Michael Cook | Sunday, 24 February 2008
Sincerely sorry
The thing Australians should really feel sorry about is trashing the Aboriginal family.
“Sorry
seems to be the hardest word”
sang Elton John in one of his early hits. But the new Australian
Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, found it easy enough. As the first
official parliamentary act of his government last week, he apologised to his
Aboriginal countrymen in an eloquent and passionate speech. “For
the indignity and degradation... inflicted on a proud people and a
proud culture, we say sorry.”
Many of
Australia’s 500,000 Aborigines live in Fourth World conditions in a
First World country. Life expectancy for them is 17 years lower than
for the rest of Australia. The statistics for health, housing,
literacy, infant mortality and employment are appalling. Last year
the Federal Government spent A$3.8 billion on Aboriginal affairs and
had precious little to show for it. No big deal. Neither had its
predecessors.
Yet the
Prime Minister was not apologising for any of this. Nor was he
apologising for the theft of land, the murders, the discrimination,
the neglect of the past 200-odd years since European settlement.
Instead, he was apologising for wrecking Aboriginal families. An
estimated 50,000 of their children were removed from their families
between 1910 and 1970 – the so-called “Stolen Generation”. Rudd
called it
“one
of the darkest chapters in Australia’s history”.
A thick
1997 report, Bringing
Them Home, brought these stories to the attention of white Australians. As Rudd said, “There is something
terribly primal about these firsthand accounts. The pain is searing;
it screams from the pages. The hurt, the humiliation, the degradation
and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother
from her children is a deep assault on our senses and on our most
elemental humanity.”
The
Bringing
Them Home
report claimed
that
thousands of Aboriginal children were “stolen” – somewhere
between one in three and one in ten. Although this is asserted “with
confidence”, the margin of error is high, amazingly high, for a
government report. Rubbery figures like these set off alarm bells
with historian Keith Windschuttle, who has bedded himself down as one
of Australia’s least liked people for arguing
that
the issue has been fabricated by ideologically driven academics. His
counterclaim
is
that “Rather than being stolen from loving parents to fulfill a
nationalist policy of racist eugenics, the only cases where
Aboriginal children were removed involved serious parental neglect.
In many of these cases, the parents were alcoholics who were not
providing proper nutrition or health care and the authorities would
have been culpable had they not acted.” He plans to publish a
refutation of the whole “stolen generation” issue later this
year.
The Prime
Minister and most Australians ignored the historical controversy:
“Decency, human decency, universal human decency demands that the
nation now step forward to right an historical wrong.” He
issued an unqualified apology.
The problem is,
Aborigines have heard rhetoric like this before. Rudd’s precedessor
Bob Hawke created an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission
in 1990 to deliver better social outcomes. It dissolved 15 years
later in a welter of corruption. In the best speech of his life,
Prime Minister Paul Keating said in 1994 that “we cannot resign
ourselves to failure” and promised justice within a decade.
Aborgines are still waiting. In fact, last year the Australian Army
surged into Outback towns to quash an epidemic of drunkenness and
sickening child sex abuse which is destroying remote Aboriginal
communities.
The
apology, however sincere and well deserved, diverts attention from
the cluelessness of government policy. Many Aborigines live in
physical and moral squalour which is unimaginable in the wealthy
coastal cities. One promising solution, proposed by Aboriginal
activist Noel Pearson, centres on restoring a sense of the dignity of
work and personal responsibility.
But an even more fundamental
issue is still being ignored: the disintegration of the Aboriginal
family. Yesterday's bureaucrats tore families apart. Today's are
tossing them in baths of acid. In the acres of newsprint about the
Prime Minister's apology, two words were conspicuously absent:
“husband” and “wife”. There was a lot of windy talk about
Aboriginal families in newspapers, but they are not the families that
readers are used to, the kind that include husbands and wives. The Soviet Union effectively abolished marriage as a symbol of bourgeois oppression in the 1920s. That experiment didn't work -- and there is no reason to think that leaving Aborigines in a desolate no man's land between traditional marriage and Western marriage is going to work either.
