Alice Springs by Hogan Eleanor;

Author:Hogan, Eleanor;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press

Local elder Betty Pearce suggests the combined impact of pastoralism and the missions in central Australia was to destabilise and erode Aboriginal family and social order, with the result that no one these days has a ‘proper structure on how to deal with the violence from a traditional Aboriginal perspective, they’re dealing with it from a white man perspective’. Born in 1932 to a Wambaya woman and a central Arrernte man of mixed descent, Pearce lived on various cattle stations in the Territory with her family while attending school in Alice Springs, giving her insight into both cultures. She recalls how, before the ‘white man came’, women were ‘bosses’ of their own sphere of law. At the age of eleven, she was invited to see the women enact a punishment to a man who had interfered with traditional law, and she later saw a woman who had been punished because she’d ‘interfered with the male side’. But the balance of this world was soon disturbed:

By the time I was thirteen, that rule or law was taken away because the women were getting stronger while the men were working on the station. The women were having to take more care of the children, and of the older children and the older boys, because the men weren’t around. So the women were stronger and they started making their strength felt, and then it changed.

Once ‘the white system was predominating’ on the stations, Aboriginal people would say ‘white man’s boss’: they did not wish to punish people under two laws.

Pearce also thinks that the creation of the stolen generations, in which the churches and the missions were strongly involved in the Territory, ‘must have something to do with’ the prevalence of violence in contemporary central Australia. The removal of Aboriginal children from their parents was practised widely across the Territory from the early 20th century onwards, particularly in response to fears of miscegenation. Recent statistics support Pearce’s conjecture: in remote areas Indigenous mothers removed from their natural families during childhood have nearly three times the risk of being victims of violence as those who have not been removed from their natural families. Like other commentators, Pearce blames the removal of children from their parents for the erosion of psychosocial development and skills, and for Aboriginal children, a sense of having fallen between two cultures without forming an effective identity within either and the confusion of the ‘traditional Aboriginal way, the confusion of the Christian way’. She comments: ‘So they were a lost people, and there has to be some kind of frustration there. A feeling of disempowerment. And then that feeling comes out … People have glossed over it and that has to be addressed before you can say violence is unacceptable.’

Pearce observes that violence was used as a sanction within traditional culture before European contact, but that it was ‘controlled violence’: ‘If there was a punishment, the punishment was over and done with. It was done straightaway by the right people. It did not carry on and on.

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