There's a new blog out there to keep your eyes on: Thriving in the Desert, authored by Edwina Circuitt of the Warakurna Artists Art Centre. It made its debut November 10 (which would be yesterday in Australia, but is still today here in the USA. Here's her statement of purpose:

This blog aims to stir the pot and give people a pathway to a better understanding of the issues faced by remote Aboriginal art centres and artists.

This is a collection of personal impressions and insights from my time in Warakurna Community, working as the manager of Warakurna Artists Aboriginal Corporation, Ngaanyatjarra Lands, Western Australia.

I had the pleasure of meeting Edwina in Warakurna back in May, on one of the most memorable stops on our tour of 21 art centres. She's a truly dedicated coordinator, a tough promoter of the community, a generous and hospitable host, and a thorough pleasure to spend time with. I'm delighted that she's going to try to take on the challenge of bringing life in the Central Desert to the rest of the world; it would be hard to think of a better candidate to undertake this task.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Edwina, and best of luck in this and all your endeavors.

The main doors of the art centre (Photograph courtesy of Warakurna Artists)

 

For the past couple of nights a special Four Corners presentation, "Tracking the Intervention" has aired on Australian television, and can now be seen in its entirety on the web. It is well worth the time to watch it: the published transcript doesn't have the coherence of the broadcast. You need to see it to understand it.

This is not simply because it's a television program that relies on visuals as well as narration and interviews. There's nothing quite like having a look at the Maningrida health-care clinic, which is funded by the Northern Territory government as is indistinguishable from any suburban medical office I've visited here in my home town. Then contrast that which the demountable clinic flown in for the use of the Emergency Task Force: two tin shacks connected by a blanket that provides some shade. You have to wonder whether the Commonwealth is spending its money wisely.

A moment later, when Geoff Stewart, a medical officer at the Maningrida Clinic, notes that the $83 million the Commonwealth is spending on the Intervention's health checks could "bring all health services across the Northern Territory up to a level of funding where we’d all be expected to be able to provide a comprehensive range of primary health care services," it's hard to find any logic. Except of course, that the health checks are a one-time cost, whereas adequate funding to provide continuing health services in these communities would require continuing investment that has so far not been discussed.

The second half of the program focuses on the more advanced state of the Intervention at the southern end of the Territory, in Aputula, where "income management" or quarantining of welfare as it used to be known, is already in place and CDEP is history. The confusion in the community store, the clear lack of comprehension that people show, is hard to watch. So is the anger and frustration at the simple unfairness of the blanket quarantine that Ray Ferguson and Pauline Coombes express.

And then there's the men who formerly worked in the community orchard. This was CDEP funded work, and it's gone now. The men's wives (some of them) have gotten "real" jobs at the Aged and Child Care Centre. As a result, the men's payments for "transitional" work in the orchard have been cut dramatically. Perhaps the most outrageous moment in the show comes when they hear that their payments for two weeks work, at 25 hours a week, is now a total of $8.24. Eight dollars!

But most of all, the program is worth watching because it's one of the few opportunities available to hear Aboriginal people speak for themselves. Some of them have good things to say about the Intervention, and bad things to say about CDEP. Others are angry, disgusted by hypocrisy and repeated meaningless promises. But it's all too rare that these people voices are heard and the emotions are seen.

The Four Corners website devoted to this program also provides access to the Constructive Engagement report on the impacts, limitations, and possibilities of the Intervention, commissioned by the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation; to the summary of the Territory's summary of the Report on the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse (i.e. Little Children are Sacred); and to a long list of other reports and news items, along with links to Aboriginal organizations.

There's also a link to another Four Corners program, "The Cape Experiment," broadcast last July. I haven't watched this latter show yet, but it's a similarly in-depth look at Noel Pearson's program out of the Cape York Institute that presaged the debacle in the Territory and should be well worth watching.

***
In related news, Kim Christen of Long Road is the guest author at the anthropology blog Savage Minds this week. Kim is summarizing her experiences of the Intervention and will be reporting on the work she's done establishing a digital cultural archive at Tennant Creek in recent months. While much of what she has to say here has already appeared at Long Road, the commentary from the Savage Minds community, most of whom are not Australianists, is as fascinating as Kim's own insights and reporting.
 

We arrived at the Gove Airport in the wake of a sudden downpour that left the runways and the red earth puddled and the air feeling like the Wet wasn't quite gone yet. On the way to the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, coordinator Andrew Blake explained that the rains were lasting a bit longer this year than usual. Mostly the dry weather has settled in but every now and then.... Well, this was the Top End, but luckily the temperature was still in the 20s.

While driving us to Yirrkala, Andrew also explained the meaning of the art centre's name. We were now in Miwatj country: land of the sunrise. Buku means face, but it also means mind. Larrnggay is the sun in Yolngu-matha. Mulka is a verb that means to touch. It also refers to a sacred public ceremony. Buku-mulka is an idiomatic expression that means to reach the end or climax. In my end is my beginning, said T. S. Eliot.

So, Buku-Larrnggay Mulka. The touch of the sun on one's face. Holding the sunrise and all it suggests in your mind. A ceremony, a place for keeping the culture of the Yolngu. It wasn't terribly far from here, less than a hundred kilometers, that the Wagilag Sisters, who had paddled in a canoe from the eastern island of Bralgu, first set foot on what we now know as Arnhem Land and began their journey across to the west, naming the land, giving birth to the Yolngu clans, leaving the languages. Bralgu in the east, the place where the spirits of the dead return. In my beginning is my end.


Yirrkala Creek
Jarringly, Andrew pointed to a long structure that we were passing just then, stretching as far as the eye could see to either side of the road. As we sped past, he explained that it was a section of a twenty-kilometer long conveyor belt that carried bauxite ore back to Nhulunbuy. In the midst of this humid jungle that looked so nearly primeval, the road that carried us (not primeval at all) was bisected by the signs of the mining that brought an end to the Aboriginal possession of Arnhem Land, prompted the Yirrkala Bark Petition (1, 2)and in turn gave birth to the modern land rights movement. We'd barely even arrived and my head was already spinning with the back-and-forth rhythms of the country.


Part of the bauxite processing operations near Nhulunbuy
Soon enough we were piling out of the troopie at the art centre. Things had changed since I was here two years ago. A new addition was nearly completed, which will house the centre's museum.


Buku-Larrnggay Mulka
The impact of this change was immediately evident as we passed through the reception area and into the space that had formerly been filled with exhibits of Yolngu history and bark paintings by the masters of forty years ago. Now the space was teeming with new work, racks of bark paintings tilted against the walls, and larrakitj towering down the central aisle and laid out in rows. It was a stunning richness, almost too much to take in.

Margo and Joel inspect the new work on offer
We headed down to see the Yirrkala Church Panels, which are housed in a tiny sanctuary reached by either of two semi-spiral stairways. Four meters tall, one illustrating the creation stories of the Dhuwa moiety, the Wagilag sisters, the other Barama and the stories of the Yirritja moiety. Andrew said they are the most important Australian art in existence, and it's not hard to believe that when you're standing in front of them. You can see reproductions of them in books, most comprehensively in Ann Wells's This Their Dreaming (University of Queensland Press, 1972), but nothing really prepares you for the surprise or the solemnity of the experience itself. It's an experience comparable only to two others in my memory: reaching Salisbury Plain and seeing Stonehenge in the distance, and turning through the Propylea for the first glimpse of the Parthenon, like this small room, sites where human ingenuity meets the ineffable.

Back upstairs, I ran into Randin Graves, Buku's yidaki coordinator who has also been helping out at the Arts Centre. Randin has spent years in Yirrkala studying with Yolngu masters, working on recordings, and generally spreading the gospel of the drone pipe in ways that affirm its connection to Yolngu culture and Yolngu law. He has assembled the best online information site about the instrument I've ever seen (and you know there are hundreds of them), Yidakiwuy Dhawu Miwatjngurunydka (Didjeridu Story from Far Northeast Arnhem Land). It covers not simply buying and playing yidaki, but aspects of relevant law and culture, discussions of thorny issues like women and the yidaki, and links to "useful websites owned or made with Yolngu." This last category covers topics ranging from Yothu Yindi to land managment and the Garma Festival to Arnhem weavers.

The sheer richness of the art on offer, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, made the next couple of hours fly past. And then, inevitably, came the time to sort out purchases, payment details, and shipping arrangements. Eventually I wandered out of the Arts Centre for a walk past the Mission Church across the road, and down towards Yirrkala Creek, whose supply of freshwater and sheltered location led the Methodists to choose this cove for their settlement back in the 1930s.


The Mission Church at Yirrkala
Walking back from the shore of the bay, we encountered a group of young boys near the football oval, riding their bicycles in the dusk, popping wheelies, and like all the young people we met in communities across Arnhem Land, eager for a chance to chat with the balanda visitors.


Basketball courts and football oval
We spent the night at the Gove Motel, a comfortable, low-frills establishment, and had dinner at the Gove Yacht Club. After an afternoon immersed in the art of the Yolngu, it was surreal to be dining out on the darkness of the lawn with the lights of the bauxite processing plant glittering across the water. At times like this I'm always tempted to ponder contradictions and cognitive dissonance. But I find it more useful in the end to remind myself of Djambawa Marawili's injunction: "Your knowledge, your education, your background, we are using it. ... OK and in the same way you must learn..."


The central courtyard at Buku-Larrnggay Mulka
 

Just in case you've been vacationing in Antarctica for the last week and haven't heard the news, the latest international YouTube sensation (71,000+ views as of this morning) features the Chooky Dancers from Elcho Island performing at the Ramingining Festival back in September. Dressed in nagas or soccer shorts, ochred up, and driving the audience wild with a soundtrack out of Zorba the Greek, the young men had the crowd howling with delight. The ten dancers mix unequal parts of traditional Yolngu steps, disco line dancing, Busby Berkeley, and Greek syrtaki moves with plain old foot stomping rhythm. According to ABC Radio National, the Chookys have gotten invitations to perform in Canberra and at Darwin's Greek festival, Glenti, and have been broadcast in the town square of the Greek Island of Kastelorizo.

According to comments left on the YouTube site, the group has an unfilmed Bollywood dance in their repertoire as well. Maybe we'll have a chance to see that soon. In the meantime, enjoy this one.

 

I received the following press release today from Ian Munro, CEO of the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation (BAC) in Maningrida, which has mounted what I understand to be the first legal challenge to aspects of the Intervention in the Northern Territory. There will be a directed hearing on Thursday, so watch the newspapers for more information. Some reporting has appeared recently in The Age ("Aboriginal Group Fights Canberra's 'land grab,'" October 27, 2007), The Australian ("High Court test for takeover", October 27) and on the ABC. Last Friday, on PM, Anne Barker interviewed Munro and lawyer St John Frawley.

It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to say that BAC is the lifeblood of enterprise in Maningrida, and represents the kind of economic engine that can offer real hope for Indigenous people, rather than the vague and ill-defined promises that government has on offer. The following description of BAC's scope of operations is quoted from Bill Fogarty and Matthew Ryan's essay, "Monday in Maningrida," published in Coercive Reconciliation (Arena Publications, 2007).

At the forefront of this development model [a cultural alignment between Indigenous and non-Indigenous governance] is an institution named the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation. The Corporation runs twenty separate businesses and last year had a turnover of $26 million. Of this figure, 55 per cent was contributed directly from enterprise and trading activities. The most successful of these enterprise, Maningrida Arts and Culture, returned $1.1 million directly to artists in the 2005-2006 financial year and purchased art and craft from over 700 producers. The corporation also runs, among other things, a mud brick factory, a 'good food' kitchen, housing, roads and building crews, an outstation supply service, a camping and gardening store, a supermarket, and a women's centre that produces quality screenprinted fabric. The Corporation's responsibilities are augmented by a range of human services that it auspices, including an aged care program, partnership with the Malabam Health Board, a disabilities service, and a program to tackle substance abuse. There is also the Maningrida Progress Association, which runs a take-away, another large supermarket, an airline charter service and a ten-room motel, while the local Maningrida Council provides a range of municipal services. Training for the labour force is also provided locally through the Maningrida Jobs Education Training Centre, which has links to registered training organisations across the North Territory (p. 265).

The Djelk Rangers, another important operation of the Corporation, has received attention in the press lately as a prime example of how the abolition of CDEP will threaten not only Indigenous livelihood, but the natural heritage of Australia's northern coasts. The Rangers provide essential services in controlling feral animals and invasive weeds, and support quarantine activities along the coast. They are working with other Indigenous groups in the area of wildfire control, and working with the CSIRO to monitor the after-effects of Cyclone Monica. A Junior Ranger program offers promising and meaningful activities for Year 11 and 12 students. There was a minor hubbub a few months ago when some of these students identified several new species of spiders.

All of this is threatened by the Intervention.

With best wishes for their success, here is the text of the press release.

CONSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGE TO THE ACQUISITION OF PROPERTY IN NT

A case has been commenced in the High Court of Australia challenging the Constitutional validity of certain sections of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 (Cth) and the Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Northern Territory National Emergency Response and Other Measures Act 2007 (Cth).

The case is concerned solely with the Constitutional validity of the provisions that:

1. grant to the Commonwealth a 5 year lease over the Aboriginal land in and around the townships in the Northern Territory;


2. grant to the Commonwealth the power to acquire all of the moveable assets of Aboriginal corporations conducting business, enterprises or activities in the townships;


3. abolish the permit system.

The case has been brought by:

1. Reggie Wurridjal, a traditional Aboriginal owner of land in the Northern Territory known as the Maningrida land; and


2. the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation, a substantial Aboriginal community services organisation which owns and operates businesses and community services on the Maningrida land for the benefit of the Aboriginal community.

The precise basis of the claims of Reggie Wurridjal and Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation is set out in the Statement of Claim filed late yesterday in the High Court. In the Statement of Claim the Plaintiffs are seeking declarations that the relevant provisions of the legislation are invalid, and orders restraining the Commonwealth from relying on those provisions to occupy the Maningrida land or to acquire Bawinanga’s assets.

The High Court has listed the matter for directions on Thursday 1 November 2007.

Further information:

St John Frawley (Partner, Holding Redlich) (03) 9321 9809

Addendum:
Just in from The Age: Justice Kenneth Hayne has granted BAS time to file an amended statement of claim. Next court date is December 3, and the case may go beofre the High Court in March. 

Is it election season that is bringing forth a steady stream of major addresses on the politics of the Intervention? Since the start of October, Brough, Howard, Scrymgour, and now Galarrwuy Yunupingu have appeared in Melbourne and Sydney to deliver major addresses on the the state of Indigenous Australia and the state of emergency.

In the wake of last week's Difference of Opinion broadcast on the Intervention and with the speeches this week by Scrymgour and Yunupingu, along with the reactions those speeches have provoked, the press has begun to focus on divisions.

The Sydney Morning Herald ran an article on Friday (the day of Yunupingu's address in Melbourne) lining up the opposing points of view among Indigenous leaders. Scrymgour and most of the Difference of Opinion panel (Tom Calma, Olga Havnen, and Lowitja O'Donoghue) are cast as staunch opponents of the government's actions. The differing opinion of Sue Gordon puts her alongside Yunupingu, Noel Pearson, and Marcia Langton in supporting the Intervention, according to the Herald.

Meanwhile, over at The Australian, Ashleigh Wilson reported on the political fallout within the Labor Party in the wake of Scrymgour's fiery speech in Sydney, casting the NT Labour government in opposition to Rudd and the national forces of the ALP, which by a curious political algebra of the election season, come out not being the Opposition. Or at least, not in opposition to the Intervention.

