Homogenous? I don't think so

The black and white leaders who make decisions that impact on the lives of Indigenous people ought to get with the times or move on. They also need to know that Indigenous people do live south of the line that runs from Townsville across to Broome.

In the past couple of months I’ve had the good fortune of being invited to speak at a diversity of conferences in various locations including Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Darwin and many centres in between.

The one constant of all topics shared with old and new friends is the issue of identity.

From informal chats at these conferences, with leaders presenting papers on the same dais to those observant and engaging attendees, I gathered a strong sense that there is, on the one hand, a feeling of oneness (as being from a single Indigenous ancestry) but, on the other hand, a definite disquiet for their rights to be respected by others by not being pigeon holed as homogenous (all one people).

It seems they are happy to cheer on Anthony Mundine as one of the mob when he enters the boxing ring and raises his hand in victorious salute, but hate it when they are made to feel guilty, because of a perceived association by others, when a description of a wanted serious offender is read on the radio or television news as being of Aboriginal descent.

Many speakers at the “Who you calling urban?” conference, hosted by the Australian National Museum in Canberra, asked why 70 per cent of the Indigenous population that live in urban areas receive the smallest piece of the financial pie while the minority who live in remote areas receive the lion’s share of federal funds.

Many participants posed the question: “What does an Indigenous person look like - given that we are so diverse in appearance?"; "What single facial and physical characteristic best represents an Indigenous Australian in 2007?”

At the same conference many participants were challenged, some affronted, by the controversial arguments offered by two of our most talent artists: Richard Bell, from “white women can’t hump?” fame, and Vernon Ah Kee. Vernon, a north Queensland artist on the rise who paints “… Aborigine[s] as a worthy subject to be sure, but my intention is to strip away from the image any of the romantic and ‘exoticised’ notions of primitivism, virtue and most importantly, the decorative stone-age”.

Richard shocked the more mature paying attendees by telling them emphatically that he is a reformed homophobe and racist and later told them that they were in fact all Christian racists. Before the audience could regather their collective breath an old Jewish lady identified herself to the assembly as having escaped the concentration camp of Auschwitz and most definitely wasn’t a Christian or a racist.

Vernon, without blinking an eyelid, said “… you might think you’re not a racist but your act of choosing to move to the whitest of all white countries; Australia, was in fact a racist act”.

A deafening hush fell over the entire Vision Theatre crowd as they sank into their comfortable seating.

You could’ve heard a pin drop.

I haven’t heard that level of racial discourse since the good old days of attending, as an impressionable teenager on weekend leave from boarding school, the black power sessions in the back of the old FAIRA office in George Street, Brisbane when Dennis Walker, Cheryl Buchanan and Sam Watson Jn. were at their rhetorical best.

Do Richard Bell and Vernon Akee speak for the majority of marginalised Aboriginal people today or does the old saying of Muhammad Ali ring true that: “The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life”?