Back in October last year, I promised a group of Aboriginal stockmen that I would soon return to observe progress in the re-establishment of an Aboriginal cattle industry in the Northern Territory.
It was not a promise that I considered I could break just because I now had a different job. The problems of indigenous Australia need to be taken seriously by Australia’s leaders and not just by the ministers and shadow ministers with special responsibility for them.
That’s how I came to be on a quad bike, low on fuel, following tyre tracks in the gathering dark earlier this week. That’s how I sampled a witchety grub and honey ants dug up by the women of an outstation called Ukaka.
These are the sort of experiences that politicians need to have if they are to have some understanding of the issues facing remote indigenous people and some real engagement with Aboriginal people trying to live on country.
In 2001, on my first trip to Cape York as a cabinet minister, a local person had likened government officials to seagulls: whities who fly in, scratch around, and fly off.
Ever since, I have tried to build ongoing relationships with indigenous people based on something more than the standard drive around the community, meeting with the local council and, perhaps, visit to the art centre. Of necessity, there have been plenty of those. As health minister, though, I made three longer trips to the APY Lands in northern South Australia. As shadow minister for indigenous affairs, I spent three weeks as a teacher’s aide at Coen in Cape York in 2008 and, last year, spent 10 days helping the truancy team at Aurukun. Election campaign permitting, I will have another stint in Cape York later this year helping, I hope, local people who are building homes for their community.
Official advice is important but politicians can’t really hope to understand the issues they are required to deal with if they rarely leave capital cities and are never out of their comfort zones. One of the reasons why Aboriginal policy has been so unsuccessful, despite an abundance of official goodwill, is that few policy-makers have ever spent a night in an Aboriginal community or mixed with Aboriginal people except those who have made it into the middle class. The experiential gulf between most Australians and most remote Aboriginal people is so vast that it takes more than diligent reading to grasp.
Most remote Aboriginal people are only a couple of generations away from a hunter gather existence. Many have pre-modern connectedness to land, systems of kinship obligation, and sense of the sacred. This helps to explain contemporary Australia’s fascination with indigenous culture. Our mourning for the loss of so much traditional culture, in part, reflects regret for our own loss of authenticity. Modern Australians’ desire to engage with Aboriginal people is entirely to the good but it should encompass an unsentimental appreciation of the downside as well as the upside of Aboriginal ways of life.
Our best guides to deeper insights into Aboriginal life and how it might be more fulfilling are usually Aboriginal people who are fully immersed in their own traditional culture as well as in that of modern Australia: people such as Noel Pearson and the host for my latest trip, Ian Conway. Conway is a traditional owner of much of the land on which Alice Springs is built. He’s also one of the few cultural Aborigines to have built a successful private sector business in remote Australia. Getting a party of scratchy politicians and journalists across miles of rough country at night was a remarkable feat of instinctive navigation.
I may not have much uncluttered time for the rest of my period in public life. Even so, the press of events is a poor excuse for neglecting what’s really important in favour of the merely urgent. That’s why I will continue to seek opportunities to move off the well-worn paths of politics.
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