The Hatfield clan circa 1897 |
I had a long chat recently with an old mate from my politics days who I hadn’t seen for some time. The conversation turned to Aboriginal affairs issues, as it does when you’ve both worked with and for Indigenous groups for the best part of thirty years.
Somewhat surprisingly for an aging lefty, my old mate’s attitude was quite similar to mine (and that of another old lefty in Bob Durnan who I often mention in posts like this). The former left-liberal approach to Aboriginal affairs, based as it was on “self-determination” and symbolic issues like treaties, apologies and recognition of customary law, just didn’t work. The plight of Aboriginal people actually became progressively worse by just about any measure. Of course, some supporters of that approach continue to argue that self-determination was only ever tried in a half-hearted, piecemeal, stop-start fashion. There’s probably some truth in that , but you still can’t argue that those policies even remotely resembled a raging success.
Similarly, the Howard Intervention and its relabelling by the ALP government as “Closing the Gap” has also enjoyed underwhelming success to date despite multi-billion dollar spending, as a recent article by Indigenous legal academic Larissa Behrendt highlights. Part of the problem, as Behrendt argues, is the “top-down”, prescriptive, paternalistic nature of the federal programs. As Behrendt observes, successive Productivity Commission reports (hardly a bleeding heart, left-leaning organisation) have found that the programs that work in Aboriginal communities are those based on consultation, partnership, mutual respect and communities “taking ownership” of initiatives. That must not obviate acountability or efficiency, but the two are not incompatible.
However, I strongly suspect after nearly 30 years of observation that the lack of a “partnership” approach per se isn’t the main problem. The principal and possibly insoluble problem is that key central aspects of traditional Indigenous culture are simply fundamentally incompatible with a contemporary, post-industrial, western capitalist individualistic culture like that of the dominant Australian community. However, as soon as you make such a statement, other than privately and sotto voce, you end up being howled down as a “racist” (or at the very least an arrogant xenophobe). Even undeniably well-motivated, knowledgeable experts like veteran anthropologist Peter Sutton have experienced this backlash after daring to critique aspects of Aboriginal culture. Here is Sutton talking about the inherent extreme violence of Aboriginal society:
The anthropologist and linguist, Peter Sutton, lived and worked with Aboriginal people for 40 years, including in Central Australia. He says violence was not considered inherently negative.
Peter Sutton: There were many acts of violence which were considered very important and positive, such as cutting open the skull with stones in grief, such as piercing the nasal septum to wear a nose peg, such as circumcision, sub-incision, and other bodily operations that were part of the religious law and status marking and so on.
Chris Bullock: He says today’s violence is a mix of things that are deeply embedded, like teaching children to react quickly to a threat, because that was a critical survival response in days gone by.
Peter Sutton: So when you’ve got children still being brought up to be quickly vengeful and quickly vengeful in a physical way when they’re slighted or insulted or attacked, if you combine that with a sedentary community, people living maybe 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 strong in what is really a kind of a suburb in the bush, where people are not dispersed and they’re not moving camp whenever they need to, but have to keep dealing with the same relatives all the time, and these people are all related in these communities, then you add to that, say, alcohol, which is a disinhibiter, it lets the steam off, you can suddenly have a tremendous amount of bloodshed because it’s the new combination that is structuring this thing and it’s going off. But one element of it, or two or three elements of it actually come down from a very long ancient line of how children are raised.
In other words, while the extreme violence, especially against women, that we witness today is certainly exacerbated by alcohol and substance abuse, violence at levels that non-Indigenous Australians rightly regard as utterly unacceptable was always inherent in Aboriginal society. It’s a point veteran journalist Hal Colebatch makes even more trenchantly in the latest edition of Quadrant, albeit that he rather undermines his own argument by relying on egregious ideological denialist Andrew Bolt.
Sutton also emphasises a much less well understood aspect of traditional Aboriginal culture and religion, the concept of sorcery, curses and payback violence, as this summary of Sutton’s book The Politics of Suffering by the Dominican Friars observes:
Many remote-area indigenous people also believe most illnesses and deaths are due “to the ill will and sorcery of other people”, a belief that further complicates efforts to boost health. …
In fact if anything this understates the real picture. Traditional Aboriginal people believe that not only just about all illnesses and the deaths flowing from them, but also accidents and many if not most criminal acts, are a result of curses and sorcery inflicted by particular malevolent individuals from other clans. There is no such thing as illness or accident! Not only does this extraordinary belief system result in cycles of extreme and utterly irrational “payback'” violence inflicted on entire extended families for acts they didn’t cause and are powerless to prevent or mitigate, but more generally it also means Aboriginal people have no incentive to examine or change their own behaviours. Why worry about alcohol or substance abuse, poor nutrition or personal hygiene if these things have no causative relationship with the observable chaos and misery that surround you?
