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.1
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.2 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.3
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.4 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 conf lict 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 f lailing 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’.5 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, inf luential 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?
Difference and inequality
Before I proceed, let me define two terms that are crucial to this book. The terms are ubiquitous in social science but in this context have a particular import.
As understood in anthropology, I take the concept of cultural difference to apply to a way of life, society or other bounded social milieu which can be modelled as a distinctive whole. Aboriginal culture, especially in its traditional form, has been modelled in this way and, as discussed in Chapter 2, numerous university texts and other tracts have been written about this ‘other’ or ‘different’ culture. Crucial to the understanding of this difference is a range of institutional forms including a hunter-gatherer economy, a specific cosmology and ritual forms (the Dreaming), and an elaborate kinship system, one role of which has been to facilitate the organisation of a regional life in the absence of centralised governance. This distinctive set of institutions was aided in its reproduction by a range of Aboriginal languages, only a small minority of which are still spoken today.
When one writes of Aboriginal cultural difference the reference is generally to elements of practice and belief, some of them implicit and some explicit, that can be linked more or less closely with this ‘traditional’ way of life. Importantly, these current elements of practice and thought have also been attenuated, changed and repositioned in the course of histories that have involved encapsulation in the Australian state and marginalisation in its capitalist economy. Moreover, in this process quite new forms of specific practice and belief have been generated in accord with transformed elements of the past—for instance, new ways of understanding the ‘spiritual’ presence of antecedents in the land and of classifying relatives in response to contemporary life. New, specifically Aboriginal iconographies have been created, including both genres of fine Aboriginal art and the types of graffiti found in remote communities today. Nonetheless, all these forms have some link with a historical experience grounded in that initial cultural difference and the impact on it of the state, modern capitalism and their associated institutions. Albeit in more diffuse and elusive ways, this cultural difference is patterned today just as it was in the past. In some degree, the difference in remote Aboriginal life therefore stands in contrast both to non-Indigenous life and the distant past of remote Aboriginal people. Still, that past is a touchstone for discerning the present.
The inequality in remote Aboriginal life with which this book is most concerned is a legacy of invasion and the history of European settlement. This is not to say that traditional indigenous societies had no inequalities. Clearly they did. By and large, women were unequal to men and younger generations were unequal to their elders. In terms of knowledge accumulation some men and women were ritually unequal to others of their gender. Some were clearly unequal in terms of strength, beauty, dexterity and motor skills, including those involved in dance, hunting and the like. Nonetheless, the specific inequality that bears on this discussion is that which began to unfold once Aboriginal Australians were encapsulated in a European-derived state and became increasingly positioned by a capitalist economy. By virtue of laws concerning citizenship, property and association—not to mention crimes and misdemeanours—Aboriginal people became encapsulated by the state. These laws were applied to them and enforced. Where economy is concerned, the expansion of capitalism meant the obliteration of hunter-gathering, or its attenuation and repositioning in almost all parts of the continent.
In short, the inequalities created by these factors of law and economy are the ones of interest here. Aboriginal people in particular lacked many citizen rights and still lack equality in terms of service deliveries deemed the right of all citizens. The unequal delivery of services, including education, housing and health, ramify in the domain of economy. Many remote Aboriginal youth are poorly equipped in terms of their capacity to find jobs of any sort in remote Australia today. Uneducated and often suffering the effects of poor health or substance abuse, their chances of economic success in rural and remote Australia are quite slim. A legal status that in the past facilitated policies that held remote Aboriginal people on the margins of capitalism has promoted poverty today. Moreover, held in this position as much by law as by cultural inclination, remote Aboriginal people have responded by building forms of practice and belief that make them feel at home in this world of state encapsulation and economic marginalisation. It is at this point that inequality and cultural difference intersect, each now intensely reactive to the other.
