How to improve their fate? This is the transition to be managed now, in the midst of cataclysmic bureaucratic reform. Should remote Australian Aboriginal people be gathered again, both for their own health and to promote better economic outcomes, into a range of towns – so that Warburton itself would be left as the only surviving permanent settlement in the Gibson Desert, while the distant outstations decay into ghostly remains?
“No more cultural museums that might make some people feel good and leave indigenous Australians without a viable future” – that was Vanstone’s headline-grabbing declaration. “Continuing cultural identity does not require poverty or isolation from mainstream Australian society.”
But there are, in fact, fairly good reasons for believing exactly the opposite. The truth that becomes plain from a visit to the Ngaanyatjarra lands is that the senior generation there put culture before all else – precisely because they know that integration into mainstream Australian society destroys their language, destroys their law, destroys, in fact, everything special about them. Simply put, the remote communities and their outstations were established as a form of cultural resistance.
Their leaders know they are not thriving – in Western terms – but they are unwilling to launch a campaign of full-scale linguistic and social assimilation. The federal government, by contrast, wishes to bring modernity and its blessings to remote Australia. Compromise between these two contending programs will require heroic reserves of patience and subtlety.
The Perfect Trap
DURING THE MID-1990S, I often visited a small desert Aboriginal community on the fringes of the Pitjantjatjara lands. Each night, when darkness fell, the sobbing and moaning began; you heard the sound of blows and cries and dreadful cursing shouts. Then, a few hours later, when all was quiet, a little knock came at the clinic’s metal door and a trembling, bruised, raped teenage girl – a different one each night – would plead for shelter from the storm.
The picture has been the same down the years in much of the Western Desert, where child abuse is a familiar rite of passage and girls are routinely violated before their thirteenth birthday. It is the same across remote Aboriginal Australia to this day, from Cape York to the Pilbara: in one Kimberley town, some months ago, a baby was burned and tortured to death by its parents.
There were shocked meetings and community demands for moral reform. The same week, a young mother left her one-year-old baby in a relative’s care and came back to find the child had been raped. Or take another north Kimberley community and the tale of a four-year-old boy, repeatedly raped last year by a mature man, until he had lost control of his bodily functions. The young victim was taken to Perth for surgery, then returned to his community, where he drifted, his parents nowhere to be found, until nine months later he was savagely raped once more, this time by a twelve-year-old assailant.
These stories could be multiplied a hundred-fold: mutilations, gang rapes, assaults on children. They are the nightmare under- side of life in North and Central Australia. And the situation is fast approaching breakdown, for these violent crimes are on the increase in places such as north-east Arnhem Land, the town camps of the Centre and the desert communities south of Alice Springs. Young bush Aborigines – the same people we expect to maintain their traditions, get jobs and walk the line between two worlds – are more than likely to have been raped, battered or sodom ised. Their constant background is one of sickness, malnutrition, domestic and sexual violence, total unemployment and combined alcohol, petrol, drug and kava abuse.
Many remote communities and fringe camps are becoming increasingly dangerous places, especially if you are young or female, or both. All this has been widely described and reported, yet until now this horror has been systematically swept under the carpet or, at best, acknowledged then ignored. Why? This question is the heart of the present crisis, as grave an ethical crisis as Australia has faced.
But many effective devices are in place to keep the disaster out of view of the general public. It’s easier to talk sweetly of reconciliation than to visit the hot, bleak badlands of the indigenous domain, sheltered as they often are in permit-only zones. A brave cadre of nurses, emergency health workers, welfare officers and women’s counsellors patrol the front-line: they all burn out after a few years and are replaced. The police in remote communities and town camps take the heaviest burden; they have an impossible job, trying to stop hidden crimes and collect evidence across the barriers of language and culture.
Local indigenous community leaders, almost all men, will not speak out or condemn perpetrators who are linked to them by kinship ties. Most rapes and sex crimes don’t even come to light: how, if you’re a shattered child, to report your kinship cousin or uncle? Those crimes that do surface and are then pursued in court will be fiercely contested by state-funded Aboriginal legal service lawyers whose key mission is to keep their client out of jail. Judges hear them and pass sentence with heavy heart, and wait for the next dreadful case. What are they supposed to do, they wonder: lock up the whole Aboriginal world?
And so the chain of failure mounts. It is at the political level that the ongoing betrayal of Aborigines is most evident. Take the Northern Territory, which is home to almost half of Australia’s remote area Aborigines. Its ALP Chief Minister, Clare Martin, who has a vast parliamentary majority and three indigenous women on her team, largely turned from the Aboriginal world after her election in 2001, and pursued instead a quixotic enthusiasm for costly, grand projects. When the public outcry over abuse of Aboriginal children in remote areas of the Territory mounted, after a dramatic television appearance by crown prosecutor Nanette Rogers in mid-2006, the same Chief Minister refused to take part in a national summit on indigenous domestic violence, and chose to hit out at Canberra’s level of funding for the outback crisis.
