A pervasive and profound sense of hopelessness has settled over many people working indigenous Australia. Journalism student Clare Negus visited townships in Western Australia and — in the first of a three-part series for Crikey — reports on how communities keep the faith.
“You’re seen as seagulls,” said the principal of a remote community school not trying to hide his contempt. Casually leaning against a rail he made it clear he was more bothered by my presence then the persistent flies he was waving away from his eyes. Busy looking teachers passed us on their way to morning class and he nodded affectionately to them, a sign of solidarity only earned after years spent slugging it out in the driest, roughest and most isolated schools. I was another invader, an intruder in their home.
He looked down at his watch and sighed. “You fly into town, pick and pick and fly away again.”
Two weeks into a trip to remote communities in Western Australia’s mid-west, the comment articulates the reason people were treating me with a mix of disinterest and disdain. I’d seen it on the exhausted faces and heard it in the bored voices of the people I’d interviewed. The principal was referring to every journalist, academic and government department who, uninvited and unwelcome, swoop in, take what they want and leave. The promises of progress left behind merely add to the sense of despair.
There’s no defining moment, no light switch. But, sometime between watching the tar road become red dirt and pulling spinifex shards from my socks, the soles of my feet begin to grow roots. It’s a gradual sense that takes over my being and the longer I spend in the outback the deeper my roots grow. Growing up in Perth it came as a huge shock to find third-world poverty and disadvantage, not in a distant country, but right in our own backyard and the realisation of my ignorance was a slap across the face.
As a bright-eyed student journalist, trying to make sense of how our communities have deteriorated into what anthropologist Peter Sutton calls “diaster zones”, I lay awake in my donga every night of the trip asking the seemingly basic question: how is it that after billions of dollars have been spent — after being the subject of a harvest of PhDs, after being interviewed, followed, poked, prodded, interpreted and analysed — how can it be that the situation for indigenous Australians hasn’t improved?
“There are a couple of answers to this,” says Lieutenant General John Sanderson, head of the West Australian Indigenous Implementation Board (IIB). “But, the correct one is that we have been doing it the wrong way.”
The IIB was set up in 2009 “to advise the state government on how to identify and cut through the obstacles and really improve social and economic outcomes” with indigenous people. Since then, the IIB has been attempting to establish indigenous voices in Western Australia that can communicate effectively with government departments.
But recently WA Shadow Indigenous Affairs Minister Roger Cook said the recommendations of the IIB are being ignored. “The Barnett government has failed to respond to the issues confronting Indigenous communities,” he said. The IIB has criticised the industrial development in the Kimberley, calling it ‘ad hoc’ and ‘driven from Perth’ and claims Royalties for Regions has failed to deliver to indigenous people. As the advice from the IIB falls on deaf ears, it seems the cycle of ‘all talk, no action’ continues.
Confronting what is described in terms of indigenous ‘dysfunction’ and ‘disadvantage’ for the first time, there was a moment of clarity when I realised that the government just needed to start listening, that communities just needed to communicate better with politicians and force the kids to go to school and ensure the houses are built without fault. But it’s a simplistic notion.
Problems have been entrenched for centuries; others tried and failed. Some of the brightest minds in the country have attempted to answer why conditions in Aboriginal communities continue to worsen. Academic Sarah Maddison from University of New South Wales argues until Australian governments come to grips with the complexity of Aboriginal politics they will continue to make bad policy with disastrous consequences for Aboriginal people. But people are tired.
“It’s just been forever and a day they have been researching Aboriginal people and asking them all these questions,” said Annie Pepper who works with the region’s Community Drug Service Team. In her spare time Pepper runs an Aboriginal women’s cancer support group in Geraldton. She, like many others, can’t see the point in all the surveys and questions, especially when “nothing ever happens”.
In her book Black Politics, Maddison wrote: “Aboriginal people are tired of being asked to educate white people about what it means to be Aboriginal.” Maddison explained how she, like many white ‘do-gooders’ before, respond to their growing sense of awareness about the impact of our colonial history with a “paralysing guilt”.
She transformed her guilt into anger, then into something more productive. But how can I not feel guilty? Indigenous Australians are the most researched people in the world and I’m just another white fella with a notepad.
Register to read Part II: the communications barrier in black Australia
Part III coming tomorrow: As successive governments fail to improve living conditions for indigenous people, individuals are taking ‘closing the gap’ into their own hands.
