The picture is just as ambiguous in Alice Springs, home of the Arrernte people and base for many of the Centre’s pioneering linguistic preservation programs. Veronica Dobson, a celebrated native linguist who taught herself to read Arrernte and compiled the dictionary of her language, sees, for all her efforts, the change sweeping across her world: “Language is my life, Arrernte language. I live it, I am it. It’s the hardest of languages to learn, with its double-r words, its prestopped nasals and its sneezing sounds; a beautiful language, though, in its effect. But today it’s not really well spoken by young people, they speak in a different way, with words coming in from television. Yes, Arrernte’s in trouble. It’s debatable whether the language I speak, the old Arrernte, will survive. When the old people die, it will die with them. It makes you feel sad. I think in 100 years all Arrernte people will be speaking English. That’s just the way it is.”
That pattern is repeated a hundredfold across Australia. A quiet, deep pathos surrounds the story of each Aboriginal language in its individual encounter with the modern world.
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Is there, then, any viable way forward, a strategy, beyond simply documenting, studying, watching as the dissolution of languages takes place?
A fall-back option is the unspoken aim of most language programs in remote Australia. Many language workers who live on the front-line are engaged in projects to promote or fine-tune “two-way” learning programs, designed in a bid to keep indigenous tongues alive – if necessary as subsidiary languages – alongside English.
Why, though, such a fight against the odds to preserve language, when the more immediate problems confronting remote Aboriginal Australia are so pressing: the medical crisis of kidney disease and raging diabetes, the economic void, and housing shortages, the epidemics of alcoholism, the drug abuse, the domestic violence?
Partly because language loss may be near the root of that upsurge of chaos. Partly, too, because of the natural desire of native speakers to keep the deepest threads of their tradition alive. But even beyond the Aboriginal world there is a compelling argument in favour of language defence, an intellectual one, which the Foundation for Endangered Languages puts squarely in its manifesto: “As each language dies, science loses one more precious source of data, one more of the diverse and unique ways that the human mind can express itself through a language’s structure and vocabulary.”
For the languages of Aboriginal Australia, the hands of the clock stand close to midnight. The battle is almost over, the extinction near-total. As its linguistic patrimony vanishes forever, there is at least a case for thinking that mainstream Australia should be aware of what is being lost a little more with each new day.
Nowhere To Go
AS YOU GLIDE IN TO LAND at any one of Australia’s 1,200 remote Aboriginal communities, a little self-contained world lies framed in the light plane’s round window: tin-roofed houses, a dusty football oval, sewage ponds, a car dump, thin dirt roads leading off into the endless bush. These indigenous dwelling places of the North and Centre come in many shapes and guises, but they have one thing in common: they are not economically viable and, after a generation of policy inaction, their status and long-term future have become a priority and concern of the federal government.
In December 2005, when she was still the minister for indigenous affairs, Senator Amanda Vanstone made a sweeping speech devoted to the state of this isolated domain. It was the most important policy speech on remote Aboriginal Australia since the Coalition took power in 1996: it asked pointed questions, offered no easy answers, and showed all the signs of urgent reflection on a fast-growing crisis in the country’s less-known corners.
For the remote communities, at least if you measure by Western standards, have not been a success. Health outcomes for Aboriginal people worsen with their distance from the cities. An epidemic of kidney disease is raging across Australia’s Western Desert and far north, life expectancy for both men and women in remote areas hovers just under fifty years, educational outcomes are disastrous, while the prospects for creating real employment in this far-off welfare archipelago remain, despite ever-renewed good intentions, entirely elusive.
The federal government’s new policy architects have now cut to the heart of things: Vanstone anatomised the failure of the Left-liberal consensus of “conspicuous compassion” in a single sentence: “Caring but not making change condemns Aboriginal people to some sort of cultural museum where they should expect less than others.” Her successor as minister, Mal Brough, spent the first months of his tenure proving by his concerted actions that the status quo would not be allowed to endure.
Practical steps, not ideological debate, would now be the watchword. Several factors have combined to force the state of remote Australia to the top of Canberra’s agenda. First, the emerging trends are so bleak it has dawned on the government that it must act if it is to avoid securing a place in history for its neglect and failure on this front. Second, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, which both restricted radical initiatives and provided a cover for inaction, is no more. Third, Noel Pearson’s argument that passive welfare rots isolated indigenous societies has won the day.
Together, these shifts have produced a revolution in thinking about Aboriginal affairs. As a result of this new approach, remote indigenous communities are being encouraged to take responsibility for their own wellbeing. The government is offering less a blueprint than a first step towards one.
It strongly backs the “shared responsibility” arrangements, under which communities get grants in return for basic public health or social capital-enhancing measures. It stands behind new moves to promote 99-year leases on traditional Aboriginal land, wants education to be the top priority, and calls for state governments to publish the (usually shocking) attendance rates at remote schools. And it confronts, at last, the most trying problem: the tiniest remote settlements, known in the desert as outstations, and in the Top End as homelands, may not be sustainable.
