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The Forum > Article Comments > The dirty secret of Utopia > Comments

The dirty secret of Utopia : Comments

By John Pilger, published 12/4/2016

White Australia sets up organisations and structures that offer the pretence of helping us, but it's a pretence, no more.

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Hi Bernie,

New computer :( Fifth-time lucky with this post :)

Moses Tjalkabota's book, the first in an Aboriginal language, is on

http://www.aboriginalculture.org/index.html

and also on my website www.firstsources.info, on the 'Twenty-First Century' Page. Well-worth a good look.

As for deaths in custody, it was reported today that 27 % of all prisoners in custody are Indigenous, but only about (from memory) 17 % of deaths in custody are Indigenous. It's safer to be Indigenous in jail than for non-Indigenous prisoners make up 73 % of prisoners but 83 % of deaths. And as anybody knows, deaths OUTSIDE OF custody are much higher for Indigenous people, suicides especially. I wonder when anybody will talk about that.

Hi AC,

Indigenous people in remote 'communities' get standard welfare payments, as well as mining and conservation royalties. But you and Bilger raise the serious issue that, even though ATMs would be available in larger 'communities', in very small ones like Utopia, population Around fifty on a good day, and with no local shop, old ladies specially would find it very hard to get to a shop if nobody wanted to drive them.

As for your observations that I am

" .... always moaning about them Loudmouth.
Why are you so angry?
Did one impregnate your daughter or mug you or something?
Why are you so against them?
What did they ever do to you?"

my kids are Indigenous, my wife of 43 years was Indigenous, like a fool I was dedicated to Indigenous affairs for the best part of 55 years. But I didn't think that I actually moaned. And angry ? Probably. Pissed off ? Yes, of course. Would I do it all again ? Probably not. Mugged ? No, my sister was, but no biggie, she took it in her stride.

Back to topic ?

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Tuesday, 19 April 2016 3:11:34 PM
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Hi Luciferase,

You're right to suggest that " .... all we are doing is providing half-way housing between traditional life and modern civilization from which there seems no escape, as decades of experience shows."

I typed up the verbatim discussions at the string of Conferences of National Welfare Ministers and Officers from 1961 to 1968 (around 2000 pages, all on my web-site, colour-coded by State for easy reference) and it is clear from the dialogues that participants, having encouraged people to come into missions and settlements like Yuendumu, didn't quite know what to do next: they touch lightly on the issue of training for employment, in situ, then, as if realising there will always be bugger-all employment out in the sticks, move quickly on to other issues.

I'm not suggesting that they deliberately practised apartheid, just that the options of apartheid and assimilation seemed equally impractical and unattractive. But apartheid is what the people have been stuck with.

As you add,

'Aborigines must come to towns and these must be firmly run for the greater good, so that problems are minimized, while finding their feet without free meals based on race. The towns are the staging point for the urbanization and full integration of aborigines and their thriving into wider, multicultural Australia.'

Yes, integration into a far more multi-culti society than fifty years ago. But 'down south', people have been doing that for two hundred years. 80 % of Indigenous people, perhaps 90 % 'down south', live in cities and large towns. Nearly forty thousand, one in every eight or nine adults, have graduated from universities.

And, perhaps to Bilger's surprise, the great majority have health/crime/education rates similar to those of other Australians. They're getting on with business.

Cheers,

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Wednesday, 20 April 2016 11:20:26 AM
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"Apartheid" is a good description, albeit not intended. Your points about urban aborigines, and what is done for them beyond mainstream welfare and education is where Pilger should look for his next story.

Today's news on earning income from native titled land: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-19/adam-giles-call-to-support-uluru-climb-eiffel-comparison/7339976

Native land is not just for looking at. It is a capital asset that should be and is being utilized, giving aborigines an option other than urbanization http://www.ilc.gov.au/
Posted by Luciferase, Wednesday, 20 April 2016 12:10:02 PM
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Hi Luciferase,

I suppose the essential requirement for healthy, permanent but remote 'communities', is some form of economic activity - endogenous activity, economic activity, not just appointing an army of outside professionals and calling it 'employment'. Local employment which generates product or income on-site. If that is impossible, then yes, we are supporting Apartheid. Talk of 'culture' is just putting dirty bandages on festering sores, as GB Shaw would say.

What's the answer ? I don't know, except that nothing seems to be currently working for the great majority - not just the cliques - of the able-bodied populations.

Perhaps to support those who want to move and work in neighbouring towns - that might give the next generation a chance. Perhaps it would need very supportive training for work, very intelligently applied TAFE courses - not the usual run of make-work courses but REAL courses in training, with thorough literacy and numeracy courses as a basis.

Assimilation ? Not necessarily. But certainly, surely, we must support moves against the continuing Apartheid which is destroying lone generation after another since the sixties.

Cheers,

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Wednesday, 20 April 2016 1:04:56 PM
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Hi again Luciferase,

You noted that " .... urban aborigines, and what is done for them beyond mainstream welfare and education is where Pilger should look for his next story."

Yes, that's so, but he won't: the great majority of urban working Indigenous people don't ask for much assistance, or any at all, and that's how it's been for many generations now.

It's striking how that dichotomy between working and shirking populations, Menzies' 'lifters' and 'leaners', strivers and skivers, has been evident for a very long time: in the Protector's Letters throughout the nineteenth century in South Australia [on my web-site: www.firstsources.info], there are people constantly asking for free travel passes, more rations, more blankets, assistance to go here and there; while there are many other people who ask for nothing along those lines, but for assistance in taking out a land lease, or funds for fencing wire or another draught horse or a 15-ft canoe or a rifle, or some building materials. One bloke asked for funds for an organ (and got them).

The exodus from missions after the war to infrastructure projects down this way stripped them of capable, hard-working people and at the one mission that I have school, birth, death and marriage records for, lo and behold - the 1950s was the decade with the highest infant mortality and the highest number of kids taken temporarily into care, i.e. the 'Stolen Generation'. I knew most of those kids and, despite having much affection for many of them, I have to say that not too many ever morphed into working people, but have remained skivers to the end.

Perhaps working or shirking is a result of family culture, in a sociological sense ? Certainly, some ancestors could look with pride on dozens of descendants who have become university graduates, while others could look at dozens each generation in and out of jail, and not a single university graduate. In fact, in another settlement, now defunct, everybody was on CDEP - non-work for the dole - and apparently, no-one has even finished secondary school. Some correlation there.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Thursday, 21 April 2016 10:47:07 AM
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As others have pointed out, there is a culture of bludging and facilitating bludging, but specific to Pilger there is also an endless cacophony of whining that "white Australia" is supposedly responsible for a gap between its living conditions and those of "indigenous Australia" [1].

If Aboriginal Australians want to contribute to closing the gap, then they can keep incarceration rates down by not committing crimes, they can try looking after their houses and co-operating with educational and nursing services and refraining from boozing and gambling and petrol and glue sniffing and engaging in tribal brawls and beating up their partners. That is, give up on the sort of behaviour that disadvantages everyone, Aboriginal or not, who indulges in it.

The main contribution non-Aboriginal Australians can make is fund individual Aborigines on a basis of equality with individual non-Aborigines, and crack down hard on any racist discrimination on the specific basis of ancestry (hard enough to actually put a stop to it, maybe starting with officialdom and in particular police).

As for the whining industry, let them put up (i.e. specify the measures they advocate based on what should be DONE not what the outcome should be) or shut up.

[1] The term "indigenous" used loosely, ignoring the fact that everyone born in Australia is indigenous)
Posted by EmperorJulian, Thursday, 21 April 2016 1:40:36 PM
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