The ongoing farce of 60 people from Yuendumu who keep fleeing their community and ending up in Adelaide is a result of just such a bizarre, irrational “payback” situation. It makes the Hatfields and McCoys or the Montagues and Capulets look like models of proportionate restraint by comparison. At least their vendettas were triggered by real acts that someone actually committed! The Yuendumu feud between the Watson and Nelson clans is exceptional only in the large number of people fleeing town and the fact that they keep lobbing in Adelaide and hence hitting the national media.
Other aspects of traditional culture that are fundamentally incompatible with modern society include the rituals of “sorry business”. Whole communities shut down, sometimes for weeks on end, when someone dies. Moreover, given the ubiquitous extreme violence and range of behaviours leading to appalling health outcomes, deaths are frequent. “Sorry business” rituals mean that Aboriginal communities cannot maintain business enterprises capable of competing in the broader economy, nor can traditional individuals hold down jobs in the mainstream economy unless they have extremely understanding and flexible employers.
Finally, the traditional system of “caring and sharing” kinship obligations, so beloved of many left-leaning commentators wearing rose-tinted spectacles, is itself rendered toxic by interaction with the modern economy and welfare state. Why bother to hold down a job if you’re going to be forced to share your earnings with a swag of idle, welfare-dependant relatives who will intimidate you to hand over your cash to fund their alcohol, substance abuse, gambling and porn addictions? It is largely this ugly phenomenon which causes otherwise left-leaning community workers like Bob Durnan to support the Intervention income management program despite its evident paternalistic aspects. Income management means that mothers at least have enough unstolen money to feed and clothe their kids.
Cape York Indigenous leader Noel Pearson tries (tacitly) to undertake his own form of social engineering by advocating that Indigenous people adopt a “ladder of opportunity” world view in which they put the welfare of their immediate family first. However, Pearson deliberately fudges the extent to which that would represent a radical departure from the traditional culture of kinship obligation.
Frankly, I despair of any lasting positive changes in Aboriginal society unless and until Aboriginal people themselves decide to address these issues and adapt their own culture to the contemporary world. The assimilation and “stolen generation” policies of the twentieth century demonstrated the futility of imposing such changes forcibly on any culture or community. How to effectively sow the seeds of such a desire for change is the problem, at least as I see it? Honest discussion like this post could be a useful start, though only if at least some others participate in a constructive spirit. Real friends don’t hesitate to level with each other when one of them is stuffing up. The same should be true of blunt but fair and reasoned criticism of cultures in our midst, despite the post-modernist pressure for multicultural “acceptance'” of even the most obnoxious practices of oppressed minorities. However, the real solution must lie in education, both of children and adults, as well as identification and fostering of potential future leaders. If we had a couple of Noel Pearsons in every community then real change would become possible. But knowing that and achieving it are two different things.
I recall a bizarre post by Mark Bahnisch at LP several years back in which he argued that Aboriginals are no more inclined than other Australians to have a problem with alcohol. Apparently we shouldn’t believe our own racist lying eyes. Ditto for the sexual abuse, violence etc that pretty well everyone outside the lefty denialosphere realise are rampant in indigenous communities.
The prevailing denialism on the left and the paternalism or indifference on the right skewers any chance of fructuous policy settings.
A thoughtful piece, Ken.
Well done.
I hope it provokes further thought and discussion.
Ken – Can you think of any successful examples of self-initiated cultural change?
Ken,
I think you are being too pessimistic, the most recent indicators suggest that things are getting better, and I would suspect that a lot of the ultra-negative things will get better with them — there are lots of cultures that have historically done horrific things to each other and especially women but most ditch them once they get better educated and wealthier. I don’t see why Aboriginals are going to be an exception here.
conrad
The ABS figures are for Indigenous peoples as a whole, around 500,000 of them. Most are “part-Aboriginal” and resident in towns and cities. I’m talking about the 50,000 or so traditional Aboriginal people in the NT and a similar number in remote communities in Queensland and WA. For these people the situation is not improving and if anything getting worse. See the article by Larissa Behrendt linked from my primary post:
Don
I’m not suggesting self-initiation, rather significant prodding/guidance and active encouragement of change, education and fostering of future leaders likely to embrace change, along with resolutely prohibiting and deterring the most obnoxious violent cultural practices. That is, social engineering by the dominant culture, but not compulsion as practised under the old assimilation policies.
