A Different Inequality

The Politics of Debate About Remote Aboriginal Australia

By Diane Austin-Broos

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2011 Diane Austin-Broos
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74237-049-1

Contents

Foreword,
Preface,
Abbreviations,
1 Two debates,
2 Culture and ethnography,
3 A postcolonial critique,
4 Opposing separate development,
5 Defending the homelands,
6 The politics of difference and equality,
Notes,
References,

CHAPTER 1

Two debates

Mathew’s story

I met Mathew on my first trip to Ntaria, the site of the famous Hermannsburg Mission to Western Arrernte people in Central Australia. The town is located on Aboriginal land about 120 kilometres due west of Alice Springs. I had been in Ntaria for just a few months, starting fieldwork among Western Arrernte people. Normally I camped or lived in a caravan but at the time I had managed to borrow a house for a while (my young son had a broken arm). I was learning Western Arrernte using a small grammar compiled by the Lutheran mission and spending as much time as I could with an Arrernte woman who had become my teacher and guide. We travelled to her son’s outstation and camped for days with just a mob of grandchildren and her late husband’s aging next elder brother and his wife. All the other brothers were dead. These two old people told me stories about the mission and also, in the wife’s case, what it was like to see the last senior and ritually active man in her father’s line pass away. ‘He just finished,’ she said.

Mathew was related to these people although that hardly distinguished him given the very large network of relatives that each Arrernte person has. He was about twenty when we met, smart and lively and, I imagine, normally not inclined to speak to strange middle-aged women including white ones from the coast. I had seen him around Ntaria occasionally, mostly in the camp called ‘middle east’ with some of his brothers (his male siblings and the sons of his father’s brothers). For a few days in each week, he worked across the Finke River at Tjuwanpa helping to construct the new outstation resource centre. One of his tasks was to drive the earthmover. I used to wave to him as we drove by on our way to country. Mathew came to see me to deliver a message from a relative. I drove a Toyota Hilux truck with a large tray and people used to line me up for lifts into Alice Springs. He wanted to confirm a trip for his relative and to ask if he could come along. As a young initiated man, he knew he would probably sit in front. I had bent to this delicacy among the Western Arrernte. Unless elderly women were coming, men sat in the front with me. In those days — things have changed so rapidly, really — hardly any Arrernte women around Ntaria drove a car. It was a male thing. When the cabin was full of men, I became almost a part of the truck I drove.

On that day, Mathew walked in and looked at my books. Previously I had worked for twenty years in the Caribbean and, in particular, on ghetto life in Kingston, Jamaica. I had always been interested in people in transition: from country to town, from high life to low life, seeking new religions, cultures and class milieus, across established boundaries and borderlands. Hailing from a suburban family with a modest rural background, I was myself an in-betweener. I had brought the books with me in order to finish an article on Jamaica, maybe my last for a while. Mathew delivered his message in Arrernte, saw me struggle, translated into English, and then allowed me to respond in my own stumbling version of his language. He decided that English was the best way to go, and began to pick up various books and ask me what they were. He read out the titles of some. I explained my past research projects and remarked that I had lived ‘in America’ for a while. He rummaged through more books, read a sentence here and there, mouthed more titles and then, not looking up, suddenly said in English, ‘Maybe you know Martin Luther King. Arrernte mob, that’s what we need. Some fella like Martin Luther King.’ I told Mathew that I had never known Martin Luther King — killed before my time in the USA. However, I knew about him and I knew a bit about the mob from Africa who were taken to that part of the world as slaves. Mathew asked me if they still spoke ‘language’. I said that they didn’t, not the ones that I knew, although they did speak Kriol ‘little bit same’ as mobs up north and in the Kimberley. He nodded and a long silence followed. I think we exchanged remarks about Tjuwanpa and then he left.

The next time I had occasion to speak to Mathew at any length — and those ‘lengths’ with Arrernte men were always pretty short — I was driving him back from the Alice Springs jail after a three-month stint. It was about two years later. I knew his relatives a great deal better and I had been recruited to collect him because his family wanted Mathew taken directly to an outstation — away from Alice Springs, straight through Ntaria and out the other side, further west. He was slim and looking good: healthy. It had been his first time in the Big House and he was predictably sober; chastened as well as engaging in sobriety. Mathew told his mother and me that he would become a Lutheran pastor. He had even brought a Bible from the jail and was flicking through it. He said he wouldn’t drink anymore and would live on the outstation with his brothers. We laughed a lot and talked about names from the Bible for his recently born third child. I remember I put a Western Arrernte country-and-western tape in the cassette deck. We sang ‘Hermannsburg Mountain’ together. Then we all sang a hymn as well.

Things didn’t last on the outstation, though, and Mathew had disengaged from Tjuwanpa. He pulled his CDEP pay and often went directly into Alice Springs. His wife began to follow him, leaving the children with relatives. Soon they were both drinkers, and fighting too. Jail visits became a regular feature of my trips. Sometimes I went inside, both to the security part, and also to the low-security shelters that look out over the Aussie rules football ground. The place where the prisoners meet their visitors could as well be a footy club barbecue area. Other times, depending on how many relatives I had brought, I stayed outside and chatted with an attendant. Mathew was only one of many young men that people I knew visited, and there were always kids to see their fathers and brothers, and sometimes the person who called the jail prior to the visit forgot to give my name. Without advance notice, visitors were not allowed inside.