On Saturday, Nicolas Rothwell weighed in with a blistering attack on Clare Martin that appeared at first to reiterate the received wisdom that Labor's best strategy right now is not to allow Indigenous issues to become a wedge that will drive voters away from Labour on November 24. But in the end, Rothwell blasted Martin for allowing her personal and political motives to undermine not just Labour but the goals of the Intervention itself. Of course, Rothwell anticipated the Intervention by over a year, starting with his piece in The Australian in May of 2006, "Cry of the Innocent," in which he chronicled violence and abuse in the Territory and ended his tale thus:

It is time for the unthinkable to be put on the agenda. One logical course of action would be for the federal Government to declare a state of emergency in many of the communities and ghetto camps of the centre and the entire north, and to employ the army or a civic service volunteer corps to provide viable settlements with proper facilities and to impose a system of benign social control. This is an unpalatable prescription for those who fancy the ideals of Aboriginal self-determination. It is hard to imagine a more disturbing alternative, except the one that exists today.

And so it has come to pass. And now, says the press, it is a matter of taking sides, seeing who falls where in the black and white discussions of what to do next.

And yet, as I read the capsule reports of the Indigenous participants here, it seems to me in many was that they are all saying much the same thing. The headlines are different, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of disagreement over some fundamental facts: that the abolition of the permit system is a bad idea, that the compulsory leases are an intolerable violation, and that neither of them has the slightest connection to Little Children are Sacred. That the quarantining of welfare is unworkable, and moreover, it is racist.

The difference that I read is that some people are hopeful, and others are cynical. Everyone agrees with Rothwell that the situation today is intolerable, nearly the worst imaginable. The big question is will the government, Howard's or Rudd's (should that come to pass), deliver this time? Will the planning be there, and the ongoing commitment? Or will the government once more fail Indigenous Australians?

And these questions bring me back to Yunupingu's speech. It's a fascinating piece of rhetoric, and it deserves careful reading and consideration. A mash-up artist or a hip-hop wizard could take whole paragraphs from this speech and combine them with selections from this month's talks by either Brough, Howard, or Scrymgour and still come away with a coherent message for the masses.

I think there are two things going on in Yunupingu's speech. While it certainly expresses support for the government's promise to do something about Indigenous disadvantage and even Howard's late recognition of the importance of reconciliation, the speech is more than that. I read it as a challenge to the government: a challenge to make good on their words, to make a positive difference in the lives of Aboriginal Australians.

More than that, it reminds me of Jennifer Deger's description of the Yolngu imagination in Shimmering Screens:

To see and make connections with the practices and priorities of the generations that have gone before, while taking up the possibilities of the modern ... this is Yolngu contemporaneity (p. 210).

Yunupingu will not allow his knowledge of past actions or his disappointment over broken promises to discourage him. When the press sees divisions and locates Yunupingu among the "idealists," I think they do a disservice to his vision. The Yolngu have tried to teach us that life is not black or white, not freshwater or saltwater. It is both. We need all these points of view to move forward. Let's hope that the people in power will listen, will understand that it is asking the unconscionable to move Indigenous Australia into the suburban backyard. Let's remember Stanner's important question: "Suppose they do not know how to cease to be themselves? People who brush aside such a question can know very little about what it is to be an Aboriginal."

Serious Business
Galarrwuy Yunupingu
University of Melbourne Law School
October 26, 2007

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for having me here tonight.

I would like to pay my respects to the traditional owners of this land, the Wurundjeri people and the Kulin nations who, like me, inherited their homeland from their ancestors in the sacred past and who are bound to it by a sacred duty. I thank you for allowing me to speak on your land.

I would also like to thank Vice Chancellor Professor Glyn Davis for his kind introduction.

A new settlement?

Ladies and gentlemen, recently the Prime Minister of Australia announced that if re-elected he will call a referendum to amend the Constitution to recognise the Indigenous people of Australia in the preamble.

He said that he wanted to see a new settlement of the relationship between Indigenous Australia and the Australian nation.

I was particularly pleased when the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Kevin Rudd, announced that he and his party would support the referendum.

In fact I waited anxiously to hear this news. I was delighted when I was told that Mr Rudd was with Mr Howard on this issue and that both leaders would support the idea of a new settlement.

I was delighted because for the first time in Australian political history we have agreement between both parties that there must be a resolution of the place and rights of the Indigenous people of Australia.

This is why I have named this speech Serious Business.

This business is the most serious business that we face as a people and as a nation.

After many long years we are now facing the moment when we must decide how this country will recognise the First Australians.

Captain Cook

When Captain Cook landed on the Australian continent he had with him an order from King George the Third.

That Order was that he obtain the CONSENT of the local people to his arrival and any settlement.

The Order said:

You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain:

Captain Cook and Captain Phillip after him ignored that order.

And of course it was not too long before he was in open conflict with the local Aboriginal people.

The Eora people who owned Port Jackson and Sydney did not recognise the Crown’s claims to ownership just as so many Aboriginal people today still do not recognise those claims.

Cook’s actions were on behalf of the King and he left a legacy that the nation is still trying to tackle today.

Indigenous people have our own law and society.

For my people it is Rom Watangu.

Rom Watangu is the law of the land and the seas, and of life itself. My people are and will always be the owner and the maker of the land and sea.

Rom Watangu is the most powerful and real thing in Yolngu life. We do not pledge allegiance to the Crown.

Captain Phillip and those that followed him failed to understand this. They failed to establish a proper order or balance and this has been tearing away at the heart of the nation ever since.

Howard

Ladies and gentlemen, 220 years later we return to where we started.

A Prime Minister has said that he will now do what was not done before.

He will recognise the special place of Aboriginal people in the Australian nation.

He will sit down and talk with us, consult with us, listen to us, and learn from us in the process of formulating questions for the whole of Australia to vote on.

As I said earlier, doing this properly and honestly is the most serious business that we have faced as a nation.

And it is not just a matter of a Preamble. Mr Howard has talked about a New Settlement and the Commonwealth government’s actions in the Northern Territory show that its search for this new settlement is more than just symbolic.

Mr Howard is trying, on behalf of the nation, and on behalf of the Queen, to get it right.

On behalf of the Gumatj people I must thank the Australian people for this.

As Mr Howard acknowledged, it is the Australian people that have maintained a sense of injustice about the place of Indigenous people in Australia, and the Australian people have finally got through to Mr Howard.

The hundreds of thousands who walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and who signed the Sorry Books, and the good people who have worked away in Aboriginal communities doing good things and volunteering their time, their money and their voice to our cause.

The efforts of these people will find a special place in the history of this nation.

So, I am very grateful as a Gumatj person to everyone who has made their voice heard in the struggle for Indigenous rights.

Because it is a struggle.

Let me just pause and talk a little bit about my people and our struggle.

My people had a good relationship with foreigners for more than two hundred years before the British came to Australia. The Macassans came to the Yolngu coastline each year with the trade winds, or monsoon winds. In my own land, the land of the Gumatj, they came to Gunyangara and camped. They caught and cooked trepang, which they then traded with the Chinese. They negotiated agreements with the Yolngu about their visits and we had very close friendships, and some Yolngu people married Macassans. Some Yolngu went to Macassar and back, and some Yolngu people are buried in Macassar. Some Macassans stayed and lived with us for a time. Children from both cultures were born during that very long history. The Macassans joined with us in our ceremonial life and we shared food, songs, and technology. Macassan words, songs and cultural traditions are still part of the Yolngu culture.

But when the whites came in the nineteenth century, our world changed. By 1885 Arnhem Land had been divided into two pastoral leases. From 1885 to 1893, whites terrorists employed by the pastoral lease companies shot Yolngu and killed them with poisoned horsemeat.

In about 1910, at Gän gan, inland from Blue Mud Bay and the homeland of the famous Yolngu artist Gawarrin Gurmana, white men killed almost an entire clan. Then they rode on horseback to Biranybirany, where they nearly wiped out the Yarrwidi clan, the saltwater people of my Gumatj people. Then they rode to Caledon Bay and Trial Bay. At Gurkawuy, they nearly wiped out the Marrakulu clan, which included the family of the famous artist Old Man Wanambi.

One of the men killed during the expedition of 1910 was an old man of the Djapu clan from the area of Caledon Bay. It was that man’s son, Wonggu, who later became a leading figure in Yolngu resistance to European invasion.

My father told me many stories about these massacres. My father was there when my people left the mainland for the islands off the coast so that they too would not be killed.

These stories are very real to every person in Arnhem Land. They are living memories. My father very courageously brought our families back to the mainland and reasserted our ownership of our land and continued in the practice of our culture.

Then in the 1960’s a mining company came to the Gove Peninsula. Representatives from the government came and simply told us that we were to move out of the way because a mine was to start on our sacred lands.

That moment was the start of land rights because it brought together the senior people of the area and they started to fight for recognition. They painted their position on bark in a statement that is now known as the Bark Petition.

That was in 1963. I was involved in the following years as this struggle continued.

But today, although we have land rights, the mine remains on my land without an agreement with my people. It is a daily reminder that I am not in full control of my land.

So my whole adult life has been a struggle for my rights.

In 1988, with the late Arrernte leader Wenten Rubuntja, I led the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory to make another bark petition, which is called the Barunga Statement. I presented it to the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke who understood our reasoning. He wanted a treaty with us, but he was opposed in Canberra by both sides of politics.

At one point a few years ago I was so frustrated that I wanted to go and bring home the Barunga Statement from where it hung in Parliament.

It was prepared after great consultation with the traditional owners of the Northern Territory. It calls for Aboriginal self-management, a national system of land rights, compensation for loss of lands, respect for Aboriginal identity, an end to discrimination, and the granting of full civil, economic, social and cultural rights.

The Barunga Statement is a foundational document and starting point for this current debate. I am pleased that it still hangs in Parliament.

But I had come to feel that its words had been so ignored that the best thing to do would be to get it out of the Parliament and take it home and bury it in a bark coffin.

My cousin, Wali Wunungmurra, who is the last living signatory to the original Bark Petition told me recently that he wished to go and get that Petition and take it home also.

These are the frustrations that men like Wali and I live with.

But without doubt we now have a new opportunity. We now face the start of a process that has the potential to set this generation apart as a generation of unifiers and peacemakers.

Ladies and gentlemen, it will not be easy.

It will be a great challenge.

Let me say again that this is serious business.

And allow me to make the following 3 points to illustrate how serious this business really is.

Number One - The referendum must be about more than just the Preamble.

We must make changes to the Constitution to make sure that our place in the Preamble is not undermined.

Mr Howard has said that the Constitution must be amended to recognise the special place of Indigenous people in Australia and that means we must deal with the section known as the “race power”.

This is Section 51(26) and it currently allows the government to make laws based on race that can disadvantage Indigenous people. This clause needs to be removed and replaced with a clause that protects and strengthens Indigenous rights.

This includes most importantly our property rights, both to land and sea.

These rights must be recognised and protected.

To date Indigenous people fight a continuous battle to hang on to what rights we have to our land. A line must be drawn that prevents any further taking of our land or sea country without our consent and agreement.

Indigenous people owned the land and the sea before anyone else. This must be recognised once and for all.

Ladies and gentlemen, I want to emphasise this point. If there is to be a settlement at all, the Constitution must not just recognise us – it must recognise what is ours and what has been taken from us.

We seek this recognition within the nation, not outside it. This is a discussion we must have as Australians.

Point Number Two - We must ensure that we bring all of Australia along with this process.

These changes - this Settlement - affects every Australian. Every Australian must have a chance to have their voice heard.

We need balance in this Settlement.

To obtain balance we must ensure that every Australian has an opportunity to involve himself or herself in this discussion.

When we are done, every citizen can proudly stand and acknowledge what they have achieved in their country.

They can say: “This is our country. It is a country that we are all proud of. We now rejoice and celebrate with our Indigenous brothers and sisters together as one.”

We live in a multicultural nation that is made up of many different cultures and languages. This needs to be recognised so that we can deeply and honestly express who we are as a nation.

There will be opposition from Aboriginal people who are so distressed by their personal circumstances that they are incapable of agreeing about anything that involves government. These people too must be heard. Let us put our agreed position, achieved in good faith with all Australians, to a referendum of Aboriginal voters. This will require them to think about their future: yes or no? Do they want dignity or do they want conflict for all our future generations?

Point Number Three - This point concerns the practical aspects of this Settlement. There can be no settlement if Indigenous people remain the most disadvantaged citizens in the nation.

Words can set the scene but real commitments are required to tackle poverty and disadvantage. Fixing these problems will take time, energy and money. The immediate problems of the Indigenous world cannot be put to one side as we start to talk about symbols and words. This is why I have supported the Emergency Intervention in the Northern Territory. There are problems with its implementation that must be fixed, and I am personally committed to putting my shoulder to the wheel and getting the intervention working. And so must we all, for the sake of the children.

And these children must have a future, which means economic development.

Significant investment and effort is required in order to build economies that can provide jobs and income for future generations.

These are matters I have discussed at length with Noel Pearson.

Our words must inspire us to greater efforts on behalf of the children and the old people and the everyday people who struggle out there in our communities.

Ladies and gentlemen, I ask that you come with me in this great challenge.

In this most serious business.

It will not be an easy task and I know from experience that many times we will want to stand up and walk away from the table. But we must persist. We must never give up on this task as it is the most important task.

We must find the balance between all the people of this nation.

We need to go into this Hand in Hand and Heart to Heart with our fellow Australians.

And because our loss is great we will need face to face dealings and eye to eye talk.

Reconciliation does not come about because we agree to sit down and talk. Reconciliation only comes about when we have talked and reached an understanding. It is at the end of that process, when we shake hands and go off into our day-to-day lives, that is when we are reconciled; reconciliation does not come just from turning up to a meeting place.

Reconciliation comes about because of honesty, truth and making good what wrong has been done.

There has been much wrong done to my people, including to the Stolen Generations. These wrongs must be made right.

We have the opportunity now so I encourage you all to work towards this great prize that is reconciliation.

Let's get it right once and for all.

Thank you.

 

Marion Scrymgour, the first female Aboriginal Minister, delivered the Charles Perkins Oration last Tuesday night, October 23 2007, in Sydney. Since I gave Mal Brough ample space in this blog a few weeks ago afer he delivered the Deakin Lecture in Melbourne, fairness alone would dictate equal time for Minister Scrymgour.

But it is more than just a sense of fairness or equal time that makes me go to the lengths of reproducing Scrymgour's speech here. As outraged as I was by Brough's remarks, I am moved by the simplicity and the passion of what Scrymgour has to say. Although the women's movement long ago gave us the injunction that "the personal is political," Scrymgour has given eloquent voice to that sentiment in her remarks.

And it is a measure of just how far Brough is removed from the "reality-based community" that he can respond to this speech by saying "I mean, come on, let's get real. I don't know where Marion's living but she's not living in the town camps of Alice Springs, she's not living in the town camps of Tennant Creek." In my conclusion remarks last week about the new book Coercive Reconciliation, I noted that the theme of respect ran through many of the essays in that volume. (And, honestly, I hadn't heard Kevin Rudd's remarks to that effect in the Leaders' Debate at that point.) Brough has, with these remarks, once again demonstrated a fundamental lack of respect for those who agree with him. How can he hope to maintain his credibility as a leader when he argues like a petulant teenager?

I understand that Awaye! will be broadcasting Scrymgour's oration this Saturday at 6 pm, and again on Monday at 3 pm. In the meantime, I hope you too will be moved by this heartfelt oration. I have taken the liberty of adding links to several sources Scrymgour refers to in her remarks.

Whose national emergency?

Caboolture and Kirribili? or Milikapiti and Mutitjulu?

Charles Perkins Oration 2007

Marion Scrymgour MLA

May I first acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, traditional owners of the land on which we stand, and thank "Chicka" Madden for his welcome to country.

I acknowledge Vice-Chancellor Gavin Brown, Chicka Dixon, guests and friends.

May I thank, as well, the Perkins family, both for their welcome earlier this evening, as well as the great honour of their invitation to me to speak at an event that commemorates Eileen’s husband and, in the case of Hetti, Adam and Rachel, their father, Charles Perkins.

Our families share some common history, which I will mention shortly.

