Disappointing Indigenous People: Violence and the Refusal of Help

Gilian Cowlishaw

Why does she hate me? I didn’t even help her.

Aphorism, origin unknown

Recent revelations about extensive disorder, violence, and misery in Australian Indigenous communities dealt a shocking blow to a nation that deploys, with pride and passion, images of Indigenous people in its self-representations.1 The condition of Indigenous people has often been considered a major touchstone of Australia’s moral standing in the international arena (e.g., Whitlam 1985: 466). It has been sadly observed that “settler society” consists of immigrant peoples from Europe who tend to cling to the coastal rim and have only a superficial relationship with the vast continent whose heart is inhabited and owned by Indigenous people, with their ancient, spiritual, and nurturant relationship with the land.2 This romantic orientation, though only one aspect of public perception, underpins a national goodwill that reached a high point in May 2000 when massive numbers of Australians marched over city bridges in support of “Aboriginal reconciliation” and urged the prime minister to apologize to Abo-riginal people for the wrongs they had suffered.3 Since then a series of revelations about crisis levels of distress—domestic violence, homicides and suicides, drunkenness, child neglect, and sexual abuse—in Aboriginal communities has been widely publicized in the media and in some scholarly works (see Martin 2001; Pearson 2002; Sutton 2001). The widespread public interest in these issues reflects a pervasive and growing disillusionment among those more closely involved with policies of self-determination and the disappointing results of recognizing native title and Indigenous heritage.4 Concerned debate now centers on how to rescue Aboriginal communities from violence rather than on how to recognize land rights, heritage, and culture.

I want to examine how we, the concerned citizens of contemporary Australia, are imbued with desire in relation to chronically unequal and needy others, even when they appear to refuse to recognize their need and reject the proffered succor. The unremitting and solicitous national discourse about Aborigines is imbued with urgency and instrumentalism and replete with competing theories of cause and remedy. This discursive field is an unstable mix of the romantic and the statistical, a surface imagery that mirrors the nation’s desires and fantasies. The surface does not follow the contours of what lies beneath, that is, the relationship between Indigenous people and the white officials, scribes, and multitude of others they interact with in remote, rural, and urban communities. However, significant connections can be shown between the experience and incidence of Indigenous violence in Australia and the moral universe of redemptive talk, explanation, reproach, and remedy that is a dominant theme in national conversations about Indigenous people. I will explore such connections here, not as cause and effect, but rather as an ongoing living relationship. Because the public realm is a companion of any thinking about Indigenous people in Australia, I will sketch some major themes of public debate.5 My general aim is to identify and unravel some knots that are tying up our thoughts.

I am exploring public opinion and liberal convictions less as problem spaces to be corrected or transcended by intellectual efforts of exposition and explanation than as the cultural realm we inhabit, even though, as an elite minority of academics (with lawyers and others), our work may be dedicated to understanding alterity. Indeed, instead of trying to transform liberal habits and convictions with more sophisticated insights, I want to emphasize the formative power of this cultural realm in the relationship between the nation and Indigenous people. Further, I suggest that some specific forms of what is deemed public disorder among Indigenous people in a rural town can be interpreted as a tangible, radical political analysis and response—a refusal to accept the promises of liberal progress. The nation’s myopic concern and limited goodwill can become a burden on Indigenous consciousness.

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Notes

1. The capitalized term Indigenous Australians has largely replaced Australian Aborigines because the former includes the racially and culturally distinct Torres Straight Islanders.
2. See Lattas 1997 and Marcus 1997 for anthropological analyses of the deployment of romantic Indigenous imagery in the service of other identities in Australia.
3. In Sydney a privately hired plane wrote SORRY repeatedly across the sky as wave upon wave of people poured from buses and trains to walk across the harbor bridge. The numbers exceeded expectations by several thousands; many had to wait hours as more trains and buses were hastily brought into service and the planned two-hour bridge closure was extended until 2 P.M. Perhaps the most powerful contribution to the outpouring of goodwill in the 1990s was the report on the government’s removal of Indigenous children from their families, known as the “stolen generation report” (Wilkie 1997). An annual Sorry Day has now been established.
4. Public debate is famously amnesic, and the nation appears to have forgotten the profound disappointment when it was realized how little land native title applied to and the terrible struggle involved in preserving that little in the first Native Title Act passed by the Labor government in 1993 (see Goot and Rowse 1994). Forgotten also is the anger and disgust experienced by Aboriginal leaders and their supporters when the conservative government in 1996 severely undermined the rights that remained in their “ten point plan” to ensure what they called “security” for landholders.
5. With many anthropologists engaged in state-sponsored processes of land claims or native title recognition and in government-sponsored research, the discipline is now clearly positioned inside the state and further has become the object of public scrutiny in relation to Indigenous claims to recognition. Bruce Kapferer (2000: 175) has spoken of a “climate of confusion, uncertainty, even vulnerability, in contemporary anthropological circles” because of the loss of its “relatively distinct project” with an epistemology founded on “culture” and “fieldwork.”