The interpretation Inga Clendinnen provides in her book on the first four years of British occupation in Sydney, Dancing With Strangers, is of a male warrior society consumed by face and shockingly violent toward women (and which was in turn horrified by the British practice of whipping and hanging).
Vivid post, Ken. The bottom line is that their ancient way of life is no longer viable and for their own good they have to join the dominant culture.
Everyone has to face up to that and figure out how to facilitate it. At best it must take a couple of generations.
I have a specific suggestion which I have mentioned before: seduce Aboriginal boys with high quality internet access. Probably quite low cost in the scheme of things, too.
[…] bunch from Troppo. Ken Parish on the intractability of indigenous issues, and funding infrastructure in NSW, Nicholas Gruen on the problems of rationalising rustic […]
Don Arthur.
Kenneth Maddock in his seminal 1971 ‘The Australian Aborigines’ details how in the 1950’s Elcho Islanders, off Arnhem Land ‘broke spectacularly with their tradition by building within the grounds of the Methodist mission a rangga’ (carved wooden figures usually for a ‘men only’ display). The sacred became profane and Maddock goes on to see this as an attempt by the locals to gain some reciprocity from white society.
OK it is a long time ago to search for ‘self initiated cultural change’ and I share the despair of others on this post. Maybe we could try a bit of ‘tough love’. Take the issue of not publicising the names of the recently departed Indigenous Australians out of some sense of respect for traditional culture. Maybe we should announce that from January 1 2012 all media are free of this informal obligation.
At the same time the NT Government could say to the Yuendumu that no more tourists can climb Uluru. Now it’s your turn! How about dropping collective clan feuds such as the embarrassing Watson-Nelson debacle. Cultural give and take.
Well put Ken. I seem to recall you having similar pragmatic views many years ago: but one would be hesitant to air them in recent time for fear of being howled down.
(I trust this comment is not ‘the kiss-of-death’ given that you think I am a ‘pompous wanker’)
Ken, insightful post.
I struggle to see any meaningful way the “dominant culture” can socially engineer or (as Mike puts it) facilitate change in these remote aboriginal communities given the vast geographical divide. Ideas such as internet access provide a possible avenue of influence, however given the stories I’ve heard of how other goods are treated I’m not sure personal computers would stand a chance of long term survival and influence.
Ultimately I think the lack of hope for economic independence of the communities will continue to hinder the desired social outcomes, in much the same way intergenerational welfare dependence weighs on other cultures within society.
Is there that much difference to the long term generational unemployment culture of parts of the SW Sydney, apart from lack of media interest (outside the odd ‘glenfield riot’ scenario)?
John
Remote indigenous communities are an utterly different world from “parts of SW Sydney”. If you haven’t been there you couldn’t even begin to imagine. No doubt habits and assumptions about work (or lack of same) are common factors in a very general sense, but I don’t think that really takes you very far.
“Between 1990 and 2000, the HDI [Human Development Index] scores of Indigenous peoples in North America and New Zealand improved at a faster rate than the general populations, closing the gap in human development. In Australia, the HDI scores of Indigenous peoples decreased while the general populations improved, widening the gap in human development. While these countries are considered to have high human development according to the UNDP, the Indigenous populations that reside within them have only medium levels of human development.”
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-698X/7/9/
The improvement in the situation of indigenous peoples in North America and New Zealand contrasts sharply with the static or worsening situation of Australian Aborigines. I wonder what accounts for the difference.
Nice work.
“Frankly, I despair of any lasting positive changes in Aboriginal society unless and until Aboriginal people themselves decide to address these issues and adapt their own culture to the contemporary world.”
Which it seems to me they can only do individually. So we need the right incentives to help individuals in the communities abandon the problem parts of the culture. Something that unfortunately would require relocation in most cases.
I know its a lot worse out west- orders of magnitude worse …but ..lots of violence/crime , no go zones, drugs , 15 year old mothers, illiteracy and so on .is not that different except it is not looked at much , back in the late 80s used to do a bit of work in the area.
