Finding a voice in the quiet revolution

One person's story has just emerged.

Kerry Arabena is a descendant of the Meriam people in the Torres Strait. She has lived and worked in rural and remote Australia for a large part of her adult life, developing expertise in social health as a manager and worker in a number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations, including the Pintubi Homeland Health Service, west of the Alice, and the Cairns-based Apunimipa Cape York Health Council.

She is keenly interested "... in the replication and evolution of societies, particularly Indigenous societies; and the impact of the beliefs, values and attitudes of dominant groups on the capacities and aspirations of people who make up the minority".

Following the abolition of ATSIC and ATSIS in 2004 she accepted a position as Director of the Regional Governance Unit in the newly created OIPC, situated within DIMIA. Her job was to assist communities to develop regional representation strategies before the abolition of ATSIC Regional Councils.

It was a "sad job". During the ensuing months she found herself “... getting physically ill every morning I went into the office in the Lovett Tower, Woden in Canberra”. “This feeling would abate,” she recalls, “when travelling in communities and over the weekends, only to recur with full force upon my return… In the lifts going up to the fifth floor every morning I found this to be the case with many other Aboriginal, Torres Strait and non-Indigenous OIPC staff members.”

Needless to say, Arabena “... did not work long for the Australian Public Service”.

She was given the opportunity to take a short-term Visiting Research Fellowship at the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) reviewing the new arrangements in the administration of Indigenous Affairs, or as she puts it [to] "... read, think, write and reflect [for the] first time in my life".

The result is a thought-provoking, if slightly over-written, 57-page research discussion paper entitled: Not Fit for Modern Australian Society: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the new arrangements for the administration of Indigenous Affairs.

Arabena found an environment at AIATSIS which "promotes cultural safety" and developed her paper "... primarily to understand my adverse physical reaction to working at OIPC and to provide an analysis about the new arrangements and some strategies for consideration by the new Indigenous leadership".

There is not enough space here to do her paper justice. She skilfully lays bare the denial of Indigeneity inherent in the Howard Government's mainstream mania, accentuated by her own experience in the OIPC workplace over the past year.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, she contends, are being made "... fit for modern Australian society by overcoming our status as 'disadvantaged citizens' to take our rightful place in the social, economic and cultural life of our country. This assertion is framed in a way that simply allows us to 'overcome our disadvantage'. These new arrangements are not about forging relationships with Indigenous peoples, but instead about resisting and minimising the recognition that is provided to our cultures, our history, our capacities to contribute and our ongoing connection with the land".

She worked for a government "... ill equipped to deal with the contemporary political consequences of Indigenous identity (including separate representative structures and inclusive cultural aspirations) and this incapacity significantly influences how the government treats those who are different.