Journeys to the Interior by Nicolas Rothwell

Author:Nicolas Rothwell [NICOLAS ROTHWELL]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd
Published: 2011-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

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Behind them they leave a transformed landscape and several disturbing questions. During the political and ideological struggles of recent years in this domain, almost the entire Australian intelligentsia, both mainstream and indigenous, tended to highlight complex, near-theological issues such as treaties and reconciliation, native title and representation. But the all-dominating plague of alcohol dependency and the sapping curse of welfarism were both constantly swept to the margins of public discussion.

There are obvious reasons for this record. Progressive thinkers often accepted the idea that alcohol was the result of disadvantage; a pleasing, almost consoling idea, because disadvantage can be remedied, of course, by such tools as welfare, and if past oppression is the present, hidden cause of trouble, that trouble can be tactfully excused and subtly, constructively addressed. The enlightened class wished to give no help to their grim conservative adversaries, while the vast majority of indigenous intellectuals found themselves unable to ‘let down their own side‘ and talk plainly about the alcoholic syndromes that had trapped their cousins in the bush. And so silence reigned. The spokesmen would not speak. It was left to a pair of indigenous thinkers to take back power and responsibility.

Naturally there is a tragic aspect to this saga. A generation of well-intentioned figures, whether intellectuals or activists, handson community workers or discriminating scholars of indigenous life ways, found it their fate to preside over a deep, grinding social crisis, which their best efforts failed to solve. Indeed the Aboriginal societies they wished to help fared worse and worse thanks to the suite of policies the helper class had chosen to pursue. This was a spectacular failure of understanding, which will stand out clear in the record of Australian history.

But there is a darker twist. Indigenous societies across Australia today are intensely studied, watched and surveyed. How minutely detailed our surface knowledge of them has become. We operate, in truth, a kind of collective Truman Show! Yet changing the fundamental behaviours of those societies has long seemed an elusive, distant goal — and this may well be precisely because of the mainstream presence there. In today‘s Australia, there are very few purely Aboriginal spaces left: the frontier is closed, and closed forever. All through the remote indigenous world there are outside helpers, the enabling army, delivering services, building capacity, looking on through engaged, compassionate, postcolonial eyes. With their art and their troubles, their spirituality and their mesmerising difference, Aboriginal people in the bush have become ever more necessary to the mainstream. It is a strange dance. As we waltz into the future, a relationship of codependency, marked out by the bright ring of racial thinking, controls our fate.

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