The change that has been the result of encapsulation has not been simply loss. New institutional forms responsive to Aboriginal experience have been created. Moreover, Aboriginal people have taken on new capabilities as they have lost old ones—in language, technology, practical knowledge, ritual, and ways of organising social, political and economic life. Many would argue that in a literate, global world these new capabilities are more valuable than those that have been lost. Be this as it may, the question remains whether or not remote Aboriginal people have had an opportunity equal to that of other citizens to own these new capacities and employ them fruitfully. If the answer to this question is ‘no’, this may be because remote Aboriginal people are culturally disengaged from market society, or it may be that marginalisation has reduced their opportunities to engage. Alternatively, both these and other reasons may explain the structural inequality of most Aboriginal people in Australian society today—unable to realise and explore all the forms of human capital that the state purports to offer them.6
In sum, to grasp the circumstance of remote Aboriginal people requires an understanding of both cultural difference and inequality. Mathew’s life underlines this fact, which I pursue throughout this book. Two further points follow: first, with the advent of an Australian state, Aboriginal culture has always been something positioned within the state and in relation to a capitalist economy. This history of inequality—for that is what it is—has always been a factor bearing on the shape and extent of cultural difference. Aboriginal cultural difference—as it is known now, and in the past—has always been a difference interpreted through inequality. Second, the forms that this inequality take, including issues of service delivery and market capacities, are often exacerbated by neglect of relevant, mundane cultural difference; for example, how to get children to school when obligations to relatives call, and how to promote employment as an integral part of life even in remote locales. In short, Australian society and the state have been perennially disinclined to address Aboriginal inequality in the context of continuing cultural difference—a difficult and also an expensive enterprise. Rather, the proposal has been that if inequality is to be addressed, it can only be addressed by obliterating difference. Alternatively, some have suggested that so different are remote Aboriginal people that inequality as I have described it does not really amount to an experience of poverty as such.
This book has been shaped by just these issues and their impact on Mathew over time. My contention is that cultural difference does not override inequality or redefine it as experience. The prevalence of lifestyle disease, substance abuse and violence in communities attests to this. At the same time, inequality cannot be addressed except through the cultural difference of those who live remote. Routes to a good literate education and market capacities that facilitate employment, even from a remote base, should address and grapple with the cultural difference in communities. There is no simple route around the conf licts involved between institutions that derive from very different cultures (see Myers 1986:258–285). This is not to deny that Aboriginal people have hard choices to make. History is never fair. Nonetheless, the Australian electorate and the state have their own commitments to make on remote communities before Australia can describe itself as a fair and just society.
Two debates
The failure of anthropology and its cognate disciplines to address these issues convincingly created a space that was filled by others, some of whom were antagonistic to cultural difference. This process found its culmination in 2007 with the NT Intervention that brought a range of policy change to remote Aboriginal communities. Rather than extol or deplore the Intervention, the focus here is on the fact that academics were unable to divert it and were virtually silenced by it. Theirs was not the policy voice heard in spheres of government. Two debates, one within the universities and one in the public domain, throw some light on why this was so.
In the 1980s and 90s, some historians and some anthropologists launched a postcolonial critique of Australian anthropology. In essence, the proposal was that this anthropology did not attend to Indigenous people as historical agents; that is, as people who change, and who negotiate the orders of power with which they are confronted, especially as these are manifest in the state and its legal system. Australian anthropology lacked an analysis of the dynamics of British settlement and of Indigenous people’s fight against becoming subjects merely fashioned by the state. A variety of concerns informed this debate: the initial fin de siècle construction of the ‘savage’ in natural science; racism in Australian society; the authenticity that land rights conferred on only some Aboriginal people; and anthropology’s preference for an abstracted social analysis that masked the ‘blood and sweat and tears’ of Aboriginal life. All the niceness in this normal science misrepresented both traditional society and the limits placed by the state on an Indigenous response to the exigencies that people faced. The debate about the Stolen Generations and those excluded from land rights—did they count as Aboriginal people?—gave a practical edge to this postcolonial critique. It was used to question the ahistorical portrait of hunter-gatherer Aboriginal people that still resided within anthropology.7
Though less remarked upon, the postcolonial critique also rested on the fact that, once encapsulated, Aboriginal people were subject to the dynamics of a capitalist economy, its market institutions and, by and large, its variable interest in regions where they remained the majority. The intersection of economy and law not only secured land for the Crown, but also at a later date determined the forms of marginalisation that various Aboriginal people would experience—as itinerant or seasonal workers, wards of state or welfare recipients. The dynamics of change that produced Indigenous political advance cannot be separated from this positioning that capitalism brought. Nor were these advances left uncontextualised when presented in histories of pastoralism, pearling and itinerant labour in the eastern and southern states. Yet for remote Aboriginal communities, the record is a patchy one.8
An early collection on the impact of mining, for instance, did not foster a genre of critical research either ethnographic or historical (see Berndt 1982). Most historians stayed away from cultural difference and the domain of the Land Rights Act. Most practitioners in the field of Indigenous studies were inclined to do the same, although the field has produced its own notable literature.9 Notwithstanding important examples of genres mixed and boundaries crossed, the ‘homeland’ communities that grew in the wake of NT land rights have remained the bailiwick of anthropologists, their particular focus of research.10 For this reason, it is significant that most anthropologists did not come to grips with two major postwar changes in remote Aboriginal conditions. These were the incorporation of Aboriginal people in an Australian welfare state and the rapid escalation of unemployment in rural and remote Australia.11 Soaring unemployment came to remote Aboriginal communities in the context of bounded and highly local lives subsidised by the state. In these milieus, consumption has been organised through kinship networks which are resilient but also vulnerable now to manipulation by bullies who transgress old ways. At the same time, and with welfare ensconced, it is ties to country or locality rather than a working life that have sustained both status and identity. Importantly, this situation signals something in addition to a simple continuity of culture and location. The status confirmed through land rights and its valorisation of tradition also filled the gap that unemployment left (see Beckett 1988:9–15). Traditional ownership became the route along which most resources travelled, many in the form of government grants. As a result, some in communities became involved in a torrid resource politics to secure goods for their relatives (Austin-Broos 2003). Others unable to enter this contest have been involved in substance abuse and personal violence. Health has been a casualty as the epidemiology of remote communities came to resemble that of other indigenous peoples who have been marginalised (see Trovato 2001).
