HOWARD’S DESERT STORM

LIZ CONOR ON PATERNITY, PATERNALISM AND ABORIGINAL CHILDREN.

I THOUGHT I knew, or at least had some idea. Until I read the Bringing Them Home report I was like any other non-Indigenous Australian. I operated under a set of understandings about our past that was piecemeal – well-intended but uninformed. Since reading that report and recent Indigenous history, knowledge has rebuilt me from the inside out. It is a way of ‘knowing’ that alters how I occupy this land and collect the dividends of colonialism. And it places an indelible question mark over the success of white ways of living.
    In June of this year Mr Howard read another report – Little Children Are Sacred – and experienced, it seems, a similar epiphany. But he arrived at very different conclusions. Given his record – undermining Indigenous land rights through his response to the Wik decision; dismantling ATSIC; cutting funding for a range of health, housing and education programs while espousing ‘practical reconciliation’ – it’s been difficult not to view his epiphany with scepticism.
    Howard’s call to arms was an extraordinary and unprecedented mobilisation of the military to operate as a peacekeeping force for domestic violence. But I would defy our federal Indigenous Affairs Minister, Mal Brough, to uncover a child protection file in any sexual assault agency in the entire country which shows a child disclosing sexual abuse to a soldier.
    Marching camouflaged combatants into sixty Northern Territory communities as though paedophilia is a national disaster that can be sandbagged is a script fit for the Marx Brothers. ‘Sending in the Feds’ created a pre-election media event out of the very communities who begged for policing all through the 1989, 1991, 1993, 1997 and 2002 federal reports into violence and sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities.
    It was too late for this Johnny-come-lately to Indigenous welfare. Howard’s failure to respond to another national calamity of Aboriginal child abuse – the Stolen Generations – and his attempt to relegate it to a history in which he had no part, had already coloured the way he will be remembered, as our Australian superhero of patriotic amnesia. The trauma of the Stolen Generations caught up with him. It is written through every page of the Little Children Are Sacred report. The past shapes and determines our present and, until we collectively reconcile ourselves to it, we will remain haunted by its impact.
    Precisely because child sexual abuse is rife across all communities, it has a number of characteristics we can identity with confidence. It is cyclic, in that victims often become perpetrators. But this cycle is entirely determined by gender. Girls remain the overwhelming majority of victims, yet they do not go on to offend as adults. Paedophiles can pass on to their male victims a particular version of masculine identity in which sexual intimacy is framed by violence and coercion, and the right of sexual access inheres in being an adult male.
    For Aboriginal victims, the cycle goes back further, enmeshed in the ‘civilising’ and ‘assimilation’ projects. The sexual abuse of Aboriginal children was already endemic in mission settlements, church and government training homes, in pastoral and domestic work placements, and in foster and adoption placements. Whatever inference might be made about traditional child betrothal and the sexual access of older men, those anthropologists, such as Phyllis M. Kaberry and Diane Bell, who bothered to consider the position of women made it clear that, in the communities they documented, both boys and girls were bestowed but not married until after initiation, which might take place some years after sexual maturity. The sexual misappropriation of Aboriginal children was a distinctly white exploit.
    From my own research into white imaginings of Aboriginal women and children, there are two striking themes recurring throughout settlement.
    Aboriginal children were seen as ‘petted’ and ‘made much of’ by their communities, so much so that some thought they were undisciplined and ‘spoiled’. There is a remarkable consensus in colonial accounts that ‘piccaninnies’ had happy, rambling childhoods, later romanticised in the enormously popular ceramics of Brownie Downing, the water colours of Peg Maltby and the children’s stories of Mary and Elizabeth Durack. To rifle through these archives over the last weeks and see the particular beauty European-Australians identified in Aboriginal children has been poignant indeed. It is a reminder of the peculiar investment European-Australians have always had in rescuing the child remnants of a ‘dying’ – but now ‘self-destructing’ – race, as well as in trafficking those children, for labour and sexual misappropriation and, on another level, for spectacle and ornament.
