Today’s dispatch is Stolen Stories, dispatched just this Tuesday 21 March
¿Que tal? amigos,
It is nearly a decade since the Howard/Brough team, in a desperate failed attempt to get re-elected, launched the Northern Territory Emergency Response, which quickly became known as ‘The Intervention’. Ownership of the Intervention was soon claimed by the Rudd/Macklin team.
I feel compelled to once again quote Mahatma Ghandi:
“ They do not know, that a subtle but effective system of terrorism, together with an organized display of force on the one hand, and the deprivation of all powers of retaliation or self-defence on the other, has emasculated the people and induced in them the habit of simulation.”
As a non-indigenous resident of one of the targeted communities (‘Prescribed Areas’ under the Act), I keenly felt the injustice of the Intervention as well as becoming aware of the organized “deprivation of all powers of retaliation”
At countless meetings I have witnessed dissenting Aboriginal voices being silenced or ignored, or worse still deliberately misunderstood (‘twisted’ in Aboriginal English).
It was the latter which prompted me to launch these Dispatches into cyberspace, only to be described (in a letter to the Editor) by a prominent Aboriginal person who resides on a pedestal as “That loud white-fellow who claims to speak for my people”
It was thus with some trepidation I opened this link a friend sent me: https://meanjin.com.au/essays/what-happens-when-you-tell-somebody-elses-story/ lest I again be accused of “speaking for my people”.
I needn’t have worried, Alexis Wright’s essay: ‘What Happens When You Tell Somebody Else’s Story’ is far deeper than that shallow accusation.
In a previous Dispatch, Patrick Dodson is quoted (from a speech at University of NSW):
“The strategy for assimilation of our peoples is not a mistake made by low-level bureaucrats on behalf of successive governments who didn’t know better. It was and continues to be a deliberate act orchestrated at the highest levels in our society, and no amount of moral posturing can hide that reality. This Assimilation I talk of has notbeen evidenced by equality, but by further control, incarceration and subjugation to norms and values without our consent.”
It is this paradigm which is explored in the essay. To quote the author herself (albeit slightly out of context):
“ … questions I am asking about the enormous cost of losing one’s voice, being muted, silenced, others speaking or doing the talking or telling for us, or ways we self-censor, or defuse our own stories….”
The essay speaks for itself, and I won’t be so presumptuous as to assume that my discussing it in depth would add to it. Suffice it to say that the word ’intervention’ occurs 26 times, and the word ‘control’ 25 times.
I hope many of you can find the time to read Alexis’ article- you’ll be much the wiser for it.
Earlier this month two prominent and brilliant cartoonists died within days of each other. In Australia Bill Leak and in New Zealand Murray Ball.
Murray Ball was the author of Footrot Flats… A slice of Heaven:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cujKv5DclPI
I first got to admire Bill Leak when he featured in a television show. The show concluded with Bill playing a very funky blues on the piano accompanied by his son on double-bass.
On Youtube, I can’t find any of that heavenly music Bill played. He came close to winning the Archibald prize on several occasions. Sadly, Bill will be remembered mostly for the cartoon of the drunken Aboriginal man who doesn’t know his own son’s name.
I saw Bill Leak defend that cartoon on the basis that “it raised a topic which should be debated”
So effective has been the Intervention stimulated propaganda barrage, so effective the dispossession of Aboriginal Australia’s right and ability to tell its own stories, which is the theme of Alexis’ essay, that many (as did Bill Leak himself) believe that the cartoon reflects an unpalatable truth. That the depicted stereotype is the norm in Aboriginal society.
Many outsiders who have lived on Aboriginal communities have become aware in wonderment of the intense and complex family relationships which apply in Aboriginal societies. Here in Yuendumu, not only do fathers know who their children are, they know how just about everybody else is related to each other. These family ties extend far beyond the confines of these communities.
Several Dispatches have contrasted Australia and New Zealand (‘Under the Radar- February 2013):
PM Gillard visited New Zealand a few days ago. The main announcement emanating from that visit is that 150 refugees will be passed on from Australia to New Zealand per annum from 2014. Not a word about the Treaty of Waitangi, and the relationship between New Zealand’s native and colonizer populations. Such is under the radar.
I am told that the Maori/Pakeha relationship is far from perfect, it is none the less light years ahead of Australia’s relationship with its First Peoples.
On Q&A the Leak cartoon was discussed as if its obnoxious racism was open to question, or even that the cartoon had merit as some sort of social service or as an expression of free speech.
Bill Leak had many friends who sprung to his defence and attested to his humanity and talent. He wasn’t alone in swallowing the propaganda. James Anaya (the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples)’s report said the Intervention “stigmatized an already stigmatized society”. The reaction to the cartoon lends weight to that assertion.
Alexis Wright in her essay has a fair bit to say about the role of the media in selectively printing mostly negative stuff about Aborigines.
May Bill Leak rest in peace. I can’t say the same for the editors who allowed the “controversial” cartoons to be printed and probably encouraged Bill to draw them in the first place.
I’ll leave the final word to Q&A panellist Martha Wainwright: “In Canada, he wouldn’t have got away with it”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9baaOBF1ipY Martha Wainwright….You cheated Me…
Hasta la proxima vez
Franklin
PS- as this was being cobbled together news came that Chuck Berry died at the age of 90. Too late to weave him into this Dispatch which is long enough already.
Chuck’s most relevant song (to the Intervention):
Too much Monkey Business…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwTBLWXJZX0