The Best Australian Essays 2015 (23 page)

My task, I came to see, was as a novelist, not as some kind of inadequate faux anthropologist. So it's perhaps fitting that, for all my reading, the point made itself, and a certain emotional sense, when I first encountered in Ömie the image of the tree as a metaphor for the clan. Whereas in the Anglophone West we draw a family tree from the top of the page with each individual marked along horizontal generational lines, the Ömie draw their tree upwards. The roots represent the Ancestors, the trunk the members of the clan, all in together, and the branches are symbolic of the
duvahe
who stretch the clan into the future. This does not mean that everyone in the trunk is the same – you only have to be an hour in a village to know that – or that they think of themselves as the same. But it does mean that their taken-for-granted sense of who they are in relation to each other and their society is markedly different from the way we in the West, each with our place on our horizontal lines, take for granted the nature of self.

That is what my character Rika, who wants only to be the same, has to learn. She has to learn it in her professional life with her camera, and that is hard enough. In her personal life, in her deep love for Aaron, it is harder still coming to understand how she is seen and, in a sense, can only be seen, especially by the older members of the fjord village where Aaron was born and grew up. She might be called sister friend by his young women kin, she might refuse all difference in the name of race equality. She might wish to be the same,
ache
to be the same, but she is not. Her marriage to Aaron looks very different to the village than it does to the cosmopolitan young in Port Moresby celebrating the mixing of race and colour. To them their marriage can symbolise the changing tide of history, the new day coming, but to the older women in the village, the
aya
, whose task it is to hold the ground steady, it is a turbulence in the order of things. To the young women in the village, her sister friends who have a greater sense of the changes that are coming, Rika's IUD – a piece of metal inside her to stop the making of babies – is as incomprehensible as it would be to a woman in contemporary Australia that there are certain springs where a woman should go if she wishes for a baby. The point here is that to dismantle the ‘other' does not mean to replace ‘other' with ‘same'. Like so much in life, movement between the two depends – to use the camera metaphor – on what lens you use, what focus and exposure, on who is behind the camera and which way it is turned.

It was only when I relinquished the epistemological grip of a first-person narrator that had, in my thinking until then, held the two parts of the ‘informed imagination' together, that I (in my particularities and limitations as a writer) could bring a more polyphonic perspective to the moral predicaments in which this book had entangled me. I'm not saying it could only be done in fiction, but it was, for me, a kind of liberation to come to understand that fiction stands on different ground from history. There is scope for play along the borderlines, but there is also a ravine, to use Inga Clendinnen's word for it, or at least a rocky valley, which we should respect. From the point of view of writing, there is, I think, an epistemological necessity for even the most literary of non-fiction writers to act as the lens through which we can trust, or evaluate, or revisit for ourselves the selection, presentation and interpretation of the lives and events put before us. The non-fiction writer might use the techniques of fiction to bring
lifeness
to her lives and to conjure the paradox of difference. But her pact with the reader, and her subject, returns always to the record, however patchy, however interrupted, from which she works. Fiction makes a different pact. It might contain argument, but it is not an argument; it involves interpretation, but to make it depends not on reference to the sources (important though they might be) but on perspective and patterning, voice and language, metaphor and image.

But there's a rub. By crossing into the land of fiction, and by creating characters that do not equate in any simple way, or even at all, to myself or to the many lives I've bumped up against in my rich experience of PNG, I had confronted myself with a possibly greater challenge if I wanted
The Mountain
to be more than ‘set' in that time, that place, that history.

For while the best of non-fiction writing also depends on the skill of the writer to conjure life on the page, and to use literary conventions without them appearing conventional, for the novelist who engages with history as more than a set, the stakes are higher. For a novel that gestures to history but cannot breathe life into that paradox of difference has nothing in the annals to fall back on. If its characters do not move us, if we do not believe in the world it creates, if difference is not rendered tangible, the writer cannot then fall back on biographical or historical veracity and say that there really was such a tide of events, and such people swept up by it. A poor history might still tell us something worthwhile, and hand the baton on. A bad novel tells us nothing, and if it does not allow us to glimpse ‘that blue river of truth, curling somewhere', as the critic James Wood calls it, there is little left behind.

