settlements, and the imminent expectation of rocketing urban migration by Aboriginal people leaving failing outback communities.
There were other relevant differences between print, radio and television. In the period after 1999, there was an ongoing but narrowing gap between the major media outlets in their approach to this general story of Aboriginal community dysfunction. This may be a rough generalisation, but in my view the print media led the way in terms both of honest reporting of the story and bringing the Aboriginal leadership to account. It's also pretty clear that the northern media led the way. In 2000, Peter Botsman made a scathing attack on the southern media for taking eighteen months to catch up to Tony Koch and Noel Pearson. His article was charmingly titled ‘Pearson, Weipa, and the damned southern media'.
Other changes were afoot. By the mid-2000s, we were regularly being treated to news coverage of the Indigenous leadership in a way that had formerly been inconceivable. More taboos came down. The private lives of leaders had tended to be under some kind of unofficial D-notice. Issues of personal behaviour, and the sometimes linked exercise of sexual power and preferment power, now became intertwined with the politics of bureaucracy and policy-making. The two key behaviours getting exposure were violence against women and financial corruption. It is not really clear whether ATSIC leaders Geoff Clarke, accused of rape, and Sugar Ray Robinson, convicted of rape and investigated for corruption, were taken down by ATSIC's fall or whether the two descents were incapable of separation. About this same time, the chairman of the Central Land Council was convicted of assaulting a woman with a tomahawk and lost his position. A bit later, national figure Galarrwuy Yunupingu's court appearances over alleged violent assaults on one of his wives made front-page pictorial news, not a fourth-page paragraph, and reporters were prepared to ask questions.
The key historical point here, I suggest, is that the Indigenous leadership was suddenly no longer being quarantined by a code of silence that didn't apply to others. The powerful were no longer racially segregated when it came to public scrutiny. Political morality, personal morality and cultural practices were now irrevocably intertwined as one complex issue in the Indigenous arena.
Television journalism by and large trailed behind both the northern and southern print media. It crossed its Rubicon when television brought remote Aboriginal communities into the living room, both as evening news and as investigative and documentary journalism later at night, in an unprecedented series of programs in the mid-2000s, especially on SBS and the ABC. Abuse of minors and women in Central Australia became national news when the ABC's Lateline aired a story based around an interview with Alice Springs prosecutor Nanette Rogers in 2006, with research by Suzanne Smith, a Lateline journalist with strong Aboriginal affairs connections and a history of commitment to Indigenous causes. A follow-up story took the unusual step of identifying local Aboriginal men and their criminal records at a named community, Mutitjulu. The temperature soared not only because of this, but also because the Lateline series became embroiled in federal politics and in warfare between journalists. This was something of a turning point in the relationship between the liberal media and the Indigenous affairs political left. For a long time, this relationship had enjoyed something of a sweetheart deal. But now the loss of consensus was extended to the ethics and politics of revelation.
PART OF THE NEW DEBATE WAS OVER WHAT SOME CRITICS referred to as the reimposition of colonial controls, as against the view espoused by Noel Pearson and others that the political cost of repression was worth the community advantage when crisis conditions obtained.
In Cape York Peninsula, this new approach started to bite well before the Northern Territory Intervention. For example, severe alcohol restrictions were imposed on Aurukun in 2003. Aurukun hospital figures in late 2006 indicated that the average number of sutures required per week, as a result of trauma induced by physical conflict, had gone down by 90 per cent. In the four years 1999-2002, there were six suicides and six homicides in this community of less than a thousand people. That was an annual murder rate of 150 per 100,000, nearly forty times the national average. In the almost four years after the introduction of alcohol controls, there were only two suicides and one death caused by ‘trauma', and no confirmed homicides.
In Cape York as a whole, in the four years from January 2000 there were nine murders, and alcohol was a factor in each. By contrast, in the eighteen months until January 3, 2007, during the alcohol prohibition era, there were no murders. The one murder later in 2007 was in a community which had not adopted the alcohol controls. The system of externally imposed alcohol restriction nonetheless had its critics. There was no evidence of a mass exodus to places where alcohol was freely available, and the direct relationship between alcohol consumption and stupendous levels of violence and death had again been demonstrated.
