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...