But the standard device in Aboriginal policy argument has long been the blame game: the buck never stops. Thus federal Labor spokesman on indigenous affairs Warren Snowdon is quick to blame today’s sexual abuse plague in remote communities on the old conservative NT government’s neglect, while NT Opposition Leader Jodeen Carney blames the courts for taking account of customary law in their judgments, and the Central Land Council blames lax liquor controls.
There is always the ultimate fall guy to condemn, of course: the Prime Minister, who won’t apologise. But at the federal level, the picture has at last become intriguing. After a decade of inaction and ideological warfare over Aboriginal policy, the Howard government has hit on the indigenous affairs minister it may always have needed: a plain-speaking former military man. Mal Brough has signalled his intent to disturb the landscape and voice unwelcome truths.
For with the demise of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, the disfranchisement of a generation of outmoded male Aboriginal leaders and the death of political correctness in the policy domain, the conditions for a dawn of candour have at last arrived. The true account of what has been transpiring in remote Australia can begin to be told in unsparing detail. It will look something like this. Across indigenous communities, most crucial social and economic indicators have been worsening, traditional cultural ways and languages have been dying, and a pathology of violence, pornography, promiscuity and sexual abuse has taken hold.
In most communities, nothing is replacing the old ways except the instincts of the ghetto. Missions, which struggled to keep some vague sense of personal discipline alive, have long been disbanded and a whole generation has grown up in the rotting grip of welfare, with sit-down money to keep the population quiet.
In much of the remote bush, gambling, daytime television, feuding and gang warfare are regular features of the social landscape; genuine literacy and numeracy are rare. The repetitive ceremonial practice of cultural traditions has become an obsession, as has mass attendance at protracted funerals: factors that prevent any basic participation in a real economy. Through the ill-effects of well-intentioned policies, a perfect trap has been designed to hold and suffo
cate whole generations of vulnerable people.
Why has it been so hard to see, and say, all this? In large part, it is the fault of the outside world. Journalists have tended to look away. Male Aboriginal leaders have chosen other battles. Idealistic bureaucrats have deluded themselves that signs of progress could be seen, and have held up the example of functional communities almost as a screen to distract their eyes from the darker picture. And so a whole remote domain within Australia has been quietly, for years, failing to thrive.
A top public servant in indigenous affairs retired recently. This is what he told me, voice low: “I look back and I see that my activity in trying to help Aboriginal people has been largely a failure. We have tried everything, we have pulled every lever and nothing has worked. And now I begin to think that my side, the progressive side of politics, may not have had the best answers to this set of problems and that some of the more immediate, simple answers for the present state of affairs may even lie with the other side of politics.”
A paradigm, a set of beliefs about progress in the indigenous domain, has long since failed, and with it have gone the dreams of a distinct current in Australian politics. In place of hope, for years there was a grim silence. But the long days of discreet cover-up are well and truly over, thanks to the efforts of whistleblowers linked to the women’s advocacy groups in Central Australia and the remote North, and thanks to the indigenous women who have campaigned for years to tell their story.
Theirs has been an extraordinary campaign. Recently, one prominent indigenous academic, Marcia Langton, a professor at the University of Melbourne, put it bluntly: “Aboriginal women have been screaming for police help on this issue for thirty years. Is it ever going to happen, we wonder? Are there ever going to be police charges against rapists? Are the Aboriginal legal services who supposedly work for us ever going to stop arguing that rape is traditional law? Is there ever going to be proper protection for people on remote communities? Maybe now there’s some hope.”
But the abuse has been going on for years in the shadows, it is going on right now and it will continue unless action is taken. What might that action look like? Minister Brough has hinted at removing responsibility for overseeing the communities from the NT government, while former Kimberley Land Council chief Peter Yu has even spoken of a mission led by a military man to help remote communities. Many remedies already have been tried and have failed. Police are hamstrung by procedures of evidence collection, while safe houses and women’s centres have been little more than makeshift shelters from the perpetual tide of nocturnal assault.
It is time for the unthinkable to be put on the agenda. One logical course of action would be for the federal government to declare a state of emergency in many of the communities and ghetto camps of the Centre and the North, and to employ the army or a civic service volunteer corps to provide viable settlements with proper facilities and to impose a system of benign social control. This is an unpalatable prescription for those who fancy the ideals of Aboriginal self-determination. It is hard to imagine a more disturbing alternative, except the one that exists today.
IV. PORTRAITS
Hector Jandany
A BLACK CHRISTOPHER ROBIN HAT, with discreet lime-green tabs; a saffron and yellow checked shirt, complete with a gold thread contrast stripe; loose board shorts, dark-tan sandals. A tall, thin figure, almost marionette-like in its disjointed elegance. A handsome, faintly mournful face, with close-cut Athenian beard and moustache, and quick, assessing, all-seeing eyes. Aboriginal men of high degree aren’t supposed to look quite like this – to have such a well-developed, distinctively personal sense of style. Certainly not ones who are over eighty years old, have helped found a painting movement, have chaired a bush school and campaigned for tuition in their own language. But Hector Jandany, the animating spirit of Warmun community in the East Kimberley, is far from a conventional man of his time and cultural domain. At once a traditionalist and an innovator, a custodian of the old Ngarrangkarni (Dreaming) stories and a curious spectator of modern ways, he bears the impress of life lived on the margins between worlds.
