Cecil Poole: Yesterday’s blog “Just Ice 1” looked at the impacts of the “Intervention” on remote communities in Australia’s NT through more intensive policing.  After noting that the intervention was predicated by reports of rampant domestic violence and child sexual abuse the authors went on to say “we witnessed few indications that the state was effectively uncovering, let alone prosecuting, cases of child sexual abuse and/or family violence, but we did see …….. significant increases in the numbers of indigenous people being prosecuted for failing to adhere to new rules”.

Whilst in a remote community in 2011, I happened to attend a court session and saw numerous minor driving offenses prosecuted including one person convicted of driving a car in which four people did not wear seat belts. The fine was $1,200.  I understand the offense took place within the settlement, on aboriginal land, where observed car speeds rarely exceed 25kph, with journeys being short, with many stops to change passengers,  chat to pedestrians, other car travellers, and just pass the time of day.  I was assured that the offender could pay the fine over time using her Basics Card – you know, the card provided to quarantine income for use on essentials.

I also happened to ride in the car of white people there.  Sitting in the back seat I reached for my seat belt and found nothing there.  The response to my query as to its whereabouts was “Oh, we cut that out last year to use as a tow rope”.  Of course the police there, like those in the US rarely stop white people.

And here is a story from Arena Magazine, June 2012

Passive Complicity looks at “Just Ice” over the next seven days.  Starting here.

Northern Territory: Addressing The “Crime Problem” Of The Northern Territory
Intervention – Alternate Paths To Regulating Minor Driving Offences In
Remote Indigenous Communities

Thalia Anthony, and Harry Blagg, 2012
(Download full report here)

Report to the Criminology Research Council Grant: CRC 38/09-10

This study of the incidence of Indigenous driving offending was conducted by
the authors in the Northern Territory from 2006 to 2010 on two central
Australian communities. It demonstrates how new patterns of law enforcement,
set in train by the 2007 ‘intervention’, inevitably led to a dramatic
increase in the criminalization of Indigenous people for driving related
offending. We critique the effectiveness of mainstream law enforcement in
addressing driving related offending on Indigenous communities and argue
that alternative forms of regulating driver safety may be better adapted to
Indigenous communities. We identify some of the major reasons for offending,
particularly for driving unlicensed and driving unregistered and uninsured
car that have increased dramatically since 2006. Our research suggests that
the criminalization of driving related offending represented an attempt to
construct a new form of coercive, neo-assimilationist governmentality in the
NT through which the state seeks to discipline, normalize and incorporate
elements of the Indigenous domain into the mainstream. In Simon’s (2001,
2002) phase the state is effectively ‘governing through crime’: amplifying
and dramatizing a particular crime problem (child sexual abuse) to
legitimate an aggressive annexation of Aboriginal space. The case studies we
present show that whereas Aboriginal violence and sexual abuse were the
Federal Government’s raison d’état for new interventions the processes and
outcomes have been solidly fixated on eradicating key cultural differences
between mainstream Australia and its Indigenous Other. Over the lifetime of
the study we witnessed few indications that the state was effectively
uncovering, let alone prosecuting, cases of child sexual abuse and/or family
violence, but we did see significant changes taking place in the physical
lay out of the community and a significant increases in the numbers of
Indigenous people being prosecuted for failing to adhere to new rules. The
issue of driving and roads became a site of contestation and conflict
between mainstream government and Indigenous communities.

Tags: Northern Territory  driving offenses  law enforcement  criminalization

Download Full Report Here

Due to popular demand C & P have put together this useful and might we say tasteful summary of the last week of postings.  May you find it……. “useful”?   (And no complaints about the mixed tenses please, tense is a word we have no truck with.)

This week in Passive Complicity C & P have brought you many delights.  We wish we could bring you more, but the leather is in short supply

Ira Maine, brings to us a full report of “The Day of the Tragedy” in a piece titled “Defenestration” and follows this up a few days later with the sequel, “After the Defenestration”.  C &P fear these pieces are just part of Ira’s cunning plan to to build both sympathy and trust.

Mine Tinkit looks at the way signage can grind the heel of modern man into the face of recalcitrant indigenes in the Northern Territory and a view of how those recalcitrants respond

Our favourite family, the Whitesides feature again in “Stranger Futures” looking at the way the more blessed help the poor with their money.