My father died very recently, on Wednesday 10 October. The following day the Prime Minister announced his claimed conversion to symbolic reconciliation. The day after that, in an interview on ABC Radio, he drew a distinction between saying sorry and an apology. He said that saying sorry was an expression of sympathy, for example “I’m sorry that your mother died”. He said that an apology was something different - a formal acknowledgement of blame and responsibility.


I accept and agree with the distinction that the Prime Minister has drawn. I think it is a useful one.

I am not particularly interested in “sorry”. I am interested in the exercise of separating those bad things for which the Commonwealth had no responsibility, from the ones for which it had exclusive responsibility. And I am interested in getting an apology for the matters in the exclusive responsibility category.

Between 1911 and 1978 the Commonwealth - and the Commonwealth alone - ran the Northern Territory. The legal and political entity which Mr Howard heads up - and the legislature of which he has been a member for 33 years - is the same legal and political entity which took my father away from his family and culture, leaving no return roadmap. The Commonwealth had exclusive responsibility for what happened to my father - and other Territorians like him. The apology I seek is a Northern Territory-specific apology for that matter.

I want to stick for a bit with the unfinished business of my father’s childhood, before I move on to discuss the current Commonwealth Intervention in the Northern Territory.

I think it is important and relevant because the Commonwealth’s record during the long period of its earlier Northern Territory Intervention inevitably influences to some extent my attitude to the current one. Perhaps more importantly, the values and principles which motivated the Commonwealth back then, continue to motivate the Commonwealth’s principal decision-maker today.

I guess the first thing to absorb is that no matter how strange and unfamiliar non-Aboriginal people may find central Australia now, back then - in the thirties - it was a different world, certainly a different country. Backtracking a little, Leichardt had disappeared into thin air some time after 1848. In 1864 the telegraph line opened up a tentative north-south corridor of notional white presence, but it was hardly a credible assertion of sovereignty. As in many other parts of Australia, the real business of colonisation was privatised, left to pastoralists, miners, or even dingo trappers, who tried to carve a marginal frontier existence for themselves in harsh and unpromising country.

For the most part right up until the transfer of administrative responsibility from South Australia to the Commonwealth in 1911, Aboriginal tribes carried on relatively oblivious to the encroaching new order. It was a benign neglect born of necessity - the South Australian authorities of the time could not have comprehensively subjugated and regulated the Aboriginal population even if they had wanted to.

But by the early 1930s large cattle station domains had been established across the Centre, Alice Springs was a permanent town, and the Commonwealth mounted police patrolled regularly throughout those parts of the region to which the cattlemen and miners had laid claim. Large numbers of Aboriginal people now lived either on pastorally unproductive but accessible land designated as Aboriginal reserves, or on the fringes of station settlements. Aboriginal people were under the thumb. The 1933 Coniston Massacre was just one demonstration of that.

The new colonial order was reflected in contemporary legislation. There had already been a generic South Australian act which purported to control and regulate Aboriginal people in the same sort of manner as was being done in other jurisdictions. But in 1918 the Commonwealth introduced a much more detailed and rigorous regime, which would be enforced on the ground by mounted police - the proxy foot soldiers of the early Native Affairs bureaucracy. Many of them were former soldiers, still scarred from the First World War.

The legislation was called the Aboriginals Ordinance, and it authorised the physical removal and detention of any Aboriginal or “half caste” - the actual term used in the legislation - from pretty much anywhere in the Territory. It also allowed for the establishment of “Aboriginals Institutions” for the purpose of warehousing the removed “half castes”.

Regardless of any ancillary or collateral welfare considerations pertaining to any particular case, the removal power was primarily used for the purpose of separating children of mixed race descent so that they could be assimilated.


At this point in Australia’s history, the Aboriginal tribes in central Australia were a newly subject people, to whom settler language, culture, and morés were foreign. Scarcity of resources and other economic imperatives had forced many of them to interact strategically - or in other cases in circumstances of abject submission - with the vanguard of white colonisation. That vanguard was almost exclusively male and made up of settlers and government men.

The government men who Aboriginal people came into contact with were mostly the mounted police officers who determined how far the Federal Government’s writ would run in the heart of the continent. A small number of Aboriginal people succeeded in living with a foot in both worlds, working as stockmen or police trackers if they were men, or in different roles if they were women. The Commonwealth had, with some degree of success, undertaken the “stabilisation” stage of its first Northern Territory Intervention.

It was into this strange and unwelcoming environment that my father was born.
The paucity of records about his childhood is in my view a crime, one that will continue to haunt my family. But that documentary vacuum is the norm not the exception in relation to Aboriginal people of Dad’s age who were removed and institutionalised by the Commonwealth under the Ordinance.

As best we can piece it together, in particular with the past assistance of my Aunty Elsie Hayes, Dad’s father may have been a mixed-race stockman called Jack Woods Perrurle, an Anmatyerre man who is mentioned in the writings of Strehlow, and who attempted to raise a family with an Aboriginal woman from the Ti Tree area called Dolly Penangke. But Dolly was not Dad’s mother and we don’t know who was.

All we know for sure is that Dad was taken from somewhere in central Australia to the Commonwealth-run Central Australian “Aboriginals Institution” called “the Bungalow”.

I want to pause here and ask you to imagine what it would have been like for my father - not just as a child, but throughout his whole life - to not know from what family and what place he was taken, let alone for what purported reason.


For any white child in the Territory to be taken into Commonwealth care back in the thirties, the authorities needed to make an application to a court under the State Childrens Act of South Australia, one of the many pieces of South Australian legislation that continued to apply in the Territory after 1911. There would have been a hearing involving the adducing of evidence, and some kind of a transcript. Dates, and places would have been stated, and the child’s parents identified. It is hardly a surprise that, in later life, my father’s mechanism for coping with this void was to turn his heart and mind against any thought of recovering what he had lost. Despite numerous urgings by his children and others, my father never went back to Central Australia.

It is with a heavy heart that I dedicate this speech to him.

So what sort of a place was the Bungalow?

The first version of it was established near the Police Station in Alice Springs, and it attracted critical comment from journalists and other concerned citizens. With a view to trying to reduce the Commonwealth’s administrative burden, then Prime Minister Stanley Bruce wrote in 1927 to his South Australian counterpart to see whether South Australia would take the lighter skinned mixed race children slated for removal - ’quadroons’ and ‘octroons’ as the language had it then. He said:

They could hardly be distinguished from ordinary white children …If these babies were removed, at their present early age, from their present environment to homes in South Australia, they would not know in later life that they had Aboriginal blood and would probably be absorbed into the white population and become useful citizens.

The words sound harsh and discordant today, but in my opinion they are not really all that different from those of the current Prime Minister, with his fixation on “one Australia” and the culture and values he wants to impose through his new citizenship test.

The Bungalow was moved from Alice Springs to Jay Creek in 1928. It was then brought back to Alice Springs in 1932, where it was located at the Old Telegraph Station. We don’t know for sure, but it is likely that after his removal it was to Jay Creek that Dad was taken. Here is an extract from a letter about conditions at Jay Creek written to the then Commonwealth Minister for Home and Territories in 1929:



The accommodation provided for them exhausts my power to paint adequately. A rough floor of burnt lime and sand to make a form of cement has been laid down. A very rough framework of wood was put up, and some dilapidated sheets of corrugated iron roughly thrown over it. There are no doors or windows. A more draughty, ugly, dilapidated place one could hardly imagine. I think the children would be less liable to colds in the open than in the disgraceful accommodation provided for them. And that is not the worst. Boys and girls of all ages from one year old to sixteen are herded in this so-called room whose dimensions are about 24 feet by 50 feet. At present there are 48 children in the institution. The girls and boys are mixed indiscriminately. The children are issued with two blankets and lie on the floor. One small stove has to cook bread for over fifty people. They apparently have never had fruit or vegetables. The ration scale has been deplorable …the scale is meagre in the extreme. The only lighting is two hurricane lamps. The children have no games or amusements of any description. Cooking utensils are practically nil. There are six bowls and twenty towels to serve everybody.

In the same year when this letter was written, a middle-aged husband and wife couple, the Freemans, were hired by the Commonwealth administration as part of the first Intervention to manage this particular “Aboriginals Institution”.


In March 1934, Mr.Freeman was accused and found guilty of sexually assaulting a number of the girls at the Bungalow.

My father was one of the unfortunates who were detained in the Bungalow in its earlier years. Charles Perkins was placed there a fair bit later, more towards the end of its ignoble history. Both my father and Charles were sent from the Bungalow to comparatively much better places: in my father’s case to the Methodist Mission on Croker Island; and in Charles’ case to St. Francis College in Adelaide.


A second Intervention

On 21 June this year, the Prime Minister and Indigenous Affairs minister Mal Brough announced their response to what they called “akin to a national emergency”. John Howard likened it to Australia’s “Hurricane Katrina”.


The “national emergency” was in response to an inquiry commissioned in August last year, carried out by Pat Anderson and Rex Wild - the Little children are sacred report - into child abuse on Aboriginal townships and communities. The report and its 97 recommendations had been delivered in April, and was released a couple of months later.

What was to be shortly enshrined in 500 pages of legislation was shocking - and unexpected. The guts of it was that:



• children would be subjected to compulsory health checks;


• alcohol and pornography would be banned on all Aboriginal land, and the importation of kava effectively banned, with the suggestion that “wet canteens” would be established on communities - even on those that didn’t want them;


• 50 per cent of welfare payments would be quarantined, to control recipients’ spending on alcohol, cigarettes and gambling, with food to be spent at selected stores;


• the federal government would compulsorily acquire leases over 73 “prescribed” towns and communities;


• federal government “business managers’ would be recruited to take control of all Commonwealth programs (and many Territory Government programs) on prescribed places, with powers to control and direct Aboriginal organisations and their assets;


• the army would be deployed and federal police would be joined by police from all other states and territories to bring law and order to the Aboriginal domain;


• the permit system applying to those prescribed places would be abolished; and


• the Community Development Employment Program - CDEP - would be abolished, with participants forced on to welfare payments so their income could also be quarantined and controlled.


In the context of a gathering election campaign in which Howard had been trailing in the opinion polls for months, it was difficult to escape the conclusion that the initial commentators were right. This was Howard’s “rabbit out of a hat” - the black kids’ Tampa.

Mind you, this was not the first time the Howard - and other governments - had been made aware of child abuse and neglect in Aboriginal communities. Queensland, Western Australia and NSW had similar inquiries in recent years, with little apparent action from those jurisdictions - and nothing from the Howard government. Aboriginal women had been begging for action from Howard over a raft of social problems the best part of a decade - entreaties which he had studiously ignored or paid lip service to. Women’s shelters; night patrols; kids programs had been dumped by the Commonwealth over that decade, a process which had been accelerated since the abolition of ATSIC after the 2004 elections.

In this case - unlike the states - the Commonwealth could do it because they constitutionally could, without question, and it was on that basis the Commonwealth’s second Intervention into the Northern Territory began.


The response of the general public was one of general support, even if Howard didn’t get his anticipated bounce in the opinion polls. Federal Labor fell into line, and supported the Intervention.

Apart from cynicism about the timing of the response and the coming elections, the media - led by the Canberra press gallery - has been largely one of breathless support and enthusiasm as, in the first weeks, they were embedded with Malcolm Brough and Norforce troops. At least one southern news editor purported to see salvation for Territory blackfellas in this “boots on ground” strategy.


At last, it seemed to be said “something was being done”. It was all about “protecting the kids”

But was it?

In the 500+ pages encompassing the “National Emergency Response” legislation, the words “child” or “children” are not mentioned once. The legislation does not address any of the 97 recommendations of the report, and as Pat Anderson, one of the authors of Little Children are Sacred, has said: “There is no relationship between their emergency powers and what’s in our report.”


At the heart of the federal government’s dismissal of the report, is its deliberate rejection of the very first of those 97 recommendations: “that governments commit to genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for Aboriginal communities”.

That is, as I mentioned, that the values and principles which motivated the Commonwealth in its first Intervention in 1911, continue to motivate the Commonwealth’s response to Aboriginal people 96 years on.

But there is more to it than that. It is as if the second Intervention has given the Commonwealth permission to enact a great undoing of our lives. Aboriginal Territorians are being herded back to the primitivism of assimilation and the days of native welfare. It has been a deliberate, savage attack on the sanctity of Aboriginal family life. As I said in parliament a month ago, after speaking with hundreds of Aboriginal people out bush:


People feel betrayed. Good, honest, caring members of our remote towns and communities spoke up to the inquiry. They spoke from their hearts - and many spoke for the first time about their fears. And the result has been that they have been flogged by distant, ideologically driven politicians and bureaucrats remote from the realities of our every day lives.

Instead of compassion and understanding, and a working through of the ways and means of reaching mutual understandings and solutions, thousands of our parents; thousands of our grand parents, have been tarred by the same brush.
I have attended meetings made up of decent, caring fathers, uncles, brothers and grandfathers, who feel they have been universally branded as perpetrators. As child abusers. To see these men, who are undoubtedly innocent of the horrific charges being bandied about, reduced to helplessness and tears, speaks to me of widespread social damage - not of a decent approach to tackling child abuse.

Aboriginal men have been universally condemned as uncaring, substance-abusing vicious molesters; while women have been portrayed as hopelessly weak, pathetic creatures, incapable of caring for their families or their children.


And woe betide anyone - Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal - who dares criticise the second Intervention. Time and again, Mal Brough has launched attacks on anyone who has raised doubts and fears about this new world order for Aboriginal Territorians. It goes far beyond “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”. According to Brough, “if you’re not with us, you are for the perpetrators”. The new world order for Aboriginal people requires, it seems, a vicious new McCarthyism.

John Howard and Malcolm Brough, this evening I am doing far more than merely criticising you and your government’s assault on Aboriginal Territorians, I am condemning its motivation; I am condemning its operations; and I am condemning - outright - its moral basis and the moral authority you purport to exercise in “saving the children”.

You are doing nothing of the kind.

And as someone who has worked in Aboriginal health for much of my working life; as someone who has focussed on child protection, and indeed as someone who now has ministerial responsibility for child protection, I will not be cowed by the bully boy tactics of McCarthyism - old or new.



The impending social crisis has arrived

At the 2002 Charles Perkins Oration, Marcia Langton spoke of an “impending social crisis” for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. In my view, and I am sure she would agree, it was a crisis that had been building for the best part of 30 years, and she spoke in the following terms:




A range of social indicators and demographic data point to an impending social crisis within the next decade in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations, if, as is likely, the predicted rapid population increase and the inadequate government responses to the present status of Indigenous people in relation to their health, housing, education and employment conditions occur. Despite the elaborate governmental arrangements purportedly designed to overcome these disadvantages, it is clear that fresh strategic policy thinking is required to identify and establish the arrangements that would enable effective dealings by all stakeholders to minimize the impact of the predicted crisis in Indigenous socio-economic conditions.

With the alarms ringing, it is time to reconsider how we deal with these matters of national importance.


Aboriginal men and women in key political and administrative positions are presently debating the idea of a new deal for Aboriginal people. The concept of a framework agreement and national partnership arrangement aimed at settling matters in contention between Indigenous and settler Australians is one of the key ideas under debate, catalysed by the worsening social and economic situation of many Aboriginal people”.

Half of that decade Marcia warned about has passed. Tragically, she has been proven largely right … and the Little Children are Sacred report has documented elements of that crisis - elements on which the Australian Government has palpably failed to act, and over which the Australian Government has refused to countenance any meaningful dialogue, let alone action.

Things have got worse, and in many areas they have been getting worse at a faster rate. The impending social crisis has arrived.

The have been three advance parties of Howard and Brough’s second Commonwealth Intervention. It has been led and accompanied all the way by the army. The last time civilian authority was overturned by the military in the Northern Territory was in the aftermath of Cyclone Tracy. The then-commanding officer post-Tracy, General Stretton, turned his powers over to civilians within a week of that disaster. We look like having army direction on Aboriginal communities for at least a year.

