B l o g a g o g u e r y

It hasn’t taken long for blogging to go to my head. I’m going to launch my first official rant.

We seem to have this bizarre mental block in this country about its first peoples. It’s best summarized for me by a story told by Prof. Judy Atkinson, an Indigenous woman with a PhD and decades of awesome work with women, children and men on violence and abuse of all kinds to her name. Her work has globally applicable insights and takes a deeply mindful approach to the reasons people abuse and the transgenerational effects of that abuse. The book I’ve linked to above, Trauma Trails, is an eye-opening read that I recommend to anyone; it gave me plenty to think about in terms of my own family and cultural (Irish) history.

This extraordinary woman was in Canberra talking to senior bureaucrats about the problems of abuse in Indigenous communities. Unsurprisingly, education is one of the pillars of her approach to try and reduce and prevent the harm being perpetrated (and perpetuated) in these, or any, communities. She was talking to a senior ministerial advisor about the desirability of getting Indigenous people into education and was told to her face, her professorial face, that “her people” could “only manage a Certificate 1″.

Huh?!?

It will be no surprise to anyone that although she was commenting publicly on the Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle (Little Children are Sacred) report before the Federal government decided to send in the troops to fix child abuse in the NT, and despite being one of the nation’s foremost experts on child abuse in general and Indigenous child abuse in particular, her considerable wisdom is being completely ignored.

Setting aside the general problems with the intervasionvention (which are considerable, but which others are doing a better and more authoritative job of criticising than I could hope to), this points to a more general problem with the unconscious culture of this country. We seem to be totally unable to regard Indigenous people as authority figures, and the number that we even take pride in is pitifully small compared to their achievements.

Another example: our country has what is believed to be the oldest known representation of a human face in the world in rock art on the Burrup peninsula in WA, among a huge collection of art that is tens of thousands of years old. Instead of protecting this piece of world heritage, let alone respecting the traditional owners’ spiritual beliefs about the sanctity of the site, our nation has given the go-ahead to build a gas processing plant over part of this unique cultural treasure.

If this country had any ability to treasure Indigenous people and culture we would never even consider such a move. The Burrup would be a major point of national pride. But because there is so much unaddressed shame in our colonial nation’s history, in our past (and present!) treatment of Indigenous people, we can’t look Indigenous culture in the eye enough to see its value to us as the present co-tenants of this continent. (Let alone recognising the rights and values of Indigenous people themselves!)

We can flog paintings to make a buck (often ripping Indigenous artists off along the way), and some professional thinkers and culture-workers can begin to grasp what we have, but as a nation we can’t actually admit that we’re sitting on a treasure trove because that would mean respecting and being grateful to the communities that created that treasure.