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Unheard Voices
Published in Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues Vol1, No2. 1998, Andrew Gunstone, Editor.
Preliminaries
For such a small population of human beings Aboriginal Australia is incredibly complex. This is partly demonstrated by the number of terms Aboriginal people use to refer to themselves. Because the centres of political and economic power and the concentration of population of this continent are in the South East most Australians would be familiar with the term “Kuri” or “Koori”. Queenslanders may know “Murri”, South Australians “Nanga” and maybe “Yura”. In Perth “Nyungar” or “Nyoongar” is the term used. In much of the North where languages are still spoken by significant numbers there are as many terms as there are languages; Piyirn, Tiwi, Yolngu, Marrngu, Anangu, Tyerrtye Urrperle and so on. In this article we use the Warlpiri terms because they are the ones we routinely use and they are well known throughout this region.
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Yapa is used for “Aboriginal person” and “person” generally in opposition to animals or objects.
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Kardiya is used throughout Central Australia and the Kimberley for “whitefella”, persons of European descent.
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Yapakaji is used to refer to people of mixed descent and heritage. It is derived from the English ‘halfcaste’ but has none of the pejorative connotations of that term. There are many who are both yapakaji and completely Warlpiri. Being Warlpiri is a matter of language and culture not biology.
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We do not use the negative terms “non-Aboriginal” or “non-Indigenous” because they are descriptively weak and potentially offensive.
The problem
We are deeply concerned that the problems facing yapa, the people of the remote communities and the fringe camps of Northern Australia, are becoming more intractable daily because of the refusal of the rest of the world to fully recognise their humanity. Yapa are capable of representing themselves, of speaking for themselves. They are capable of moral judgement, of intelligent appraisal of their situation, of planned decision making. But they do all of these things very differently from those who make decisions on their behalf. That’s what culture is about. They are also capable of making disastrous mistakes. As with any group of human beings anywhere their current predicament is partly of their own making, partly the result of their own reactions to the intrusion of mainstream Australia on their world. They will not improve their situation unless they are expected to make their own decisions and deal with the consequences of those decisions. They need to be challenged to do better. The support of governments and NGO’s should be accompanied by constructive, but genuinely challenging criticism. Those willing to constructively criticised should be encouraged not vilified as racist. Government and the media seem incapable of handling the complexity of their predicament and continue to base judgements actions on stereotyping derived from the current fashionable perspectives of social theorists or the conservative reaction to them. Being prevented from ownership of their problems means that yapa are also prevented from ownership of the solutions.
Stereotyping and the denial of complexity.
The linguistic complexity of Aboriginal Australia is matched by complexity in culture, historical experience, politics and economic circumstance. Several tendencies combine to deny the reality of this complexity. In political forums the search is for simple solutions. The sort of solutions that government agencies can achieve through policy making and funding programs. As in war, the first casualty in any political campaign is truth. Simple lying is not the problem. The opposing forces resort rather to a more insidious simplification of the issues and abuse of statistical data to support ideological preconceptions. If a point of view cannot be reduced to a slogan it is not considered. The media takes up and advances this process as it forms public perceptions. The constraints of time and language, of the mechanics of compressing information into ‘the news’, the presentation of information as entertainment all force the media into competing with each other in the process of simplification. The media try to maintain the myth of objectivity while earnest, over confident journalists make moralistic editorial comment in the most blatant manner. These are facts of life.
The voices in between
It is also understandable that government and media have turned to the Aboriginal people of what we in the NT call the ‘South’ for advice and comment on the formation and appraisal of government policy. After all that’s where the seat of power is, that’s where the voters are. Given our history, the Commonwealth government’s definition of Aboriginality is rightly fairly broad. Australians who identify as Aboriginal are a very varied group culturally and linguistically. Because of historical injustices like regional genocide, forced removal of families from traditional country, removal of children from families and official policies aimed at the destruction of cultures and languages there are many of mixed heritage who are trying to reconstruct what Aboriginality means for them. Most have been forced to adapt to trauma and drastic change. The experience has been necessarily painful and related political issues are therefore profoundly emotive. The process adds an extra layer of complexity on top of the matrix of surviving traditional cultures. There are many differing, legitimate, usually competing points of view in all of this. Yet there is a commonly accepted myth that there is a definitive Aboriginal viewpoint on any issue. That somehow the huge cultural gap between the city and the bush, between the populated and settled South and the harsh, empty North doesn’t count in relation to Aboriginal issues. White rural Australia is now in open revolt over this urban bias it is also a problem for Aboriginal Australia. If the search for a pan-Aboriginal identity, including the outdated European notions of ‘nation’ and ‘sovereignty’, is successful it will mean that those with the most to lose will lose the most. Those without a voice will be the losers, those who are closest to the ancestral, millennia old culture.
