Remote Aboriginal Australia is one place where great beauty can be juxtaposed with seemingly endless grief. Such a situation allows ample scope for silences of one type or another about remote Aboriginal life as it is described in Australia’s urban centres. This is a book about such silences and arguments not carried forward. Its focus is cultural difference and inequality as each bears on those who live remote—especially in the tropical north and in Central Australia. I treat cultural difference and inequality as facts that are given more or less weight according to the form and politics of the analysis involved. For some, remote Aboriginal life is a site of enduring and remarkable difference while for others, the hallmark of that same site is poverty and deep distress. Consequently, this book is not simply about inequality and difference but also the politics and policies that these issues have produced. A Different Inequality describes some forms of recent and continuing disagreement. The touchstone for the book is the debate about remote communities that both preceded and followed the Northern Territory Intervention of 2007—a debate that began in earnest in the 1990s and continues to this day. I lead into this dispute with an account of another one within the universities. This was a postcolonial critique of anthropology that foreshadowed issues raised in the remote communities debate. My discussion thereby ranges across both an academic and a public policy domain. It concludes with the proposal that we need to reconcile two forms of politics—those of culture difference (or identity) and those aimed at pursuing equality for remote Aboriginal Australians. Cultural difference does not override socioeconomic disadvantage, but neither can that difference be ignored if the object is to lessen disadvantage in remote communities. Land rights, education and employment need to be addressed in concert—a proposal that is easy to write but not so easy to formulate in policy terms.
Disappointment with public debate created the impetus for this book. At the time of the Intervention, I had just completed another work based on many years of engagement with Western Arrernte (Aranda) people in Central Australia. My disquiet came from the Arrernte’s circumstances and from the tenor of debate about their lives and other comparable lives in remote Australia. Uncharacteristic at the time, my unease was with both sides: with my colleagues in the universities and with the opinion writers and private think tanks that provided a competing view of remote communities. The polarisation of opinion was marked. Each side accused the other of ulterior motives. As the words f lew thick and fast, in my view they reflected real dilemmas in the analysis of a confronting human situation. I was led to think more broadly about universities and their approaches to research among Indigenous Australians. I realised that if anthropology must change so too must some of the other disciplines involved. Yet in recent times, if the universities have not always served remote communities well, this is also true of an Australian polity that allows a crucial debate to be mired in prejudicial accounts of Aboriginal people. In the end, the loser is policy for remote communities, deprived of the scrutiny it deserves in the public domain.
While this book is a critical ref lection on anthropology, my own discipline, it also discusses the work of other academics and policy consultants who have written about inequality, poverty and cultural difference in remote Aboriginal Australia. As a result, the book is directed to an audience beyond anthropology and the universities. The range of material covered demonstrates the need to build a forum for discussion that can dissolve some current and quite unhelpful boundaries. I have tried to keep the language plain and as direct as possible although the discussion ranges from traditional Aboriginal culture through 19th century debates about ‘the Aborigines’ to pressing issues of illness and unemployment today. This is a discussion of the contemporary circumstance of those who live remote. It also provides some perspective on the past in order to suggest how the present and its politics have been produced. Terminologically, I employ ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Aboriginal’ to refer to group identities in the present. The terms are more and less inclusive. With regard to Aboriginal customary ways—specific elements of culture that are not shared with Torres Strait Islanders—I use the term ‘Aboriginal’. This designation is especially pertinent when the discussion turns to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and its social corollary in a homelands movement that fostered outstation life. At other times, and especially in the course of my discussion of the postcolonial critique of anthropology, I use the term ‘Indigenous Australians’ to refer to both Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. Finally, when I am referring to original peoples of the continent, rather than to an objectified identity, I use the term ‘indigenous’. I have tried to keep my usage consistent.
In this work, my first debt always is to my friends at Ntaria. One family in particular has been my mainstay over many years and I am now growing old with them. My thanks go out to some very special women for keeping me abreast of family matters over many years. I also wish to thank Jeremy Beckett of the University of Sydney and Nicolas Peterson of the Australian National University who read a part or the whole of the book in earlier drafts. The responsibility for the final version is my own but their early input helped me greatly. There are three other colleagues I wish to thank. One is my departmental associate Gaynor Macdonald. Over many years, we have discussed the types of issue raised in this book. Through our teaching, public debate and publishing we have sought to encourage broader conversations, especially within anthropology. Another is Marie de Lepervanche with whom I worked at Sydney University prior to her retirement. Marie has shared my vision for a critical anthropology in Australia and I have valued her companionship. In different ways, each of us has raised issues that concern the intersection of economy and law as they shape particular lives within the state. The other colleague I wish to thank is my friend Geoffrey Hogbin, a neoclassical economist. Geoff and I met at the University of Chicago when we were both doctoral students, he in economics and I in anthropology. We have never agreed about much. Yet without our conversations, also over many years, this book would not have been written.
Finally, I wish to thank my own small family. Close at hand, and at a slightly greater distance, my husband Frank and our son Harry have lived with me through almost every paragraph. Their own engagement with the Western Arrernte, anthropology and the remote communities debate helped me to complete this project.
Diane Austin-Broos