Ken,
you and I have longed agreed on most of this. The key point to keep making though is that policies have never wavered from paternalistic assimilation. The key way in which the mainstream tries to change the original culture is via compulsory education in the production techniques of urban life. We do not teach canoe making, but English and maths, skills quite useless for hunter-gatherers.
Hence it is simply a fallacy to talk about any period in policy making towards Aboriginals that the mainstream has not had an active program of assimilation (and in that sense the reports of the Productivity Commission are disappointingly lacking in vision). All that has changed over the decades is the degree of pressure the mainstream has been willing to exert and the false labels attached to that policy. The notion however that ‘we’ are truly going to engage the Aboriginal community and talk about what they would like to learn at school has never been on the table and of course wont come on the table for the reasons you state: there is no long-run alternative to assimilation.
Societies that have faced Malthusian conditions for millenia tend to be very violent ones – that’s a fact, and pretending otherwise has done a lot of harm. The best you can do is to remove the Malthusian pressure and wait for attitudes to adjust – a multigeneration project.
The point is that for two centuries the white fella intensified that pressure. It aint surprising that we’ve ended up where we are.
“We do not teach canoe making, but English and maths, skills quite useless for hunter-gatherers.”
However, contemporary Aboriginal people living in remote communities are not “hunter-gatherers” in any meaningful sense. As Sutton memorably puts it, they are “a sedentary community, people living maybe 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 strong in what is really a kind of a suburb in the bush”. Most go hunting or fishing only marginally more often than the average outdoorsy Darwin resident. They live on food bought at the local community store, just like other Australians (only it’s much more expensive and their food choices are usually far less healthy).
Ken,
of course they are not hunter-gatherers. The point is that the original culture is one of hunter-gatherers and that the remnants of those cultural proclivities are dysfunctional. The attachment to land, reverence of elders, spirit worship, etc., all makes sense in a hunter-gatherer production environment, but makes no sense in urban or sub-urban production realities. Yet cultures are tenacious and slow to change.
Ken – I wonder whether the problem is cultural breakdown rather than traditional Indigenous culture. In the early 1980s, criminologist Paul Wilson pointed out that:
It may be that it’s the breakdown of culture that causes the most problems. In the 1700s when England was going through a period of rapid social and technological change there were huge problems with family breakdown, child neglect and abuse and alcoholism. None of this had much to do with English culture.
Perhaps it was over zealous attempts to obliterate traditional Indigenous culture that caused many of these problems.
The point of saying this isn’t to assign blame to one group or another, it’s to think about what to do next. If Wilson is right, then gathering people from different language groups together in regional centres and trying to get them to give up the last vestiges of culture might just make things worse.
On the English example — Historian Jessica Warner’s book Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason is a good introduction.
Don
The observed situation doesn’t really support your hypothesis. There are numerous different arrangements in remote communities. Some still practise customary law fairly rigorously and have relatively intact authority structures, many don’t. Some have local liquor outlets (or at least did before the Intervention banned them) many don’t. Some tightly enforce permit restrictions and are difficult for outsiders to access, some are quite open townships. And so on. What they all share is very high levels of crime, violence, dreadful health outcomes, poor school attendance etc. There are differences in those measures, but they’re shades of dark grey. In other words, outcomes don’t vary according to the extent to which traditional culture remains intact.
Your suggestion seems akin to that of many well-meaning people in the 1980s: that we could and should assist Aboriginal people to revert to some sort of traditional “museum culture” insulated from western influence. Experience showed it couldn’t be done. In theory any remote community could elect to cut itself off completely and revert to a traditional lifetyle. None have chosen to do so. As Noel Pearson powerfully argues, Aboriginal people overwhelmingly aspire to the benefits of western culture, but exposure to consumerism, welfare dependence etc has inherent destructive effects. There is no way to turn back the clock, and no easy way to smooth the path to adaptation.
That said, your observation about pushing people together in large communities has considerable force. That’s one of the major reasons why the larger communities that are old missions (e.g. Port Keats, Maningrida, Lajamanu, Yuendumu) ARE measurably worse than other communities. Lots more clans rubbing against each other who wouldn’t have done so in traditional society exacerbates friction and maximises chances of cycles of payback violence etc. Some people argue that the current federal/NT policy of creating 20 larger growth centres to facilitate development of jobs, enterprise and higher levels of helath care and education delivery involves similar problems to the old mission days. People won’t be forced into the growth centres, but some outstations are being defunded and there will certainly be an informal pressure towards relocation and centralisation. That’s a risk that will need to be managed. However it isn’t easy to see how else one could affordably create adequate job opportunities, better health and education delivery etc. You certainly can’t build a high school and a full service health centre in every community of 50 or 60 people, nor can such a community support meaningful jobs and enterprises.