About 1,000 of these outposts have fewer than 100 people, and more than 80 per cent of these have fewer than fifty. Some of them may be distinctly poor environments for women and children. “Perhaps,” Vanstone mused when she first opened up the subject of the outstations and their future, “we need to explicitly draw a line on the level of service that can be provided to homeland settlements. Listening to indigenous Australians does not mean blindly accepting that services – such as education, health and housing – can be delivered at equal levels and equally well in townships and the homelands.”
Behind all this lie much deeper questions: What are the remote communities actually for these days? What do we expect them to become? And what, above all, do the people in them hope for, and want of us? Theirs is the voice that tends to go unheard.
To hear their priorities, and gauge the prospects for the remote world, I paid a visit to Warburton, in the Gibson Desert of Western Australia, the main centre for the Ngaanyatjarra people, most intact of the desert’s traditional groups.
Distance is an ally here, as much as an enemy. Warburton lies midway between Kalgoorlie and Alice Springs, 1,000 kilometres from each along dirt roads. Culture is the backbone of society. Alcohol is banned; conventional petrol is not sold on Ngaanyatjarra lands, and sniffing is rare.
Warburton, with a population of 550, is surrounded by ten much smaller communities and outstations spread across a 160,000-square-kilometre swathe of country. It is a well-run, conservative place, much admired by the Howard government.
It was former Aboriginal affairs minister John Herron’s favourite community, and Tim Fischer devoted a chapter to it in one of his books. Vanstone liked to quote the Ngaanyatjarra expression “Ngapartji Ngapartji” (very roughly “share and share alike”) as a proof that mutual obligation has a basis in traditional society. By wide consensus, Warburton is a success: as good as it gets in the remote world.
Its social indicators provide, then, a chastening baseline. English is very much a sec
ond language here, though it is the language of schooling. In the past twenty-five years, only one Ngaanyatjarra student has passed Year 12; a skills audit recently showed the general standard of literacy was short of the level required to read a newspaper. Private economic activity is essentially non-existent outside the region’s art centres. Per capita income in the Ngaanyatjarra shire is the second-lowest in the nation: those with jobs are all on the Community Development Employment Program, “work for the dole”, which pays $226 a week.
The most venturesome individual in Warburton is former council chairman Livingston West, a pastor in his mid-fifties with strong ideas. West has just set up a new home on a small block outside the community, where he hopes to run a few cattle, trap camels, establish an orchard and even operate small-scale tourism, showing off the remains of the old Christian mission huts.
“The crucial thing for the future is to build up the Ngaanyatjarra people,” he says, “and the way to do that is through education. Our education has not been adequate, it has not put us on the road moving ahead. There is a way for Warburton to develop, with both Aboriginal people and white people working here, in business, in industry, growing things. But the future for us must be on our country, here. The one thing that’s strong and special about the lands is the culture: the culture has to remain strong.”
This view is universal among the political elite of the Ngaanyatjarra. They know they face a challenge of balance: their traditional way of life and the requirements of Western society can be aligned only with extreme difficulty.
Ian Ward, the chairman of the Warburton community, is in his late forties. He was one of the last nomads born in the Gibson Desert: he is also one of the most Westernised and widely travelled of the Ngaanyatjarra’s leadership. His chief priority is plain: above all else, cultural survival.
“I would like my children and my people to maintain their cultural values: the law, the connection to the land,” he says. “They know they are a part of Australia, but the most important thing for them is their cultural values. There should be a recognition on the part of Australia at large of that value. We have two worlds that people here live in: the traditional way and the Australian-citizen way. I want my children also to live in those two worlds. I know that in the coastal areas in the south, Aboriginal people don’t have the possibility to keep their culture.”
The policy thinkers shaping a new paradigm for remote Aboriginal Australia and the figures at the helm of these communities all, then, seem to be searching for the same grail: a formula to protect traditional life and introduce a degree of economic activity, a means to improve living standards and infuse a sense of purpose into these isolated, marginal societies without destroying their particular sense of connection to the land.
Given the sheer distance dividing the most isolated settlements from urban Australia, and the low skills base, few avenues hold out the promise of swift improvement. Warburton’s key strategic thinker, shire president Damian Mclean, a mainstream Australian long married into Ngaanyatjarra society, identifies only two realistic ways of generating long-term economic activity and growth in this stretch of desert rangelands. One is mining: the area is rich in lateritic nickel deposits that remain unexploited because of the high cost of power in such remote terrain. The other is land management: the country is fragile and best maintained by traditional techniques of controlled hunting and patchwork burning, which could form the basis of a permanent, state-funded employment scheme.
“I think,” says Mclean, “that most Australians are happy with the idea that the people who have a close connection with this land should be responsible for it, as rangers.”
This kind of program would dovetail neatly with traditional Ngaanyatjarra ceremonial life, and build on a f ledgling state nature reserve joint-management plan operating in the Gibson Desert.