The first to go out have been “assessment teams”. Their job has been to visit the 73 “prescribed” towns and communities to look at housing, health, education, enterprise and employment.

The second have been health teams of well meaning doctors and nurses checking child health. Thanks to the office of Tony Abbott and the Office Of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health - God bless them - Brough’s “compulsory” medical checks were overturned as constituting potential assault and in breach of rather too many international conventions, even for the taste of a Howard government.

The third teams have been made up of public servants “transitioning” Aboriginal people away from CDEP into so-called “real jobs”. Part of their task has been to educate people about “income management”, that is, how to deal with the fact that half of their welfare income is to be controlled by government.

These advance parties have been a fraud on the Australian public generally, and Aboriginal Territorians in particular. It’s been a circus: no more, no less.


One small community in central Australia, as of ten days ago, has been visited by 164 Commonwealth public servants and consultants related to the Intervention for a population of a few hundred over a period of ten weeks. This included a departmental visit - from public servants flown in from Canberra - to download data from the community’s computer on to a Government memory stick. That same data had been emailed to the same department - to their Canberra headquarters - ten days beforehand.

Stories like this abound, but the assessment teams have found out nothing the Commonwealth and Territory governments have not known for decades. The two governments have been diligently collecting all manner of data for years. They have noted, for example, that in 1998 the housing backlog for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory was measured at $465 million. In 2001 that figured was calculated at $850 million; by 2005 it was around $1.2 billion. It is now over $2 billion. Like philosophers debating the numbers of angels on the head of a pin, or physicists counting exotic sub-atomic quarks and hadrons in particle accelerators, the Commonwealth has documented all this and more - but to less effect.

As I noted a month ago:

The so-called “survey” is little more than window-dressing. We know the results. They will tell us that - for generations - Aboriginal Territorians have endured poor housing; poor health; low educational outcomes; and few job prospects. While not necessarily directly causal in relationship, these social factors, which the Commonwealth has known about for 30 years; and which the current Federal Government has presided over for 11 years; have undoubted impact on the incidence and severity of community and family violence, sexual abuse and substance abuse.


Further, the child health teams have told us nothing we do not already know about Aboriginal child health in the Territory - in fact their work has been an object lesson in how not to do things properly. They have told us less than what we know, and have added to ignorance rather than hope.


The medical teams, on average, have barely got to 67 per cent of the children they are targeting - and this figure has been lower at many of the larger communities. Not only is this inadequate in epidemiological terms, the teams in any case are detecting levels of damage and disease far lower than the incidence levels we know exist on these communities. The teams are well meaning - but not properly trained to detect conditions they just wouldn’t encounter in southern suburban GP or hospital settings.

For example, the 7.30 Report recently documented Fred Hollows teams surveying for trachoma and related damage on communities covered by these same health teams. Surveying over 80 per cent of the local populations, they have detected in excess of 20 per cent damage from trachoma to kids in the 0-14 group, and have been treating and referring those kids.

The National response teams have barely detected trachoma - it is a disease that disappeared from white Australia in the 1930s, after all.


This does not just do a disservice to the children the teams are checking, but may also threaten to reduce future resources to children’s health in the future. “It’s not as bad as we thought,” it might be said. “We are only detecting ear problems among 30 per cent of the kids”. No matter previous studies have shown effects of ear disease in up to 90 per cent of kids by the time they reach 14, and that the World Health Organisation suggests that a prevalence rate of Chronic Suppurative Otitis Media of four per cent indicates “a massive public health problem requiring urgent attention”.


The only bright light in this is the fact that the Commonwealth - at least at the level of OATSIH and Abbott’s office, if not that of Howard and Brough - are recognising the need for long term strategies, and are in serious negotiations with the Aboriginal Medical Service Alliance of the Northern Territory (AMSANT).


But the cruellest part of the fraud being perpetrated as part of the second Intervention relates to the abolition of the Community Development Employment Program - or CDEP.

Unlike any other in the western world, the Howard Government, as part of their response to the National Emergency, has embarked on a deliberate policy of moving people from work to welfare. In their bid to control the incomes of as many Aboriginal people as possible - and discovering that CDEP is classified as a waged income, and not welfare - they are in the process of dismantling CDEP, and announced it as part of the Intervention on 23 July.

For people on CDEP, that means being told their wages - earned through the sweat of the brow - are to be abolished, and they are to be moved to Work for the Dole, or short term training programs.

To be sure, some will get full time jobs - however almost exclusively in the public sector at local and Territory Government level. However, of the 7500 people currently on CDEP, some 5,500 people will be thrown out of work. This will push Aboriginal unemployment rates in the Territory to over 50 per cent, and in remote areas to over 75 per cent.

I have been astonished at the way in which the Federal Government - and minister for Workplace Participation Sharman Stone - has been able to get away with this - and convince the media in particular that what they are saying is anything other than a lie and a hoax. She has continually been able to get away with stating that CDEP is welfare - when it is in fact an employment program that has been in existence for 30 years. She has continually referred to CDEP as “sit down money”, when in fact CDEP was created specifically to get people off the dole - ”sit down money” - and into work. She re-invents history and she has got away with the oft-repeated lie that people now on CDEP will be “transitioned” to “real jobs” - when only a fraction will successfully get jobs.

And the media - and initially federal Labour - have swallowed the lie. At least federal Labor has been persuaded by its Territory representatives to resurrect a reformed CDEP if they are elected.

Ironically, we should refer again back to Professor Langton’s Charles Perkins Oration of five years ago, and her lengthy discussion of CDEP. She noted that CDEP had been slowly starved of funds in the first years of the Howard Government; she called for “imagination” in seeing Aboriginal people as participants in the economy, with detailed proposals for a reformed and revitalised CDEP, when she said:




I propose, that the CDEP scheme requires radical transformation into a genuine labour market strategy that brings Aboriginal people into the workforce in sufficient numbers to enable them to escape the poverty trap.

It’s not so much that Professor Langton’s words were ignored, but that the second Intervention’s idea of a “labour market strategy” has little to do with getting people into the paid workforce - let alone assist the protection of children.


The loss of CDEP incomes - including the capacity for those wages to be topped up through extra hours of work - and relegation to capped welfare incomes, will massively reduce family incomes, leading to less money for food for their kids. Thousands of workers will now no longer be able to contribute to superannuation as they move to welfare; thousands deprived the dignity of productive work.


Furthermore, Aboriginal enterprises that have been built - sometimes over many years - on the basis of subsidised wages through CDEP, now face ruin or drastic reductions in their capacity and effectiveness.

The effect of the removal of CDEP on the Aboriginal arts industry - one of the few areas in which Aboriginal workers enjoy a real competitive advantage - might be catastrophic. Its effect on tourism has been documented - to no avail - by Gunya Tours based at the central Australian community of Titjikala. The potential effects on land and sea management programs across northern and central Australia has been highlighted by Aboriginal groups throughout the region.

In my own seat of Arafura, the town of Maningrida has 550 CDEP participants across some 28 businesses. Those enterprises face a bleak future; the workers in those businesses face - at best - great uncertainty.

As I made clear through my father’s story, the first Intervention had little regard for children; the second Intervention - and its National Emergency response - offers little more.

Indeed it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the interests of the current regime in Canberra lie elsewhere.

The second intervention: the crisis within the crisis

In thinking about tonight’s talk, I realised it wasn’t enough to just consider the crisis in the Aboriginal towns and communities across the Territory; the acceleration of that crisis as predicted by Professor Langton; and the ways in which the Commonwealth’s second Intervention is affecting our people.


It is a crisis that has been ongoing for 219 years, and in a sense the second Intervention is just another milestone along that path. It is conceptually more straight forward to think of that crisis as solely an Aboriginal one, or more accurately as one that just affects Aboriginal people. It is comparatively easy to document the National emergency as it affects our people, from Mutitjulu to Milikapiti.

But there is another crisis we have here - another National Emergency, another crying need for a National Response.

And that is the crisis of the “settler society” - a society that appears incapable of resolving its own contradictions - let alone the contradictions of occupying the Australian continent.

This second crisis is, in a sense, more deeply entrenched. There is an apparent lack of capacity by “settler society” to resolve - let alone understand - the contradictions of living on the oldest continent, in a world threatened by escalating environmental destruction. The longest economic boom in modern Australian history - the cause of much back slapping and self congratulation - is being fed by growing Asian economies that are in turn accelerating an approaching environmental disaster.

Unwilling and unable to resolve these big picture issues, the representatives of settler society chose to launch the second Intervention into the Northern Territory. Their political rivals in federal Labor, scrambling for power themselves, have proved largely incapable of doing much more than hang on to the Coalition’s political apron strings.

It is for that reason I will briefly consider aspects of the second Intervention that indicate we are little better off now than when my father was shanghaied to the Bungalow three quarters of a century ago.

While I have discussed the ineffectiveness of the second Intervention, there are aspects to the legislation passed, in only a single day’s sittings in the House of Representatives, that speaks to the second crisis: the crisis from Caboolture to Kirribilli.

Forty years ago, by an overwhelming vote, the 1967 referendum was passed. It did not, as common myth portrays, recognise Aboriginal people as citizens, give us the right to vote, or indeed the right to drink.

It allowed us to be counted in the census - so I guess that did recognise that we existed as part of the Australian population. It also allowed the Commonwealth to legislate for “the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.”

It is known as the “race power”, and was long thought that legislation by the Commonwealth after 1967 under this power would be for the benefit of Aboriginal people because previously that had only been a power allowed to the states.


In 1975, the Race Discrimination Act was passed which, based on international law, ultimately allowed the High Court to consider some of the nation’s “unfinished business” with the first Australians, and led to the High Court Mabo decision which recognised native title.

But enter the second Intervention.

For only the third time since the introduction of the Race Discrimination Act, legislation has been introduced that specifically excludes the operation of that Act.

And it depends on the “race power” to achieve this. The so-called “race power”, passed overwhelmingly 40 years ago, and always assumed to be for the “benefit” of Aboriginal people, now allows discrimination against Aboriginal people by dumping the Race Discrimination Act.

And on the three occasions it has been suspended, it has been aimed at Aboriginal people only: over the Wik legislation; over Hindmarsh Island; and for the purposes of the second Intervention into the Northern Territory.
And let’s look at the way it has been used in that Intervention. It has been used:



• to compulsorily acquire interest in Aboriginal private property in “prescribed communities”;


• to remove the permit system, or the right of Aboriginal traditional owners to say who can, and who cannot, come onto their property;


• to arbitrarily control individual Aboriginal incomes; and


• to control of Aboriginal organisations and assets.
  
  


It is, in other words, a leap back to the days of the first Intervention, to the days of assimilation, control and coercion; to the days when Aboriginal people were regarded as too naïve, and too simple, to control their own affairs.


And it has nothing to do with the protection of children.


There is something else going on here. Just why those who represent the cultures of Caboolture and Kirribilli see it as so critical to roll back on land rights, and to use openly discriminatory legislation to achieve it, beggars belief. Why have they exploited the undoubted problems faced by Aboriginal families as the pretext for achieving these ideological ends?

I find it difficult to comprehend.

Is the crisis, from Caboolture to Kirribilli, as simple as a lack of capacity to abandon past thinking about colonialism; of not having the imagination to imagine other ways of ordering the world?

If that is it - we are indeed in a national emergency. The times should be changing, not reverting to a colonial past.

The puzzle, on any rational analysis, is that Australia is well placed to resolve the material poverty of Aboriginal Australia. The current election has thrown up between $31-34 billion in personal tax savings alone - and the commentators reckon there may be another $20 billion on offer.

In the context of the Northern Territory, and noting that the Commonwealth has “reinserted itself into the affairs of the Northern Territory”, economist Will Sanders has pointed out that places such as the Northern Territory are perennially disadvantaged in funding “catch up”. In other words, the Northern Territory - and the 30 per cent of its population that is Aboriginal - will remain impoverished so long as the Commonwealth refuses to undertake, or finds itself incapable of, “nation building exercises” such as resourcing infrastructure for Aboriginal communities in the north.

And it is that impoverishment, not land tenure systems such as that which exists under the Land Rights Act, that has led to the crisis from Mutitjulu to Milikapiti. It is the lack of understanding - and will - to overcome that impoverishment that constitutes the crisis from Caboolture to Kirribilli.

It is a task that is not going away, as has been pointed out to the Commonwealth, in the face of a population that is doubling every 25 years.


As a politician, I am acutely aware of the intense contradictions being involved in running an economy which seeks to distribute benefits equitably. The current resources boom, of which the Northern Territory is a beneficiary in small part, is one of the pieces to the jigsaw of creating enough social wealth to meet social needs.

I am also acutely aware that the cost of the resources boom - led by Asia - is also an additional threat to the world’s environment.

Which is why am equally aware of the need for a long term approach: there are no quick fixes to all this. It is what also puzzles me about the current Commonwealth approach in its second Intervention. Rather than taking a generational approach to Indigenous disadvantage, as we have in government with Closing the Gap, they have brought in the army. Rather than investing in the future of our people, they seek to control and obstruct. Rather than protecting our children, they have attacked our livelihoods.

I am sorry if I appear so negative: it’s not all doom and gloom, even behind the front line of the second Intervention. There have been some advances, which I desperately hope will survive that second manifestation of the Commonwealth Intervention. They are advances that should be embraced by the shock troops of Caboolture to Kirribilli, and certainly not ignored.

As I look around me here at the University of Sydney, knowing that Charles Perkins graduated from this place 40 years ago, I am reminded of the vast deficits in educational outcomes still endured by the vast majority of Aboriginal Territorians. It may not seem like much, but in the last four years - for the first time in the history of the Northern Territory - a small but growing number of kids are graduating from Year 12 from Aboriginal communities in the Territory.

For the first time, there is the possibility of Aboriginal kids from such communities achieving what Charles Perkins did.

There has been some recognition of Aboriginal knowledge, and the role it may play in biodiversity protection - and indeed in combating greenhouse gases.


The sandstone walls of this university remind me of the sandstone escarpments of Kabulwanarmyo, in western Arnhem Land, where Lofty Bardayal and his families are working with western scientists, harnessing traditional burning practices to be utilised as greenhouse gas off sets for the gas industry.

These are very real ways in which “real jobs” - the traditional jobs of the First Australians, can be part of the solution of a developing world.

And finally ...

I am of another generation - I was only five when Charles Perkins led the Freedom Ride through NSW. Yet we are linked by history and struggle - family history and Aboriginal history. It is history that speaks to us - to our families, everyone here this evening, and beyond. And we must learn from those histories: in this case the history of the Northern Territory’s two interventions.

The Perkins and the Scrymgours, along with thousands of other Aboriginal Territorians endured the first Intervention; many more are having now to work through the second Intervention.

But this time around, it is all Australians that must work their way through both these two national emergencies: the one that has faced Aboriginal Australians for 219 years; and the crisis that faces settler Australia if it is to escape its colonial past.

It was an honour to be invited to speak this evening, at the 7th Charles Perkins Oration. A personal honour, of course, particularly as the first Territorian to give a speech that commemorates the life of such an amazing Territorian.

I am especially honoured to be asked to speak as the first serving politician invited to speak - but admittedly a bit wary. From all accounts, Charles Perkins was not overly enamoured of politicians: many of his major political battles were with politicians - from all sides of politics. He was, so I am told, into equal opportunity when it came to taking pollies on.

I’ll keep that in mind. Thirty odd years ago, Charles Perkins wrote a biography called A Bastard Like Me. In the years to come, in my own different ways, I’ll try to be a bastard like him.

And I reckon Dad would be proud of me.

Thank you.

 

It may well be that the most important book on indigenous themes published in 2007 will turn out to be Coercive Reconciliation: stabilise, normalise, exit Aboriginal Australia (Arena Publications, 2007 342pp.), edited by Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson. It is a collection of thirty essays occasioned by the declaration of the national emergency and the massive intervention into the lives of the indigenous people of the Northern Territory, and a remarkable achievement not the least for the speed with which it was produced.