Ken – Noel Pearson does not accept that Aboriginal Australians must give up their culture in order to escape disadvantage. What he advocates is bi-culturalism.
In a 2009 opinion piece he insisted:
Not only does Pearson argue that Aboriginal cultures should be preserved, but he insists that non-Indigenous people have an obligation to help Aboriginal people preserve them. He’s not arguing for separatism but for bi-culturalism. He writes:
Cultures are not static. They are constantly assimilating new social practices and technologies. For example, Christian churches eventually found a way to modify their teachings on usury and come to terms with modern banking. The shift from feudalism to capitalism did not require Europeans to give up their religion.
Pearson argues that traditional Aboriginal cultures have yet to come to terms with things like alcohol and welfare. He thinks these have been assimilated into the culture in ways that are not functional (eg the tradition of ‘demand sharing’ allows alcoholics to divert resources from kin to fuel their personal addictions). But his solution is not to abandon Aboriginal culture.
But none of this means that Pearson accepts that Aboriginal culture is responsible for problems like alcoholism. In a 2000 speech he made it clear that the welfare system was at the root of the problem:
It seems to me that what Pearson wants is the reform of white institutions and the strengthening of black culture. It’s not the restoration of some pre-contact ideal he wants, but a living, changing culture that can help Aboriginal people come to terms with the modern economy without sacrificing their identity.
Don
I’m not arguing for the abandonment of Aboriginal culture. I’m arguing for its substantial conscious adaptation by Aboriginal people themselves, with the active encouragement of the dominant society. Pearson argues similarly. Adoption of an immediate family “ladder of opportunity” approach to kinship obligation is a substantial adaptation of traditional culture, whose significance Pearson downplays for obvious strategic reasons.
Moreover, if you asked Pearson whether his endorsement of traditional culture included embracing the proposition that there was no such thing as illness or accident and that all adverse events resulted from sorcery by malign individuals, and that payback violence should therefore be applauded/supported, I would reasonably confidently predict that he would demur rather strongly.
Here’s what Pearson’s written on alcohol and Indigenous culture:
Peter Patton (John Greenfield)
All Don has done is quote Noel Pearson on alcohol and Aboriginals. Your accusations are distasteful and out of line.
Some radical intervention is required to deal with the indigenous alcoholism:
“It has been estimated that the prevalence of FASD in Australia is 0.06 per 1000 live births, and even higher in Indigenous populations at 8.11 per 1000 live births (Elliott, 2008). ” http://www.druginfo.adf.org.au/newsletter.asp?ContainerID=foetal_alcohol_spectrum_disorder
As Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder is about 135 greater in the indigenous community than the general population, and it impinges on the “rights” of the unborn, I would not preclude interventions that impinge on the civil rights of the worst effected communities or that appear unsavoury, such as payments in exchange for voluntary sterilisation of mothers deemed extremely high risk.
Yes I was thinking about deleting Greenfield’s comments. They are as you say tyoically silly and add nothing to the discussion.
Mel — I very much doubt that anyone would ever think of that. I also think you are unfairly tagetting groups that you happen to know about.
The reason I say this is that there are other groups of “at-risk” mothers, and no-one is going to do anything about them. For example, older mothers have a higher risk of having children with Down syndrome, not dissimilar to your figures — but I don’t think anyone is going to suggest such radical things for them. Note that the table in that article is for Down Sydrome births, but I believe many foetuses with Down syndrome get aborted, so they are just the ones that are actually making it into existence — the actual rate in terms of pregnancies is higher.
‘The reason I say this is that there are other groups of “at-risk” mothers, and no-one is going to do anything about them.’
Not really. Sixty-five percent all persons diagnosed with FASD in Australia are indigenous.
“older mothers have a higher risk of having children with Down syndrome”
So what? We can and do screen for Down’s Syndrome. Besides, at least to my knowledge Down’s Syndrome sufferers are not responsible for the level of rape, assault and robbery attributable to indigenous FASD sufferers, nor are they as prone to suicide or clinical depression.