The federal government has proved rather less visionary to date. Senior bureaucrats went to Warburton late in 2005 to sign a “regional partnership agreement” governing the new relations between Canberra and the Ngaanyatjarra in the post-ATSIC era. The key to this agreement is an acceptance that both government and the communities need to change, and do business differently. The Department of Indigenous Affairs has also reached one of its much-vaunted shared-responsibility agreements with Warburton community’s arts project, providing $130,000 for efforts to promote youth learning through art.
Other much-promoted reforms are faring less well. One key plank of the “revolution in indigenous affairs” is the dream of replacing “work for the dole” with something better, in the form of Newstart training programs. But the drive to achieve this aim has been outsourced, for the Ngaanyatjarra region, to a Gold-fields-based corporation. In theory, $10,000 in federal funding is available for every worker to be retrained: so far, in the first year and a half of the program’s operation, it has yielded exactly two pairs of workboots and two workshirts for a total of 700 potential candidates for training on the CDEP list in the Ngaanyatjarra lands.
“There is a new thinking in the air about remote communities,” says Mclean, “and we welcome that. We badly want to see regional development and opportunity for our children. So far, though, the transition away from the former system has been a disaster, and the bureaucracy don’t tell government ministers what’s really going on. You have the disturbing sense of a reform project not working at all on the ground.”
Getting the formula right for remote Aboriginal Australia matters: perhaps half of Western Australia’s land mass is held by indigenous people on distant communities. And just over half the rapidly increasing indigenous population of the Northern Territory live in homelands and remote communities.
The political history of these settlements is central to their plight. Across Australia, in the late 1960s and ’70s, as the era of missions and government rations posts came to a close, administrators and indigenous leaders developed grand plans to relocate traditional people to their former country. This move took on a messianic tinge in much of the country: new dwelling sites were carved out of the bush and grew to permanence without any serious expectation that they would be economically productive.
Indeed, they were set up as little symbols of self-determination, precisely to be “cultural museums”. By an unexpected irony, their awful health statistics stem, at least in part, from the resilience of traditional social norms, which are based on semi-nomadic camping, and fit ill with housing and sedentary lifestyles. These communities have not crossed smoothly to modern life partly because of poverty, but partly because to do so would require them to abandon the collectivist culture that forms their core.
Prominent anthropologist Peter Sutton put his finger on this point in a paper last year, describing the ways that failure to assimilate to settled lifestyles breeds ill-health and chaos. “It is arguable,” he said in lapidary words, “that the maintenance of racially separate communities via state funding results in many cases in rapid cultural change, not entirely towards non-indigenous culture, but so often towards the culture of welfare and the culture of the ghetto.”
Yet despite the bleak economic and social prospects in these isolated, artificial societies, outstations have proliferated across Central and Northern Australia to an extraordinary degree: there are fifty-four separate residential areas for the 3,000 people in the Pitjantjatjara lands, while the far north Kimberley is dotted with costly houses which function as holiday camps for residents of Derby.
In the Ngaanyatjarra lands, the story is rather more restrained. Warburton began life in the 1930s as a mission. Overcrowding became the key problem after the deserts were cleared in the ’60s for rocket testing. When the Ngaanyatjarra began to have a say in their own affairs, they started to return their people to traditional country and set up smaller communities in places where mining-company water bores had been sunk.
Some of these mini-communities are pretty marginal: take Tjirrkarli, set up as a vibrant outstation for a group of some sixty old men and women, almost all of
whom have now died. Tjirrkarli’s little buildings lie in deep sand-dune desert, dreaming away: a lone community adviser drives a bulldozer around. There is a school, with three pupils.
Damian Mclean accepts that in a well-ordered world, Tjirrkarli, which he helped found, would cease to exist. And Livingston West, with his customary far-sightedness, set up his block outside town precisely because he expects the outstations around Warburton to be closed down, resulting in a population influx into the little capital.
There are other Ngaanyatjarra communities that are just as small as Tjirrkarli and have equally minimal facilities. On the face of it, Tjukurrla, near Lake Amadeus, would seem a primary candidate for rationalisation: only a few people live there permanently. But Tjukurrla is the Ngaanyatjarra equivalent of Chartres or Siena – it is a marker of faith, and lies hard by the Western Desert’s most crucial sacred sites.
The point, of course, is that the argument for maintaining these pinpoints on the map is not an economic one. The millions of dollars necessary to build their housing, establish their generators and push through their roads have already been spent. If one closed down a typical outlying Ngaanyatjarra community, the net saving might be $250,000 a year (the bill for basic services and administration). A more profound issue is the survival of the desert people’s culture, which forms a deep level of Australia’s history and, now, generates some of its most vibrant modern art.
But that culture, and the culture of other remote indigenous Australians, is changing and passing, and the younger generations living in distant communities and outstations tend to be disaffected, poorly educated, ill-served for opportunity – hanging uneasily between two worlds, rather than partaking in both.
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