Arena Publications proposed the idea of a "quick book" about the government's plans as announced in the press conference Howard and Brough called on June 21 of this year. Two months later, to the day, on August 21, Coercive Reconciliation went to the printers and into circulation a month after that. The first of its accomplishments, then, is to record what people thought and felt in the very first moments when the shock and the wonderment, the outrage and relief were new. For as the thirty essays in this volume document, all those emotions characterized the initial reactions.

Now that another two months have passed since the last of the words contained here were penned, things have inevitably changed. Yet another strength of the book is that most of it remains highly relevant, and will no doubt continue to be so. These essays are of the moment, indeed, and yet they are for the years to come as well.

Some of the authors are indigenous writers, others are not. Some are impassioned and angry, some exhort, others reason. There are essays about economics, and philosophical speculations, essays that scrutinize not just Howard, but Clare Martin and Noel Pearson as well. In turn, the authors take up child abuse, grog and petrol, land rights legislation, home ownership, the permit system, indigenous demography, and neo-liberal economics.

This variety in tone, in the structure of arguments presented, and in the scope and depth with which topics are treated is another of the book's strengths. At times my blood was stirred by passionate preaching and at times it was chilled by brutal analysis. I now know that Section 19 of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act details arrangements for leasing Aboriginal land, and I understand the differences that the 2006 amendments introduced. (I must confess that even the extended discussion of home ownership still leaves me painfully befuddled about the mechanics and subtleties of that process and how it works in Australia as opposed to here in the States.)

Coercive Reconciliation is divided into four parts. The first, "A National Emergency?" provides background information and looks at the government's action in relation to the larger national and international context. Part Two looks at the issues raised by Little Children Are Sacred; there is probably more relevant information in these chapters than in all the government "response" and legislation.

The second half of the book takes as its metaphor the plan expressed by Brough and taken up in the book's subtitle: "stabilise, normalise," (in Part Three) and "exit." The plan is to stabilize communities through the drastic imposition of changes in welfare and work, and through prohibitions. The next phase presumably will be to normalize Aboriginal Australia, which in the government's philosophy still means (even now that the Prime Minister seemingly has seen the light of reconciliation) giving Aboriginal people the means to become liberal white Australians like John Howard. Having achieved that goal, the government forces can exit, presumably at the end of five years when their new leases are up.

With so many excellent essays to hand, I can not hope to do justice to each of them other than to urge you to read them all. So I'd like to focus on a pair of essays that deal with substance abuse, and the trio that concludes the book and catches themes both particular and encompassing.

Maggie Brady, who has written two book length studies of problems and solutions relating to alcohol in indigenous communities (Alcohol in the Outback: two studies of drinking (Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, 1984) and Indigenous Australia and Alcohol Policy: meeting difference with indifference(UNSW Press, 2004)) here contributes "Out from the Shadow of Prohibition." In its few short pages, she tackles the gamut of problems with the government's proposal for curbing alcohol abuse, from outright prohibition in areas that were already, for the most part, legally dry to Brough's ill-considered notion of opening social canteens in previously dry communities.

She traces the calls for assistance that have come out of communities for decades, and the attempts that have been made to reduce violence and protect its potential victims. She notes, as many others have, the problems that will result from prohibition without programs in place to deal with alcoholism. But she goes further and looks squarely at the other obvious part of the problem: supply.

News reports have made much of the ineffectiveness of the requirement for registering purchases of alcohol in excess of $100, a plan that already represents a revision of the earlier attempt to regulate sales by percentage of alcoholic content. But few to date have laid out as clearly the culpability of the liquor industry in insuring the continued supply of booze. The lobby has refused to tax stronger grog to increase its price and thus, perhaps de facto, to decrease it salability to impoverished people. The tourist industry fears the impact of total prohibition on visits to Uluru or fishing trips out of Maningrida. The government fears for the $4 billion in taxes it does collect on liquor sales already.

She notes that indigenous people who suffer from alcoholism have their problems confounded by the fact that they are the very ones least likely to have access to the medical treatments it will eventually require, the least likely to be able to afford help, and the least likely to take advantage of such help were it accessible and affordable. Her remarks resonate strongly with the proposition put forward elsewhere in this book that questions of human rights are important because nations have demonstrated that they can not always be trusted to act in the best interests of all the people they govern.

In the face of government callousness, corporate indifference, and a general lack of resources, it is not surprising that there is an alcohol crisis in Outback Australia: Brady notes that effective government action might alleviate a problem that, especially in the Northern Territory, afflicts not only Aboriginal people. All the measures proposed to control the consumption of alcohol will remain half-measures as long as nothing is done to control the supply.

Brady's essay is followed immediately by another telling the story of indigenous determination to foil substance misuse that has beaten the odds and led to demonstrable victory. Tristan Ray's contribution, "Youth Well-Being in Central Australia," offers details of three programs initiated by communities to combat addiction among youth to petrol sniffing.

The best known of these is the Mt Theo Program begun by Warlpiri people from Yuendumu, which aims to first isolate sniffers, then to provide them with meaningful and (perhaps more importantly) enjoyable activities, and finally to encourage them to become mentors to still-troubled peers. Other programs in Docker River and Alice Springs have followed suit. But the success of all these activities has undoubtedly hinged on the introduction of unsniffable aviation fuel and Opal. Consonant with Brady's arguments about alcohol, the control of supply is crucial. It is all the more remarkable that success in this arena has been achieved, given that petrol is a commodity that Central Australia cannot do without. Perhaps the very fact that prohibition is not an alternative gave a boost to the introduction of Opal. Or maybe, just maybe, we have proof here that indigenous initiative, unthwarted by white resistance, can make a huge difference in resolving problems in indigenous communities.

Coercive Reconciliation ends with three essays that examine large themes in contemporary indigenous affairs and of great importance to civil relations among Australia's citizens. They offer the opportunity for us to meditate not on specific issues like substance abuse or child protection, but on matters that underlie the success or failure of any government policies and indeed the very question of "reconciliation" itself.

John Hinkson's "The 'Innocence' of the Settler Imagination" tackles the fundamental difference in cultural assumptions and values that bedevil so many Australian attempts to come to terms with indigenous advantage. He sees the tensions inherent in the distinction between kinship-driven social norms and those of market-based individualism as the key problem that will require understanding and resolution if solutions that are meaningful to Aboriginal people are to be uncovered. Under Western eyes there is an inviolable primacy to the individual and the social institutions that allow us to interact with other individuals: primarily money and the marketplace.

The Intervention is founded on these principles of the marketplace. The individual ownership of homes, the leasing of communal lands, the participation in the for-profit economy are all essential building blocks of the Howard-Brough solution. They are all also inimical to the values of indigenous society. The globalization of markets and the pressure that it puts on Western democracies will exacerbate "settler" intolerance of social norms that do not follow the dictates of classical economics.

This relates to a theme that is sounded frequently in Coercive Reconciliation, and one I had not consciously considered until now: that the global war on terror that has dominated international discourse since 2001 has greatly increased the suspicions of Western democracies towards societies they perceive as "the other." I do not mean to imply, and nor do the several authors who raise this point throughout the book, that white Australia thinks of Aboriginal people as terrorists. But the demonization of those who are different and who hold to differing belief systems than those that grew out of Enlightenment Europe has doubtless resulted in a decrease in tolerance for indigenous Australians in recent years.

Following on Hinkson's delineation of differences, Raimond Gaita takes up the need to find common ground in "The Moral Force of Reconciliation." This is a powerful essay that takes up Howard's refusal to apologize, the spurious and distracting question of "white guilt," the value in Noel Pearson's attempts to wrestle with the problems of his communities on the Cape and the reasons why his best efforts have been betrayed by the co-opting of them in the name of the Emergency. Gaita is particularly forceful in deconstructing the condemnation of those who criticize the Intervention, those whom Brough and Pearson have repeatedly attacked as heartless conspirators in continuing the abuse of children because they disagree with the particulars of the neo-paternalistic strategies of the government's opportunism.

Gaitia is equally devastating in his discussions of the very notion of reconciliation, especially as Howard has manipulated it over the years. He points out, for starters, that the very choice of the term "reconciliation" is misguided, implying as it does "that non-Aborginal Australians had a legitimate complaint against the Aborigines" (p. 301). He skewers Howard's logic of "practical reconciliation." If, as Howard insists, there is nothing to apologize for, then it follows that there is no need for reconciliation. The politician hopes to exploit the "feel-good" reaction to reconciliation without having to do the hard work of compromise or assuming responsibility for the current (and very sorry) state of affairs.

The volume closes with Jon Altman's "In the Name of the Market?" Weaving together the themes of cultural difference, market economies, and a very real "practical reconciliation" of the economic quandaries that he sees as fundamental to the logic of the intervention, Altman attempts to chart a middle ground. In this ground the priorities of Aboriginal culture--connection to the land, caring for country, respect for relations--are married to the concerns of non-indigenous economic and social issues such as climate change and biodiversity and Aboriginal art, already a proven success in international markets, is supported and allowed to flourish.

Altman proposes that a hybrid economy can be created that can begin to ameliorate indigenous disadvantage and so help to alleviate the social problems that beset impoverished and marginalized communities. Altman's primary research over the years has been conducted in and around Maningrida and another essay in this volume by Bill Fogerty and Matthew Ryan, "Monday in Maningrida," offers concrete examples of how indigenous initiative and government support can combine to create solutions to both economic and social woes. And like so many other essays included here, theirs notes that more than anything else, it is the failure to follow through, to sustain initiatives through community involvement in making decisions and through timely and effective delivery of funding for human and physical infrastructure, that has resulted in past failures and will threaten future success.

As I look back over the pages of Coercive Reconciliation, I am struck by one theme that arises repeatedly: respect. Respect is implicit in the reports of communities that have welcomed the first waves of doctors and soldiers who have come to help. A lack of respect for indigenous values is central to most of the fears of further harm being perpetrated by the intervention. The debates about rights and responsibilities are fundamentally about respect. Coercion is the antithesis of respect. This book's achievement is to offer a sustained critique--emotional as well as rational--of the current crop of solutions to the perceived problems of indigenous Australia. The authors recognize much that is flawed but still maintain hope that, given respect on all sides, the future can be made to work more effectively, if never perfectly, than the present. 

Thanks to Kim Christen, author of Long Road, for pointing out that video from the SBS program Living Black is available online. I can see that I've got some late night viewing ahead of me: the content that's up on the Living Black website now reaches back to May, and includes stories from the intervention, on the ground, from Yuendumu to Broome and Papunya to Maningrida. There are interviews with Mal Brough, Jon Altman, Galarrwuy Yunupingu, and Queensland Democratic Senator Andrew Bartlett, who was a member of the Senate Inquiry into the Indigenous Visual Arts and Crafts Sector and who has consistently supported indigenous involvement in political solutions to community affairs. What I've managed to watch so far has been enlightening, to say the least. It's refreshing to watch commentators like Altman and Bartlett who are articulate and passionate and insightful. It sure puts CNN to shame (not that, in itself, that's such a hard thing to do.)

I happened to stumble on even more video today at the news.com.au site Culture in Crisis. There are clips of Yolngu dances, an interview with Gawirrin Gumana, and Djambawa Marawili explaining funeral ceremonies in the "Stolen Culture" section. The "Shame File" offers audio slide shows that speak frankly about the problems of alcohol, petrol, and child abuse. In the third section, "Future," you can listen to John Howard, Brough, and NT Chief Minister Clare Martin, as well as Mandawuy and Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Jakie Huggins, and athletes Kyle Vander-Kuyp and Nova Peris. The contrast between Howard's vision of Aboriginal people's future as being "just like us," and Yunupingu's vision of mutual support and respect is not news, but it's somehow more shocking to see the two men actually say the words, rather than reading them in the newspaper. Clare Martin's 30-second clip has more impact that Howard and Brough combined.

And speaking of reading and reports from the ground, I should take this opportunity to plug Long Road one more time: Kim has just returned from two months in Tennant Creek, and her reporting on her work there in establishing a digital archive of Warumungu culture as well as on the ugly business of the intervention and the loss of CDEP should not be missed.
 

The ABC Television program Difference of Opinion this week features "A New Deal for Indigenous Australians?" Thursday, October 18 at 9:25. Here's a preview of what to expect:

Prime Minister John Howard has announced a vision for a "new reconciliation". The proposed changes to the preamble of the Constitution have bi-partisan support. But what does this mean for Indigenous Australians? Is it an election ploy or does it reflect a wider shift in attitude and a community push for reconciliation between black and white Australia? Will the proposed formal recognition of the special status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the nation’s first people assist the reconciliation process? Is it enough or should there be an apology as some Indigenous leaders are still calling for?

This call comes just over three months after the Federal Government's takeover of Northern Territory Communities. Also receiving bipartisan support, the emergency response was in response to a report detailing the extent of child abuse in the Territory. The panel will discuss what inroads are being made in changing health, education and employment opportunities and what it means for the future of these communities? What are the impacts of the abolition of CDEP and the quarantining of welfare payments? How do changes to the alcohol laws affect the communities – is it enough or should it go further? Are children better off? And is the $1.3 billion for this 5 year plan being well spent?

This Thursday October 18, ABC TV's Difference of Opinion program will bring together an expert panel to discuss these important issues. On the panel will be Dr Sue Gordon, Chair of the National Indigenous Council and the Northern Territory Taskforce, Tom Calma, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Professor Lowitja O’Donoghue, AM, Aboriginal health and welfare advocate, Inaugural Chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and Olga Havnen, Co-ordinator, Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory.

The program will be aired at 9.25 on Thursday evening and will be the first in a range of programs addressing election issues in the weeks coming up to November 24.

If you're like me and can't catch the show when it airs, you can download it from their video archives afterwards. The files are large (170MB), so even with a fast internet connection you're looking at a 15-minute download. Shows are available in Windows Media (WMV) and Quicktime (MP4) formats. You can watch it on your iPod!! How cool is that?!
 

The third and final stop on our tour of the Tiwi Islands was Munupi Arts in Pirlangimpi, near the northwest tip of Melville Island. This general area was the location of the first British settlement on Melville Island, Fort Dundas, founded in 1824 and quickly abandoned. In the middle of the 20th century, the Garden Point mission was established near the ruins of the old fort, whence came the current community. "Munupi" is the traditional name of the the country that borders the northern end of the Apsley Strait.


Munupi Country


Clouds cast their shadows over the forests near Pirlangimpi
The art centre is a very short walk from the airstrip, not even a five-minute stroll. The centre comprises a painting shed, with attached offices and a small display gallery. A carvers' shed stands off to one side. Although there was some activity there when we arrived, the buzz of chain saws gave way to an intermittent pounding on an ax, and after a while, to silence broken by a voice calling out to the occasional passer-by.


Welcome to Munupi Arts

It was nearly impossible for eight of us to occupy the two small rooms where small sculptures and pottery were on display and racks of works holding unstretched canvases were ready for browsing. We all managed to keep out of one another's way until the selection process began, and then it became clear that we'd need to take shifts in the small galleries. Remembering a small patio with benches and tables outside, I decided to take a respite from the business of art and watch the men at the carving shed pack up their tools for the day.


The carvers' shed

The general air of quiet around the art centre seemed to have deepened at the afternoon wore on. Maybe I was still not used to the more tropical climate after the relatively cool and dry desert air. But I was about to doze off when a little fireball whose name I later learned was Bella appeared on the scene.

Like most of the children I met on the tour, Bella didn't have a shy bone in her body. She also seemed to understand that whitefellas and cameras go together: this was another nearly universal trait across the Top End's juvenile population. I'm guessing that she was four or five years old, and she had a pretty good grasp of the practical end of a digital camera, even though she clearly had a lot more experience being in front of one.

Bella with Margo (left) and Khadija (right)


We were also joined by Regis Pangirminni, the chairman of Munupi Arts, who was most generous with his time. He talked about the business end of Munupi, the work of organizing art for exhibitions, his role in community relations, and his suspicion of the forestry initiatives that are underway in the area.