The tendency of anthropologists has been not to look too closely at these forms of change and distress. Consultancy reports commissioned on the homelands seldom brought critical ref lection on the frameworks prescribed for that research. In the 1970s and 80s this was also true of the ethnographers. They produced a portrait of continuity and cultural difference that responded to a land claim context with its particular evidentiary requirements.12 Professionally, history and Indigenous studies dismissed this ethnography as lacking interest for those who worked in south-east ‘settled’ Australia. Yet this meant that in the everyday of public discourse, the image of remote Australia as a bounded traditional milieu lived on. It lingered not only in the other disciplines but also among those anthropologists who were not ethnographers as such. Consultant anthropologists advised on services delivered to traditional people as portrayed by ethnography. A sense of remote Aboriginal people as historical subjects marked by inequality as much as cultural difference remained elusive. Furthermore, the range of remote historical experience and the range of communities produced were barely canvassed. As a result, a romantic and reified image of remote Aboriginal life survived the postcolonial critique. This would inf luence anthropology’s response to another debate.
From the late 1990s, a vigorous campaign began to emerge concerning violence and poor health in remote communities. Before long, there was steadily mounting critique from opinion writers and private think tanks. Noel Pearson published his Our Right to Take Responsibility in the year 2000. In that same year, conservative critics came together in a Quadrant – sponsored conference, followed by formation of the Bennelong Society in 2001. The latter was headed by Peter Howson and Gary Johns, ex-politicians drawn from the two major parties, Liberal and Labor respectively.13 In 2001, Peter Sutton published his paper on the ‘politics of suffering’ that critiqued the violence in remote Aboriginal communities. In his discussion, Sutton held a misguided service bureaucracy and its cultural relativism to account. Yet, by and large, he let anthropologists off the hook and took care to cite colleagues working in Cape York where he had done his doctoral research.14 Around this time, The Australian newspaper began to run an editorial campaign. Its impact was augmented by various writers who included Noel Pearson, Peter Howson, Gary Johns, Nicolas Rothwell and economist Helen Hughes.15 A disregard for difference was common, though not uniform, among these writers. Some of them opposed land rights and all placed an emphasis on welfare dependency and unemployment. Academics and others took offence. For them, the idea that welfare caused the dependence that brought substance abuse and violence ignored a history of the state and its exclusions. Just as important, many anthropologists thought that these critiques targeted land rights. Did critique of living conditions on the homelands aim at undermining government support? Some proposed that what outsiders thought was poverty was in fact cultural difference.16
The voice that emerged in opposition to opinion writers and representing anthropologists was the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR), located at the Australian National University (ANU). CAEPR writers rejected the common critique of a federal government scheme, Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP). These projects provided federally funded part-time employment in communities and had been intended as a constructive alternative to welfare. It was argued that in areas where there were no labour markets the CDEP offered community-based employment compatible with a traditional style of life. Critics responded that the scheme had become no more than welfare and should be replaced by other policy measures that would not produce a ‘dependency’ likely to contribute to social pathologies. Some of the suggested alternatives involved attacks on land rights; for example, Hughes proposed dismantling land rights in order to encourage more engagement with a market economy. Johns proposed that residents of homelands should migrate to locales with more employment options—as other unemployed do elsewhere in the world. Pearson did not endorse these measures meant to undermine land rights. Nonetheless, he did underline that welfare was ‘poison’ and recommended that CDEP should go.