According to 2005 figures from
the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 86 percent of Aboriginal
children are born out of wedlock, that is, in neither a conventional
Western marriage nor in a traditional tribal marriage. And where the
stories of abused children, abused women, drunkenness and
pornography are most sickening, in the Northern Territory, the rate
is 95 percent.
Even more unsettling is the
fact that the father of 18 percent of Aboriginal births is
unacknowledged. Is it any wonder that infants are raped in a culture
where, as in the Northern Territory, in nearly half of all Aboriginal
births the father did not sign the birth certificate?
Admittedly, these statistics
might not be accurate. Many Aborigines in Outback communities speak
little English. They have very sophisticated notions of kinship
relations and marriage which cannot be translated into whitefella
questionnaires. But clearly something is terribly amiss – and the
whitefellas are turning a blind eye to whatever it is. One telltale
sign is that the 2002
National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey
never mentions marriage or marital status. Apparently the 2008 survey
will be improved – more information about hunting, fishing and
gathering activities. This is not what Aboriginal people need.
There is an immense amount of
research which shows that marriage is associated with substantial
benefits in Western societies. Children do better on a wide range of
economic, social, educational, and emotional measures. They are far
less likely to be poor. They are far more likely to stay in school.
Their parents are happier, healthier, wealthier, and live longer. If
there is one single improvement which could be wished for the
Aboriginal people, it would be stable, intact marriages. And if there
were only one thing that Australian bureaucrats should be sorry for,
it would be stifling ideas on how to foster this.
The difficulties cannot be
underestimated. How can successful marriages be built in communities steeped in drunkenness, drug abuse, unemployment, and pornography. But you have to start somewhere. Dr Lara Wieland, a doctor who works in remote
Aboriginal communities in the far northern reaches of the state of
Queensland, insists that young Aboriginal parents at least need to be taught the
basics of parenting:
The dysfunction has become
so deep that many people do not even realise the damage that is being
done to their young people. They hardly bat an eyelid at events that
would make your stomach churn. A young mother in a drunken state
beats her young child with a stick and screams that she is going to
kill him. The next day, that same mother, sober, hugs her child and
does not even think about the lasting emotional scars. Why would she,
when her mother did the same to her, and her neighbours do the same,
and no one has ever told her that it is wrong?
“Children who have had
sexually transmitted diseases and have been raped and molested are
now parents. No one ever helped them or told them that what happened
to them was wrong or not normal. Today's teenage parents grew up in
homes with hardly any furniture or toilet paper or soap or
toothpaste. They don't know what it means to make your child wash
with soap in the shower or brush their teeth at night. They eat meals
that materialise -- if they're lucky -- occasionally around pay day.”
The biggest stumbling block
may be the bureaucrats who are reluctant to impose Western values
like marriage upon Aboriginal communities. I suspect that Dr Wieland
knows a thing or two about their obtuseness. In 2003 she wrote a letter to the
Federal Prime Minister and the State Premier which revealed the
appalling state in which Aboriginal children were living. What
happened? She was fired.
Michael Cook is editor of
MercatorNet.
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Comments (12)
David Page said...Michael Cook said: “The biggest stumbling block may be the bureaucrats who are reluctant to impose Western values like marriage upon Aboriginal communities.”
From what I understand, Indigenous Australians had an enormously complicated family structure. This structure was destroyed by European settlers and the missionaries who accompanied them. What you see today is the result of that destruction aggravated by a racism as pervasive as anything that existed in the United States. So now Michael Cook wants to impose western values like marriage on Indigenous Australians. Why not? It worked so well the first time it was tried. The Bible isn’t the solution to everything. Thinking that it is has caused many of the problems in the world. The same goes for other religious text.
United States | Sunday, 24 February 2008 at 9:43 am
Darren Mason said...In this article, about the sorry plight of Indigenous Australians, Michael Cook puts forward ideas that go far beyond mere rhetoric. He gives genuine, practical insight to matters that require urgent attention.
Australia | Sunday, 24 February 2008 at 12:43 pm
Sharon said...From what I understand, Indigenous Australians had an enormously complicated family structure. This structure was destroyed by European settlers and the missionaries who accompanied them.
