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A never-never land for sense

20 October 2007 - Don Watson visits a resilient Aboriginal community where the would-be protectors are the problem, not the people.

Three-and-a-half hours westward from Gove, the half-dozen houses of an Aboriginal outstation lie baking in the scrub. At certain times of the year about 80 people live here. As well as the houses, there is an airstrip, two school buildings, a workshop and a phone booth; and a story attaches to each of them.

A couple of weeks ago, police arrived and searched the place for drugs. They had no reason to think they would find any and they didn't. When the place was established almost 40 years ago the community banned all drugs, including alcohol and kava, and the rule has applied ever since. There is no gambling. And if the police were looking for signs of domestic violence or molested children, they weren't going to find them either. It is not paradise, but these things don't happen there.

They are Yolngu people. To judge by the rock paintings and mythology with which they identify, it is likely they have been on these lands for 4500 years. As with other outstations, this one was set up to maintain the culture and language and the land from which they are inseparable. The white Australians of those times thought this
was reasonable. The feeling was that enough damage had been done to these people, and that less might be done in future if they were given their ancestral lands and, as far as possible, allowed to live according to their customs and beliefs.

It is hard country and it has made them resilient people. The chief custodian was raised in keeping with the laws and rites of his ancestors. He grew up nomadic and can give the Yolngu name to every species of plant and animal that lives there; every rock and every painting; every waterhole and every kind of fish. He is a tiny,
impish man; alternately anxious and laughing. He also looks indestructible, and if he proves not to be in the next few years, it will be the tobacco and not the country that does for him. Tobacco is the only non-medicinal drug allowed at the outstation.

The great objectives of the outstation movement were to protect the cultural traditions and pass on them on to future generations, and to keep the young people away from the chaos of the larger settlements where drugs, violence and despair devour them. Go to one of these settlements and then go to the outstation and you can easily conclude that the objective has been met. The young people of the larger centres know nothing of their traditions, and look unhealthy. The children of the outstation know something and look healthy and happy. The teenagers and adults carry no surplus fat. Their skin shines.

They would be even healthier if the contractors who put in the septic tanks and drains had done their work a more conscientiously: a real septic tank instead of the 44-gallon drum they used, and agricultural pipes to drain water away from the taps, would have eliminated the pools of stagnant water where parasites gather. They would be healthier still if the health department had held the contractors to account: or if it had not taken the view that people's rotten teeth should not be treated because then everyone else would want their teeth done, and excused its own neglect on the grounds that Aborigines can tolerate more pain than whites.

The people at the outstation go hungry sometimes. This is partly because the habitats of the animals they once hunted are being destroyed by exotic species. Cane toads have killed off the goannas and pythons that were once an important part of the people's diet. Water buffalo and pigs gouge the land, rip out vegetation
and erode and foul the creeks.

They also go hungry because their supports fail them at nearly every step. The half- dozen houses are as if expressly designed to be unliveable in the sweltering climate and perfectly unsuited to the inhabitants' way of life. No breeze can blow through them. Most of the solar panels only worked for a few weeks after they were installed and no one ever came back to fix them.

The tractor provided to maintain the airstrip is a rare Korean model without spare parts. For more than a year the people asked for someone to come and fix it. Three months ago a volunteer overhauled it, but it lacked two parts. It still does. The community generator was running the batteries flat. The community was blamed.
But the volunteer found that the person sent to repair it had assembled the alternator the wrong way. The daily life of the people is conducted in the shadow of this incompetence, waste and neglect. The stories are funny in the manner of Russian satire; but the reality, like the Russian one, is corrosive and dispiriting.

Dr Neville White is a biological anthropologist. He is also a Vietnam War veteran. He drove up from La Trobe University 35 years ago and has been there for months at a time every year since. He persuaded Rotary and other philanthropic bodies to put up the money for a school and a workshop, and he took a team of other veterans up to build it with the young men. When the workshop was finished, at a cost of several thousand dollars, a bureaucrat flew out from Darwin to supervise the installation of an illuminated exit sign.

