Down Under (42 page)

The real surprise, however, was that there seemed to be no Aboriginal children involved – certainly none were evident in the photographs. The population of the Northern Territory is about 20 per cent Aboriginal overall, but in the far outback the proportion is much higher. I asked the man about that on my way out.

‘Oh, there are some,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure how many just at the moment, but there are a few. The problem is that the pupils have to be supervised by a competent adult, you see.’

I waited a moment, then said: ‘I’m sorry, I don’t see.’

‘They need a reliable, conscientious adult with core language and reading skills.’

‘And Aboriginal parents don’t have that?’

He looked unhappy, as if this was a route we really shouldn’t be travelling down. ‘No, I’m afraid not. Not always.’

‘But if you’re not giving the kids the lessons because the parents can’t help them, then those kids, when they become parents, won’t have the core skills either, will they?’

‘Yes, it’s a problem.’

‘And so it will just go on for ever?’

‘It’s a very big problem.’

‘I see,’ I said, though of course I didn’t really see at all.

Afterwards, I continued into town. I bought a newspaper and took it to an open-air café on Todd Street, a pedestrian mall. I read for a minute or two, but then found myself just watching the passing scene. It was quite busy with Saturday shoppers. The people on the street were overwhelmingly white Australians but there were Aborigines about, too – not great numbers of them, but always there, on the edge of frame, unobtrusive, nearly always silent, peripheral. The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only person who could see both groups at once. It was very strange.

A very high proportion of the Aborigines looked beaten up. Many had puffy faces, as if they had wandered into a hornet’s nest, and an almost absurdly high number sported bandages on shins, elbows, foreheads or knees. A
label at the Strehlow exhibition which I had seen the day before had been at pains to stress that the most ruined Aborigines were those one saw in towns. The idea, I guess, was to inform visitors like me that one shouldn’t judge all Aborigines by these mild wrecks seen shuffling through the streets. Nonetheless, it struck me as an odd and paternalistic thing to say, in that it seemed to imply that Aborigines had two choices in their lives: to stay on the missions and prosper, or come into town and fall into penury and dereliction.

It made me think of a line I had seen penned by a famous outback character named Daisy Bates, who came to Australia from Ireland in 1884 and for years lived among and studied the indigenous peoples of Western Australia. In
The Passing of the Aborigines
, published in 1938, she wrote: ‘The Australian native can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation – but he cannot withstand civilization.’ In 1938 that may have qualified as sympathetic and enlightened comment, but it was disheartening to see it presented in modified form at an Aboriginal research centre in 1999.

You don’t have to be a genius to work out that Aborigines are Australia’s greatest social failing. For virtually every indicator of prosperity and well-being – hospitalization rates, suicide rates, childhood mortality, imprisonment, employment, you name it – the figures for Aborigines range from twice as bad to up to twenty times worse than for the general population. According to John Pilger, Australia is the only developed nation that ranks high for incidence of trachoma – a viral disease that often leads to blindness – and it is almost exclusively an Aboriginal malady. Overall, the life expectancy of the
average indigenous Australian is twenty years –
twenty years
– less than that of the average white Australian.

In Cairns, quite by chance, I had been told about a lawyer named Jim Brooks who has worked for years for and with Aborigines, and I had managed to meet him for a cup of coffee in town just before Allan and I had flown on to Darwin. A calm, easygoing, immediately likeable man with just a hint of the earnestness that must have led him to devote his working life to fighting for the disaffiliated rather than piling up money in private practice, he runs the Native Title Rights Office in Cairns, which helps native peoples with land issues, and was one of the members of a human rights commission set up in the mid-1990s to investigate an unfortunate experiment in social engineering popularly known as the Stolen Generations.

This was an attempt by government to lift Aboriginal children out of poverty and disadvantage by physically distancing them from their families and communities. No one knows the actual numbers, but between 1910 and 1970 between one-tenth and one-third of Aboriginal children were taken from their parents and sent to foster homes or state training centres. The idea – thought quite advanced at the time – was to prepare them for a more rewarding life in the white world. What was most amazing about this was the legal mechanism that enabled it to be done. Until the 1960s, in most Australian states Aboriginal parents did not have legal custody of their own children. The state did. The state could take children from their homes at any time, on any basis it deemed appropriate, without apology or explanation.

‘They did everything they could to eliminate contact between the parents and children,’ Jim Brooks told me
when we met. ‘We found one woman whose five children were sent to five different states. She had no way of keeping in touch with them, no way of knowing where they were, whether they were sick or well or happy or anything. Have you got kids?’

‘Four,’ I said.

‘Well, imagine if a government van turned up at your house one day and some inspector came to the door and told you they were taking your children. I mean seriously imagine how you would feel if you had to stand by and watch your children taken from your arms and put into a van. Imagine watching the van driving off down the road, with your kids crying for you, looking at you out the back window, and knowing that you will probably never see them again.’

‘Stop,’ I said with an uneasy stab at jocularity.

He smiled sympathetically at my discomfort. ‘And there is not a thing you can do about it. Nobody you can turn to. No court that will take your side. And this went on for decades.’

‘Why did they do it in such a heartless way?’

‘They didn’t see it as heartless. They thought they were doing a good thing.’ He passed me a précis of the rights commission’s report, which he had brought for me, and showed me a quotation from early in the twentieth century by a travelling inspector named James Isdell, who wrote of the dispossessed parents: ‘No matter how frantic [their] momentary grief might be at the time, they soon forget their offspring.’