David, what are your sources for this comment?
Australia | Sunday, 24 February 2008 at 2:38 pm
Susan Reibel Moore said...There is important information in this article about Aboriginal family life and the number of children born out of wedlock--’if the statistics are accurate’. Michael Cook’s sensitive observations about the importance of loving marriage to family life cannot be ignored by any decent person.
But the importance of loving, responsible behaviour by ummarried adults who are nonetheless responsible for protecting Aboriginal children from serious crime and neglect also cannot be ignored by decent people.
ALL wise input should be generously received.
It is important to note in this context that Keith Windschuttle’s claim that the ‘only’ children stolen were taken from dysfunctional families has been refuted by distinguished Australians in public life, all of them married parents who have raised children in decent homes: e.g. the more eminent essayists in Robert Manne’s Whitewash.
Windschuttle HAS exposed slack historical scholarship--an important service to the nation; but there is much that has been shown to be inadequate in his discussion of Aboriginal suffering in Tasmania and elsewhere.
Helen Hughes’ scholarly tome, Lands of Shame, should be carefully read--especially on remote communities. So should the writing of Jenness Warin and Jim Franklin: http://www.bennelong.com.au.
Sorry Day and its aftermath, with Kevin Rudd and Brendan Nelson agreeing to work together, has dramatised the need for humane people publicly linked with either the Right or the Left to join forces in working together for change.
Of course we need to understand who did what, and why they did it. Historical knowledge has always been important to mankind. But our emphasis should be on HOW to move beyond political tribalism for the sake of our common humanity.
Michael Cook’s words for our PM’s speech--’eloquent’ and ‘passionate’--bear repeating.
Australia | Sunday, 24 February 2008 at 8:16 pm
Marie Coulombe said...Michael Cook has a good article.....at least he’s offering or tempting to offer a solution while nothing is being done for the Aborignials. They need the basic of life’s skill.
Nothing is perfect in this world. David Page criticizes Michael’s article but doesn’t offer any thing better. He blames the past without offering anything to remedy the huge problem.
We have to start somewhere instead of blaming people of the past. Tomorrow someone blame David for not doing anything about the present.
Canada | Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 4:02 am
David Page said...Marie Coulombe, I don’t intend to make light of the problem. I don’t have an easy solution. I think that coming to grips with their racism, if that’s really what’s going on, is a good first step. I lived in London in the late sixties. There was an Australian woman in the group we hung around with. One day in conversation she spoke passionately about racism in America. I had to agree with her. Things were bad then in American race relations. Besides, I had marched with Martin Luther King the previous year. I was dating my wife then. She is black. During this discussion I mentioned that Australia also had problems with race relations. This Australian woman reacted by never speaking to me again. From this incident and from conversations I had with the few Australians I worked with, I got the impression that Australians were an insular people, loathe to accept criticism but quick to give it. I think that racism still pervades Australian society. Tell me if I’m wrong. Can you help people you have contempt for? Can you say that Australia is a country that has put racism behind it? Racism in America was burned into us and was not easy to purge from oneself. It had depth and breadth and a hundred little manifestations. Getting rid of it was, and is, an ongoing process. Have Australians really started that process? And finally, I think that for a white person to use the phrase ‘whitefella’ is condescending. Although I’m sure not intentionally so.
United States | Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 9:16 am
Steve Morris said...I’m quite sure that David is correct in that many Australians will deny they are racist in one breath, and then speak disparagingly about indigenous Australians in the next.
However, I personally don’t think that it is a question of the bible being right for everything either. There are excellent non-biblical texts that discuss the statistical impact of traditional family, i.e. mother, father, children, on a society. One of my favourites can be found here.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1412807549?tag=
jenniferrobac-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode;=
as1&creativeASIN=1412807549&adid=1HR2Z1F4PF418XYNPHDQ&
David, I am looking forward to your response to Sharon’s question pasted here:
From what I understand, Indigenous Australians had an enormously complicated family structure. This structure was destroyed by European settlers and the missionaries who accompanied them.
