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Bringing back 'Aunty'

By Liz Conor - posted Tuesday, 4 July 2006


It's a crying shame that the courageous revelations of Alice Springs Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers have incited nothing but competitive and defensive posturing by Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal Brough, and the Northern Territory Chief Minister, Clare Martin.

While they bicker at and begrudge one another's proposals, they walk roughshod over the knowledge and experience of Indigenous leaders. If one thing characterises the Howard Government’s treatment of black Australia, it is its arrogant disregard for, and active undermining of, black leaders’ authority.

Brough’s determined exclusion of policy formulators, such as Marcia Langton, Noel Pearson and Patrick Dodson who recently set up the new the Lingiari Policy Centre, is symptomatic of his government's paternalism. Tying services, that white Australians enjoy with taxpayer righteousness, to school attendance and children’s hygiene moves beyond paternalism. It is racially discriminatory. Brough has the cranky swagger of Rex Harrison, cursing on the set of My Fair Lady, "Why can’t they be more like us".

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He does, however, appeal to a broad-based consensus - the violence is unacceptable and somehow has to be addressed. But if he knew just a smidgen of Australia’s colonial history, it might guide him through the mire of white perceptions of Indigenous gender relations and violence and enable him to sort through long-standing myth.

Violence toward women and the early betrothal of girls in Aboriginal communities was a pervasive stereotype in settlers' and administraters' accounts of early colonial Australia. Over a vast archive of Australian print media, domestic violence, as we’ve come to call it, was as much a staple of white accounts of Aboriginal peoples as skulls, place names and artifacts.

Our present abhorrence of violence in communities, and calls for intervention, are indelibly shaped by this long-standing tradition. It says much about colonial gender relations: the cult of "true womanhood" and the pervasive trope of the chivalrous explorer or settler who was able to discern the finer of point of "lubra" grace and dignity, not to mention the naïve and uncalculating beauty of the Australian "native belle".

Colonial men had a lot of gall, given their "interference" with Aboriginal women and children, not to mention the dreadful record of treatment of convict women and girls, to portray Aboriginal men as "savages" in the treatment of their women. This specious gallantry was a colonial observance which helped to establish a rights discourse over the sexual misappropriation of not only Aboriginal women, but their children and their lands.

Also historically instructive is the writing out of Aboriginal maternity in all but anthropological accounts of Aborigines. While it was common for white men to note with a kind of inadvertent admiration the tender affection that Aboriginal men showed toward children and their direct involvement in their daily care, the figure of the piccaninny, popularly consumed by whites throughout the 20th century, was invariably alone in the bush, the unadmitted black orphan of white conscience.

Aboriginal mothers again are absent in the recent revelations of child abuse. It is not dissimilar to legal and support service attitudes toward mothers of children abused by their partners, that somehow they had to know, that somehow they are more culpable than the men that raped their children.

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But these conventions are not all determining of present responses to gendered violence in Aboriginal communities. As Henry Reynolds work shows there have always been sympathetic whites who, though sometimes the appropriators of Aboriginal land - and in so many cases misguided and exploitative, they nevertheless shed light on the occurrence of violence in post-contact communities, all of them profoundly impacted by the trauma of displacement, loss of context for systems of governance, observance of law, alongside unimaginable grief, despair and rage.

Daisy Bates is perhaps exemplary of conditions and terms under which white sympathy was expressed. She lied to the elders, letting them believe she was a ghostly manifestation of their revered ancestors, Kabbarli, and she misused this authority to pinch precious artifacts, crucial in the observance of law, which she shipped off to museums.

She flogged hundreds of sensationalist articles to the press - often to fund the assistance she was providing - about infanticide and cannibalism. But she also nursed entire communities through whooping cough and an array of white-imported diseases. She was, like all of us, absolutely appalled by the trafficking and abuse of Aboriginal women and girls, but it should be stressed - by white men, along the Ooldea railway siding. Bates had an absolute horror of the "half-caste" and race degeneration.

Most Australians are acutely aware of a long history of whites "intervening" in Aboriginal family and community structures, justifying the removal of women and children on the grounds of violence against them. In fact, their real concern was that the white blood of "half-caste" children would be submerged in "primitive" tribal tradition if the children were not "absorbed", biologically and culturally, into the "white way of life".

We now know that these children, who were loved and cherished by their families, were placed in institutions and white homes where, in a truly shocking number of cases, they were subjected to physical and sexual violence, emotional neglect and the constant and debilitating undermining of their Indigenous identities.

While this very history gives us pause to intervene in communities where abuse is now rife, it could be used thoughtfully by the likes of Brough to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

The devastating fact of children being hurt and the clear priority for their safety and well-being threatens to overwhelm the lessons of history. The early suggestion to send in the army shows the hallmarks of understandable panic. It would hardly make children feel "safe". It would have turned their townships into militarised combat zones.

We know from history that removing children induces crises in identity, the consequences of which we arguably can see so tragically played out today in Aboriginal communities.

The argument to remove the perpetrators gains strength from collective memory of the suffering of removed children, but it also takes instruction from service providers in family violence across all communities.

Still missing however, in this excavating of histories that we know too well Howard would like to see dead and buried, is Aboriginal people. There have been many brave and extraordinary initiatives by elders, mostly women in remote communities, to halt the spread of petrol sniffing and substance abuse. These elders need to be brought to the table, empowered to act, promised the delivery of services and resources and a mix of their traditional authority and white law brought to bear on the perpetrators.

I may be naively invoking yet another colonial stereotype, but it seems to me the figure of the "Aunty" recurs in Aboriginal biography as playing a key role in the survival of Aboriginal families since white incursion.

Since white mistresses often demanded that Aboriginal domestic workers - who were often mothers - "live in" and since the pastoral work of Aboriginal fathers was often itinerant, Aboriginal life histories sometimes tell the tale of an "Aunty" home where kids were looked after and thrived among their extended families.

Perhaps each township should have some kind of "Aunty" safe home - government-funded, supported by health workers and community police, supporting mothers, linked to schools and subject to mandatory reporting so that perpetrators cannot access their victims.

If violence in Aboriginal communities has always been a part of white perception, this is surely cause not to shy away from it but to learn from the mistakes and ineptitude of the past. We need to empower the elders, particularly the women, who have despaired at the abuse and dislocation in their communities.

The remote communities need a police presence highly trained in the aftermath of colonialism on Indigenous communities, the structures of authority within those communities - where they are not being invoked to justify abuse - and in exactly how those women and children will experience "safety", given their connectedness to place and community.

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About the Author

Liz Conor is a research fellow in the Department of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Read her blog Liz Conor: Comment and Critique here.

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