The vets teach the young men various skills: how to repair houses, how to paint them. The young men are keen to learn. Until recently a teacher came each week from the regional college - a teacher with trade skills who could work with the teenagers and young men. Two young women from the outstation were trained to be
assistant teachers. Enrolments at the school more than doubled. A second, larger school building was erected.

And then, after a few months, the trade teacher was taken away. The young men who had been learning how to repair Land Cruisers and plumb houses found themselves in class with six-year-olds being taught how to make pizzas. Enrolments halved. Most have gone to the centres where the drugs and chaos are. Some went
because they were scared by stories that the police and soldiers were coming after them. The Yolngu often use signs to communicate with each other: to signify police they cross their wrists, as if handcuffed.

The difference between the efficiency of the volunteers and the ineptitude of the bureaucracy is startling - as startling as the difference between the volunteers' generosity and the paltriness of the bureaucracy and the contractors. Next time Australians congratulate themselves on their work in Aceh or East Timor, or deplore the US response to Hurricane Katrina, they might reflect on the Northern Territory.

No white community would stand for it. But then, in general, white communities are not so heavily dependent on the government. Some are, of course; and some, like the Aborigines of the outstations, choose to live in remote and unproductive places. But the white people who do this are commonly esteemed as authentic, if not
"iconic", Australians, and the passing of their way of life is reckoned a national tragedy. There was a time when it seemed possible the country would think this way about the Aborigines living on their homelands, but it now seems certain that this time has passed.

Even if the services intended for the outstations reached them, life on the outstation would still fall well short of perfect. When the sun is setting and the kids are playing football or hanging from the mango trees, and the men are hunting and the women tending fires, and the bee-eaters are whizzing about and the old custodian is
wandering up the airstrip on his nightly search for tracks and taking the odd pot shot at mudlarks with his shanghai, it comes close to seeming perfect. But, of course, it's not: it wasn't before the Europeans, it wasn't after them, and it's not now.

Yet it is so much better than the bigger centres. And it would be so much better still if the promises were kept; the humiliations and disappointments were kept to a tolerable minimum; and the people were not obliged to be always asking - like children - for their recognised entitlements. It is not just the impression of relative
health and happiness: there is hard data to say they are healthier. And while government surveys never seem to ask the question, the people on the outstations will tell you that they feel healthier, happier and safer there.

The practical skills the residents want, and the vets and the government teacher were beginning to provide, are precisely what the Government says it wants. Being able to fix their own and others' vehicles would not only provide income and jobs but free them from the grip of town repairers who charge them what they like and do not hesitate to confiscate their cars if they cannot pay their bills. Yolngu work teams can maintain the buildings, machinery and roads at a fraction of the cost of contractors. Providing guided tours for scholars and students would make for useful jobs and income and maintain the connection with the land. Everything the people of the outstation want, the Government says it wants for Aborigines. Everything the people have conscientiously shunned for 35 years, the Government says must be shunned now.

So why would the Government abolish the permit system that protects the land against degradation and the people against booze and drugs? No one seems to know if the system still applies or not, but tourists and hunters are assuming that it doesn't and are heading into the lands for the first time in 40 years. Why would they cancel Community Development Employment Projects on these outstations? Why would they tell the people that they must be economically self-sufficient, yet deny them the means they have chosen to do it? Why tell them - as the Yolngu say they have been told - that they must set up a shop and sell drinks and artefacts to
motorists passing on the Katherine road? Or dance for them at night? Why, when the centres are plagued with booze, dope and violence, force the outstation people back into them? These are not my questions: they are what the local administrators and educators are asking.

Whatever the particular merits of the present Federal Government intervention, there is no question that the big centres needed drastic action. They have needed it for years. But why starve the people out of the homelands? The old custodian speaks just enough English to make his view of these things clear. It's not for drugs or for children, he says. It's for mining. He has always said "no". But they never stop asking. And they'll win in the end.
That is one plausible explanation. There is another one which he cannot know: that they have put themselves beyond the reach of booze and drugs, but they could not escape the culture wars and the Carlylean tenet of their chief protagonist - that history is always right and just and the vanquished have no cause worth defending.

Don Watson is an author and a former political speechwriter.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

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