Clare you little gem, you. Why do government initiatives fail? Because no one listens to Aboriginal people.
It only seems simplistic but the reasons why we do this go to the root of our relationship with the first Australians and they are far from simple.
If more people went and vistied ‘remote’ communities and read some stuff by people who have taken the time to listen there wouldn’t be so much useless yapping going on.
congrats Clare what a great, simple piece.
Yes Clare, we are tired. I’ve lived on Yuendumu for over three decades. I’ve seen it change from a colonial outpost to a vibrant self determining community (admittedly not without its faults), a terrific place to grow up your children in, back to a disempowered community over-run by public servants, politicians, consultants, researches, contractors, law-enforcement agents etc.
I keep getting back to the following:
“In Australia, our ways have mostly produced disaster for the Aboriginal people. I suspect that only when their right to be distinctive is accepted, will policy become creative”… Kim Beazley Sr.
I’ve never seen the assimilationist multi pronged attack to be as intensive as it is.
Attack by acronym and semantics all in the name of closing the ethnocentrically defined “Gap”.
How about the “mutual-respect Gap”, the “fair go Gap”, “the dignity Gap”, “the equal rights Gap”, and most of all “the common sense Gap” and the “sense of humour Gap”.
Seriously, I’m thinking of buying in a gross of vuvuzelas!
Crikey, why are you publishing this tripe?
A few weeks away and some cultural shell-shock is a very poor way to understand a complex problem and recounting the squalor and hopelessness isn’t going to shed any light on it either.
As Rundle said at the time of the NT Intervention (kindly recently re-posted by Crikey)
“What we will get is more squalor p-rnography – [..] The ostensible purpose will be to expose terrible conditions for which we are all etc, the real effect is to make people reading the Saturday papers feel good about their own lives. Catharsis sells, as does an implicit sense of racial superiority.”
A lot of hand-wringing and self-obsessed guilt won’t get you anywhere and neither will quoting marginal lunatics like Sutton who peddle poverty-porn. Why are no ordinary Indigenous residents quoted, why is the article quoting more endless reports? Why no knowledge of the rich and beautiful cultures and languages on the communities? These things all take time to see, as our non-Indigenous eyes take some time to adjust to the very different Indigenous cultures throughout Australia.
You are demonstrating the problem you are criticising – an inability to be silent, to observe, to listen and then – only then – to engage and seek to understand and share.
Ritual discalaimer: I have lived and worked in remote NT for the past six years and don’t have the answers and only a few of the questions. I encourage others to realise the same thing.
Bob, you’re too cruel. It’s not the Clare Negus’ of this world that should shut up.
It’s the Jenny Macklins and other government and opposition propagandists, and indeed the “peddlers of poverty porn” (as you so well expressed it).
Clare is a student of journalism, and it is too much to expect for her to fully grasp “a complex problem” at this stage of her career.
As a long term resident of Yuendumu I too have more questions than answers.
As for why are “no ordinary Indigenous residents quoted”, it’s for the very reasons described in the article. I often see Warlpiri people deliberately avoid visitors especially “Interventionists”.
People just want to be allowed to get on with their lives and usually when “consulted” and/or “engaged” with they’re not listened to anyway.
On many occassions it’s left up to us “loud whitepeople” to counter the massive Government dis-information and stand up to the bureaucrats and their bullshit.
Encourage Clare and she may end up writing stuff like author/journalist Martin Flanagan who once wrote about Yuendumu: “To visit Yuendumu is to have the glass tower of your preconceptions shattered into countless brilliant fragments”. It takes experience to be able to spot those brilliant fragments. You mention “the rich and beautiful cultures and languages on the communities”, you’ve seen the briliant fragments.
Yes, jamirdi, not the real cause of the problem, but why is Crikey publishing it?
I’m sorry but anyone – especially a journalism student – should not be shocked to “find third-world poverty and disadvantage, not in a distant country, but right in our own backyard” when it’s been all over the papers for the last three years and well-known for much longer than that. I’ve just had my absolute fill of road story exotica about ‘remote communities’ that are more about the journo than anything else. And if no-one wants to talk then maybe don’t write something until you’ve understood enough for people to want to talk to you.
I don’t mean any particular disrespect to Clare as this is just another example of the genre, but I’m irritated Crikey has seen fit to publish it when they’d never consider publishing a journo student’s analysis of the budget or mining policy as a main article, particularly if they had (self-confessed) complete ignorance of the issues.
Ngula-juku.