Continued from above …
I have seen a modern indigenous humpy settlement just out of Roebourne, Western Australia. I wouldn’t leave a dog there, let alone a human child. And I have stayed in a Djakarta kampong with a Muslim family who were at least as poor or poorer than any indigenous person in Australia They struggled so hard to keep their children fed, clean, safe and educated in the ways of the Qur’an.
Over the ditch, the idea of compulsory Maori child removal wouldn’t have even crossed the minds of Pakeha administrators. Aside from the fact that the Maori would have collectively responded extremely poorly to any such a thing, their society was widely regarded as a responsible agency, albeit not very cooperative in becoming anglicized.
I personally know of a white woman whose father was a Pakeha gangster, who as a child in the late 50s, fled her Christchurch home and sat outside a Maori village compound for a week, until they reluctantly took her in. They lived in well kept longhouses, were well organized, caring of the children and the discipline was strict enough that even young men did what they were told by the matriarchs, or they got a whack over the ear. She was an emotional Maori, a Maori Christian and enormously in their debt for having given her her life back. And part of her payback was founding and running one of the few successful cold turkey drug rehab programs in Melbourne of the early ‘70s.
It is some measure of how narrowed our historical dialogue has become that is necessary to have this conversation here and not inside our universities. It is deeply regrettable that it was left to the Institute of Public Affairs to challenge the skewed version of history coming out of places like the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, that produced the child ‘theft’ report, ‘Bringing Them Home’, for they are just as partisan as their antagonists. In the debates following that report, we were treated to the equally dubious spectacles of ‘black arm band’ vs ‘white blindfold’ historical caricatures.
The shame of it was that if the IPA had been slightly less polemical and obviously intent on just defending the migrant settler regime from its grottier underside, they would in my view have easily won the battle for a more robustly disinterested narrative; one that settled for a more balanced picture of no longer just a single inter-ethnic divide, but one between a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic modern world, and indigenous peoples still mired in their reluctance to join it.
Guilt, uncritical empathizing and victim/oppressor ‘analysis’ doesn’t solve anything as an informant of current policy, nor does it as a predictor of prospects for future success. It merely averts the collective gaze from the awful reality that parts of indigenous society are now in a worse mess than they were thirty to forty years ago, when liberal humanists took control of managing indigenous policy.
History’s judgment on the ‘Bringing them home’ report will measured against ‘The Little Children Are Sacred’ report, that raises the question of what on earth indigenous children were ‘brought home’ to. Nobody is coming out smelling sweetly from the imbroglio that has been the story of inter-ethnic relations between indigenous peoples and the interlopers who overran them.
There are some signs that a very modest number of indigenous people are really starting to kick some goals, but they are painfully few and very recent. The first indigenous graduate to get a degree at Cambridge was in 2013 (well done Lilly Brown) only 162 years after the first Afro-American managed it with the support of his slave abolitionist church in New York and the church of England; the very same denomination trying futilely to educate indigenous Australians during the same period.
The small collection of indigenous achievement firsts is a hopeful sign, but seeing indigenous people take their place in our society like any other ethnic group is a long way off. When you take out the sporting, art, film/media, drama, dance and music cultural components and look at the business, professions, administration and intellectual/academic sectors requiring entrepreneurial and educational skill, indigenous achievements have been thin on the ground and mostly only in the last twenty plus years. And in some ‘communities’, not only has social governance fallen to pieces, but so has the education output. Something really tangible has to change if we are to expect something better from that quarter.
No amount of money or policy is going to change that until the indigenous community as a whole starts to admit it has a problem that is now largely of its own making and starts to energetically address it on its own. Nobody can do this for them. Only when the large majority of it decide to become citizens of the modern world in the unreserved sense that we all have to, will that constituency be able to make its way in it successfully.
The fact that an outsider like myself has to say the terrible truth is a reminder that still, hardly anyone inside indigenous society has either the courage or the perspective to say the blazingly obvious and start having the brutally blunt conversation that some indigenous communities so desperately need to have.
All the sorries in the world aren’t going to do anything tangible to help and leave the false impression that extracting almost nothing from the new order and the opportunities it offers to all comers, regardless of ethnicity and social origin, was everyone else’s fault. After over two hundred years of exposure to the modern period, large sections of the indigenous community have hardly got a cracker to show for it except a rucksack full of negativity and bad attitude.
Throwing welfare money at the problem just maintains the status quo.
Wringing our hands at the ridiculous imprisonment rate and terrible health and educational status of indigenous people, as if the rest of us are to blame, merely absolves law breakers, the self indulgent, the ignorant and the lazy from responsibility for their poor behavior and the rotten moral, hygiene, eating and general health and exercise habits they’ve been taught and grown up with. There seems to be no end in sight and no one prepared to bite the bullet to put a stop to it.
And yes, confronting that from within would be very tough, because there is an enormous collective investment in corruption and failure in parts of the indigenous community that also poultices a great deal of very long standing pain and loss; a well nursed and fondled, yet extremely sensitive to touch suppurating boil, that will make a very ugly and traumatic mess when someone lances it. Anyone who tries doing this risks violence or even martyrdom. There isn’t an easy option on this. People are going to have to go in boots and all to kick arse as hard as they try to save souls, as they try to redeem communities.
None of this means that anyone should abandon their culture. This is a multi-cultural society where everybody’s culture has value, but it is time to admit that there is no way back to the hunter gatherer world indigenous society has had to leave behind. All the rest of us have had to let go of the past repeatedly in our family histories. Some of the new refugee migrants from Africa who have lived in near Iron Age villages in countries where the modern world hardly extends beyond the capital city and some of the bigger regional towns, are having to do it as we speak.
