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(Continued …)

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1. The Aboriginal tribal elders need to define realistic short, medium and long term objectives for their people to improve their individual outcomes, indicating how and when these objectives should be achieved.

2. We need to establish a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), or similar document, to the effect that as Australian citizens we constitute a single nation even though we come from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds which we are free to continue, to honour and cultivate, provided we do not encroach on the freedom of others.

3. We need to modify our pre-eminent “social contract”, the Australian Constitution, to recognise the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as the first peoples of Australia.

4. As it was the British who colonised our country under the auspices of the Crown, they bear the prime responsibility for the deep-rooted injustices caused to our indigenous peoples by colonisation. But history records that the same ill-treatment, and worse, was inflicted on them by successive generations of Australians. It is clear that our two governments and the Crown are jointly and severally responsible for all this and owe them compensation.

Having said that, I do not pretend to have all the answers. Like everything human it is extremely complex and I am a perfect neophyte in such matters. That is why I presented my article as “An open letter to my aboriginal compatriots” and published it here for discussion by all and sundry, in the hope that those with more hands-on knowledge, such as yourself, would make a positive contribution to the debate.

And I take this opportunity to thank you, Joe, for having so generously and enthusiastically done so. It has been most enlightening for me.

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Hi Rodney,

Thanks, but I dispute ALL of your premises. As for your comment on the sovereignty movement, that " .... Perhaps the future will prove me wrong, but I don't think that anybody in his right mind would want to do that."

Yes, I agree. Surely nobody would. But one thing I've learnt is not to over-estimate the epistemological the Aboriginal elites. My wife used to get browned off when I suggested that, if Aboriginal 'leaders' were presented with all the principles of Apartheid, without actually mentioning that word, their eyes would light up and they would say, "Hey ! That's a good idea !'

But even then I didn't put 2 and 2 together.

As for your comment that

"I think you will agree that it is not the “well-educated, work-oriented indigenous people” who would be tempted to join any such secessionist movement and I doubt that the “less well-educated, welfare-oriented indigenous, minority group" would be terribly enthusiastic either...."

it's far more complex than that - many of the elites are, after all, quite well-educated, in mainstream fields, but are, to a surprisingly large extent (when you deconstruct their writings), tacitly promoting secessionist/sovereignty/separatist/segregationist policies: after all, it's about power. Yes, crazy: since a separate State would probably be somewhere out in the desert and/or remote North, who in the southern cities would go there ?

The elites certainly wouldn't: they seem to have some fuzzy vision of running their separate State by remote control from their leafy suburbs. What work would there be to do - so decent, good, honest, working Aboriginal people would have no role there - after all, with mainstream qualifications, they would be condemned anyway. Who would round up all the people in rural towns and outer suburbs, and ship them up to wherever ? Sometimes fine theory succumbs to dumb practicality.

[TBC]

[continued]

Yes, many well-educated people would be striving to find work in the mainstream, in which they have been born and raised, and in which they belong as much as any other Australians do (no need to curl the lip in disdain, Rodney), but I suspect that the welfare-oriented populations, in remote, rural and outer-suburban environments (les banlieus domestiques et ruraux), couldn't give a toss as long as the money keeps coming. What else can they do - they've missed the boat on gaining skills, and have to have steady income somehow.

I hope that we are not still having magisterial debates on these topics in five and ten years. But we probably will. If progressives don't have the courage to condemn child abuse, they're hardly likely to bring themselves to clearly admit that there is any elite discussion at all towards sovereignty, i.e. meaning sovereignty, I.e. meaning separateness, i.e. meaning cession, i.e. meaning independence - or at least political independence with unbroken access to the Tits of Canberra. Crazy indeed.

Cheers,

Joe

PS. Oops, I apologise for using that big word 'deconstruct'; since I'm not a post-modernist, I should have stuck to 'analyse', critically examine', 'rip the shirt out of', even 'sink the boot into'.

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Dear Joe,

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You wrote :

« Thanks, but I dispute ALL of your premises »

I see that we also agree on a number of things, but that’s not the object of the exercise. The exchange has been interesting and if we had agreed on everything we wouldn’t have had so much to say to each other.

I am surprised that you think that “… progressives don't have the courage to condemn child abuse …”. Why “progressives”, and why would they need “courage” ?

Presumably, you consider that “conservatives and “moderates” are the only ones to condemn child abuse. If that is so, is it because they do not need to have “courage” or, is it because they are more “courageous” than “progressives ?

Also, why do you think it is political ideology that determines people’s attitude to child abuse ? What about the “child abusers” themselves ? How do you classify them politically ? Are they “progressives”, “conservatives”, “moderates”, all three, two out of three, only one of the three ? If so, which ones, or one ?

I’m sorry for all these questions, Joe, but I must confess it’s the first time I have ever heard that politics determined attitudes to child abuse and whether one had courage or not.

When I think of “progressives” and “courage”, for some reason my mind goes back to Cassius Clay. I don’t know if you consider him to have been a “progressive” or not. When he returned to the US after winning a gold medal at the Rome Olympics in 1960 he was refused a job in a general store because he was black. Because of that he became a social activist. He joined the Democrats and campaigned for Jimmy Carter in 1980 against Ronald Reagan.

He was stripped of his boxing titles and sentenced to 5 years’ prison for refusing to fight in the Vietnamese war, declaring at the time :

« I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nig.er »

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(Continued ...)

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(Continued ...)

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As a conscientious objector, he became an icon of the counterculture generation of the 1960s and an inspiration to the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King.

Despite his absence from the ring for four years, he came back and won the world heavyweight title again in 1974 and 1978 and was ranked as the greatest athlete of the 20th century by all the major sports organisations. He was known as “the people’s champion” and respected by black and white America alike.

I was an amateur boxer myself in the late 50s in my home state in Queensland and followed Cassius Clay’s boxing career with great interest.

Perhaps I am wrong but I can’t help feeling that he was probably the sort of person you have in mind as a “progressive” and yet I think you will agree that he was not lacking in “courage”.

He certainly was “the greatest” in his particular domain, but I am sure there were and are many other so-called “progressives” who exemplify outstanding courage in their daily lives – unless, of course, you are able to demonstrate the contrary.

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Hi Rodney,

Sorry, I've been having all sorts of trouble with my bitch computer. Fingers crossed.

Brilliant Bill Leak cartoon this morning: it shows tow Aboriginal people, a man and a boy, the man reading the paper with the headline" Aborigine in Germany: too afraid to go home". And the boy says "I knows how she feels."

Now that's courage on Leak's part, and he's spot-on. Actually I think he may be a genuine 'progressive', not the faux flag-waver who, I expect, will now jump up and down and try to somehow divert the discussion, maybe to the difficulties of being Aboriginal in Germany, or some such.

No, I didn't think Muhammad Ali was a progressive - a radical maybe, i.e. someone who fought like buggery for his own group's legitimate interests, while a genuine progressive will go beyond and risk it all in some other group's interests. He was a beautiful man, but too wrapped up with the Black Muslims who killed Malcom X.

Now perhaps we can get back to the key issues in Indigenous affairs, # 1 of which is how to extricate people from the dreadful hell-holes which are remote 'communities', how to ensure that children are born free of congenital defects caused by alcohol and neglect, that they are as loved as other children are and deserve to be, that young people can be encouraged to get a full education (like you and I have, Rodney), that they can be gainfully employed in due course, that they can have lives as long as ours.

That may take a realisation that 'culture' may well be, not the solution, in any way, but the problem .....

[TBC]