Notes

1.
Albert Wendt, Introduction to
Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980
, University of Hawai'i Press, 1995, p. 3.

2.
Wendt, Introduction to
Nuanua
, p. 3.

3.
Steven Winduo,
Transitions and Transformations in Papua New Guinea Literature and Politics
, UPNG Press and Bookshop, 2012, p. 41.

4.
Colin Filer, ‘The Political Construction of a Land Grab in Papua New Guinea', Australian National University, Pacific Discussion Paper, September 2011.

5.
Janet Malcolm,
Paris Review
interview: The Art of Non Fiction No 4.

Meanjin

Remote Control: Ten Years of Struggle and Success in Indigenous Australia

Noel Pearson

I

I've been to many remote places in Australia, but this is entirely new to me. I don't know the desert. From the air, the vastness of the rolling dunes, green after the summer rain, is beguiling, as is the mild weather when we land. But I've been to enough places in the north of the country to know that come October this land is harder than any place I know. I'm travelling to the Pilbara with a former Western Australian state parliamentarian, Tom Stephens, whom I invited onto the board of an organisation that supports schools with tackling literacy. Stephens was a member for electorates in the Pilbara and the Kimberley and has been travelling to remote communities for the past thirty years.

The Martu leader at Jigalong, Brian Samson, picks us up from the charter and takes us to the school. Outside the gates, we are met as if royalty. Student leaders, the principal, Shane Wilson, and members of staff are there, replete with a welcome banner. We are as excited as they are. For the next three hours, we are taken on a tour of the school, visiting every classroom. After seven weeks of the Direct Instruction approach to teaching, the Jigalong School is moving. It reminds me of three schools in Cape York that started using Direct Instruction five years ago. It is doing as well as, if not better than, we were in our first term. What strikes me about the school is the quality of its leadership and the commitment of its teachers. Armed with an instructional program that works, the teachers and students are turning a virtuous circle. Students experiencing learning success means that teachers experience teaching success.

Samson is like me. Although I am from the coast and he is from the desert, he and I could well be brothers. We share a fierce hope for these children. He brought a crew of Martu leaders and educators to Cape York last year to visit our schools, and told me the first priority of Martu's native title organisation, the Western Desert Lands Aboriginal Corporation, is to ensure Martu children get a good education. There are more than half a dozen state and independent schools in the Pilbara region and on Martu land, which Martu children attend, more or less. Attendance levels are an obvious challenge.

Samson's aim was to bring this eclectic bunch of schools into an alliance. Each school would adopt the Direct Instruction program. Kids who travelled between communities and shifted schools could pick up in their new school where they had left off in their old.

I look at Samson, see his weariness and the obvious ravages of a whitefella diet of flour and sugar on his giant body. He could well think the same of me. The Martu have been embroiled in various controversies concerning mining and environmental protection. I know what Samson has been going through. Leadership in our world is full of strife and controversy.

II

The big question in Indigenous affairs after these past ten years is this: ‘Are things better since the demise of ATSIC?' I think in aggregate the show has gone backwards. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission collapsed in 2005 in a conflagration of vicious internal rivalries. By that time, a maelstrom of media allegations about corruption and wastage had emerged, driven by John Howard from his very first press conference as prime minister in March 1996. Today the name ‘ATSIC' conjures up all that is bad and hopeless about Indigenous affairs and Indigenous people. But is this the truth?

If ATSIC failed, there were three parties to the failure. First, there was the Indigenous leadership. Second, there was the bureaucracy that supported the commission: the Australian Public Service. Third, there was the growing private industry, largely comprised of consultants, some Indigenous but mostly not, who generated most of the strategies, plans and design of programs that failed. There were three culprits, but only one was singled out for contumelious outrage.