‘They sincerely believed that indigenous peoples were somehow immune to normal human emotions,’ Brooks said. He shrugged at the hopelessness of such thinking. ‘Very often the children were told that their parents were
dead; sometimes that the parents no longer wanted them. That was their way of helping them cope. Well, you can imagine the consequences. There was a lot of grief-related alcoholism, stratospheric levels of suicide, all that kind of stuff.’

‘What became of the kids?’

‘Well, the kids, meanwhile, were kept in care until they were sixteen or seventeen, and then turned out into the community. They had a choice of staying in the cities and trying to cope with the inevitable prejudices, or returning to their traditional communities and resuming a way of life that they could barely remember with people they no longer really knew. The conditions for dysfunction and dislocation were bred into the system. You don’t get rid of that overnight. You know, some people will tell you that the removal of children only affected a small proportion of indigenous families. That is both wrong – there was scarcely a family in the land that wasn’t affected at some profound and immediate level – but even more tragically to miss the point. Taking children away destroyed a whole continuity of relationships. Just because you stop that practice doesn’t mean that all that damage is going to be magically undone and everything will be fine.’

‘So what can you do for them?’ I asked.

‘Help to give them a voice,’ he said. ‘That’s all I can do.’ He shrugged, a little helplessly, and smiled.

I asked him if there was still much prejudice in Australia and he nodded. ‘Huge amounts,’ he said. ‘Really quite huge amounts, I’m afraid.’

Over the past twenty years, successive governments have done quite a lot – or quite a lot compared with what was done before. They have restored large tracts of land to Aboriginal communities. They have returned Uluru to
Aboriginal stewardship. They have spent more money on schools and clinics. They have introduced the usual initiatives for encouraging community projects and helping small businesses get started. None of this has made any difference at all to the statistics. Some have actually got worse. At the end of the twentieth century, an Aboriginal Australian was still eighteen times more likely to die from an infectious disease than a white Australian, and seventeen times more likely to be hospitalized as a result of violence. An Aboriginal baby remained two to four times more likely to die at birth depending on cause.

Above all, what is perhaps oddest to the outsider is that Aborigines just aren’t
there.
You don’t see them performing on television; you don’t find them assisting you in shops. Only two Aborigines have ever served in Parliament; none has held a Cabinet post. Indigenous peoples constitute only about 1.5 per cent of the Australian population and they live disproportionately in rural areas, so you wouldn’t expect to see them in vast numbers anyway, but you would expect to see them
some
times – working in a bank, delivering mail, writing parking tickets, fixing a telephone line, participating in some productive capacity in the normal workaday world. I never have; not once. Clearly some connection is not being made.

As I sat now on the Todd Street Mall with my coffee and watched the mixed crowds – happy white shoppers with Saturday smiles and a spring in their step, shadowy Aborigines with their curious bandages and slow, swaying, knocked-about gait – I realized that I didn’t have the faintest idea what the solution to all this was, what was required to spread the fruits of general Australian prosperity to those who seemed so signally unable to find their way to it. If I were contracted by the Commonwealth
of Australia to advise on Aboriginal issues all I could write would be: ‘Do more. Try harder. Start now.’

So without an original or helpful thought in my head, I just sat for some minutes and watched these poor disconnected people shuffle past. Then I did what most white Australians do. I read my newspaper and drank my coffee and didn’t see them any more.

Consider the platypus. In a land of improbable creatures, it stands supreme. It exists in a kind of anatomical netherworld halfway between mammal and reptile. Fifty million years of isolation gave Australian animals the leisure to evolve in unlikely directions, or sometimes scarcely to evolve at all. The platypus managed somehow to do both.

When word reached England in 1799 that there existed in Australia a toothless, venomous, fur-covered, egg-laying, semi-aquatic animal with a duck-like bill, the tail of a beaver, feet that were both webbed and clawed, and a strange orifice called a cloaca, which served both reproductive and excretory purposes (a feature, as one taxonomist delicately noted, that was ‘highly curious but not well adapted for popular details’), it was received, not altogether surprisingly, as a hoax. Even after a careful
examination of a shipped specimen, the British Museum’s anatomist, George Shaw, found it ‘impossible not to entertain some doubts as to the genuine nature of the animal, and to surmise that there might have been practised some arts of deception in its structure’. According to the natural historian Harriet Ritvo, the original specimen still bears the scissor scars where Shaw snipped and fiddled to determine whether a hoax had been perpetrated.

For most of the next century, scientists argued – and argued heatedly, for it was an age obsessively devoted to exactitude – over how to classify the animal before putting it and its cousin the echidna (a creature similar to a hedgehog) in a family of their own: the monotremes. (The name means ‘one hole’, in reference to the distinguishing cloaca.) Unresolved, however, was the question of whether the monotremes were to be regarded as primarily mammal or reptile. It was evident from their peculiar anatomy that monotremes laid eggs, a reptilian trait, but it was equally evident that they suckled their young, a mammalian characteristic. A further vexation was that for almost a century nobody could find a monotreme egg. So we may envision the murmur and buzz that swept the auditorium when, in 1884, at a meeting of the British Association, the delegates were read a cable just arrived from a young British naturalist in Australia named W. H. Caldwell.

Caldwell’s message in full read: ‘Monotremes oviparous, ovum meroblastic.’