We thought it time to introduce our Design Doctor and his immediate superior Claude.  May you come to know and love them both in unequal measure, and may they bare little similarity with your own work colleagues.  The doc features again today with “Countermeasures”.

Our Dispatchee (Musical Dispatches from the Front) talks on spin

And Ali Cobby Eckermann gives us a wonderful poem contrasting two worlds in “Circles and Squares”.

Expert commentary from Quentin Cockburn and Cecil Poole

Quentin: I say Cecil, take a look at this Claude chappy.

Cecil: A dry, unlikely looking fellow, doesn’t inspire much confidence

Quentin: Hmm… reminds me a bit of Percival, at Singapore, diffident, indecisive.

Cecil: His presence undermines authority, we used to weed those types out in the colonial office

Quentin: And now they just rise to the top.  In our day we had a place for them, out of the way, remote, irrelevant,

Cecil: Canberra?

Quentin: Precisely

Today, Ira continues his sad account of the “Terrible Tragedy”.

IRA MAINE 
From his private journal.

Shipwrecked,I think.  Dragged from the rocks half dead, but I’m not sure.  From my bed, the room was open fronted, slightly elevated and  looked out on a fine green tropical forest.  Once, when I was conscious I remembered two mature women quietly coaxing me to eat.  They wore crisp, brightly coloured dresses and spoke very quietly to each other.  I supposed it was traditional costume but I couldn’t be sure.  Somehow I was aware that they were both deeply concerned about my condition.  In the same manner I knew, in a passive, switched off way, that I might die.  As yet, there was no sense at all that I had any role to play in the decision.

At some other point, having been lifted, carried and rolled, I remembered claustrophobic panic in an MRI machine.  This was very disturbing and made me chillingly aware, for the first time, that this may not be a real hospital!   As unobtrusively as possible I studied my surroundings.  Above my head, and to the left and right were monitor screens.  I avoided their gaze, acutely aware of being studied.  I was alone in a small room, obviously being prepared for a procedure over which I had no control.  Proper hospitals don’t watch you, don’t hide you away in tiny rooms.  On the wall was a picture of a recumbent dog, it’s coat so long you couldn’t see it’s feet.  It had too much flesh.  Was this a joke?  Then, like a hammer blow, it hit me.  The image on the wall represented, in this world, the perfect life-form.  Or perhaps, and I was more certain of this every minute, a stage on the way to the perfect form.  This animal’s legs were not covered up; it had no legs!  It’s excess of flesh, the inability to walk were wholly, completely and utterly the result of barbaric genetic experimentation!   And horrifyingly, I was to be part of this ghastly work!.

Sweating I lay there, shaking in fear, convinced of at least one thing; I was not going down without a fight.  Quietly, in full defiant view of the cameras, I swung out of bed, gathered my allotted drips, catethers and drain tubes and made for the exit.  I’d bloody show the bastards!.

‘They’ve changed your pain-killer, your morphine’.

The voice floated up like a kite*, cutting it’s way through the clouds in my head.  It was Herself, the Light of my Life.  Somehow I was back in bed, re-plumbed and completely confused.

‘What…?’

‘You had to be restrained!’

There was a lot of laughter.  When I looked, all our friends were there, smiling, then they were gone.  It was enough.  That’s when I decided I had no interest in dying.  I made myself a promise.  When I could remember clearly where I lived, then I’d know I wasn’t destined to be a vegetable.  Remembering nothing  I concentrated hard.  Nothing, for ages.  Then without warning, a crystal clear image, not of my house, not of my driveway, but of the public toilets in Mansfield, 25ks away!   I was so grateful I wept.

Who said the Gods don’t have a sense of humour?.

* For some fabulous Kite Flying check this out

“There’s not much you can say in 28 minutes” Professor Marcia Langton *

Poetry Sunday edited by Ira Maine

Ali Cobby Eckermann

An Indigenous writer, Ali Cobby Eckermann has studied Visual Arts and Creative Writing at various institutions and has been employed in the film industry.

Ali was a finalist in the 2005, 2006 and 2007 NT Literary Awards; in 2006 she won the NSW Writer’s Centre ‘Survival’ competition for Indigenous writers and was selected to participate in the Australian Society of Authors’ national mentorship program.