The 1970s had seen the rapid entry of a new kind of frontier person into the Australian outback. The ones I refer to here were predominantly people who had grown up in Bob Menzies' stable suburbia in the southern towns and cities, including Brisbane, or in similar conditions overseas, and had had the benefit of postwar liberalisation and affluence after times of austerity. They were influenced by anti-authoritarian, liberationist philosophies. They were interested in new knowledge of the exotic and its role in protecting the natural and ancient from the creeping mower of industrialisation and its uniformities. Biologists, ecologists, national park rangers, archaeologists and others benefited from the four-wheel-drive revolution that remote Australia had enjoyed since the postwar period. Anthropologists were just one variation on this theme. In a sense, these people ‘opened up' the new outback as much as tour buses, Cessnas and beef roads did. It was a lot easier than their predecessors' expeditions by packhorse teams and, in the desert, camels.
These modernists overlapped, in many regions, with the last of the generations of Aboriginal people socialised in the bush or on remote cattle stations, who had a rich and complex grasp of their traditional landscapes, languages, religious life, mythology and song. Much of the research we did then could not be carried out now, as so many of those people have passed away and their kind of knowledge has not in general been reproduced to a similar extent in the young. On that score we can be happy to have recorded so much that otherwise would have been lost. That this massive quantum of knowledge has been able to play a constructive part in providing evidence for land claims and cultural heritage management, and in promoting Aboriginal arts – now over many years – is also a source of satisfaction.
But Australian anthropologists have also left the wider public now potentially puzzled as to the lack of fit between their accounts of the distinctively Aboriginal communities and the overwhelming evidence of levels of dysfunctionality and abuse suffered in them in recent decades. We have tended to be protective of the people with whom we have worked, to the point where the recent descent of so many places into dire conditions seems almost scientifically inexplicable. This is not literally true, but we are struggling. Some of us have attempted such explanations, but it must be said that anthropologists, with few exceptions, have neglected two important areas of Indigenous Australian life that now seem of vital importance to understanding why things have become as they are: the social and cultural factors influencing mental health; and the nature of changes in sexual behaviour.
In early 1970s Aurukun, when I first went there, there were occasional large-scale battles, but mostly there was peace. Alcohol found its illicit way in, but only every now and then, and was drunk in secret. Homicide, a common feature of the region from earliest records to the 1950s, had been eradicated. Suicide was unknown. People who survived the rigours of infancy and early childhood had a good chance of living to their seventies. Child abuse, if it occurred, found the records only on the rarest of occasions. Local men mustered cattle and ran the local butcher shop, cut and sawed the timber for house building, built the housing and other constructions, welded and fixed vehicles in the workshop, and worked the vegetable gardens, under a minimal set of mission supervisors. Women not engaged in child-rearing worked in the general store, clothing store and post office. It wasn't heaven, but it certainly wasn't hell. That was to come later.
Truthfulness is not necessarily a good uniter of people. Fictions, or mere simplicitudes, so often better bind us – at least for a time. The end of political consensus on Australian Indigenous policy has been a casualty less of the standard left-right tensions of ‘race politics' than of a battle to get vested interests to acknowledge and deal squarely with the various profound failures of policy and practice, rather than to re-emphasise alleged solutions that will magically materialise after further changes in stratospheric rights. Even people who support a treaty, formal reconciliation and reparations, for example, can no longer be counted on to believe the myth that these things will put food in the bellies of toddlers in the bush. Some, who might be identified as the southern urban soft left, have now become targets of criticism and rejection, even by those for whom they have long formed a key supportive audience. There is a sense that the old political alignments have been thrown up in the air. No one yet knows where the pieces will fall. Are we in an interregnum between illusions? I hope not. My certain feeling is, though, that the current wave of unusual honesty and self-examination in Indigenous affairs needs to proceed a while longer before the future becomes any clearer. ♦
Acknowledgement
I wish to thank the following colleagues and friends for their most helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper: Athol Chase (also for some detailed memories), Inga Clendinnen, David Martin, Bruce Rigsby, Julianne Schultz and David Stephens. Jennifer Dalakis of the South Australian Museum kindly prepared the photo from an old print and Campbell MacKnight helped out with Macassan history. Where possible I have checked contemporary notes or the memories of friends so as to get the past right, but I have also included here some things purely from recall. Research for this essay was supported by the Australian Research Council.