Indigenous organisations and their leaders bore the brunt of allegations of corruption and wastage. They were the Aboriginal Industry. The public service and the private consultants escaped scot-free. Thus began a concerted scorched-earth policy on the part of the federal government to erase Indigenous organisations from the landscape. The chief means for forcing the demise of the network of community and regional organisations across the country was to cease their operational funding. Instead, organisations were increasingly required to fund operations out of service-delivery grants. These programs in turn were subject to market forces. Indigenous organisations were unable to compete with larger organisations from the mainstream that soon entered the Indigenous sphere. These large organisations had the benefit of scale, and the smaller Indigenous ones died out.

It was as if the government had developed a great allergy towards putting money into the hands of Indigenous peoples and their organisations. Of course, there were exceptions, but this was the rule. It was the rule of the past ten years.

The post-ATSIC story is one of ever-increasing passivity. Indigenous people are not even presiding over their own deathbed. Instead there is an army of white people with palliative responsibilities.

The truth is that ATSIC was not a complete failure. There were many positive features. Many Indigenous leaders from communities around the country share my assessment that at the regional level, with the regional councils, many good things had taken place in the fifteen years it operated. That was certainly the case in Cape York with the Peninsula Regional Council. In our region, the agenda constructed during the ATSIC days underpinned the decisions taken over the past twenty years, including on social and economic reform.

I was involved in the struggle to protect the 1992 Mabo High Court decision on native title from extinguishment at the hands of state governments and a hostile Hewson-led Coalition. We would never have succeeded if the Lowitja O'Donoghue–led ATSIC had not co- ordinated its defence. Under O'Donoghue, ATSIC achieved a great deal. But even she was dismayed by the internecine conflicts and power struggles of the national organisation by the time it came to its bitter end.

III

The Productivity Commission reported that Australia expended $30.3 billion on behalf of Indigenous Australians in 2012–13. This is unbelievable. The figure represents not the funding that goes directly to Indigenous Australians but the total quantum that Indigenous Australians justify as part of allocations to Commonwealth agencies and state and territory governments. So-called ‘Indigenous specific' funding is $5.6 billion per annum. These numbers tell us several things. First, they tell us that even the funding that does go directly to Indigenous affairs is not producing the outcomes that would be expected of it. The sheer lack of social and economic productivity from this investment is plain to see. Second, the extent to which governments and their agencies receive funding that is nominally allocated because of Indigenous numbers is now transparent. The federation has been nominally allocating up to $30.3 billion per year in the name of Indigenous Australians and has been profoundly short-changing them. Third, the growth in Indigenous expenditures has accelerated – occasioned by the growth of the real Aboriginal Industry. This Aboriginal Industry is largely not comprised of blackfellas, but a vast parasitic industry of government and private-sector players. Indigenous budgetary allocations now support not only Indigenous organisations of varying quality and effectiveness but also an even larger non-government sector. Consultants and service providers, ranging from Work for the Dole programs and employment programs to child welfare protection organisations, have now colonised the entire Indigenous landscape. Even community development activities like mowing lawns and painting rocks have been outsourced to these organisations, both not-for-profit and for-profit.

The burgeoning of this industry has largely taken place under the radar, and without critique. Because the majority of this industry is not Indigenous, there is no controversy. There are no allegations of misuse and waste of money. There are no lurid media stories about misappropriation of funds. Bureaucracies which supervise the tendering of these programs are in cahoots with this industry. Many of the players are former public servants who have strong links with the political parties in office. When child protection organisations offer safe houses and foster-care homes for children, they can charge up to $5000 per week per child. This is a lucrative industry. Basic questions like this one are rarely asked: should a commercial operator be given a five-year contract through a national tender process to supervise a Work for the Dole program in a remote Aboriginal community, if it results in an outcome no better than when the local community organisation operated the program?

