[contd.]

Suze,

Yes, education is one of the major keys - I'm very circumspect about naming anything as the Silver Bullet, the One Great Panacea. But so much flows from getting a good education, for Black or White. Probably the vast majority of Indigenous home-owners battled to get a good education, I'd put money on it.

And really, is anything at all working in remote settlements ? Anything ? Surely on the odd settlement, here or there ? Or can the history of southern people, leaving missions and settlements after the War and up through the sixties, working their guts out on whatever paid for their subsistence, be roughly replicated by people in remote areas ?

Or is it already too late, too difficult, for most of them ? No, that's too horrible to contemplate. Surely there must be pathways to employment, and alternatives to lifelong welfare and degradation.

Joe

Actually Loudmouth, I met Aboriginal people who were 'stolen' from their original families and lands, but were never adopted out or sent into service on stations or other white houses.

They ended up in what they called 'mission houses' (at least here in WA anyway), where they were cared for by Nuns.

These kids usually had an education of sorts, as opposed to those 'facilities' where the boys were cared for by Brothers, where they were used mainly as free labour.

I too despair of ever finding an answer to the current deplorable state of many Aboriginal communities in both our Northern communities and in the Southern Cities as well

Thanks Suze, that clears that up. 'Church homes' rather than 'mission houses ?

It was common practice in the fifties and beyond - since the 1860s really - at some mission stations here in SA for people to go out to work during the week, while the missionaries looked after the children in dormitories and at schools on the mission. At the weekends, the families were re-united. That is, the kids were virtually surrounded by other Aboriginal people, during school, after school and at night, and on weekends. Usually, on mission stations, missionaries were outnumbered by fifty to one or more.

So on those stations, children were, by definition, not taken away to anywhere else - in fact, they could spend most of their childhood years entirely immersed in an environment of siblings, cousins, uncles, aunties and grannies.

It's noteworthy that the first secondary school graduates, and later the first tertiary graduates, tended to come from missions rather than government settlements. I think the missionaries tended to have a far more down-to-earth and day-to-day and realistic approach to Aboriginal people and their futures than government employees did. Of course, this is at least now forty or fifty years in the past.

But this is now, not then. The great majority of the Indigenous population is now urban, perhaps a majority is living in or close to metropolitan areas. A minority of such 'Southern' people are in similar situations, in lifelong welfare, to most of the people in remote communities. However, in their case, they are far more likely to be in contact with working Aboriginal people, relations and in-laws, and to at least know of Aboriginal university students and graduates. They can't pretend that they are oblivious, or that such opportunities are too distant: their relations have seized those opportunities, why can't they ?

Yes, the miracle ingredient: effort !

Joe

Well Loudmouth, I would imagine there are apathetic people in all ethnic groups.

Aboriginal people are human, just like the rest of us.
Some will make an effort to improve themselves, and some won't.

The fact of rampant racism by employers when selecting new employees for jobs could be behind some of the apathy among Aboriginal people.

Hi Suze,

Yes, you're right: effort, some do it, some don't. I suspect - as a total cynic - that the reports of Aboriginal people starving in the APY Lands here in SA is another example of people calculating that it might pay off not to help themselves, to rely on the state now to feed them, when - as the Minister here has pointed out - they could easily re-open vegetable gardens. After all, the dastardly missionaries busted themselves to set up successful vegetable gardens, fruit orchards, chook yards, small herds of milking cows for milk, and flocks of sheep for meat, on almost every mission in Australia.

With more modern equipment, why can't it be done now ? Modern equipment ? Christ, a few forks and shovels, a few packets of seeds, connect up a few hoses and bingo ! Fertiliser from those sewage ponds on almost every 'community' could be treated and dug in. Even with a small rotary hoe, a 'community' could get a basic garden started with less than five thousand dollars, it's not bl00dy rocket science. Ah yes, the miracle ingredient.....

Somebody should tackle this issue of whether or not Aboriginal people in remote communities are actually 'in poverty'. Squalor, yes but maybe poverty, no. People in remote areas receive standard welfare payments, and correct me if I'm wrong, but they also receive the various remote-area allowances: the education allowance can be as much as $ 24,000 per year. And do people also get mining royalties or not ? As well as national parks royalties ? And pay low rents ? Have I got all that wrong ?

Thirty years or so ago,

[TBC]

[contd]

Suze,

.... I was doing research into the development of self-determination at a community where we had lived for some years.

As an afterthought, I did an income study, something totally unethical, you couldn't possibly do it these days. I was appalled to find that the median weekly income there was equal to the Australian median income.

I went over and over the figures (I didn't count some UB, do-gooder donations of clothing, 'black' economic inputs, etc.) but there it was. As well, rents were about a quarter of what would have been paid 'outside'. So effectively, the community as a whole was on something like 20 % better than median average income.

It was very traumatic, totally rocking my whole ideological framework. I thought of drowning myself, which you may think was not a bad idea. I applied for a taxi licence, but eventually mustered the courage to come back and try to understand what it all meant. I heard similar accounts of income equity in other parts of SA, including the APY lands, as it happens, as well as in Adelaide itself.

Forty-odd years ago, the wonderful policy scientist Aaron Wildavsky (he who invented the term 'Speaking Truth to Power') did an income study in Israel, examining the relation between income and people's spending behaviour. He found people on low incomes who could still save, and people who couldn't. He found people on high incomes who could save, and people who couldn't. Merely because people can't (?) afford to feed their kids, does not necessarily mean that there isn't money slopping around for more important things like gambling and grog.

Perhaps other totally unethical (and possibly illegal) income studies should be carried out in a number of remote 'communities' to get a better idea of whether or not 'communities' are in poverty, or in squalor ?

Hey, I'm retired, i can write such things :)

Joe Lane