Nina Purutatameri

Regis Pangirminni

As the afternoon waned, Nina Puruntatameri joined us briefly, along with her daughter. But soon it became clear that the art centre's business was drawing to a close, and people began to wander off towards the main part of town.


Looking towards the football oval

I walked around a bit, and discovered a wall of paintings that appeared to be the work of some teenaged graffiti artists. It featured a combination of traditional Tiwi designs, pukumani poles, clan animals, and the Aboriginal flag.


Tiwi graffiti

Our party headed back to the airstrip, where I found another example of local art, a map of Pirlangimpi, on the wall of the small building that serves as the "terminal." The black strip at the upper left seemed to be the airstrip, with the art centre below it, and the football oval just beyond.


A map of Pirlangimpi township

As we headed back to Darwin I had one last look over the islands, at a landscape that speaks of countless years gone by, and that in its very form seems to suggest endlessle the presence of the ancestors.


Tiwi country
 

This just in from John Oster at Desart:

Sydney Forum: Aboriginal Art Centres – The Future?

This Friday we take the issues of Art Centres to the eastern seaboard. We are doing this with ANKAAA and with Ku Arts. It is a rare opportunity for us to speak with a united voice about issues central to our industry. Each of our organisations will be represented by Aboriginal leaders and we expect significant media coverage. We expect The Fed Minister, Sen Brandis and Peter Garrett will attend. We have asked them to talk about how their policies at the next election will reflect industry aspirations. Specifically we are expecting to talk about recommendations from the Inquiry concerning funding and infrastructure as well as the issues surrounding CDEP employment.

I am hoping we can draw an audience of about 200 people from public and private galleries, strategic collectors and other supporters.

An invitation is attached and I would be grateful if you would circulate this through your networks and encourage all of your supporters and colleagues to come along.

 

New monographs appeared last month that celebrate the achievements of two artists of Aboriginal descent who have made their mark on the international art scene, Gordon Bennet and Tracey Moffatt. Both artists have engaged throughout their careers with the issue of "Aboriginality" and race in Australia. Both have widened the scope of their subject matter to encompass broader questions of race and identity. Both are so prodigious in their output and in their influences as to be often confounding to audiences who arrive at their works expecting "Aboriginal art," and indeed, both have consciously distanced themselves from the expectations that the label raises. Thanks to the fortuitous timing of these new publications, we have a chance to explore the pathways each has taken through careers that now span two decades of experimentation in very different media.

Gordon Bennett is the subject of a major retrospective now on view (through January 16, 2008) at the Ian Potter Centre of the National Gallery of Victoria and with additional stops next year in Brisbane and Perth. The excellent catalog of the show by Kelly Gellatly is the first major publication on Bennett's art since The Art of Gordon Bennett (Craftsman House, 1996), and is long overdue. The final chapter of that earlier volume was entitled "Toward an Australian Postcolonial Art," a directive that might well summarize Bennett's career in general and serve as an epigraph for the new catalog from the NGV show.

Born in Queensland in 1955 but raised largely in Victoria, Bennett was unaware of his Aboriginal heritage as a child. He apprenticed as a tradesman and worked for over a decade as a telecom linesman before enrolling at the Queensland College of Art at the age of 30. He graduated on the eve of the Bicentenary commemoration, and the political atmosphere of the day had a significant impact on his early career.

Combining the post-colonial and the post-modern sensibility, Bennett has made the act of art-historical appropriation central to his working methods. In the early years of his career he drew upon and combined historical paintings and engravings, indigenous techniques and iconography, and Western art traditions from Renaissance perspective through Imant Tiller's work and Jackson Pollack's drip-stick and Blue Poles as the raw materials for his own art. His use of dots to create large parts of his compositions was equally indebted to Central Desert techniques and to Roy Lichtenstein.

This part of Bennett's career is well documented in The Art of Gordon Bennett and well as in a significant exhibition catalog, History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett (Ikon Gallery; Henie Onsted Kunstsenter, 1999). The new catalog and exhibition from the NGV fills in the second decade of Bennett's career. During this time, the artist's focus has moved outward beyond Australia in a couple of ways.

For one, he has spent more time abroad, beginning as early as 1991 when he lived in France for a year after winning the Moet et Chandon Australian Art Fellowship. Other travels followed on the European continent, to the UK, and perhaps most significantly to New York. For another, his engagement with European and American painting traditions began to assume a larger and more defining role in his stylistic explorations.

Beginning around 1997, Bennett's quotations came to rely significantly first on Mondrian (in a fascinating marriage with Margaret Preston) and secondly, after being invited to participate in New York's Gramercy International Contemporary Art Fair, on Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Notes to Basquiat series represented a new form of appropriation strategies, relying less on iconographic borrowings and more on an engagement with the style of painting and composition that characterized the work of Basquiat, who is considered the first African-American artist to achieve international renown.

Thus, in his engagement with Basquiat, Bennett continued his explorations of the issues of race and identity. Interestingly, the images Bennett now directly appropriates in these work come from his own oeuvre, as renderings of his own paintings from the late 1980s and early 1990s appear amidst the graffiti scrawls of Notes as well as among the de Stijl inspired grids of the earlier Home Decor series.

Identity is at the core of another set of experiments by Bennett that began in the 90s. In an effort to distance himself from a growing reputation and perhaps even from his own manner of appropriation, Bennett invented a persona, an artist named John Citizen, under which name he painted and exhibited works that bear only minimal similarity to those of "Gordon Bennett." The influence of Lichtenstein is still quite evident, as is that of Basquiat's mentor Andy Warhol. This theme of personal re-invention and transformation, be it from suburban Anglo childhood to politician of Aboriginal identity, from blue-collar worker to international artist, or back again from Gordon Bennett to tabula rasa of John Citizen, is eloquently and extensively analyzed in this new monograph.

Indeed, the great strength of the Gellatly's catalog is its exhaustiveness. Gellatly herself contributes the major essay, which documents the variety of sources and influences Bennett has forged into his career as a painter of great complexity and subtlety. There is a "conversation" with Bennett, conducted by Bill Wright, that gives the artist a chance to speak for himself, which he does with unusual eloquence. There is an excellent and (again) extensive chronology at the end of the book that I found myself wishing I had read through first, as it provides a narrative skeleton for the changes and development ably discussed elsewhere in the book. Each section reinforces the others and builds a multifaceted portrait of the artist.

The plates are excellent in both their selection and presentation. There are well-chosen examples from the span of Bennett's career, including recent abstract works influenced by Frank Stella and a separate section devoted to the paintings of John Citizen. The densely packed early work are done justice by facing-page spreads with the entire work presented on the left and enlarged, full-page detail on the right. A most useful bibliography of writings by and about Gordon Bennett rounds out another superb contribution to the history of contemporary (indigenous) art from the National Gallery of Victoria.

***
The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt by Catherine Summerhayes (Charta, 2007) is not entirely, as one might at first suspect, about the artist's career as a filmmaker. Certainly, the analysis of Moffatt's films takes pride of place in this volume. The delightful, superb, and copious illustrations by means digital stills taken from the films, some reworked by Moffatt especially for this publication, can at times approximate the experience of viewing the cinematic work.

And that observation comes close to the central thesis of Summerhayes's argument: that the films and the photographic series (like Up in the Sky, Laudanum, and Guapa) are manifestations of the same creative impulse, and that their execution interpenetrates one another. The films are made with a photographer's attention to the composition of individual frames, while the photographic series are comprised of instances of a narrative that seem dislocated from an unmade film. The photographic series can be seen as moving images: moving (emotionally evocative) and requiring the viewer to create connections between the discrete images as she moves from one to another.

Summerhayes takes a chronological approach to Moffatt's career, noting as Gellatly did with Gordon Bennett, the arc of involvement from primarily indigenous Australian themes and images to a more cosmopolitan engagement with race and identity that parallels the artist's emergence onto the international contemporary art scene. Each of her chapters focuses on a temporal slice of Moffatt's body of work, looking at both the films and the photographs and using one to illuminate meaning in the other.

Summerhayes is at her best in discussing the early films, Nice Coloured Girls and Moodeitj Yorgas, where she locates and explicates the themes and techniques that will resonate through the rest of the work. She notes the importance of documentary technique in Moffatt's largely fictional body of work, and recognizes at the same time that even Moodeitj Yorgas, which is the closest to straight documentary among Moffatt's major films, participates in the styles and techniques of fictional cinema.

There is an extensive analysis of Night Cries: a rural tragedy, which is generally acknowledged to be Moffatt's most important film. Summerhayes devotes even more consideration to beDevil, the feature-length 1993 collection of three ghost stories that is the most demanding of the artist's films. Summerhayes does a good job of explicating the cinematic influences and examining the complex construction of images in the three separate stories, each of which contains multiple narrative threads. She is less successful at interpretation, at extracting meaning from the experience of the film. She may correct that Moffatt herself is more interested in questions than answers in her work, but I found being told that a less than satisfying critical encounter.

I was similarly somewhat frustrated by the incomplete selection of reproductions from the photographic series. I should hasten to reiterate that the compilation of stills from the films is outstanding, particularly since, as Summerhayes emphasizes, the detail and careful construction of images in these movies repays close scrutiny. But if her premise is that the photographic series, especially those from the 1990s, are narratives in themselves, then the choice of a mere handful out of a total of a dozen or two dozen images that comprise the series seriously affects the reader's ability to grasp the points that Summerhayes is making.

Luckily (and perhaps for that very reason) there is a rich store of reproductions of the series available in other publications, and having those books to hand when reading The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt will compensate. The catalog from last year's exhibition in Milan, Tracey Moffatt: Between Dreams and Reality (Skira, 2006) is the best choice for extensive documentation of these series. The earlier New Zealand catalog, Tracey Moffatt (City Gallery Wellington, 2002) covers much of the same ground but adds a selection from Invocations series which nicely supplements the images Summerhayes reproduces.

Between 1999 and 2007 Moffatt has collaborated with Gary Hillberg ("wonderful film editor and film buff" in Moffatt's words) on four short cinematic narrative collages: Lip, Artist, Love, and Doomed. In each of these, short clips from Hollywood films are strung together to tell a simple, almost archetypal story. Lip is a collection of excerpts showing black woman "talking back" to white women--often maids and their mistresses. Love traces a Tinseltown trope from boy-meets-girl, through passionate love to passionate hate, to girl-kills-boy.

As reproduced in stills at the end of The Moving Images, these four films argue Summerhayes's thesis strikingly well. Each of the short clips is iconic, most well known to film fans, for instance Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind in Lip, or Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the tideswept beach of From Here to Eternity in the early minutes of Love. They function as disparate moving snapshots, sequenced and spliced together to tell an altogether new story.

The book ends with a scrapbook of personal photographs that captures Moffatt's humor and irreverence as well as illustrating once more the fine line that she treads between autobiography and fiction, between Tracey Moffatt as artist and as character in her own creations.

Both of these volumes, Gordon Bennett and The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt, offer a fascinating opportunity to reflect on conceptions of Aboriginality at the start of the 21st century. The collision of the traditional and the modern, of high and low culture, of the local and the international, of colonialism and globalism play out, quite differently, in the works of these two artists. Their fortuitous publication within weeks of one another has added to the inherent value of each. 

Mal Brough gave the 40th Alfred Deakin Lecture at Melbourne University on October 2, a fact that until today escaped the Google nets that I cast over contemporary Australian indigenous affairs. At the risk of looking like Andrew Bolt, I'm going to post his remarks here today, because I think they give a more comprehensive summation of his stand than I've seen anywhere else.

Not that I haven't heard it all before, although the details of his negotiations with Galarrwuy Yunupingu haven't been presented quite like this in anything else I've read, and there are new renditions of his personal pain at hearing stories of abuse and despair. From all that I have read, there seems little doubt that Brough is indeed genuinely moved by the sorry conditions in many remote communities, and that his outrage tales of abuse and violence is sincere.

But I, too, am outraged, and not just by the suffering of indigenous people in Papunya and elsewhere in the Northern Territory. If you read Brough's remarks, you will find no mention of indigenous action in the face of this suffering. He talks about the "war zone" of nighttime in the Outback; he doesn't talk about the night patrols that women in Maningrida and other communities organized until the funding that allowed them to operate effectively was stripped by the machinations of the Intervention.

He doesn't mention Titjikala and the indigenous-run tourism business that has closed down because CDEP is being dismantled. He doesn't talk about the capital raised for community-based health care through the sale of art from Kintore and Kiwirrkura.

He doesn't talk about mining. Nor about nuclear waste dumps.

He doesn't talk about walytja, about the value of kinship. He talks about humbugging, but doesn't want to understand why Aboriginal people find it hard to say no to relatives. He doesn't understand the sources of indigenous shame in being seen to be "too hard," too unfeeling in denying requests from family. He doesn't betray the slightest comprehension that indigenous people can hold different values than white people.

He judges the behavior of indigenous people and the choices they make on the basis of his own values alone. Like many politicians who have gone before him, he believes in Aboriginal self-determination as long as it conforms to middle-class white Australian values like private home ownership and the satisfaction derived from holding down a forty-hour-a-week job, even if that job pays minimum wage or if you have to leave your family and home to find it.

But most of all, I am outraged that he continues to lambaste anyone who opposes him as heartless, socialist, or gutless. I am outraged that he employs the rhetoric of an emergency to justify a government intervention that disrupts the lives of impoverished people, infantilizes them, and portrays them solely in terms of deviance and pathology.

I'm outraged because I've has to live with that kind of manipulation from my own government here in America for the last seven years. Because as I follow the reports in the newspapers, I have this terrible and terrifying sense of deja vu.

For several months now I have railed against the actions of the Howard government and have done so with more than a little unease in my heart. Not because I'm not horrified by the Intervention, by the loss of land rights, and the destruction of what little Aboriginal economy exists in remote Australia. But because I see Australia falling into the same pattern of deceit, lies, and demonization that America has pioneered in the last seven years.

The Bush administration has never spoken about the invasion of Iraq as being motivated by its perceived need to control the oil supply in the Middle East. And the American press remains almost completely silent about the outrages of what a few dare to call "blood for oil." Bush and Cheney have used the fear generated by the attacks on September 11, 2001 to justify a unilateral invasion, to trump up excuses for continuing to occupy Iraq, to antagonize Iran (which gives as good as it gets), and to strip the citizens of America of civil liberties. If you dare to voice a dissenting opinion you're called unpatriotic, which oddly enough, still carries a tremendous sting in America.

Six years ago, there was a feeling of worldwide sympathy and solidarity with America. Today there is antipathy and disrespect. Our government's blindness, self-interest, and jingoistic condemnation of opposition have shamed America throughout the world.

I've heard a joke that claims Howard's nickname is "Bonsai," or "little Bush." It's a clever joke, but not a funny one.

So I hope that Australians will not follow in America's footsteps this time. I hope they will engage in critical examination of what their government claims to be doing, and why. When Brough announces, as his does in this lecture, "I have breached the Racial Discrimination Act in a positive sense," I hope someone will point out that governments that put themselves above the law--as the Bush administration has done consistently in America since taking office--tread dangerously close to the borders of tyranny.

ALFRED DEAKIN LECTURE, AT MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY

ON THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT’S INTERVENTION INTO NORTHERN TERRITORY INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

October 2, 2007

Well, good evening ladies and gentlemen and thank you for the welcome; the one inside, the one outside. I actually enjoyed the one outside because that is what I have to deal with in confronting people that are ignorant of the facts, who are ignorant of the pain and the suffering and who really will not take up the challenge of looking some child in the face, as I had to do last week, who was six years of age who had been raped only a couple of weeks earlier, not by an adult but by another child, 11 to 15 year olds.

That is what we’re dealing with. Today we stand at the crossroads. We are at the crossroads of whether we are going to move forward as a nation and we are going to take our entire nation with us, our indigenous population, as part of that, or whether we’re going to ignore it. And that is the - I guess the point that I will put to you today is that the election that we’re about to face will be the crossroads as to the path in which we take as a nation.