The organisations embedded in this industry have their own lobbyists in Canberra. Since the demise of ATSIC, I know of no Indigenous organisation that haunts the corridors of the parliament in as organised a way as this industry. Proponents are closely allied with MPs and therefore have leverage. They have former colleagues who are still in the bureaucracy who treat them favourably, notwithstanding the fig leaves of probity and competitive procurement. The bureaucracy itself equates success with the successful functioning of the industry, whereby the industry players make good profits and things are not as messy and controversial as in the old days.

This industry is the beneficiary of racial prejudice. Where blackfellas and money are concerned, the controversy is of great media interest. Indeed, the default assumption is that of corruption or mismanagement or misappropriation. The default position when it comes to whitefellas is the opposite: they are just running a business, and the fact that the outcomes may be no better than before is beside the point.

It is hard to see how this industry will be unwound. Indigenous people are employees of these organisations, the educated ones as consultants. They will therefore naturally defend this state of affairs. That there may be flashes of success and promise in various quarters also makes this overall critique difficult to accept. You can always point to good things happening, like you could in the old days. It is just that the overall impact of the new regime is no better than it was in ATSIC's day. I therefore well understand why some black Australians might occasionally look back with some nostalgia.

IV

During the Howard years, Indigenous affairs was largely in a state of torpor. The main initiatives of the government had been negative, the first phase dominated by the debate about the High Court's 1996 Wik decision and John Howard's ‘Ten Point Plan' amendments to the
Native Title Act
– a protracted and bitter controversy. Howard's approach to reconciliation in this early phase culminated in what he himself considered the low point in his prime ministership, when he berated the crowd at the 1997 Reconciliation Convention after sections of it turned their backs on him.

Right up until the demise of ATSIC, Indigenous affairs was largely an arena for conflict and controversy. The ministerial contributions of John Herron, Philip Ruddock and then Amanda Vanstone were largely exercises in political management. It was not until Mal Brough was appointed minister for Indigenous affairs in 2006 that the real action started. Brough threw himself into the portfolio with the mindset of a former military man, making it clear he was going to shake things up.

By the following year, the final year of the Howard government, Brough was constructing a radical reform agenda for his portfolio. In the meantime, Clare Martin's Northern Territory government had commissioned Rex Wild QC and Indigenous health administrator Pat Anderson to review the state of child safety in remote communities of the Territory. The resulting report,
Little Children Are Sacred
, described ‘rivers of grog' and suggested that neglect and abuse of children were rife in many communities. Upon receiving the report, the Martin government sat on it and did nothing. To be fair to them, its recommendations did not lay out an easily graspable plan for action. The issues were so complex and the scale of the challenge so large it was difficult to translate the general prescription of ‘empowerment' into a concrete agenda. The Martin government's failure to respond to the
Little Children Are Sacred
report gave Brough the opening to prosecute his agenda.

In Cape York, we had been developing a reform agenda called the Cape York Welfare Reform Trial. Our proposal, duly laid out in the
Hand Out to Hand Up
report (tabled in June 2007), was the product of two years of consultation with four communities in Cape York whose leaders decided to participate in the trial. The resources allocated to the consultation process and the time spent on it were unprecedented. We had thought long and hard about the need for communities and their leaders to opt in to the proposed reforms, rather than being forced into them. A centrepiece of the proposed reforms included making welfare payments conditional upon school attendance, child protection, meeting housing tenancy obligations and abiding by local laws. It was proposed that a Family Responsibilities Commission be established under Queensland law, which would give authority to local Aboriginal elders to decide what should happen in the event that community members breached these welfare conditions. The aim was to support individuals to uphold their responsibilities to children and families by counselling them to attend support services; as a final resort, the local commissioners could place restrictions upon the income support they received. These restrictions could apply to part of their welfare, or for certain periods of time, and restrictions could be removed if the relevant individuals remedied their breach.

The Cape York Welfare Reform proposal did not apply to all community members. Rather it targeted only those community members who were failing to fulfil their responsibilities to their family. The principle was to intervene only when there was a consistent abrogation of responsibility.