Time passed and it became clear that Mathew’s life was on that track. Mostly he went down for driving under the influence and without a licence. Sometimes he was disorderly but as the years passed he became so thin that he didn’t have much strength to hit, except his wife, who left pretty quickly and went back to country. Of course there was much I didn’t see and would not have been told about. The only incident I did see concerned an argument linked to a payback. Mathew had taken off from Ntaria in a car — drunk and careering into Alice Springs with his eldest brother’s unlicenced rifle. He was angry and ready to kill. An auntie who was about at the time went to the Ntaria constables and told them to call Alice Springs. They should set up a roadblock on Namatjira Drive and stop him going into town. Mathew went down again, for a longer time.

Nonetheless, his family agrees that only relatives and the jail have kept Mathew alive. Relatives look after him and so does the jail, where the regular food and respites from alcohol put fat back on his bones. And it has been a life worth living. I have seen two of his sons with their brothers returning to Ntaria after their initiation ceremonies. I have seen more children born and noticed that, looking good or bad, Mathew generally is present at family events — not just funerals but baptisms and confirmations and barbecues at the outstation. If someone dies, he does ‘sorry’ too, at least for a while. The naming of his children, and projected marriages, maintain generational and regional ties. The latter involve people whose first language is an Arrernte dialect or a Luritja one, spoken by people to the immediate west and south of the Western Arrernte. It seems likely that Mathew’s grandchildren will continue in this path. Moreover, this enduring form of sociality extends into the urban milieu. We meet up in the Alice Springs mall, in his town camp, at the football and the hospital, or on someone’s veranda in Ntaria.

About nine years after I first met Mathew we visited in the security section of the jail. Mathew had been in a bit of trouble and there was also family consternation about a young relative who was in jail for the first time. The young man was very depressed, in part caused by the sudden cessation of constant cannabis use. A lot of discussion took place about who to put him with and how to look after him and what to say to the jail staff. I was sitting half turned away from the animated crowd, looking at a wall. Suddenly, Mathew said to me above the hubbub, ‘Diane, I’m doing adult literacy. Maybe I can read.’ I told him that was great, and I nearly cried in frustration.

* * *

This book stems from my experience in Ntaria, and debates over many years concerning remote communities, especially in the Northern Territory (NT). It is not a book about Ntaria or about remote Indigenous life as such. It is not about the NT Intervention (2007), although that event bears on this discussion. The focus of the book — debates about remote Aboriginal Australia — draws on my knowledge of Ntaria and on my engagement with various proposals for people like Mathew: who he is, what he wants and chooses, and how his community should be run. These debates concern a population of possibly 80,000 people living in the remote parts of the NT and some states. Writers also offer a figure of 120,000 Indigenous people, mainly Aboriginal people, living in remote and very remote Australia. In other words, the lives to which this book responds are led by quite a small proportion even of Indigenous Australians. Not many live remote and the Western Arrernte, who count as remote, are not nearly as remote as some. The numbers then are very small but, in policy terms, the issue is a big one.

For readers who follow public affairs, Mathew’s story should bring few surprises. To put it bluntly, in the time I knew Mathew he became a remote Indigenous alcoholic. Everyone has read about a Mathew juxtaposed with a story on Aboriginal art (just to place the focus on hope and not despondency). But how many of us have thought about a life like his and how it bears on his relatives, especially his wife and children, and his brothers and sisters. His mother died some years ago and his father when he was just a boy. How much do we know about such families, and how much do we really care? Let me make four observations. Mathew is culturally different from non-Indigenous Australians, and even pretty different from many other Indigenous Australians. Some are more traditional than Mathew. Many are much less traditional. Mathew’s life has been one of unspectacular cultural difference. Yet for a range of reasons that I have signalled in my short description, Mathew would have found it difficult to leave his milieu at Ntaria. I think he was probably curious to leave when I first met him. From time to time, he had seen others leave because both women and men travelled out on church excursions, to land rights conventions, to DAA (Department of Aboriginal Affairs) or ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) meetings, to commercial consultations and the like. For a while, Mathew’s father drove a car and the family travelled north. Nonetheless, for Mathew and many others, a foreign land began right outside Central Australia, and still does. He was curious about life elsewhere, but the how and why of getting there was difficult to negotiate due to limited education and cultural difference. Like the figures in Samson and Delilah, a feature film about Central Australia, the route from outstation to a fulfilling life seemed illusive for Mathew, if not closed.