    The second theme concerns the calamitous impact of colonisation on local Aborigines, something which could not escape European eyes. White Australians have always been witnesses to the sufferings of disease, alcohol abuse and violence, made more visible amongst Aboriginal communities through the itinerancy of displacement.Occasionally, colonial accounts record Europeans’ dismay and resignation at the appalling toll produced by their own presence. Mostly, though, colonials looked across the barrier of colour and imagined they were seeing a ‘Hobbesian nightmare’, as Howard has called it: a state of nature in which humanity was degraded by the daily grind for animal subsistence.
     The rest, as they say, is history. In their rush to ‘protect’ Aborigines from European ‘vice’ and disease, colonials attempted to make the ‘native’ over in their own image. Yet the project of assimilation – officially endorsed as government policy in the mid-twentieth century but previously enshrined in the ‘civilising mission’ – involved a profound ambivalence. For all their claims of racial and religious superiority, Europeans were beset with the insecurity arising from the evidence of suffering before their very eyes.
    It was not at all uncommon for colonials to rue the incursion of European ‘vice’ into Aboriginal communities. They knew they were far from perfect and that ‘civilising’ or ‘assimilating’ the Aborigines might contribute to rather than alleviate the ‘benighted condition’ of Indigenous people. The drunken, brawling, itinerant ‘savage’ of early colonial artist Charles Rodius (1802–60) was our own civilisation’s portrait of Dorian Gray and, by transplanting ‘moral vice’ onto the ‘Aboriginal problem’, Europeans maintained an exalted image of themselves.
    We see a similar dynamic at work now: the disavowal of the historical workings of European ‘vice’ in the society of the racial other, as child sexual abuse and domestic violence become Aboriginal problems.
    Howard has a new word for assimilation. He calls it ‘integration’. He has been enforcing his assimilation-make-over through ‘Shared Responsibility Agreements’ (SRAs) which render welfare entitlements dependent on assessments of children’s hygiene and school attendance. Children have always been the focus of state administration of Aboriginal affairs: today, we invoke the Victorian-era sentiment of rescuing the ‘rising generation’ through policy-speak about ‘long-term generational response’. What this means is that, once again, whites imagine change as embodied in the children, with the rest of the community is figured as a lost cause not dissimilar to a ‘dying race’. The task of the Aboriginal child, then, is to mature towards white ways of living, achieving lawful civility in part through separating themselves from black ways of living – a task which revives the image portrayed by Rodius.
    Let me be absolutely unequivocal here. Aboriginal children are as entitled to safety as non-Indigenous children. It is their inalienable right. For non-Indigenous children, safety is secured through the intervention of government health and protection agencies and, in the last resort, by the police. Government reports from 1989 document an incidence of domestic violence and child sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities sufficient to warrant intervention. What hasn’t been made clear is how that intervention will stop assaults on women and children.
    From the nineteenth-century protection era, government-appointed ‘police protectors’ attempted and simply failed to combine the contradictory roles of policing with protection. Such policies created the circumstances for widespread, recurrent and long-term rorting of welfare entitlements and wages, blackmailing of mothers for sexual favours, grog running and brutality. Policing is critical to communities experiencing breakdown but so are rehabilitation and trauma counsellors, doctors, legal advocates and translators, to name just a few other elements. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, as Anna Haebich (author of the acclaimed Broken Circles) makes clear, it was simply cheaper to remove the children and incarcerate them in grossly under-funded government training homes, nearly all of which criminally breached fiduciary care. If there are any lessons from the Bringing Them Home report – which Mr Howard should frankly own up to not having read – it is that cheap fixes perpetuate trauma, substance abuse, family dislocation, economic marginalisation and welfare dependency. If ancillary services are not provided, the police will be working in yet another policy vacuum.