2007 heralded a landmark year – Ali was granted two Poetry Mentorships, through NT Writers Centre and Varuna. She is working on a new selection of poems and is presently the Art Centre and Gallery Coordinator at Titjikala on the edge of the Simpson Desert.  (From 2007)

Ali Cobby Eckermann, “Circles and Squares”

I was born Yankunytjatara my mother is Yankunytjatara

her mother was Yankunytjatara my family is Yankunytjatara

I have learnt many things from my family elders I have grown

to recognise that life travels in circles aboriginal culture has

taught me this

When I was born I was not allowed to live with my family I

grew up in the white man’s world

We lived in a square house we picked fruit and vegetables from

a neat fenced square plot

we kept animals in square paddocks we ate at a square table we

sat on square chairs

I slept in a square bed

I looked at myself in a square mirror and did not know who

I was

And one day I met my mother

I began to travel I visited places that I had already been

but this time I sat down with family

We gathered closely together by big round campfires

we ate bush tucker feasting on round ants and berries

we ate meat from animals that live in round burrows

we slept in circles on beaches around our fires we sat in

the dirt on our land that belongs to a big round planet

we watched the moon grow to a magnificent yellow circle

that was our time

I have learnt two different ways now I am thankful for

this that is part of my Life Circle

My heart is Round ready to echo the music of my family

but the square within me remains

The Square stops me in my entirety.

Ira bares more of himself, building the readers trust through this grounding.  Read on

From his private journal. 

 To tell the unvarnished truth, when I awoke that morning, I had not considered that the first order of business might be to fall off a roof.  Even at the best of times, climbing to any elevated position is not a habit I embrace with any enthusiasm. The idea is contrary to my every instinct.  If you will allow me to purge the trauma by the telling, I will lay the facts of the matter before you in what has come to be known as the Day of the Terrible Tragedy.

 

I had, at a goodly workmanlike hour, issued forth from Soggy Bottom to answer a distress call.  It would seem that an impenetrable wilderness had enthusiastically laid siege to a friend’s garden during an extended overseas posting. Reinforcements were required and were being summoned from all quarters, (experience with nettles, bruised shins and blackberries an advantage).

 

By an overgrown shed, in the rampant garden, I happened on an astonishingly beautiful young woman, nervously  positioning a sturdy ladder.  No force on earth, as I have said earlier will induce me to abandon terra firma, to take leave of all that is reassuringly solid and steady, and take on instead, the insubstantial air; no force on earth that is, save one.

 

What is it then, what irresistible compulsion causes us to abandon, at the first opportunity all of the certainties without which our lives would be as nothing?  What madness causes us to take the tools from the girl and bound up the blasted ladder and onto the roof?

 

The answer’s plain.  The forlorn hope that somehow, by this masterly display, this stranger, this beautiful woman, this cracking bit of crumpet,  forty years our junior will, forsaking all others, devote herself henceforth exclusively to our every whim.

 

In reality, we know there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of this happening, but the bone –cracking ascension is still atavistically irresistible.

As a result I am on the roof, gasping and blowing and clutching a pair of shears, whilst trying desperately not to look terrified. Because of my sprightly ascent, my hips and knees ache abominably, necessitating an elaborate shears adjustment dumb-show for the benefit of a motley group of scattered spectators.

 

It is difficult,  from this point on, to make sense of events. The luxuriant Banksia rose bushes in which most of the shed was buried,  I know I trimmed, cut, chopped and secateured to within an inch of it’s life.  I swept leaves away, tidied up then cleaned gutters, in order to leave all in impeccable order.   At some point, for no apparent reason, I set off for the unknown other end of the roof, where,  for reasons yet to be explained, I callously defenestrated myself.  Strictly speaking,  I’m not  sure if falling through a fibreglass skylight qualifies as ‘defenestration’ but it must be close.

 

In medieval times it was not unknown to take troublesome priests up to the second or third floor of a convenient castle and sling them out of the window.  This process was known as ‘defenestration’,  a euphemism which, without this knowledge, one might easily believe to be a technical term used in brass-rubbing.

 

The helicoptered ambulance took me to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. I was unconscious for the entire trip. This was just as well because, as I’ve said before, I’m not good with heights.

 

 

 

Mine Tinkit looks at the large signs throughout the Northern Territory erected by government  on Aboriginal Land.