Hi Dane,

I would hazard a guess and suggest that Dan would agree with your first paragraph.

Remote communities are in a terminal mess. The people who are condemned to live there do not deserve to be ignored, or have their ghastly existence papered over. The question is: what to do ?

In my rather biased view, forty years have shown that nothing much will come from 'community', but that the eighty thousand or so people in remote settlements still are entitled to the same opportunities as other people. How to effect this ?

Forty years of bilingual education have destroyed much of their potential to access the world, and appropriate forms of education are urgently needed, from top to bottom, to assist people to re-connect to the outside world, to gain employable skills and seek employment, even in the most menial positions, anything to get a toehold in the real world - if not for themselves, then as examples to their children.

If people don't actually want to do this - if they have a mistaken belief that the outside world will, forever and a day, feed them, tend to them, house them, shield them from having to actually do muc hfor themselves - then there will have to be a sustained education program to put them wise, to get them to understand that whites don't get houses free, or cars for free, or perpetual benefits from a money tree in Canberra. That all of the money that they live on, somebody else has had to work for.

And no, it's no good going on about the dreadful evils of the past - much of all that did not effect people in current remote communities, but mainly people in the 'South', who do not have land rights or phony non-work schemes like CDEP, who mostly have to get up every day and go to do real work.

And are better for it.

Cheers,

Joe

Bess Price gives me more hope for our first people than all the left wing academics together who have inflicted diaster for decades. Thanks Sara for also giving hope that we have a few young woman academics willing to speak the truth and not bow to the usual dogmas.

Dane (Posted by dane, Wednesday, 23 May 2012 6:11:47 PM): as Joe intimates, I wouldn't argue much with your first paragraph.
However, when you speculate that "about the only thing you don't want the government to do is to wipe their back sides for them", it is ironic that you don't realise that the governments are already having to wipe many back sides, for the simple reason that the petrol sniffing, alcohol-related road accidents and FASD epidemics in remote Australia have reduced many of these people to incapacitated states, with many more following courtesy of the early onset of diabetes, high blood pressure, Alzheimer’s, alcohol related haemorrhagic strokes and other degenerative diseases.
I actually have been calling for a lot more personal responsibility for many years, and a number of the costly programs that I have recommended here are precisely aimed at engendering an understanding and practice of personal responsibility by individuals, and the overcoming of dependence on handouts.
If you want taxpayers to have to pick up more and more of the wiping, that's your choice, but please don't complain about it as the costs keep rising at astronomic rates.
I’m not entirely sure what my vanity and pride have to do with it.

there is nothing that i don't agree with in this article, well perhaps one thing, and that is the absence of any textual analysis of how the media generally constructs Aboriginality as this would reveal a bigger story about how the producers of various 'genres' of Aboriginal are both naturally or unnaturally received by the audience.

Some of the common constructions are:

• The Native/ Inferior Other
• The Deficient/ Depraved/ Negative Other
• The Activist/ Radical/ Excessive Other
• The ‘Noble Savage’
• The ‘Ignoble Savage’
• The ‘Romantic Savage’
• The ‘Historical Savage’
• The ‘Dying Savage’

Bess Price (perhaps unwittingly) milks one of these constructions (the romantic?) for nothing more than her own political ambitions. And the question becomes not one of whether one likes Bess or not, but rather whether you think her public persona of the 'bush Aborigine' is accurate, right or otherwise. On many occasion Bess Price has openly declared that Aborigines from the urbs lack culture, have no 'real identity'.

Which raises another important question about the author, how Aboriginal people does she know in her own suburb/city. Not many I would assume, and therin lays the real problem with this article.

Note the author readily admits to being conservative and right wing but is unable to clearly define what this means - other than being contrarian to anything she sees as being too Leftist which is the usual excuse for any real interogration in racism and racist textualities.

I agree Joe. I really get into enough internet brawls already but I just think people have to challenge the disaster that left wing views have brought Aboriginal people.

Take the biggest bogeyman of them all - patriarchy. The Left is happy to preserve Aboriginal culture when it suits them, but when it conflicts with their ideological world view, it's bugger culture, Aboriginals must change.

The systemic disempowerment of men is a good example. Here we have a culture under enormous pressure due to its contact with the modern world. Instead of supporting existing power structures inside that society so that it can best cope with the change, the Left in all its wisdom, decides this doesn't suit them and determines to show aboriginals the light; to impose equality. So we get womens centres, women's leaders conferences, mentoring programs for women, health programs etc. the list is endless. Now the men have been successfully disempowered but the question is, have the women filled the void? Were they able to step into the role that the men vacated and hold their society together?

Much of remote society is now in free fall. Men aren't in charge but neither are women. Women like Bess Price are a blessing but they are not enough. We have chaos.

I'm not even a Christian but surely blind Freddy could see that missionaries and their 'right' wing views were infinitely more successful than the destruction the left has wreaked on Aboriginals. Missionaries weren't do-gooders looking for an 'Aboriginal experience' but often dedicated a decade or more of their lives to each place. They became respected members of the community who worked within existing power structures to manage change.

I'm not saying things before Whitlam were perfect but it's been a pretty steep fall since then.