    We’ve set ourselves apart from Aborigines by imagining that we’ve got a ‘handle’ on all of the contemporary signs of social dysfunction: alcoholism, pornography, domestic violence, child sexual assault. In the case of porn, debate over the past decades has roundly dismissed any causal relation between pornography and sexual assault. Not for Aborigines, though. It was once widely believed that Aborigines couldn’t ‘hold their drink’. Now, they ‘can’t handle their porn’. One recalls the recommendation of the 1927 royal commission into the Australian film industry that Aborigines should be banned from cowboy films, since these were concerned with frontier conflicts over stock and land. It was felt Aborigines were too impressionable.
    Perhaps what’s most confronting about the present crisis in remote Aboriginal communities are the implications for abuse of alcohol and access to porn in the non-Indigenous community. Not because alcohol and porn disinhibit an inherently sadistic component of male sexuality that is ordinarily successfully repressed through ‘civilising’, but because the modes of consumption of alcohol and porn can encode meanings of masculine heterosexual identity that tally with ideas of the right of sexual access through coercion.
    European Australians have never seen Aboriginal men as part of their families. In early accounts there was sometimes surprise at their tender involvement in caring for children, but Aboriginal fathers were mostly seen as ignorant of their biological paternity, as unable to provide for their families, and as failing to discipline their children.
    The cover art for the May 1924 edition of Aussie is more than a simple visual pun. It is an indictment of white perceptions of Aboriginal fathers as incapable of understanding the needs of infants.
    The structure of families and responsibility of care and providing were so diffuse that Europeans simply lost sight of Aboriginal fathers. They believed that Aboriginal men didn’t grasp biological paternity and were therefore barely fathers at all. If Aboriginal families were improperly headed, the intervention of the paternal state seemed almost natural. That the (most probable) father in the cartoon is caught in the circle of a (most probable) policeman’s torch shines the fatherly light of the paternal state over a scene of familial abjection. It is the light in which John Howard now seeks to cast himself – and in which most Australians are still frozen like rabbits.
    Throughout the debacle of the Stolen Generations we rushed to ‘save’ children, not from neglect and abuse (as is commonly claimed) but from their Aboriginality. There was little if any reflection that our institutions – church-run orphanages, police ‘protectors’ and now the army – might not be the ideal apparatuses with which to induct a people into white laws, white language, white relations to property, the white way of living.
    As though there is no other viable way to live. As if our way of living isn’t, in fact, the crux of the problem.
    The ‘horrifying and sickening’ reality of assimilation is that aspects of our way of living were ultimately destructive of this nation’s first peoples. The more European-Australians engaged with, lived with and participated in Aboriginal family structure, economy, language and law, the more some wondered at their own conceit, and whether in fact there wasn’t a better way to live right in front of them. For some it was simply romanticism of the noble savage; for others, the survival and persistence of Aboriginality was an indictment of their own civilisation.
    Howard’s desert storm may have unwittingly precipitated a moment of reckoning, with the universal community sentiment supporting the protection of Aboriginal children also propelling him into promising a referendum about a statement of reconciliation. Many Aboriginal leaders are hopeful for change and it seems churlish to recall that Howard’s tricky wording in the republic referendum defeated the aspirations of most Australians. We must give this reckoning every chance of success. If ‘we’ want to ‘save’ abused Indigenous children, for their sake we also have to reconcile with the failings of our past, and not attempt to shift white ‘dysfunction’ onto Aborigines. And if we ‘save’ Aboriginal children only for our nation’s future, under another grand scale nationalistic paternity claim, we’ll once again displace them from their distinct and rightful inheritance as first peoples. Once again, Aboriginal kids will round the cycle of trauma, alienation and dependency, while non-Indigenous Australians will quite earnestly but unknowingly compound their ignorance. Among the global village of nations wherein history threatens to repeat itself, Australia will be the idiot.

Liz Conor is a postdoctoral fellow at Melbourne University researching white imaginings of Aboriginal women and children. In 1990 she counselled at the Bendigo Sexual Assault Centre. She is a support member of Stolen Generations Victoria.

© Liz Conor

Overland 189 – summer 2007, pp.12–15.

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