Politicians and the media look for community leaders who can speak on behalf of their people. For yapa a person’s right to speak on behalf of a group depends on kin relationship to its members and his or her relative status as a member. Within the communities of Central Australia and, we suspect, generally throughout Australia, yapa are confident to speak only on behalf of the family they head. This is one of the reasons why genuine community decision making is such a slow process as family heads work painstakingly towards a workable consensus. There is intense competition between family groups for the resources made available to them by government. A workable compromise between competing groups can be difficult to arrive at, fragile and therefore difficult to maintain. Speakers need to be circumspect and diplomatic to gain their ends while avoiding open conflict. Conflict can result in protracted physical violence between the family groups involved.
Politicians and the media work to deadlines. They don’t have a lot of time. They look for spokespersons who are willing to make quick decisions and give comprehensive and comprehensible (and in the case of the media, controversial) opinions. To be comprehensible they must speak English and either share, or at least have a very good knowledge of, kardiya culture and worldview. Those chosen to speak may have a legitimate claim to Aboriginality but only a tentative, if any, connection to the communities most affected by the issue under discussion. Such people may take the great risk of accepting that role in the belief that they genuinely have something to contribute. And many do. They may also take on the role because of the opportunity for self enrichment or political prestige that it presents. They are human after all. Policy directions of government and the issues taken up by the media and the way they are dealt with are determined to a great extent by the opinions of such spokepersons in the context of the current political debates.
Then there are the kardiya. There is a tired old saying in the NT that the kardiya who come from South to work with yapa are either mercenaries, missionaries or misfits. Like all such corny generalisations there is a modicum of truth in it. The mercenaries are fairly straight forward. Self enrichment at the expense of naïvely trusting and tolerant yapa communities and a jaded and cynical public service is a long established industry in the North. It is part of the frontier experience. Increasingly yapakaji and yapa are taking part in this industry. They are human after all and the pickings are easy.
Then there are the missionaries, the old, Christian and conservative and the new, rationalist and radical, out to change the world. Many of the old are exhausted and burdened by self doubt. The new are energetic and confident. Many working with yapa are motivated by an ideology held to with a similarly tenacious faith that was the hall mark of the Christians who first came to save black souls. Feminists, environmentalists, various brands of socialists, anti-nuclear activists and others all come with burning, youthful zeal. They see yapa as their natural allies though each ideology has a different formula for liberation and salvation. Each has a different God and a different Satan. Each is a product of millennia of Judeo-Christian ethics and intellectual traditions. The new missionaries behave like nineteenth century evangelists. They preach, cajole, berate and moralise. The worst sin in their eyes is the imposition of values. That is, of course, the imposition of values not their own. To them the world would so obviously benefit from the adoption of their own values that they don’t see it as an imposition. The enemy of them all is the ‘conservative’ and the archenemy is the ‘red neck’, (the last term of racial abuse publicly acceptable in multi-cultural Australia). They are products of the Enlightenment; rationalists with a deep trust in reason and just as deep a distrust of religion in its traditional Western forms. The young come to escape their families and their cultural heritages, to find themselves in someone else’s culture. Ironically the yapa they come to work with are profound conservatives obsessed with spirituality and family. For yapa family is all. The whole of yapa society and all interpersonal transactions are strictly based on actual or fictive kin relationships. Yapa live in a world alive with spiritual forces both positive and negative. There is no dichotomy between reason and religious experience, between the physical and spiritual. The heart is often a great deal more important than the head in dealing with life’s quandaries.
Misfits turn up in all groups of course. In the North they become ‘colourful characters’ and find a ready acceptance in yapa communities. It’s a little like the old French Foreign Legion.
