Another angry, confused, condemning white voice

If he’d listened further, he may have discovered that ceremony is school, it is university and is widely referred to as such by Indigenous people. He may have discovered that the Anglo-Australian education system has so little interest in the gifts that the world’s oldest continuous culture has to offer it that it can’t even be bothered to teach kids in their own language, that it doesn’t even teach them English for the most part, preferring to continue its pigheaded, failed strategy of teaching them in English, as if by just talking at them, students will magically pick up not only the content component of the lesson, but will also somehow learn this foreign language.

Of the incredibly rich and complex philosophy, science and theory of social relations (to name just a few branches of Indigenous knowledge) there is no sign in the classroom. As in the wider society, Indigenous people and knowledge remain invisible.

Instead of working together, building on the vast resources already there, our education system prefers to wipe the slate clean and teach the natives our ways. Little wonder then that school is poorly attended.

(For those that doubt this richness, perhaps the words of a non- Indigenous person who knows some of this complexity may convince you otherwise. Nearing the completion of an anthropology doctorate he told me, in all seriousness, that the immense body of knowledge in just one song cycle is greater than that in a whole PhD.)

For Toohey too, these immense intellectual resources are invisible - he doesn’t want to know (p9), regarding this heritage as being “indoctrinated by a tribe” (p9). Indoctrination, however, is a far more apt description for the cultural imperialism being practised - albeit incompetently - by the education system and the wider non-Indigenous society.

While he seems, at best, ambivalent about Indigenous culture and law (or lore as he calls it), Toohey has no such second thoughts about permits or land rights. Land rights, he asserts, have brought “isolation, deprivation and indolence” (p9) to communities, full of “unmotivated Aborigines stew[ing] in their own inactivity or ineffectiveness” (p20).

Permits are in reality a systematised granting of access to private land, a fundamental tenet of land ownership being the right to control access - unpermitted entry to any private land is called trespass. Why this should be any different for Aboriginal people is not explained. Despite widespread implications otherwise, including by Toohey here, the only people who have power to evict people from Aboriginal land, or even ask to see a permit, are police. Additionally, contrary to the implication at p80, even before the Intervention, permits were issued as a matter of course to all public servants at Ministerial discretion, with no control by the Land Councils. For someone who has had such intimate contact with the permit system the ignorance of such basic facts is startling.

While Toohey talks up assimilation and talks down Indigenous culture (and assumes our right to change it as we see fit - e.g. “the society … had to be addressed and corrected” (p19, my emphasis)) he, perhaps wisely, avoids broaching the subject of places like Redfern, where Indigenous people - without the encumbrances of land rights, permits, remoteness, Indigenous language - are still holding onto their identity, still stubbornly refusing to become white and are still marginalised by non-Indigenous society.

Until those of us who are non-Indigenous can live in harmony with our Indigenous sisters and brothers in The Block, we should stop telling them what’s in their best interests.

But then maybe Toohey does think that it’s Anglo-Australian society’s corrosive influence that is the cause of today’s problems. In his “baffling, self cancelling … way” (p53) while he talks about the horrors of permits and land rights, he also makes it clear that “it [is] in the main [Anglo-Australian dominated] towns … where most of the violence and abuse [is] happening” (p14). Indeed, he ends this deeply confused piece with the heart-breaking story of Sophia, “a town girl, not a bush girl” (p97).

His demonisation of land rights and permits sits very uncomfortably with his assertions that problems are worst where Indigenous people live in close contact with non-Indigenous culture.

So, what are we to conclude from Toohey’s self-contradictory and unreflective essay? In one sense, it’s hard to conclude anything, as there seems to be little in the way of a consistent or clear argument.