In an election season it is clearly political (Howard is nothing if not political), and in harmony with larger agendas to replace a communally-structured with an individualistic society and to assert federal over state power. It is the PM’s first sign of concern for Aboriginal people — there have been reports on addiction and abuse for years, already in 1988 an epidemic of child abuse was reported, and Howard’s main legacy has been neglect and support of mining companies challenging Aboriginal land claims; to some it resonates disturbingly with his refusal to apologize to the “stolen generations,” those mixed-race Aboriginal children who were taken from their Aboriginal parents in the early and mid-20th century. But there seems general support for his intervention and even gratitude that someone in power has finally noticed it. The present system’s clearly failed. And the present situation is indeed horrible. There were reports of the abuse of children in every one of the fifty towns surveyed for the NT study, sometimes of children not much older than toddlers.
The larger problem (which Howard’s authoritarian measures are not likely to address) is the breakdown of traditional Aboriginal society in many places. Elders of communities throughout the land lament the neglect of their grandchildren by their children. Some speak of the greatest crisis for Aboriginal people since the arrival of the Europeans. (At least that's the elders we hear about; Vincent, the elder I met in Alice Springs, lamented decades' of lacking political will on the government side,
and regretted what's been lost through an educational system which few Aboriginal children complete.)How did things get so bad? (Not that they’ve ever been good since us lot arrived.) It is in part the consequence of failed communal policies and the corrupting effects of dependence on government handouts, but the deeper problems are economic – there is as good as no work in Aboriginal lands – and the deepest are cultural. As Aborigines have found their way into quasi-permanent settlements in various unhappy ways, the link to the land in, by and for which they lived has weakened. So have the elaborate mutual systems of social cooperation between genders, generations and groups in maintaining the land and the Law. (I don't expect that these societies were much less sexist than any other human culture, but the present horrors were not traditional parts of any of them.) The gulf between traditional and modern western consumer culture is vast and there are few bridges. Cut off from a past and unable to imagine a future, people flee to “the grog” and drugs, families and communities fall apart, abuse proliferates. (As in most child abuse, many of the abusers were themselves abused.)
The situation is comparable to that of many other indigenous populations around the world. Just as the rest of us are learning the importance of living in harmony with the land, those cultures with the most intimate understanding of the life and needs of the land are collapsing. Or is it that the land is dying, with its powerless custodians? Aboriginal cultures aren’t all dying - an Aboriginal writer just won the Miles Franklin award, Australia’s Pulitzer for fiction – but the situation is dire. Let’s hope that Howard’s moves, whatever their motivation, set the stage for new thought and new policies, and new hope.
(The picture is of Mimi Spirits by Djawida Nadjongorle; I found it here.)