The problem with yapa
So there is a clamour of voices between the yapa of the bush communities and governments and the media. Yapa aren’t competing on equal terms with those who will speak for them. They usually lack facility in English, though they may speak several Aboriginal languages. Their culturally determined worldview (with an often totally opposite system of rules of politeness and communication) makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for them to articulate their opinions in a form comprehensible to the media and the wider public. They are embarrassing. They are difficult to communicate with. Their opinions, when translated, often appear quaint, odd and sometimes down right unintelligible to the wider public. However, such people may be the repositories of exceptional wisdom. They tend to have a profoundly tolerant and accepting view of the world. They do not generally engage in the politics of confrontation in reaction to the traumas of the past. Their people suffered, sometimes horrific, frontier violence within living memory yet they are tolerant and forgiving. They tend to accept human beings on the basis of personal integrity rather than the artificial categories determined by biological descent and political loyalties. They are not racist, though Aboriginal people generally are as prone to prejudice as any other group of human beings. One does not hear them using terms of abuse like ‘redneck’ or ‘coconut’. Amongst such people are the national living treasures of traditional yapa culture, people who lived that culture minimally affected by contact with kardiya in their childhood and youth. They are also dying at an alarming rate. It is rare that yapa have the opportunity to represent themselves. On any issue yapa, of whatever cultural or linguistic background are formally represented by English speakers familiar with the workings of bureaucracy and the media. Whether yapakaji or kardiya, whether decent and conscientious of cynical and manipulative, they are appointed by government, chosen by a selection panel of their peers or elected through an alien voting system.
Yapa can be relied upon to define their own problems and make reasonable decisions about their solutions if given a real chance. The trouble is they can’t be relied upon to be politically correct. One person’s problem is not even an annoyance to another. One person’s solution is another’s denial of human rights. It hasn’t occurred to the ideologues yet that the maintenance of traditional cultures and the imposition of Western defined human rights is a logical paradox and a pragmatic impossibility. Giving yapa the chance to work it out for themselves involves being what we would call brutally honest about defining those problems, identifying the causes and proposing the solutions. There must be a willingness to treat yapa as complete human beings capable of wearing the consequences of their decisions, not as archetypal ‘victims’. Political correctness, over-simplification, naïve ideologies and shallow rhetoric have all conspired to deny them a voice in the public arena.
The tyranny of ‘Victim’ mythology
Victim mythology leads to the tendency to blame all Aboriginal people’s problems on white racist colonialism. This Paul Wilson “Black Death – White Hands”, David Bradbury “State of Shock” approach aims to generate guilt among the wider population in the hope that the guilt will force effective action by the electorate ane hence by government. So all of the problems we are told that Aboriginal people suffer from; poor housing, poor education, substance abuse, abysmal health, poverty, unemployment and so on are caused by kardiya invasion therefore they must be solved by government. This approach has two unfortunate consequences. The first is that, since it takes ownership and definitions of the problems away from yapa it also takes away responsibility for finding the solutions. At the most extreme it gives an automatic excuse to yapa criminals victimising the most vulnerable in their own communities. For example, Aboriginal women are around 12% of the population of the NT and around 70% of the victims of homicide. They are being killed by their own men not by kardiya. The argument that somehow these men have an historically based excuse for their behaviour can’t bring much comfort to the victims and their families. Secondly, it also produces an understandable backlash in the wider community. Joe Blow kardiya is tired of copping the blame for the ills of the nation. It is difficult to feel powerful and rich and benefiting from centuries of capitalism and colonialism when your ancestors came in chains and you’re on the bottom of your own socio economic ladder. It’s hard to feel threatening to another group of human beings you may have never had any personal contact with and whose predicament you can’t imagine except in the accusatory terms the media invent for you. Unfortunately, apart from Pauline Hanson, those who stand accused have few champions. Thankfully the poet Les Murray is one:
Our one culture paints Dreamings, each a beautiful claim.
Far more numerous are the unspeakable Whites,
The only cause of all earthly plights,
Immigrant natives without immigrant rights.
His anthology “Subhuman Redneck Poems” has achieved record sales. The ‘rednecks’ read poetry.
