Photo taken by Gerry Georgatos
The Northern Territory government is sort of accepting the 227 recommendations produced by the royal commission into youth justice following the disgraces exposed to the nation by the ABC’s Four Corners. Recommendations and findings are a dime a dozen. The government is giving in-principle support to 91 of the recommendations. Whether it’s in-principle or substantive support to the recommendations, the majority of recommendations will not be implemented.
I write this article while in the Northern Territory, a region with a total population of less than a quarter million, of who nearly one-third are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. But with a heavy slap of apartheid the divide between Black and White in the Territory tormentingly languishes.
The Territory has one of the world’s highest median wages. However the majority of the one-third of the population that is Aboriginal lives below the poverty line, with a significant proportion living in extreme poverty. Three quarters of the Territory’s Aboriginal peoples live below the poverty line.
The national media fails to take to household Australians the disgrace of apartheid Australia – of the hundreds of shanty towns, dustbowls, corrals. This disgrace is rarely reported; the vistas of shanty dwellings I have seen in one community after another should abominate Australians. Many communities are denied piped clean water, denied basic infrastructure, denied the bastions of institutions – including quality schools – which the rest of Australia enjoy as elementary rights.
It is grinding poverty alongside relative affluence. One Territory government after another has disgraced itself in failing the region’s Aboriginal peoples. One Territory government after another is responsible for the degradation of the Territory’s Aboriginal communities. It is not the Territory’s Aboriginal peoples who are neglecting themselves, their families, their children. It is the Territory and the Commonwealth governments that neglect the families and children. Governments are responsible for the racism, the institutional and structural racism, for the criminality that denies Aboriginal communities equivalent services and opportunities enjoyed by non-Aboriginal communities.
Every government department I have visited in the Territory, its personnel are a sea of White privilege. Every private sector enterprise I have visited is a sea of White privilege. There is no one-third of the workforce comprised of Aboriginal Territorians. This was the case two and three decades ago. It is obvious that the work of yesteryear in touting affirmative actions, the goal of workforce parity, was a lie.
Today the Northern Territory remains to Australia what Mississippi, Alabama and North and South Carolina were to the United States decades ago.
Nearly one per cent of the Northern Territory’s population is incarcerated. The downtrodden are mercilessly flogged. Nearly 90 per cent of the incarcerated are Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islanders. Only Western Australia jails its Aboriginal peoples at a higher rate. Western Australia is another reprehensible story of ongoing racism. One in 13 of Western Australia’s Aboriginal adult males are in jail. From a racialised lens this is the world’s highest jailing rate. It’s a cruel, sick Australia I am describing.
The Close the Gap education target is a national target but if that target was disaggregated to the Northern Territory you’d find that the majority of Aboriginal children are not completing Year 12. In fact the majority are not in school. The majority of the Territory’s regional towns and remote communities have only a sliver of the children attending school. A significant proportion of communities have not had a secondary school graduate in years. The majority of these communities are third-world-akin. If you imagine the apartheid can’t get worse well then visit the town camps, whether of those orbiting Alice Springs, Katherine, Tennant Creek, etc. They are the worst of Australia’s toxic apartheid. The town camps are a custodial experience, where all hope is denied, where people finish worse off by each day’s end. Apartheid is not a strong enough word. Racism is not a strong enough description.
The solution is sort quickly the social determinants, bring on the equality because the rest is chatter, actually better stated as crap, insufferable lies. What governments have been doing, the neglect of Aboriginal communities, is attrition – death by a thousand cuts. It is obvious that they want many of these communities to die out, and at least to this diabolical end governments can silently believe they are ‘winning’, achieving the goal. The painful tragedy includes children removed, children suiciding. Let us look at why all this is happening instead of dissing on people for turning to the booze and aberrant behaviour. Don’t blame the downtrodden for sinking in drink. Blame those who walk all over them.
If what is happening is not called out for what it is then we too will be damned by the future as racists and criminals just as we damn those of past generations who locked in the apartheid, who segregated, who brought on the stolen generations, one abomination after another.
The Northern Territory is a horrible home to its 14,000 Aboriginal children. Nearly 1,000 of the 14,000 have been removed from their families by the Territory government’s child protection mob – that’s one in 14. More than eight and a half-thousand of the Territory’s 14,000 Aboriginal children have been subjected to child protection notifications. Instead of the Territory government improving the lot, improving the life circumstances of long impoverished peoples it harasses them to accept miserable existences. The Territory’s privileged say to the impoverished, to the marginalised, to the downtrodden “adjust your behaviour” despite that we keep you downtrodden. They tell them to get “resilient”, but how far and for how long can someone adjust their behaviour when resilience is standalone and there is no coupling opportunity and the hopes availed to every other Australian? I have quite clearly described here the oppressor and the oppressed.
It’s about bloody poverty, and of the worst kind; all the rest is disgraceful chatter.
So the Territory and Commonwealth governments have the choice all their predecessors have had, to bring on equality or to remain steadfastly morally and politically reprehensible and remain racists and oppressors.