I’d like to acknowledge David Kemp, my very good friend, who certainly assisted me greatly in my early years in the Parliament - still my early years in the Parliament I would hope - but David, great to see you and thank you for your patronage of this organisation.

To Peter and his assistance to my team up there - Russell and Suzanne - and also to my other parliamentary colleagues.

But thank you particularly for inviting me here to listen to what I think is the single most important problem, challenge, that faces Australia today is, recently I was in South Yarra with about 200 people for breakfast, and I gave them a warning before I spoke that I would be honest with them, I’d be frank with them and, as such, some of them may find that a little difficult to take their breakfast, because there is nothing palatable whatsoever about what you see and hear in indigenous communities. And unless the rest of Australia actually understands that, the depth of despair that people are in, and the lack of culture that is resulting as a re… as a direct result of that despair, then we are going to lose not only another generation, we are in fact going to lose the last remnants in many places of what was a very rich culture.

The focus has been on the Northern Territory, and there are those who like to think this is just a problem of remote Australia, but last week I was not in the Northern Territory, I was in Western Australia. And I’m here to tell you the circumstances in Western Australia, not just the East Kimberleys, not just the Pilbara, but also the Central Desert and also in the suburbs of Perth, are worse than many of the circumstances in the Northern Territory.

And those who have not read the report, Little Children are Sacred, its two authors visited 45 communities in the Northern Territory. They didn’t find sexual abuse in some of those communities, they didn’t find it in most of those communities, they found it in every single community; 45 out of 45. Think about that, the enormity of that for a moment. People coming forward with the most horrendous stories. We have children as young as three with gonorrhoea, we have twenty-four year old grandmothers, we have so many babies being born with alcohol foetal syndrome that their - a capacity to pass on the oral history of their people is gone before they’re even born. We have physical and sexual abuse of boys and girls and men and women. It knows no boundaries.

That is the reality in the Territory and it also in South Australia, it is also in Western Australia, it is in New South Wales and Queensland to differing degrees.

The reason that the Federal Government has acted in the Northern Territory is simply because we have the capacity and the power to do so. Let me answer right up front the allegation that is thrown at me and thrown at the Prime Minister as to why didn’t you do this for the lev… last 11 years? Well, this time last week I was in South Australia before 700 indigenous childcare workers. And the first question that was thrown at me was by a white woman who said you have stood before us today and said that most of these interventions have come from direct requests from indigenous people to you, and that’s true. And I’ll articulate some of those as we go through.

She said, but tell me who told you to breach the Racial Discrimination Act, the Human Rights Act, and the Land Rights Act? I said, well, funny thing that, no-one, because no-one talks about it in those sort of terms when the children haven’t been fed or they’ve been bashed the night before, or the situation they’re living in is just horrendous. They actually talk about surviving. They talk about not being stabbed. They talk about some form of normality around their circumstances. And the crowd actually all applauded her for asking that question, long and loud, because I have breached the Racial Discrimination Act in a positive sense.

So the last question that was put to me on that morning was first of all the lady said I’m from Darwin. She said the first thing I want to say is thank you for what you’ve done. Then she went on to say that why didn’t your government do this some time in the last 11 eleven years. And there was the same raucous applause, and I thought isn’t it interesting the same audience can have two totally different perspectives. One, why did you breach the Racial Discrimination Act, and point up that that’s wrong, and then 15 minutes later applaud when challenged for why I didn’t breach it 10 years ago.

Now, that is what we get every single day. People dress up, and I think the comments by Noel Pearson that were quoted at the outset say it all: they dress up self-determination, they dress up land rights, they dress up all sorts of nuances of arguments that really in their heart are saying that the right of a child to be born and to be safe and to have an education and to have an opportunity in this country is somehow asunder below that of these other niceties that don’t even reflect anything of what occurs in their life.

Do you know how many times that I’ve had raised with me the issues of the stolen generation? Once in the Northern Territory in Darwin by a woman who wanted to be connected to family. The other time was at ANU by people who are not part of the stolen generation. Treaties: never is it raised by me by Aboriginal people in the communities, it’s raised by white people in universities. They don’t seem to understand the disconnect between where people are today and where they want to be and the fog that they’re living in. Most of you probably don’t realise that there is a thing called kava. Kava is used in the South Pacific for ceremonies, and it is coma inducing. That’s what it does. People sip it. But no, in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory it’s been legal for years. Why? Because it stops people having violent outbursts. Instead, they’re just comatosed under trees, they don’t feed their children. Their children don’t go to school and white fellas thought that was a better outcome because there were less people going to hospital.

When I discussed that with Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who was one of the champions of land rights, who is one of the most powerful lawmen in the Northern Territory, and I said, well, I understand why they did it, is to protect people from the violence of alcohol, and he said that’s rubbish. I said, how do you mean? He said the reality is that the women are so comatose they get raped, but the difference is they don’t actually fight back. He said this is another insidious drug that white man has inflicted upon us that needs to go. Alcohol needs to go, marijuana or ganja, as it’s known, needs to go. Kava needs to go.

Let me take you to Kalumburu. Kalumburu is up in the East Kimberleys. It is a town of about 300. There are only 90 males in Kalumburu. It’s isolated by the wet for a good part of every year. The wet will set in some time this month.

Of those 90 men, in the last two months 15 have been charged with child sex offences. Fifteen out of 90 men. These are the charge sheets. Not one page, not two pages, not three pages, four pages.

They’re all an offence against a child, predominantly penetrating a girl or a boy under the age of 13. Who were these 15 men? They were the mayor, the deputy mayor, two other councillors, the police liaison officer, a truancy officer, two wardens.

What does that tell you? These are people of authority. These are the people that white fellas like me and bureaucrats turn up to, who go to consult with about answers to their communities, who we give money and more empowerment to and we walk away saying, haven’t we done a good thing.

I was one of them. I went there 18 months ago and I thought that this place had a smell of decay about it. It worried me.

But you talk to the leaders. One of those leaders, who was the police liaison officer, was a man who I had great faith in. He was a man that the local police sergeant had great faith in and thought he would be an indigenous sworn police officer soon.

He and his I… wife were doing good things. They asked for money from me to assist them to take young boys out of the community who had been truant or had come with brushes to the law to take them back onto the homelands to teach them cultural ways. We provided that money to him.

He has been procuring children as young as five and six. He sat before the police sergeant who he had worked with - and you need to hear this - and said to him, and by the way, there are no paedophile rings in these places they tell me. But you tell me what this is. He said, a friend of mine told me how to procure children. He said, what you do is you say to a six year old, a seven year old, a 12 year old, here, here’s some cigarettes, here is some ganja, come with me. And they came with me, he said, and it worked. I tried it and it worked, so I did it.

The depths of depravity, if you wish to look at them, are in these charge sheets. That’s bad enough.

This week, or last week, I went back. Last week I went back because Magistrate, Dr Sue Gordon, who’s heading up our work in the NT and is dealing with all the women’s groups, she is a children’s magistrate in Western Australia.

She said to me, the problem with Kalumburu is that so many adults have just left their children behind. The adults have gone and left their children behind, just blown through. She said we can’t actually find the parents to deal with these issues. This community needs some of your support. They need to know that you care, they need to know that even though we’ve got these criminals out of there, that we can do more.

So Professor Judy Atkinson, we organised for her to do some healing work up there over the next few years. I organised for the AFL, Australian Football League, to go up and to actually do work with the kids.

But on Monday of last week, the one child protection officer discovered that the six and seven year olds in the community were running amok in a really unreasonable fashion. And it came to light on Monday of last week that eight six and seven year olds had been sexually penetrated by 11 to 15 year olds. They’ve been charged this week.

What does that tell you about the society in that town, is that not only has it been passed from one generation to another, but it’s been seen to be so normal that it is happening between children. Not just when they’re becoming adults, but child to child.

This isn’t a culture. This is not part of indigenous culture. This is not part of any sane culture. This is a culture that is being destroyed. And the people that stood outside there today were not prepared to come in here and hear this, because they’re confronted by it. We should all be confronted by it.

I am appalled by the fact that this week, when we had eight six year old Australian children sexually molested by other children it did not make the front page of every newspaper, it did not make the six o’clock news night after night and demand change. What did was Catherine being left on the steps of a hospital here in Melbourne day after day, or the child that has disappeared in Spain making a half hour television program, yet these children don’t actually count enough.

Now, we have to confront ourselves and say, why is that. Why is it that in communities like Galiwinku in the Northern Territory, where there are over 3000 people, where they make their own DVDs in their own language on petrol sniffing and sexual and domestic violence, the Northern Territory Government said that’s a good community and it doesn’t need a policeman. The nearest policeman is half an hour flight away.

These are the things that we’re dealing with. And if we don’t confront this now, and if we don’t take and sweep away the issues, then we are going to be condemned. ATSIC didn’t do it. Reinventing another ATSIC is not the answer. That’s not self-determination.

I challenge us all in this room to ha… to undo - undertake the following. For the next 10 years, we’ll all be totally dependent on social welfare. None of you will be able to own your own home. If you have a job, it’ll be at the bequest of one or two strong people and they’ll determine what house you live in and under what condition you live in it.

You’ll have nothing to look forward to. The social norms will be destroyed. You’ll have no police here, and we’ll revisit you in 10 years time, let alone in two or three generations time and see what will have happened.

That is what we’ve done. Now, there is a turning point, and the turning point is now.

The Federal Government has legislated to enable those who want to in the Northern Territory to actually change direction. Not forcing anyone. The lunatics out the front says I’m forcing and taking people’s land away. Quite the opposite. What I’ve actually done is legislated to say to people, if you want to unlock the value in your land, if you want to again - have the chance to be able to aspire to something - home ownership, jobs, cultural awareness, bringing up a child in a healthy environment - then you can do so.

And in the Tiwi Islands, they’ve taken up that chance. And everyone from the politicians, to Michael Mansell in Tasmania, who’s probably never been to Bathurst Island told us what we was do… what we were doing was wrong.

Yet one of the elders up there was reported to me as saying that 12 months ago he was walking around nearly dead. Today, he walks around with his head held high and pride in his chest, because for the first time in 100 years, he, as a traditional owner of Nguiu on Bathurst Island, is going to have a real say over what happens on his land, and his people can actually have a chance of owning a piece of turf and doing something with it and building a future for their own children in building jobs, in giving a purpose for going to school.

It will make a turnaround from the 2000 children in the Northern Territory who have never been enrolled at school Two thousand children today of school age that have never been enrolled at school.

So they have actually stared down the nay-sayers. They have taken up the cudgels, and it is now a done deal. They are moving forward. They’re building their own motel. They’re starting - they’re actually entering the NF… the NT AFL competition and getting pride in who they are, and they’re now driving to have their own high school, which the Federal Government is funding.

The people of Groote Eylandt are doing the same, the people of Tennant Creek are doing the same, and yesterday in Queensland in Yarrabah, which is just south of Cairns, I signed with the largest single indigenous community in this country a full welfare reform, housing reform package which will take them out of the dependency on welfare that they’ve had in the past, put the norms in that if you damage your house you’re responsible for it, that alcohol can’t be abused and you can’t have running brawls and parties all night and neglect your children. They did that.

I offered them the tools and they did that. They have done it. Hope Vale’s done it with Noel Pearson. Tiwi Islands, Groote Eylandt, Tennant Creek. And the letters that I have here today are a joint open letter to the Prime Minister from Wednesday, 26 September from the people of Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia. And some of the words in here from the women are just so powerful, so I’d just like to - bear with me while I … if you bear with me while I read one small paragraph.

Someone have said that children of this nature will not be able to capture nor store stories as told of their elders for its intended use of passing it down to the next generation. This is children with alcohol foetal syndrome.

Their mental capac… capabilities will be such that the culture of their forefathers will be lost forever, never to be regained. My plea is, please understand my story. Save at least one half of my generation from total physical and mental annihilation. There’s just story after story of - that was a two-day get together, pleading for governments to do something. To do what?

In Western Australia what they’re asking for is welfare reform, they’re asking for alcohol management and they’re asking for police. That community of Kalumburu. It’s not unique; there’s about 40 men that have now been charged in the Hall Creek - Halls Creek region. But there are communities all over this country that no young person can walk into and tell their story, because there is no person of authority. And can you imagine of walking in somewhere if you don’t speak English?

These are the things that we as Australians have to face up to. This is what we’ve allowed to occur over the last 30 years. When you listen to the old women, it’s the grandmothers who are now the ones who are holding it together. Interesting that the grandmothers and the grandfathers are often still healthy. They haven’t got diabetes, they’re not dying of renal failure, they have an education, they’ve worked, and they’re holding the next two generations together.

It has been our responsibility, as legislators over the last 30 years, starting with sit down money with Gough Whitlam and land rights under the Fraser Government. Those two single things did more to harm indigenous culture and destroy it than any two other - legislative instruments ever put into the Parliament. And people look at me and say, land rights. Let me explain. You see, you can be land rich but be absolutely poor in every other way.

Galarrwuy Yunupingu. I mentioned him earlier. For those who don’t know, the reason he is such a powerful man is as a champion and a pioneer of land rights, he was articulate and he went, and as a very young man, was the interpreter for the Northern Territory’s indigenous people. He learnt all the law at a very young age. Not only for his own area around Ski Beach and Nhulunbuy, but the whole of the Territory. That means he is a powerful man in every sense. He’s a law man across the Territory. And he was a champion of land rights in the way it was articulated by the Fraser Government.

He sat with me for six hours on his homeland, overlooking a beautiful piece of beach - at his homelands. And he and I and Noel Pearson spoke and we listened. And as he said, we connected as parents, as fathers. Because having opened his dialogue with me that day with a pretty trite commentary, and after I told him what we were trying to achieve, we sat and no one spoke for 10 minutes. Seemed like a lot longer; there wasn’t a word.
 And then he opened his mouth and said, kava is killing my people. He pointed across the waterway and said the people over there will not have fed their children today. Those children will not go to school. Alcohol, you haven’t restricted it enough. Your welfare payments, you need to go further; CDEP must go. And my eyes opened. I said, where have you been? A month ago you just ridiculed me for everything I did. He said, now I understand why you’re doing it. He said, now let’s talk about land reform because the next stage - this is about where we’re at - the next stage is unlocking the value in our land so the next generation actually has job opportunities.

And he said, what I want to do is not have this collective, where all of us here own the land, but no one individually. And because it cannot be turned into any value, inalienable freehold, I want to change that. I don’t want to lose my native title rights, I don’t want to lose the underlying - what my forefathers gave me, but I actually want to unleash its value. And we’re able to do that for him. He can walk in both worlds and in doing so embrace going forward. And he can do that because he knows the next generation hasn’t got a chance if he doesn’t do it.

That’s what Noel Pearson’s been advocating and for five years they’ve been fighting the Queensland Government, five years to just give them what they want, that is land rights change. They actually want what’s called DOGIT, deed of grant in trust land, to be able to be used so people can own a home where that is.

You see, we have actually built apartheid in this country. We have built an apartheid system where we have said if you live separately from us we’ll make people have a permit to go in there and we will hold you responsible for what occurs. We will pour the cash in, every now and then we’ll come in and give you something else and then we’ll tut tut when it all goes wrong.

That will happen in any society. This is not about indigenous Australia. This is about human beings put into a circumstance which is such a false set of parameters that it can’t work. They’re now recognising that. They know that in their hearts and the women are the answer. The women have said, enough.

One last point before I wrap up, is for those who say I don’t consult. Consulting is not talking to those people who purport to be indigenous leaders. Consulting is talking to people who don’t have a voice on the ground. That’s what I’ve done as a politician, as a member of parliament in my electorate, talking to people in their houses, talking to people who are not particularly articulate but have worries and concerns about their own areas.

