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The Forum > Article Comments > Practical reconciliation through business support > Comments

Practical reconciliation through business support : Comments

By Sara Hudson, published 1/6/2016

But support for budding Indigenous entrepreneurs is most needed in remote and regional areas where levels of disadvantage are highest and where capability is lowest.

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There is a brilliant article today across the middle pages of The Australian's Review, by Nicolas Rothwell - it's a review and commentary on a book of papers which in turn comment on the long-term work of Jon Altman, especially on his optimistic notion of an Indigenous 'hybrid economy'. I'll be reading that review many times over.

There have been so many promising initiatives, what must have seemed sure-fire ideas, well-funded and -equipped, and yet - poof ! Nothing. The CDEP scheme for instance: paid work, on top of funding for equipment and Indigenous management - in other words, communities being paid to build up their economic bases. In my late wife's community, of 12,000 acres of good country and unlimited water licence, her brother struggled to maintain the farm (almost AGAINST the 'community'), with a new dairy and a couple of thousand acres under grain, plus some beef cattle. He got so little help from the community that I commented bitterly one time to her, that if you brought a thousand Vietnamese down here, they would have the entire 12,000 acres under something, ducks, fish farms, vegetables, etc., etc, in twelve months. That got her riled up. Both gone now, alas.

And if eventually nothing worked at that community, then what hope was there anywhere ? And why ? Why ? Why do great schemes go down the drain, again and again ? Why are they corrupted into yet more welfare schemes ? And ultimately, why should anyone else bother ? To what extent have people brought it all on themselves, and what are the underlying principles, the 'deep culture', which guides that corruption ?

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 5 June 2016 11:29:51 AM
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Joe, you might also read http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/experiments-in-selfdetermination-serious-whitefella-stuff/news-story/1605d3a5dfc7d9c80ef159ee361f73ef.
I would be interested in your take on his writings. I am inclined to think he is close to the mark.

David
Posted by VK3AUU, Sunday, 5 June 2016 12:06:25 PM
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Hi David,

Yes, Nicolas Rothwell writes with deep passion and wonderful perception. His articles should be compulsory reading in Ab. Studies courses, but that's probably not going to happen.

Working through the journal of the missionary George Taplin, who set up and built one particular place, over twenty years, what is striking is the experience of a handful of Aboriginal men who tried to set up farms or otherwise make an honest living. They were almost all what were called 'half-castes', usually foundlings or abandoned children, and educated in Taplin's school; some came over from Kangaroo Island as young men; one went to the Armfield's Aboriginal School in Albany.

They all necessarily developed a strong work ethic (it was that or starve) and were the most steady workers on the mission well into their old age. And what is very interesting is that almost every university graduate who can trace their ancestry back to that mission, traces it back to one or more of those workers.

For example, my wife's great-grandfather, born somewhere on the lower Coorong in about 1848, was the first Aboriginal bloke in the area to take out a farming lease. He worked like buggery to get a crop in and pasture a small flock of sheep. When he reaped his crop and sold it, he suddenly found many new relatives. They cleaned him out in a day. He went crying to the missionary, poor bloke, but still gave it another year, then threw it up. Quite a few other blokes took out leases, but wisely well away from the mission and main camps.

So there have been those two ethics from the earliest:

[TBC]
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 5 June 2016 3:29:59 PM
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[continued]

a work ethic, and a starve-then-gorge ethic. Somebody wrote recently that hunter-gatherer societies are necessarily not at all productive, but distributive - and one could add, reactive, not proactive. Traditional society would have been boom and bust, gorge and starve, with little perception of effort (although of course it would have been massively expended, especially by the women): magic is why things worked, no effort, and it was the old blokes who knew the magic. And, mediated by technological change, those underlying ways of seeing the world would have been passed on to each new generation.

Welfare programs fit beautifully into that mind-set: perhaps 'self-determination' has meant, for very many people, 'We decide what to ask the white fellas to give us from their Canberra money tree, and whatever we ask for, we get'. And accompanying that is the assumption that 'Well, white fellas get everything free, don't they, so why shouldn't we ?' Something is lost in translation.

Cheers,

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 5 June 2016 3:35:22 PM
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Perhaps the solution to the problem is staring us in the face and we don't realise it. The white fella should just stop giving.

David
Posted by VK3AUU, Sunday, 5 June 2016 7:50:33 PM
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Hi David,

Aboriginal people are entitled to receive welfare payments. One day, when we all pay all our bills by debit or credit card, how people spend their welfare privileges, Black or White, may well be controlled through their debit card. So what you are suggesting may need to be qualified.

Again and again, it hasn't been a matter of what COULD work, but of what Aboriginal people have made to work to their own satisfaction. Hence CDEP, a valuable means for building up the economic bases of communities, was converted into a phony 'work' program, people being paid to mow their own lawns, or on 'home duties'. Maybe this was a consequence of people in power not having a clue what to do - I'll buy that - rather than any deliberate attempt to corrupt yet another program. Or a bit of both.

Some problems don't have solutions, if only because the people who are supposed to be the movers and shakers of those solutions don't want to, or are far too unskilled or clueless to know what to do. Economic planning needs plenty of diverse skills, and the co-ordination of those skills, as well as the anticipation of problems and means to resolve them. That never even gets off the ground if people simply don't want to actually do anything.

So it will spiral downwards. The only way is out.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 5 June 2016 10:59:04 PM
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