He was born on the banks of Turkey Creek, where he lives once more today. His father, who died when Hector was in infancy, was Mirriwong, his mother Gija; her country, which he often depicts in his paintings, lies just north of the Bungle Bungles (Purnululu).
She soon remarried a stockman from Springvale, whom Hector looked up to in his early years. The young boy was, then, already a hybrid in his cultures, as he was growing up in the 1930s, close by the Turkey Creek police station. Strange things used to happen there in those days. Hector remembers how the police would often bring in bush Aboriginal men and tie them up beside the paperbark trees lining the river; he himself was deputed to take food and water to these captives. Later, on holidays far from the white homesteads and settlements, he would come upon these “wild” Aboriginal men, and learn from them: later still, he began working himself as a stockman in the European empire of Kimberley cattle stations, spending many years on his mother’s country, Texas Downs. He was walking in a double world: he knew two Kimberleys, black and white.
Those times passed in country find their trace in Hector’s schematic, symmetrical landscapes, which mingle topographic detail and ancestral creatures. They also set the pattern for his adult life’s achievements. After the era of Aboriginal labour on the cattle stations closed, Hector moved to Wyndham, only to lead a return to Warmun, and the Bough Shed School, where he encouraged “two-way” learning. The two contrasting ways are always in his thoughts. He places great reliance on what’s internal, natural to him, dictated by country. “White people read things, but I can feel what’s right and wrong, in my heart. I have that inside feeling, but the white man – a paper tells him.” Much that’s amiss in the Gija world stems precisely from an imbalance between the two ways, and an irruption of white habits into the core of the Gija realm. But unlike others in his home community, Hector can read “the book in his heart”, which tells him not to drink.
His energies today go into teaching, painting and reflecting, often in melancholic fashion, on the course of his life, on his many old friends and colleagues, great men, great artists who have passed away. And yet still he watches, paints, asks questions of himself. “We don’t know what made this world – do you?”
Inquiry of this free-wheeling, somewhat startling kind underlies his recent works, which are still being shown in group displays of Warmun paintings, or in solo exhibitions. In them, one senses an artist’s retrospect, a careful, open-eyed examination of the land and all the meanings that it holds. Hector turns things over, his voice soft, self-amused, querulous. He glances at the peaks of his production of the past five years: pale, bleached-out landscapes, ochre tones. There are springs, and hills, and pools of waterlilies. Much of the work comes to him in dreams, communicated by his mother’s visiting spirit. She says hello to him, and tells him things. Has the journey been worthwhile? He touches the edge of a painting, and laughs to himself. “Maybe we should burn them all,” he says.
*
Some months after these conversations, in the wake of a last, triumphant exhibition of his works in Darwin, where he was present, silent, happy, wheelchair-bound, Hector Jandany passed away in Warmun early on the morning of 10 September 2006.
Rusty Peters
IT BEGINS IN WATER, the human spirit. It lingers amid fresh green floating weeds, until the time comes when it must re-enter the world. It finds its way, then, into a woman’s body, is nourished, and born. At first, it is helpless, for our minds were liquid in the primal water. Slowly, though, our parents and our teachers tell us how to live: we grow, and start talking, we regain our memory and begin to think.
Such is the life pathway sketched out in the belief systems of the Gija people of the East Kimberley: it is a reincarnation cycle, but one based on memory and the rediscovery of tradition. This is the kind of demanding subject routinely tackled by Rusty Peters, a tall, rake-thin, 72-year-old h
orse-breaker who has had an unusual career change. A painter since the mid-1990s, Peters is perhaps the only prominent indigenous artist who could be well described as a conceptualist. It is the world of ideas that he chooses to paint – ideas set in motion by the contact between Western and Gija ways of thought.
Peters’s best-known work, the multi-panel Waterbrain, a treatment of the Kimberley reincarnation story, complete with its odd echoes of and departures from Buddhism, now hangs in splendour in Sydney: it was bought by the Art Gallery of NSW the first night it was displayed in public. Then there are his depictions of Aboriginal language groups across the continent and his haunting memorial canvases, such as Blackfella Murdered in Australia, owned by the Grant Pirrie Gallery in Sydney’s Redfern. This is austere art that makes its appeal to serious collectors. In its processes as well as its look, it has much in common with contemporary Western production. How did it come into being?
Peters has lived almost all his life in the contact zone, that human frontier where cultures meet and constantly elude each other. He was born on Springvale cattle station, south-west of Turkey Creek. His bush name, Dirrji, describes dingo pups looking out of a cave entrance towards the sunrise. On the station country, he was raised by a tradition-minded grandfather, who impressed on him the need to avoid the wider world and to keep Gija ideas and words in the forefront of his mind – advice Peters followed only to a certain point.
In the wake of a long career as a stockman during the glory days of the Kimberley pastoral industry, Peters found a job in Kununurra at Waringarri Aboriginal Arts, working as an assistant to Rover Thomas, the first master of the East Kimberley school. Even within the Jirrawun Aboriginal Art Corporation, set up eight years ago by a group of leading Kimberley painters, Peters stands out.
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