Asylum seekers risk their lives and spend years in closed camps in isolated and uncomfortable places to get into this opportunity rich first world society. On the whole, these new migrants are making a better fist of it than indigenous Australians, despite some very distressingly violent history of their own, that puts indigenous sufferings into some sort of perspective. And if they can do it, well what is the matter with our indigenous brothers and sisters? The time has come for a migration of attitude from wallowing in defeat to taking a punt on a vision of a better future.
I wait in hope that one day perhaps an indigenous Baden-Powell will start a black scout movement that takes little urban milk sops and teaches them how to live completely off their own resources in the bush, without any modern tools. It would be a visionary project for over affluent year 9 layabouts and preserve and spread something of the indigenous knowledge base across the rest of society. But that would require a really ambitious and well managed indigenous team of entrepreneurial educator leaders, who could carry it off and get the punters coming back for more. I am not holding my breath.
The biggest favour that indigenous Australians can do for themselves in their quest to become history’s winners instead of its losers, is to politely ask the bleeding heart liberals to get lost and go and find someone or something else to slobber over. Then they can get on with the real business of ruthlessly disciplining those in the community who keep kicking own goals, desolating all hope of getting ahead and letting down those who are beginning to escape the loser trajectory. Then they can get on with the real business of rebuilding hope, trust, virtue, sacrifice, constancy and responsible agency. And if that means seeing the emergence of some aggressively pugnacious indigenous Muslim fundamentalists in remote settlements, that might be an excellent start.
Islam is not a leading edge of modernity, but it is part of its mix that is a good deal less than 60,000 years out of date. And if it can rouse parts of indigenous society out of its torpor and the moral slough that it has fallen into, I might not like the religious radicalism, still regard its theological claims as fanciful nonsense and be deeply suspicious of its sexual politics, but it would get my support nonetheless. It is a great deal better than the awful crap that is going down now.
A bit of Muslim ‘discipline’ in the forecourt of the local mosque might be just what it takes for some people ‘to see the light’. Human rightsie squeamishness is not part of the Muslim Way (The Prophet Be Thanked). And when the kids have to go to the madrasa school, the curriculum might be a little narrow, but by The Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him) they will actually learn something of value and remember it all their lives, which is a lot more than can be said for what passes for secular education in indigenous communities at the moment, where the ‘graduates’ walk out virtually without skills of any kind, let alone values worth a crumpet.
And if they do learn science and maths with the same disciplined focus that they learn the Qur’an, just a few more of them might end up as not only models of just and thoughtful behaviour, hard work, honesty and dedication to their work skills, but we would see them distributed across our community in places of respect, authority and social and economic standing. Why bloody not?! Why can’t we have an indigenous general as our Governor-General or President one day, perhaps swearing allegiance on a Qur’an? Anything wrong with her doing that?
Just spare me the crummy excuses and the rubbish that says it’s too hard because the poor thing indigenous people are all too racist ‘disadvantaged’. Bollocks they are. All round the world, formerly colonial and semi-colonial peoples have roused themselves into modernization in sometimes very difficult circumstances made much harder than it should have been by their former colonial masters. They aren’t whingeing. They are just getting on with it.
It is time indigenous people did the same, not in dribs and drabs, but as a community, where success isn’t an escape story from failure, so much as a reflection of its collective will, broad expectations of its children and the demands it places on itself.
My doctor and dentist are both Sri Lankans. I would like to think that one day they might be indigenous and that their older children in their final year at school will get as upset as Chinese ones, who although they did well in the year 12 exams, didn’t do as well as their peers. Why not? Look, I will settle for an indigenous electrician or plumber….
No irony could be more delicious than the picture of an indigenous mullah thumping his sermon lectern and saying a few choice words about how the rest of us ought to behave and what a bunch of derelicts we have become. And of course, he would be dead right, and I, sadly, will likely be long dead….I would so savour that scene because I would know that that benighted group had started to make its run, and do something in and for the world, whether that world liked it or not.
That is what it means to be the master of your fate, rather than its victim.
And what this fanciful indigenous mullah would be saying is that all of us are potentially at risk from the malign, third rate and derelict values that a half arsed libertarian progressivism has bequeathed all of us. Indigenous society has been the first to be laid waste by its apparently benign license, because its cultural defences were already weakened before the lamentable impacts became obvious. It is a terrible warning to the rest of us that our defences are crumbling too, and for the same reasons.
The evisceration of the existential centre by the deregulatory forces of markets, the marketing of this into civil society and the legitimization of that process by commandeering the voices of the Enlightenment, means that the next generation of parents will be almost as immature as its children, incapable of mentoring them, much worse, become a risk to them and turn much of that upcoming next generation into trash. The little children will not be sacred anymore.
That furious imaginary indigenous cleric will be demanding that we clean up our act, or else, war.
We are ineluctably being dragged into an epoch end game where everyone is playing for keeps and the shape of things to come for several millenia. Bluff is going to be called, no one is going to be indulged and the libertarian ‘progressivists’ will be treated with the derision and contempt they so richly deserve.
Christopher Nagle is … a pilgrim and have been since I was a young man who found that the religion of his forebears no longer worked. I worked through Marxism until there was nothing left of it. Then 9/11 happened, and, as I reflected on it over the next two years, everything came into focus. It wasn’t just an attack on imperial America, nor was it just an attack on capitalism. It was an attack on the modern world. And this illuminated and made sense of a very long meditation on what was wrong with the world I lived in, why I felt so alienated from it and what it was that I needed to see and do, to move consciousness into a post-modern phase.