This debate was well established when, just before a federal election, the NT government released the Little Children are Sacred report (2007) on child sexual abuse in remote communities. The terrible issues that the report raised demanded action on a broad front. To a startled public, the link between so-called welfare dependency, substance abuse and pathology seemed clear.17 The NT Intervention followed, and then policy change. At least in part, the change involved a shift away from small community-based programs to greater emphasis on inclusion in the larger economy. Nonetheless, the focus was on individual dependency and not on structural disadvantage or the enduring cultural difference that makes that disadvantage hard to address. The best known of the legislative measures involved the management or ‘quarantining’ of welfare incomes for the care of recipients’ children. A major part of welfare payments could only be spent on basic goods—food, clothing and the like—and definitely not on grog. Because the measure applied solely to some Aboriginal communities, the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 was suspended and remote Aboriginal people were made markedly unequal before the law (see Behrendt 2010). Less well known but equally important, CDEP were disbanded in all but name. This was prompted in part by the fact that federal government could in law only quarantine welfare payments, not a wage. With the cessation of CDEP many residents in remote communities simply reverted to unemployment benefits. Post-Intervention, a further swathe of federal policies was introduced to ‘close the gap’ between services and outcomes for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. On the Territory government’s part, departments devised a ‘Working Futures’ program to improve remote Aboriginal training and employment. However, the gains in services have been modest and no one suggests that the Intervention so far has brought significant advance in remote education, employment or health.18 In fact, the outlook in these areas is bleak as the public loses interest once again. In the course of Australia’s 2010 federal election campaign, Aboriginal issues were barely mentioned.
A culture war or not?
Like the postcolonial critique, the remote communities debate involved issues of cultural difference and inequality. Moreover, there was something of a parallel between the debates, though one critique came from the left and the other from the right. Both groups have argued that anthropology, in its commitment to difference, has been blind to major disadvantage. With eyes firmly fixed on cultural difference, anthropologists have largely ignored poverty, race, or both. Each critique has stressed this point, the left in terms of the history of civil rights that has involved Indigenous people, especially in Australia’s coastal regions; the right in terms of remote Aboriginal communities. As a form of analysis and politics, anthropologists have privileged cultural difference over inequality.
In the context of the remote communities debate, critics pressed their case in the face of apparent silence from the universities. With the exception of Peter Sutton and those whom he cited, academics seemed disinclined to address the issues of violence and distress (see Sutton 2001, 2009). Some of the critics read into this a vested interest in consultancies; hence the claim that those who defended homelands were a part of an ‘Aboriginal industry’. Other explanations have always been available. Some anthropologists almost certainly felt that to dwell on distress might jeopardise land rights and native title—reforms for which Indigenous peoples had fought long and hard. Moreover, a reified notion of traditional culture produced by land claim research obscured the actual state of communities and the variation between them. Many anthropologists were writing from an intensive engagement with one or two locales and possibly it was easy to say, ‘Not in the communities that I know’. Some anthropologists also feared the violation of confidentiality. Only intimate engagement with particular people can bring real insight into social suffering. But do those involved want their distress paraded in a public way? Again, the inconclusive nature of the postcolonial critique put anthropology in a double bind. History and Indigenous studies had criticised the discipline for its focus on cultural difference and its neglect of the history of encapsulation that had brought marginalisation and inequality within the state. At the same time, most academics and many of the public endorsed land rights and the maintenance of homelands. The culturally different had found a niche, albeit conveniently remote, in Australia’s consciousness. All these factors led to uncertainty and ambivalence: did the reports of distress ref lect something real and pervasive, or was this a political campaign to debunk and pathologise a way of life costly to the state and counterintuitive to neoclassical economics?
As debate heated up, a further factor impressed some anthropologists. Broadsheet descriptions of remote communities said little of cultural difference but much about pathology. Accounts of remote Aboriginal life were portraits of far more than unemployment or reliance on government support. They also described drunkenness, personal violence, disease, ignorance and incompetence. When the Little Children are Sacred report was released it seemed to confirm an elaborate portrait of pathology that was already abroad in the public domain. Explanations for this condition sometimes went to a ‘savage’ culture that had passed its use-by date, or to economic deprivation caused by faulty policy that included land rights (see Austin-Broos 2009a:238–258). Sutton’s book reflected the view that too much weight in this account had been given to economic factors, and insufficient attention to the collapse of traditional culture. He sought to specify the situation. Other anthropologists watched in consternation as Sutton’s efforts to assert expertise, and to express real grief as an Australian land rights consultant, seemed to locate the source of pathology almost exclusively in an exhausted Aboriginal tradition (see Cowlishaw 2003). This circumstance seemed to confront anthropologists with a familiar phenomenon: a readiness to render difference in terms of deviance and deficit alone and push through policy change on that basis (see Austin-Broos 2010b). The moral certainty once created in settler society by the image of the backward savage was provided in this debate by images of entirely pathologised communities. Therefore two collections edited by anthropologists, one soon after the NT Intervention and the other more recently, suggested that the debate about remote communities was a further chapter in Australia’s ‘culture wars’. Like a previous debate between historians, this one referenced European settlement and the integrity of Aboriginal culture. In the case of homelands, the proposal has been that the war is between a left defending cultural difference and a right beholden to neoliberal policy (see Altman and Hinkson 2007, 2010).19
And yet the matter is not straightforward. Sutton broke ranks in 2001. Eight years later, and post-Intervention, his original essay was expanded into a book which, by implication, endorsed the Intervention.20 Historian Inga Clendinnen supported Sutton’s views, just as she supported historian Henry Reynolds in his culture war (Clendinnen 2009). Reynolds clearly came from the left. Many anthropologists identified Sutton’s position with the right and proposed that difference or identity politics was the appropriate left position (see Lattas and Morris 2010). Sutton was also supported by Aboriginal leader and anthropologist Marcia Langton (Langton 2009). After the Intervention, Langton made common cause with Noel Pearson, who had been a strong supporter of the Intervention. Endorsing both his views and Sutton’s, Langton also became an executive of his Cape York Institute (CYI) for policy research. Langton’s theme was poverty, not cultural difference. Again, on the publication of the CYI’s From Handout to Hand Up, which just preceded the Intervention, Robert Manne, political scientist and staunch critic of Aboriginal child removal as well as Keith Windschuttle’s work, voiced his support for Pearson (see Manne 1998, 2003, 2007).21 In sum, some veterans of past culture wars saw the matter differently from their ostensible allies in anthropology. For these veterans, the issues of distress and poverty seemed to transcend concerns about pathologising homelands.
The NT Intervention focused the remote communities debate on issues of rights and pathology. One position, which many anthropologists endorsed, defended the right to be culturally different and free from racial discrimination. This position pitted itself against a view that the distress produced in communities actually violated other rights of individual women and children. The group rights of a different culture were juxtaposed with the claimed universal rights of individuals. Argument then revolved around whether or not remote communities were in fact pathological at all, and whether or not any such condition justified suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act. This style of debate also presented the matter as a culture war: Aboriginal difference versus the state and mainstream society. And yet some academics demurred because this latter construal is in fact simplistic. In reality, there are no bounded cultures involved; rather, the matter concerns ways in which Aboriginal people can and will reconcile different types of institutional practice that embody very unequal forms of power. Stated plainly, the maintenance of customary ways as they exist today relies on remote Aboriginal people grasping a secure position for themselves within the state and its economy. This is a process that creates conf lict within individuals and their communities—not simply between separate cultures. For example, Mathew, as a youth, wished to be both culturally different and engage with a wider world; to be a custodian, have congenial work, take an interest in regional politics, and perhaps to travel beyond Central Australia. Rights and the routes to them will always be important for remote communities, not least defending land rights. But beyond the Intervention as an event lies the relation between the right to cultural difference and socioeconomic standing. It is unlikely that culture and its legal status can be defended effectively without more socioeconomic autonomy and this entails, in turn, trade-offs both for individuals and their communities. A debate about the right to be different cannot get to the heart of the matter without an awareness of the way in which economy bears on culture.
This book takes its departure from the observation that in the remote communities debate, the pathologising by opinion writers and the denial of distress by some academics were real factors in the debate. Forms of silence marked both sides and reflected fundamental issues. On the one hand was a failure to acknowledge cultural difference and the complexity it brings to policy-making geared to address disadvantage; on the other was a failure to grant that the suffering and the distress brought by marginalisation are not simply defined away by Aboriginal forms of life. As I have suggested throughout this chapter, the issues that concern remote communities would be fairly easy to address if they involved only cultural difference.22 It is because this is not the case that there is distress of the type now familiar in communities.