My second observation is that Mathew’s life has been marred by alcohol. His passage into alcohol dependence was chillingly swift. Between one year and a couple more Mathew seemed entirely gone, although he had relatives who seldom drank and others who had successfully availed themselves of AA (Alcoholics Anonymous). Moreover, it seems very clear that his passage into alcohol dependence was closely connected to things culturally Aboriginal. Even with post-Intervention income management, the consumption patterns of remote Aboriginal Australians and a gender order that subordinates women mean too much money is still left for grog. Again, it does seem that for young men drinking becomes an assertion of autonomy and even a competitive assertion. Freedom is performed among one’s siblings and cousins and everyone can harass a mother or a wife. The intensity of kin relations seems to exacerbate the binge drinking, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, that is common throughout Australia. Furthermore, the dense network of relatives from Ntaria into Alice Springs that has kept Mathew alive has also kept him drinking. Conviviality among male kin seems to demand it, even of men who have led lives shaped by careers and achieved considerable distinction. No one is immune. The social–cultural and historical context and the emotional temper of Mathew and his consociates seem over-determining where grog is concerned.

Mathew should stop drinking and so should his hard-drinking relatives, and all the other hard-drinking people in the Western Arrernte mob. Yet that seems unlikely without some concomitant change in the form of life that the Western Arrernte lead — and this is my third point. Mathew is culturally different and his life has been marred by alcohol abuse. In addition, Mathew has also been disadvantaged with a dearth of options in education, in employment, and in the ability to travel for pleasure and curiosity’s sake beyond his immediate domain. Owing to his cultural difference, and his country and kin commitments, Mathew has lived in a local context of second-rate services and very high unemployment. There are few commercial ventures in Ntaria and limited employment options in Alice Springs for Aboriginal people with poor education. Moreover, apart from the clinic, the Alice Springs hospital and an improving Ntaria School, services are at their best in the Alice Springs jail. In fact, it is a life-cycle stop for many young Western Arrernte men and an increasing number of women. Central Australia begins to look a little like a version of ghetto life in the United States, where burgeoning poverty and distress also bring criminalisation of the population — often described as the US ‘ghetto–jail– complex. Where other late teen and post-teen Australian youth are in tertiary institutions, Western Arrernte are often in jail. In sum, cultural difference is important in itself and also important because it has become a site of marked inequality.

Owing to distinctive patterns of sociality and consumption, remote Aboriginal people are often less tightly tied to continuing paid work than many other Australians. In conjunction with poor education and meagre employment opportunities, this difference brings a disengagement from lifestyle aspirations common elsewhere in both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia. By virtue of the range of values in play, an experience similar to discouraged worker syndrome becomes more complex and widespread in communities. This situation would be unproblematic if cultural difference were in fact the sole cause. Aboriginal people including Mathew would go their own way and the incidence of substance abuse would be significantly less. But the issues are not so simple. In fact, remote Aboriginal people have a foot in two worlds, Aboriginal and European, that inform their local life. Along with poor services, this conflict undermines aspiration, personal health and many local forms of authority. Governments, be they federal or state/territory ones, have responded poorly to this situation. A century of policy and practice has held remote Aboriginal people on the very margin of society in mission stations and the like. These have been attractive policies because they played to cultural difference in a way that masked the inequality of services. In the eyes of many Australians, these were indigenous people who required very little from mainstream society. More recently, the 1967 referendum enabled federal government to include Aboriginal people in the census and also legislate on their behalf. Yet people who live remote have little federal electoral significance, notwithstanding NT land rights. As a result, the inequality that cultural difference masks has endured and divided people like the Western Arrernte from other Australians, including other Aboriginal people who do not live remote. Mathew’s life is as it is because of inequality and the cultural difference that makes that inequality natural in the eyes of many citizens. How many readers of this book have thought that employment is irrelevant to remote areas because ‘they’re traditional’; or perhaps that if those who live remote really want equality ‘they should change’? But is it so easy for the Mathews of Australia either to live apart from the mainstream, or drop all their customary ways? The ‘space’ of difference, as Marshall Sahlins calls it, must be redefined to address this different inequality (see Sahlins 2000:494).

My final point is that Mathew, like other Arrernte, has experienced all these factors: the comfort and constraint of minority culture, the highs and lows of substance abuse, the boredom of disengagement from a working life, and the intermittent, often flailing attempts to change things. Not surprisingly, this book is about cultural difference and inequality but also about the fact that neither critical nor policy debate has addressed the full range of issues involved. My proposal is that this failure can be traced in part to a failure in critical thought among anthropologists. But cognate disciplines are also involved, including history and Indigenous studies. I call them the ‘humanistic social sciences’. The silence of these disciplines concerning remote community distress left a space that was filled by opinion writers whose pronouncements were not always well informed. Their accounts underlined inequality in remote Aboriginal Australia but took little or no account of the cultural difference that makes that inequality hard to address. Concurrently, influential Aboriginal leaders, including Noel Pearson, turned their backs on academics, or at least on anthropologists. Consequently, there has been no searching critical debate, just policy camps doggedly defended. The outcome for the universities has been mentioned in a recent publication: Hinkson notes a new indifference to anthropology in policy circles that count (Hinkson 2010:12). How did it come to this?

(Continues…)Excerpted from A Different Inequality by Diane Austin-Broos. Copyright © 2011 Diane Austin-Broos. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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