I couldn’t agree more Mr. Georgatos; in my research to write fiction stories about these State & Territory, I found both WA & NT Govts’ and their Services are still living in the Colonial days and would generally wish a return to the days when the white-fellow was ‘Boss’ overall – much less hassle all around. Yes, some things and leaders are changing and decent folk are beginning to see the light of self-management. However, because of the remoteness of indigenous communities & the fact that mainstream Australia doesn’t even know the names of, or care about the towns and communities wherein most of the aboriginal folk were forcibly moved to in recent history, those who would keep aboriginal people in their place can get away with ‘murder’, in several recent cases literally. On the east coast of our wonderful and yet sacred land, indigenous people have had to move with the times being close to urban areas. The 16 remote communities on Cape York plus Yarrabah & Palm Island now have over sixty (60+), youth with University degrees, since programs began in 2005. These people are role models that still go home to their traditional lands with a foot in both societies no problems. It can be done and as we all know: only the indigenous people themselves can make the necessary changes for actual advancement. In fact, if one were to go through the number of people getting paid for several generations now, to ‘help’ these remote peoples, we would find as was found on Cape York, that millions of dollars are going to non-indigenous staff that have no desire to see a change. Many of these people have no genuine qualifications & couldn’t get a similar level of reimbursement or level of work in an urban environment, where one has to compete. But come to remote NT or WA & almost anyone that can read & write can make enough money to set oneself up for life in 5-10 years and feel important and superior while doing so. NT & WA should have had a plan for a 5 – 10 year system of training for indigenous people to take over these staff positions: make their mistakes & learn how to manage as did we all at some stage. Until this happens, we are all to blame for allowing an underground apartheid system to run our indigenous people in NT & WA. Shame, shame, shame Australia! You want to close the gap? Here’s the rub! WE can’t do it! The indigenous people themselves have to do it & unless we form a plan for this to begin – we’ll be still closing the freaking gap for the next 200 years.
Thank you John, much respect, Gerry.
John your response both complimented and complemented Gerry’s article – both were vague.
John was very specific about the affirmative actions required – the right for oneself to do and the right for those entitled to do to be trained up with the necessary skills. It’s a double affirmative action. Both and John and myself we’re specific of the ways forward. What part didn’t you understand about equality, social determinants, infrastructure, workforce parity? What part didn’t you understand about poverty and extreme poverty and the whys and therefore of the poverty and extreme poverty? Gerry
PS: “WE can’t do it! The indigenous people themselves have to do it” was a good comment.
I just wish that people who have not lived substantially in the Territory, and who have not lived in Aboriginal communities, would refrain from venturing their opinions.
That Aboriginal NT is in crisis and going from bad to worse, is not debatable. I make no bones about it; what is happening is genocide, pure and simple.
The real problem is that almost all commentators are transient and utterly incapable of making the cross-cultural interpretations necessary to understand what it is they are looking at; much less perceive solutions.
This is especially true of urban monolingual Indigenous who regard skin colour as a special qualification. Melanin does not magically instill culture in the mind. This can only be absorbed through language and behavior, so if you cannot speak an NT Aboriginal language you have buckleys chance of understanding anything that is happening in rural and remote Aboriginal NT.
Even those people who do speak local languages, regardless of ethnicity, are behind the eight ball because they invariably have no accurate understanding of western culture. And that is what we are ultimately talking about here… the clash between two opposing cultures: one (European) in which the prime value is Acquisition; and the other, which for millennia, has sought Harmony/Avoidance of Conflict. The two cultural imperatives are incompatible.
So what do western do-gooders do? Try to impose leadership and other western values. This means forcing unilateral dictatorial behavior on a consensus people.
How could this ever work?
The anthropologist Elkin saw the futility of this 80 years ago, and he understood the only path to resolution… abandonment of the colonial imposition of one-way language, and finally recognise Aboriginal languages as the first step in communication. Without this, nothing is going to change (he said). He was right.
For 230 years, NT Indigenous people have been forced to negotiate their survival in a foreign language: English; a language that for most is a fourth, fifth or even seventh language. This is a fundamental denial of the most basic human right. This is institutionalised and nationalised repression.
Readers, do you really get this? It means that pretty much nobody in any NT Aboriginal community has any idea what is happening in Australia, or the wider world for that matter. Denial of language means communication is completely cut off.
Now I hear plenty of westerners saying that many Aboriginal people can speak English, which is technically true, in a sense. But in half a century of experience here I have yet to encounter a single English word that has the same meaning to Aborigines. This is the impact of culture… that every word and concept is understood through the lens of culture, regardless of language.
So, reformers and do-gooders can talk for hours about education, health, and employment issues, but I can tell you that nobody here in Arnhem Land has any idea what you are talking about. They will smile and agree with you, but this is merely expression of culture. They are creating harmony with you, because in Aboriginal culture, this is the important thing to do. Meanwhile, you want to colonise them with a western way of living. What gives you this right?
Yes, there are paths to achieve Aboriginal good health, to launch jobs and enterprises, and resurrect a new and workable form of parenting to replace the old and collapsed extended family method, but the first step must flow from communication, carried out daily by people who speak Aboriginal languages fluently, and who also accurately understand the culture that is represented by the English language.
To the best of my knowledge, no such person exists. Government will have to pay for special cross-cultural training schools, to produce what are in fact sophisticated ambassadorial roles. This is the only way such objectives have been achieved over some 5000 years of international experience. Because Australians are monolingual they are blind to this need.
We have plenty of candidates for the roles but there is no political will to train such cross-cultural ambassadors because political leaders are lead astray by academics, anthropologists, and by urban Aboriginal media celebrities who speak no languages themselves and who, therefore, possess only a modified version of western culture.
This may be their ticket to easy street but their noise blocks out the voice from the bush.