ALTHOUGH distant from Tasmania and its present day dilemmas of prisoner, citizen and aboriginal rights, the Oodnadatta Track from Maree to Alice Springs has provided insights to past and present treatment of indigenous Australians.
The current “Town Camp” generational problems of alcoholism, petrol inhalation and domestic violence in Alice Springs have all received recent national press coverage. Alcohol sales are also direct from supermarkets. A key oversight has been the difficulties brought by English as a second language in many of these communities.
A zero tolerance regime versus do-gooder Land Rights idealism is gaining prominence in the debate. Unemployment levels, educational support, mental health treatment, improving pride or alleviating boredom and despair receive little prominence.
A snapshot of Australia’s history shows pioneering explorers were quickly followed into Australia’s heartland by pastoralists. Governments supplied the necessary pastoral leases for the land. Land, however, was not the lifeblood. The lifeblood was the water. Aboriginals used a series of springs rising from the Great Artesian Basin for nomadic movements, trade and hunting animals also reliant upon the water.
While recognising good and bad people exist in all walks of life there are numerous examples of pastoralists who forced aboriginals away from the water supplies that were now required for sheep and cattle. “Cattle killers” were then incarcerated by the newly required policing regime. Ironically, it was the aboriginals who had led the explorers to water in the first place.
Indirect racism
Land Rights on pastoral leases may be better aimed at Water Rights.
In Alice Springs there are real problems with the Town Camps. Much debate has centred on returning aborigines back to their communities in an apparently “out of sight, out of mind” approach. However, their communities lack the services available in rural towns. The Weekend Australian contained an article on 15 April 2006 describing many of the issues.
My reason for writing this article is the suggestion by Mal Brough for residents of Town Camps to pay council rates. Racism can be direct or indirect. Indirect racism presents itself through accepted law, policy or beliefs as shown in New Orleans after Cyclone Katrina. Mal Brough’s suggestion is code for the simple logic, “Aborigines do not have money for council rates and will move back to their communities.” Further, “We are not racists because it is their free will.”
In a past era, politicians moved aborigines by wagons from Oodnadatta to Alice Springs, Alice Springs to Darwin or Victoria to Broken Hill and Bourke. For nomadic desert aborigines with oral traditions on water sources this was a sentence to become town or mission-bound.
The Howard government has much more to do than using simple rhetoric to appease White Australia. Complex questions by their nature require complex answers. Simplistic solutions are more reflective of their author than the problem.
Mark