When a 65-year-old woman, Theodora, looks me in the eye and says a lot has changed in our town from the 300 person riots that we used to have and the houses that were being burnt down 18 months ago, but you haven’t helped me enough. I said, what do you want, Theodora? She said, I want to feel safe when I walk up to the ATM in my community to pull money out to feed my grandchildren, she said, but when I do the young men come in here and they threaten - get this - they threaten to break my washing machine or my television if I don’t hand them the money over.

They take the money, they spend it on ganja, they get high, they come down, they’re hungry and then they take the last food off the table off my grandchildren. You must take that money off me because I get humbugged, I get threatened with that.

That is what welfare has done, welfare change, and today The Australian, the first bit of evidence, a two day seminar of the people of Titjikala, Imanpa and Mutitjulu, got together and said even though it’s only been in for a few weeks it’s making a big difference. Kids are going back to school, the amount of grog, the amount of alcohol, the amount of drugs, the amount of gambling is receding, the domestic violence goes down, people start to be able to see again.

Swamp your own mind with alcohol and you won’t remember very much, you won’t be able to make many judgements and if you’ve done that for two generations then you have no hope.

In the past I have been saying it must stop. That’s not the answer. We must have the guts to make it stop and the only way we do that is to take really tough decisions, tough decisions which some people don’t like, tough decisions which the Northern Territory Government manages to pay for full one page ads ridiculing the Howard Government about alcohol restrictions in the Northern Territory, Send Howard a Message. How about sending Howard a message about the alcohol foetal syndrome, about a three-month-old being killed in their father’s arms because the mother’s thrown a bottle? How about doing that?

When is the right of a child going to be more important than any other single thing we do?

People say I’m passionate about it. I am. I’m passionate about it because I’ve taken the time to go into the town camps at night and see what is nothing less than a war zone in Australia and say what chance have these people got if we ignore them? It’s going to cost billions of dollars but it’s also going to take the entire Australian community deciding, as one, that when it’s off the front pages it won’t be out of their consciousness, that they will bring these children to have the same opportunity that your children will have, to have the same opportunities for an education but, most importantly, just to be healthy.

We have started that process but it must continue and it must spread across the nation. The kids of South Australia and the APY lands, the kids of the East Kimberley and the kids of the Cape, deserve it as much as the Northern Territory.

If we turn back now, if we blink now, then we will have committed genocide on indigenous communities. That is what it is because their oral history will disappear with alcohol foetal syndrome, abuse gets passed down from generation to generation, as I’ve said in Kalumburu this week with six-year-olds being raped by 10 to 15-year-olds. It’s too much for most people’s senses to take but that is where we’re at and as long as I am the federal Minister for Indigenous Affairs, nothing, no amount of cartoon characters out there, no amount of academics who don’t actually want to go and front the reality, or no indigenous activist will actually deter me from doing what these people have asked me to do and I just challenge every Australian to say what can they do. What can you do as an individual to make a difference? Because you in Melbourne, here in Melbourne, can make a difference and the people in this university can and you need to ask that question. If you can’t answer it, which is quite normal, is to go to people around you that want to make that change forever, and participate.

I thank you for the opportunity, I thank you for your interest in this subject. To me, it is the single most important human story that Australia is yet to tell. We are at the crossroads and let’s hope and pray that that crossroads leads to the appropriate way forward for kids so they do have a future.

Thank you.

 

Eric Michaels' essay "Bad Aboriginal Art" and the collection of his writings by the same name is the inspiration for my headline this week, of course, because I can never resist the opportunity to plug Michaels' extraordinary glimpses into Warlpiri culture and the early days of the acrylic painting movement. However, my topic today is not Michaels but rather two examples of blinkered writing about Aboriginal art that have come across the internet wire in the last ten days.

Part One: London

The first article is Grayson Perry's review of Rarrk - London, the new show of work from Maningrida mounted by Josh Lilley at the Bargehouse Gallery in Southwark, London, which opened on September 20th and runs until October 7, 2007. Perry's critique, entitled "Aboriginal Art: worthy but uninspiring," appeared in the London Times the day before the show opened. If Eric Michaels was correct in arguing that unless we can articulate what makes for bad art, we can never know good art, Perry has done us all an inestimable service by providing a sterling example of bad art criticism, beginning with his persistent misspelling ("raark") of the technique that defines Kuninjku art.

I'm tempted to dismiss Perry's analysis of the show as another example of how visual artists are far better suited to employing plastic media in order to share their responses to the world around them. More concisely, most artists should be seen and not heard. Perry uses the occasion of this exhibition to bemoan his perception of himself as a marginalized artist whose true genius has fought long and hard for recognition: this is in itself a rather unflattering position for a recent winner of the Turner Prize to stake out. But that's another story--or maybe it isn't.

Perry is an artist who works mainly in ceramics and who thus often finds himself cast on the wrong side of the case of Art vs. Craft. He must find this all the more galling because he takes as his twinned poles of inspiration the forms of ancient Greek pottery on the one hand (both in the shapes of the vessels themselves in the style of painting with which he adorns them) and the post-modernist vernacular of irony on the other (in that these pseudo-Graeco decorations often depict the seamier and less appealing aspects of contemporary life). This model of contemporary art as steeped in the traditions of Western humanism and art-critical history is what Perry finds essential, especially when the art is displayed in galleries. Arriving fresh on the banks of the Thames without these credentials condemns the art of Maningrida to a judgment of over-reaching: another case of artists who do not know their place.

In short, Perry passes off his own grievances about the art world and contemporary valuation of artistic practice as insights into the lack of aesthetic merit in the work of the Kuninjku painters. But when a reviewer's first utterance, indeed his entire first paragraph, is about a work of art he himself has created rather than anything he has seen in the exhibition, the reader is forewarned.

Perry provides color commentary for an idiosyncratic history of Aboriginal art in Western contexts. He highlights the appearance of John Mawurndjul on the cover of Time, alongside his recent retrospective in Europe and presence at the Musee du Quai Branly. He notes that among the attractions that led to the rise in Aboriginal art's profile during the 1980s was the fact that "it was decorative, and had a strong authentic look easily adapted into T-shirts and tourist souvenirs." He comments on the "protectiveness" of Aboriginal artists toward their imagery, referring in tandem to Elizabeth Durack's appropriation of an Aboriginal identity in the fictional Eddie Burrup and to Wandjuk Marika's despair at finding his clan designs appropriated to the design of a tea-towel. He offensively characterizes Marika as a helpless weakling who must "appeal" to the Prime Minister for "help in framing copyright."

But his main complaint is that these "outsiders" to the Western tradition have muscled their way into the privileged world of London galleries without paying either their dues to the system or their homage to the regulations of the art market. On the question of artistic integrity, Perry complains

Authenticity is very important to these artists, but the main source of it is the collective and historical culture rather than the authenticity bestowed by connoisseurs on an individual original artist. ... The values of contemporary art are aesthetically and intellectually complex and have been refined through a long history of challenges and movements. Aboriginal art, whose value derives from a traditional folklore context, cannot just transfer that value into the more lucrative and far-reaching arena of contemporary art without having to work with and be judged on fine-art criteria.

This is startling stuff, and certainly overthrows my art-historical perspective. I had no idea that authenticity was bestowed! Awarded like a prize, say, the Turner Prize for example (but certainly not the Clemenger). Perhaps this explains why, in his final paragraph, Perry is able to conclude that "as examples of authentic Aboriginal art, these works are OK...." So much for authenticity. As for aesthetics, Perry judges the work to be "a bit lifeless, a bit routine" and ultimately "uninspiring."

Perry can see only the "Aboriginal" and thus misses the "art." He has two problems. One is that art is de facto defined as that which emerges from a tradition beginning with the Greeks and today authorized by the Empire. The second in that he is blinded by the preoccupations of Empire and its assumption that the further from London one goes, the more primitive all encounters must be.

Perry's critique is saturated with the language of the great white hunter and these not-so-Freudian malapropisms reveal his prejudice in nearly every paragraph. The Kuninjku have failed to study the "ways of our conceptual-art witchdoctors" and so "do not fully enter the culture of the village." Perry sees himself as "an ageing spear-carrier in the contemporary-art tribe ... stand[ing] up for [his] tribe's territorial rights." And of course, he blames this ethnographic cast of mind on the exhibition itself.

Now, I haven't seen the show, though I do have a copy of the fine catalog (Rarrk-London, London: Josh Lilley Fine Art, 2007, 80pp.) that accompanies it. And on the basis of what is reproduced in the catalog, I must say it would indeed be a shame if Perry's bigoted mirror-gazing deflected potential visitors from seeing the art for themselves.

The catalog does give an ethnographic context for the show, with essays by Apolline Kohen and Luke Taylor. Anthony Downey offers an introduction to the political implications of art about country in 21st century Australia, and Wally Caruana provides a history of the presentation of Aboriginal art in Europe. (Caruana's essay may have in part have fanned Perry's indignation by suggesting that Arnhem Land art influenced Klee and thus opened the door to this current invasion of England by the primitives themselves.)

The work in the show is often stunning. Naturally, Mawurndjul must be the focal point, and the work here is far better than what was on display last year in Paris in conjunction with the opening of the Musee du Quai Branly. But my eyes are riveted by some of the best work I've ever seen by Samuel Namunjdja, Ivan Namirrkki, and Timothy Wulanjbirr.

Namunjdja's paintings are strongly patterned Wind Dreamings, similar in style to the work that work the prize for bark painting at the NATSIAA in 2006. Ironically, given Perry's dismissal of these Kuninjku works as alien to the Western canon, they bring to mind Jasper Johns's hatching and flagstone compositions of the 1980s. And given that comparison, I look at Namunjdja's paintings with a new appreciation for the tension in their surfaces, for the way the patterns slip back and forth in the plane, moving like the scales of a reptile across the plane of the picture.

The paintings by Namirrkki and Wulanjbirr bring the Kuninjku use of pattern to new heights. In contrast to the twisting, unpredictable, swirling rarrk in the grids of Mawurndjul's paintings or those of his wife Kay Lindjuwanga, these two younger men fill their rectilinear grids with strictly plotted diagonals. They inscribe diamonds and chevrons, or simply repeated oblique motifs onto squares and rectangles; and then they interrupt those echoing passages with the briefest surprises: a simple row of tiny circles, or in Wulanjbirr's case, the most exquisite inlay of a branching line, a vegetal runner athwart of field of shaken and dried berries. No one would mistakes these paintings for hommage à Matisse, but neither can one deny a common rhythmic impulse that beats beneath the dissimilar brushes.

Lilley has worked for well over a year to bring this showcase of art from Maningrida to London, to bring, as he says in the foreword to the catalog, "to the capital of contemporary art a movement of artists and a body of work that is as sophisticated and aesthetically rigourous as anything else being produced in the art world today." It' s a shame that Grayson Perry missed the point, and I hope his review doesn't deter visitors. My guess is that it hasn't. Traffic to this blog from the UK usually hovers at about 3% of the overall total; in the week since Rarrk - London opened, between 10 and 15% of the hits I'm receiving are from England.

Part Two: Canberra

The other news article I read recently isn't so much an example of muddle-headed art criticism as it is foggy thinking about the economics of art. On September 19 (coincidentally the day Perry's review appeared) the Canberra Times published a short piece by Helen Hughes of the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) entitled "Downtrodden by too much aid." The general thrust of her argument is that the homelands movement is at the root of the inability of Aboriginal artists to sustain themselves economically. By living in remote areas indigenous people cut themselves off from the education that would ensure literacy, numeracy, and resistance to carpetbaggers. How else to explain why people at the heart of a $300 million a year industry need welfare handouts in the form of CDEP? These poor artists are being fleeced out of a living.

Never mind the fact that most the testimony before the Senate Inquiry earlier this year suggested that carpetbaggers and their unethical behavior amounted to less than 10%, and often more like 5%, of the market. Hughes declares that "media reports and inquiries, most recent by the Senate, have exposed the extent of Aboriginal art racketeering." Notice the construction of the sentence, too, and how on quick reading it sounds so close to "Aboriginal racketeering."

So pay no attention to the fact that these artists are the victims of whitefellas out to make a buck off the backs of already impoverished people. Hughes avers that the artists' "inability to communicate in English, to read and write, and above all their lack of numeracy, have all encouraged exploitation." Greed seems to be no part of the equation in this rendering of the story. Once again the problem in the Aboriginal problem is the Aboriginal.

Official incompetence plays no role either. I remain astonished that a government that is capable of mounting a massive campaign to quarantine welfare payments can't manage to find sixty policemen in all of Australia to send to remote communities in the Northern Territory. The Australian Tax Office still can not find evidence against the suppliers of the often reported trucks and Viagra and prostitutes, while the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission fares no better. Money-laundering, though, seems to be a going business in the Territory, though not among the indigenous population.

Sorry, I wandered off point there. Jon Altman provided a much more succinct refutation of Hughes in his Letter to the Editor of the Times published a few days later.

Like most artists in Australia, indigenous artists, mainly residing in remote regions, cannot survive through their art alone.

Most non-indigenous artists are able to access part-time work to supplement their incomes. Such opportunity is rarely available to indigenous artists.

A mere handful of the most successful indigenous artists do not require income support, but the majority do. And as Hughes, as an economist should know, the way global art markets work only a fraction of the estimated $300 million of final indigenous visual art sales are ever paid to artists.

While not all art dealers are exploitative, the community-based indigenous arts centre model has emerged over the past 35 years as a cost-effective means to provide a point of brokerage between artists and the market. I note that Hughes is not advocating for the closure of the Australian ballet or opera because they are not financially viable.

I also note that Hughes argues, wrongly, that artistic success is linked to moving away from "homelands". This is erroneous. Most successful indigenous artists live on or near the land that they own: their inspiration comes from "painting their country".

Such political and cultural subtleties have clearly eluded Hughes.

But I suspect that Hughes's real interest is not with the art market at all. Her agenda is apparently far more transparently laid out in her new book, Lands of Shame: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 'Homelands' in Transition recently published by the CIS. That tiny pair of quotation marks around the word homelands gives it all away, doesn't it?

Truth be told, I haven't read the book and am letting my own prejudices show through. Robert Manne praises Hughes's ability to argue her point in Lands of Shame in an essay he recently wrote for The Monthly, "Pearson's Gamble, Stanner's Dream: the past and future of remote Australia." Based on the evidence her piece in the Times provides, I can't believe she argues coherently about anything; still, here is Manne's final assessment.

The policy Hughes outlines--cogently and persuasively, it must be said--is generally unsympathetic to land rights and self-determination, frankly paternalistic, opposed to those who presently exercise power in the Aboriginal communities and openly assimilationist in its ultimate ambition. Lands of Shame undoubtedly reflects the general thrust of the Howard government and conservative Australia.

In his review published at the Institute for Social Research of Lands of Shame, Tim Rowse is considerably harsher. Hughes proposes the emptying of the homelands into regional centres where education and employment would be available to advance the assimilationist agenda, but she is maddeningly imprecise about how all this would actually be brought to pass.

If Robert Manne is right in presenting Hughes as an influence over the Howard government, then Hughes' crucial vagueness about what she is proposing may also be a vacuum in the social and economic planning of the Australian government (whether led by Howard or by Rudd). Lands of Shame may be a guide not only to the 'philosophy' (a generous word) but also to the intellectual vacuity of the Australia's current political elites. The appealing chords that Helen Hughes has struck in The Australian's op-ed pages--profound ambivalence about the emergent Indigenous middle class, scorn for the homelands as Coombs' 'socialist' experiment--are no substitute for policy realism.

In the end it was not simply the temporal proximity of the publication of these two pieces by Grayson Perry and Helen Hughes that left them linked in my mind. Rather, they both partake of the utter arrogance that so often passes for reason in assessments of the Aboriginal condition and Aboriginal value. To say that they both fail to imagine the Aboriginal perspective is to understate the seriousness of the problem: they both fail to recognize that there is an Aboriginal perspective. It is this failure that lies behind the refusal to consult with communities whose lives are being disrupted in the name of progress, in the name of fixing once more "the Aboriginal problem." Would that a bad review of an art exhibition were all that is at stake.