The tyranny of culture
Another damaging myth is that of the absolute sanctity of ‘culture’. The recent and sudden awareness of historical efforts to obliterate Aboriginal culture coupled with a yearning for meaning and spiritual fulfilment in the rapidly changing mainstream has resulted in a naïve veneration of Aboriginal culture. Culture is a source of strength, identity and stability. It is also a trap in rapidly changing times if it cannot adapt quickly enough to new dangers and challenges. Aboriginal culture, along with the cultures of the rest of the world, are changing inevitably as the world changes around them. Cultural change is always painful. Rapid enforced change can be fatal. A recent visitor to Central Australia with many years experience working in the Third World made the comment, ‘people hide behind culture in this country’. The army of spokespersons between the world and yapa will tell you what yapa can’t do because of their culture. They can’t say ‘no’ to their relations so their houses are overcrowded and are quickly rendered dysfunctional. They can’t say ‘no’ to a relative who asks for money even though they know that the money is going to go on grog and the kids will go hungry. They define garbage differently so their culture forces them to live in squalor. Men had a traditional right to beat their wives so it is best not to interfere in violent domestic disputes. They must keep their own languages that’s why English literacy levels are so appalling. They will be loath to tell you what yapa can do for themselves. Yapa can and do adapt intelligently to changed circumstances. We have witnessed and taken part in deliberate, negotiated changes to mortuary rituals during funerals, for example, when it was judged by the majority of the women with authority present to be appropriate. If a culture does not adapt it dies. Change is forced anyway. If those living the culture do not take charge of the change process they will inevitably be damaged, perhaps fatally.
Conclusion
Attempts to point out that there are serious problems within yapa communities that only yapa can solve if they take responsibility for the solutions and face the moral consequences of their actions often attract cries of ‘racist’ and ‘you’re blaming the victim”! Name calling and sloganising conveniently sidesteps the difficult work of thinking through the complexity and challenging the delinquent behaviour of some yapa. The technique has been made to appear legitimate by generations of public political protest and by our parliamentarians in recent decades. Accepting guilt for, what the wider community judges to be the present abysmal state of yapa communities results in a stultifying loss of confidence on the part of decent kardiya who are frozen in inaction. It does not restrain dishonest and manipulative kardiya from acting to enrich themselves at the expense of the “Victims”. The traditional yapa unwillingness to speak up on behalf of those not related has resulted in the silencing of wise voices. The floor is then taken by those lacking wisdom and local insight. Serious problems in health, housing, employment and education are seen as requiring research before action and costly complex solutions. Technological solutions are sought for social problems. Make houses dog and child proof instead of altering the behaviour of the kids and excluding the dogs. Erect drunk and petrol sniffer proof fortresses instead of sorting out the substance abusers. Search for ‘culturally appropriate’ innovative techniques instead of teaching literacy the way it has worked in the past. Fund elaborate programs staffed by kardiya for the entertainment of petrol sniffers instead of expecting families to care for their own. Undertake long and costly research instead of making nutritious food available and requiring that people eat well and adopt the necessary hygienic practices to preserve their health and that of their children.
Somehow yapa must be given the power to define their problems and to control the process of finding and implementing solutions. They must be challenged and expected to learn from the mistakes that they will inevitably make. Lifestyle diseases are cured by changes in lifestyle. Yapa should be supported in this painful process not dehumanised further by the victim stereotype nor given excuses for inaction by the ‘culture never changes’ myth. This is the most insidious form of racism of all. Of course caution is needed by all involved. It seems to us that Aboriginal issues should be taken out of the clamour of competing ideologies and political point scoring that bedevils them at present. A worthwhile guide can be found in the ‘methodological conservatism’ suggested by Martin Krygier in his Boyer Lectures “Between Fear and Hope Hybrid Thoughts on Public Values” on ABC Radio National:
“Roughly, methodological conservatism stresses five things: Society is complex, life is hard, value what works, you’re not that smart, be careful.”
This is all the ideology yapa need.
Murray, Les Subhuman Redneck Poems Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney Australia, 1996.
We acknowledge the contribution of Michael Ellis of Alice Springs and Peter Ellis of Canberra. Several of their ideas have been incorporated into this article.