An argument and outline
In the chapters that follow, I propose to criticise anthropology in order to defend it. As stated above, my argument is that cultural difference does not override inequality or redefine it as experience. The prevalence of lifestyle illness, substance abuse, early death and personal violence in communities attests to this. At the same time, inequality cannot be addressed except through the cultural difference of those who live remote today. Routes to literate education and employment need to address and not dismiss the cultural difference in communities, including an inclination not to migrate away from country on a permanent basis. This circumstance also ref lects the need for a mix of policy, and not the polarisation that took place in the remote communities debate. If elements of tradition tie remote Aboriginal people to the local, their status as Australian citizens and market participants requires that some among them move beyond the local to negotiate a larger world and its economy as well as regional and national politics. In sum, the identities of remote Aboriginal people are multifaceted today. As such, the reproduction of cultural difference requires non-local solutions as well as local ones.
In effect, my discussion of the two debates involves completing the task of the postcolonial critique. That task involved criticism of the study of cultural difference as a bounded and reified whole. It involved a critique of classical ethnography.23 Aboriginal people, the critics argued, should be addressed as historical agents. And as such, their experience of inequality in the state is equal in importance to their cultural difference. To this view I add the point that these matters affect the writing of ethnography and its relation to critical thought. How a specifically Aboriginal experience and its significance are defined changes as the context of an account becomes more historically attuned. To make these observations is not to dismiss cultural difference and turn to a focus on inequality, even including race. Rather the issue is that all Aboriginal difference, as it is lived and interpreted today, is difference mediated by the state and its histories of inequality. The task is to understand what difference means within the framework of a state underpinned by the market institutions of a capitalist economy.
Finally, I have written this book as an anthropologist and in significant part about anthropology, but in order to speak to a broader audience of academics and others who are interested in policy debate. Anthropology’s tools are important because they are designed to interpret difference. Equally important for Australian research, anthropology needs to enter fully into dialogue with other humanistic social sciences that address Indigenous Australia. This should mean the end of representations of remote Aboriginal life as an exotic, even privileged, ‘other’ beyond the gamut of historical research and changing, contested experience. The connections between Fitzroy Crossing, Maningrida, Ntaria and Bourke need to be underlined, as well as the differences. In addition, the distance that the postcolonial critique created between anthropology and the other disciplines should be reduced. If anthropology has not addressed inequality as it might have, there is little evidence that policy today actually does come to grips with fostering equality in the context of cultural difference. Not doing better at this task entails the perennial pathologising of remote communities. Australians who are in and beyond the universities share a responsibility to do better.
The book includes three ‘background briefings’ as part of Chapters 2, 4 and 5. They provide the reader with useful information that helps make sense of the debates. The briefings concern, in turn, traditional Aboriginal culture, the growth of an Indigenous sector, and unemployment in remote Aboriginal communities. Most chapters end with an overview. Chapter 2 involves a discussion of classical ethnography and its strengths and weaknesses. I also sketch the postcolonial critique as it was pursued in anthropology itself. Chapter 3 describes some aspects of the postcolonial critique that was launched by history and Indigenous studies. These include the charge that anthropology is or was a racist discipline. I assess the validity of this critique, both its sound and unsound points. An account of the ways in which this critique both within and beyond anthropology struggled with issues of equality and difference sets the stage for the remote communities debate. Chapters 4 and 5 address that debate as it unfolded through the 1990s and into the 2000s. In Chapter 4, I describe the types of critique fielded by those who opposed what they saw as a ‘separate development’ for remote Aboriginal communities. They argued that these remote communities had become sites of pathology and suffering. Often they also proposed that cultural difference precludes equality and therefore should be dispensed with. These writers had a range of positions, including those maintained by some Aboriginal leaders. Chapter 5 describes the position of many anthropologists on land rights, CDEP and the NT Intervention. Often these defences were in the form of writing produced or coordinated by CAEPR. Although contributors to these collections did not have a uniform position, the collections have a discernable tenor in support of homelands and outstation life. It was among these writers that the view was put that ‘statistical equality’ and cultural difference do not always go together. Chapter 6 assesses the debate and relates it to the postcolonial critique. I explain how cultural difference and inequality were in play throughout the debates. I also raise some general points concerning the politics of difference (or identity) and the politics of equality, and the tensions between them. Finally, I instance mainstream education as a policy issue that needs to be understood both in terms of equality and cultural difference. I argue that equality in primary education for remote communities is a matter of equal citizenship and a prerequisite today for cultural difference as well. I conclude with an update on Mathew’s story.