David, what are your sources for this comment?
I think this was fairly good article.
Australia | Tuesday, 26 February 2008 at 10:38 pm
David Page said...First, let me say that I don’t approve of any culture or marriage system that doesn’t allow for absolute freedom of choice. I also said that I didn’t have a solution. Finally, I can’t pretend to know enough about this problem, except in so far as it is similar to problems in America. My feeling is that the Australian government shouldn’t spend any money either supporting or destroying Aboriginal culture. It should all be spent helping people who want to be successful in mainstream Australian life. I think the law should apply equally to every Australian. If the age of consent is 16, then it should be 16 for every Australian. Any attempt to support a parallel culture will result in permanent poverty and degradation. The problem isn’t anthropological. To act as if it is is to treat Aboriginal Australians as if they are not really human.
Steve Morris said: “David, I am looking forward to your response to Sharon’s question”
I can’t find the original article I read but here are a few more.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/
rsjproject/rsjlibrary/alrc/custlaw_summary/61.html
http://www.adelaideinstitute.org/Australia/002.htm
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AboriginalLB/1985/10.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_kinship
United States | Wednesday, 27 February 2008 at 9:14 am
Elizabeth said...David is blaming the missionaries. Why? He doesn’t know what they did. One thing I know is that missionaries was teaching to love one another and would strive to get everybody with food and the basic of life. What is wrong with this?
Perhaps you are not a Christian so what burden do you carry against them. They did not harm you. You have big prejudice against them.....clean your own ground before trying to clean someone else’s yard.
Canada | Thursday, 28 February 2008 at 10:33 am
David Page said...Elizabeth, I am not familiar with the specifics of the conquest of Australia by white people. I know that everywhere else European armies and people went, the missionaries followed like carrion crows. Sometimes the Cross was used to justify the plunder and destruction of native populations. Sometimes the justification was supposed racial superiority.
Elizabeth said: “clean your own ground before trying to clean someone else’s yard.”
I’m working at it.
United States | Thursday, 28 February 2008 at 11:58 am
Adebowale Oriku said...‘We have to start somewhere instead of blaming people of the past. Tomorrow someone blame David for not doing anything about the present.’
Between David and the angelic host who have been remonstrating with him it is easy to see whose eyes are looking backwards. Religion - Christianity or any other - is in a lot of ways an adverse countercheck to progress. I wonder why someone who argues that being gay does not make anyone less human - and that it shouldn’t be anybody’s business, anyway - should be accused of not doing anything about the present. And why should the people of the past be left alone? - after all their action or inaction still reverberates.
Since most novels are written in the past tense - shuffled with pluperperfect - I do understand what certain novelists who write in the present tense are trying to achieve: fix the present in a secular flux - a devise that is not always successful. At the other extreme of the novelistic instancy are the three Abrahamic books, bible, quran and torah, these books are the perfect result of retrocognition, believers in them have placed themselves in as many removes from the present as may not be countable. (see next)
United Kingdom | Friday, 29 February 2008 at 9:47 am
Adebowale Oriku said...(Continued)
Michael Cook’s article has its points. I do understand David Page’s allusion to running undercurrent of racism in Australian society. A first cousin of mine has a large medical practice in Western Australia and… (I’ll let that go).
When I was a literary editor in a West African country, a young Australian tourist had all but shocked me when she asked me how I acquired the habit of reading. No, not just being a university graduate, but how was it that I was able to read War and Peace at 16, or Thomas Mann or discuss Rushdie and continue to read as if my life depended on it. I asked her whether she had read The Bell Curve, she said no, and I made her understand that this was a book that said I was not supposed to be discussing such things with her; she should read the tome to know more about that. I also made her understand that something that my country Nigeria had in common with hers was that we had both produced Nobel Laureates in literature, one from each country: Patrick White from Australia and Wole Soyinka from Nigeria.
I was thirty two and the young woman was twenty one, and being the liberal that I am I pardoned her. Besides, she saw nothing wrong in being friends with me.
-- | Friday, 29 February 2008 at 9:51 am
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