40 Years On, Still Tied To The Past
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday May 22, 2007
FORTY years after the vote which granted Aborigines full citizenship, the condition of the indigenous population is still a scandal. As the Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson has asked, if David Hicks can garner enough support among progressives to secure his release from Guantanamo Bay, why the silence about a continuing stain on Australia's reputation? Why do Aboriginal affairs attract so little useful attention, and every effort peters out in failure and indifference?
Aboriginal Australians have had the societies they built before Europeans arrived crushed, their values and their morality utterly destroyed. In place of the cultural subtleties and hierarchies they had evolved over 40 millenniums, an alien society has been imposed in which they now struggle daily to obtain the least foothold. A few may make their way successfully in wider society, but many do not, and many Aboriginal lives are formed by bitterness and frustration which is eased only by alcohol or other drugs. A society so demoralised finds social relationships reduced to their most basic: the physical domination of one person over another - a repetitive Hobbesian contest played out in an endless nightmare of squalid violence and exploitation.Here, it has to be said, the conventional media approach simply fails to tell the Aboriginal story. To give Aboriginal violence, case after case, the same attention as might be given to similar violence outside that community would overwhelm the medium with a single message. It would seem biased - a form of racism. But avoiding that appearance produces a worse result: a veil of silence descends over an appalling problem. Those who point out the violence now endemic inside some settlements, as the Northern Territory prosecutor Nanette Rogers did last year, become heretics for simply confronting the wider community with the truth.Many things obstruct a clear appreciation of the problems of Aboriginal society. White guilt, whether acknowledged or denied in non-Aboriginal Australia, is a serious complication in Aboriginal affairs. Forty years of atoning for past misdeeds have failed signally to improve the lot of Aborigines. Policy needs some other, sounder basis. On the Aboriginal side, as Mr Pearson says, the tendency to claim the status of victim has made it too easy to shirk genuine responsibilities. Guilt and victimhood are two blind allies. By concentrating on blame, not problem solving, they tie up policy-making in culturally sensitive knots. Without denying, excusing or hiding the past, it is time both sides in Aboriginal affairs got beyond it.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald