Sorry for What?

Sorry for What?

Silke Beinssen-Hesse

Monash University, 2002

Though I am somewhat of an outsider, I have decided to attend an Alice Springs conference on the Strehlows, father and son, and their contribution to the study, the preservation and possibly even the destruction of Aboriginal culture in Central Australia. Strehlow senior came to Hermannsburg on the Finke river, eighty miles south-west of Alice Springs, as a Lutheran missionary in the late nineteenth century and between then and his death in 1922 published seven learned volumes on Aranda-Loritja language, customs and myths. In those early frontier days when white settlers and the police were, not to mince words, waging war on the natives whose country they had invaded, his “mission block” provided sanctuary, sustenance in the form of the usual sugar, flour, tea, tobacco and beef, a determined and charismatic advocate who gave protection against the lawlessness of  white farmers and police officers, and schooling in the language, religion, customs, and agricultural techniques of the white man. On the overcrowded and financially struggling mission station birth rates did not decline, as everywhere else.  But hamstrung by his profession and his own fundamentalist Christian beliefs, Carl Strehlow was never able to give full recognition to the religious beliefs of Aboriginal people. He never once attended one of the ceremonies which he so carefully and intelligently recorded, true to the information provided by native informants. Consequently his relationship with the natives always remained one-sided and paternalistic.

Carl Strehlow’s son, Theo or Ted, was born at Hermannsburg in 1908 and grew up among the natives, speaking Aranda as one of his native languages, considering himself and, it appears, being considered as a bicultural native with a passionate commitment to native welfare and the preservation of native culture and life. He studied literature, linguistics and anthropology to render him fit to record  the rapidly disappearing languages, customs and myths, and he assumed the official position of “Protector of Natives” in order to secure and put into practice the most favorable conditions for Aboriginal people that governments, during those years, were willing to concede. He was eventually asked to be custodian of sacred lore and objects by some of the old men of the Aranda tribe who felt they could no longer trust the young generation. Though on the whole he jealously guarded this endowment, too jealously in the view of many fellow anthropologists, he was accused of sacrilege when he sold some culturally sensitive photographs to the German magazine Stern. The repercussions caused him severe grief in the last years of his dedicated life. In contrast to his father, who had simply recorded what he was told, Ted Strehlow’s writings were devoted to building bridges between white and “dark” people, to awakening in white readers the understanding and deep respect he himself felt for native culture. He was convinced that if the strangeness and inaccessibility were overcome, white people would do everything in their power to halt the destruction they had caused. Rather, they would humbly admit how much they could learn from the “primitive” culture they had, misled by anthropologists like Baldwin Spencer who had never bothered to learn an Aboriginal language, assumed to be quaint, nonsensical  and worthless.

Throughout the last century Europeans have approached primitive cultures with different preconceptions. For the evolutionists the Aboriginal people were only half a step up from animals and there were no strong inhibitions to treat them similarly. For some Christians they were, like all mankind, fallen men, more deeply estranged from their divine image than Europeans, but still children of God in whom the seeds of true religion lay dormant and could be reawakened by missionary ministration. For the “enlightened” disciples of Rousseau they were enviable children of nature, who could teach us true humanity. Depending on your epistemological background, your approach to native peoples was likely to be quite different. In spite of his Lutheran background, Ted Strehlow’s approach was closest to that of Rousseau. 

There have also been different motivations for recording primitive cultures: adding to the store of knowledge about the world, trying to understand the nature of man in all the stages of his evolutionary development, contrasting yourself with the “other” in order to become more fully aware of your own nature, appropriating, desecrating and explaining away what is most sacred to a vanquished people and thus making their dispossession complete,  promoting an understanding of unfamiliar cultures with which our explorations of the globe have brought us face to face and winning respect for them as knowledge and custom and morality worth emulating or, finally, preserving a dying culture so its future generations may be able to retrieve and reoccupy it, re-embed in it, at least to some extent. Australian Aborigines, for whom secret-sacred knowledge had once been their most valued possession, perhaps the only thing, along with the land to which it referred, they considered as being of irreplaceable and permanent value, have decided that further dispossession was the most likely motive for white interest in their lore and, even if it had not been the original motive of all researchers, was the effect these interventions had produced.

Ted Strehlow himself had always stressed that myth and the ritual associated with it were extremely valuable possessions, drawing his readers’ attention to the extraordinarily high price in pain and disciplined patience the owners of the myths of their conception sites had always had to pay the old men, in whose memory the songs and traditions were stored. It appears that his decision to commit “sacrilege” and sell photos of secret-sacred rituals to the Stern magazine was to raise money to house and safeguard his collection and therefore not motivated by selfish greed. It was by no means the first time such photos had been published. The question of control of and responsibility  for entrusted knowledge for which one has paid with one’s life’s work is a difficult one. But it is not surprising that Aboriginal people felt that it was quite inappropriate that their women should thus have access to forbidden knowledge and, more specifically, that white people with their voracious reading and collecting habits should consume their sacred myths and rituals along with everything else they briefly turned their attention to, and perhaps giggle about the childishness of stories whose significance eluded them completely. Consequently, they decided to take control of the last vestiges of just about the only thing that was left to them to control, and who can deny that this was a timely and justified move. All the same, many Aranda people are today grateful that Ted Strehlow took upon himself the Herculean task of recording their customs and, above all, translating hundreds of stanzas of their poetry in those crucial years before much of this knowledge passed away for ever with the passing of the old men who were its living store-houses.

Ted Strehlow also drew attention to the fact that Aboriginal attitudes of custodianship towards the land, in preference to the exploitation and degradation characteristic of white farming, were far better suited to the preservation of a fragile landscape. And he pointed out that a social system, in which power and influence were fairly evenly dispersed, at least among men, and in which mutual obligations assured the fair distribution of care and resources among all members of a community, came much closer to the ideals Christ once preached than our hierarchical western social structures and our competitive practices. Rather than imposing their mythologies on these people, Christians should learn from them what it meant to implement the morality to which they paid lip service.

Finally Ted Strehlow made it clear to his readers that one could not generalize about Aboriginal people, who were all individuals with different talents, personalities and faults, or even about particular tribes that were normally strongly segmented within themselves. Among tribes, there were exclusively patrilineal sub-groups like the Northern Aranda with rigid structures that favored the old men and left very little leeway for the originality of the young. This resulted in their young men often willingly defecting to the white man. There were also tribes with a combined matri- and patrilineal culture like the Southern Aranda, where ambiguities opened up possibilities for original expression in, for example, the ritual dances. What was acceptable in one culture was often unacceptable in another, the myths told in one culture were given a different slant in another. Generalizations and stereotypical characterizations were as inappropriate for black people as they were for white people, even though social structures and daily pursuits could further the development of particular habits and abilities. Getting to know “Aboriginal people” was nothing that could be achieved in a hurry. In his defense of the Hermannsburg artists who allowed themselves to be inspired and taught by Rex Batterbee, foremost among them the gifted Albert Namatjira, Ted Strehlow pointed out to the critics of this “un-Aboriginal” art that traditionally native art had been so totally in the service of ritual that there had been no scope for individual artistic expression or development. The new western-influenced art was giving Aboriginal people a novel and valuable means of expressing love of their country, without in any way interfering with their traditional culture. Ted Strehlow tried to envisage a balance between the traditional and the new, from which there was now no escape. If he advocated reservations, it was not as time-capsules or zoos or museums or prisons but as meeting places and sanctuaries from white harassment.

I admire the work of Ted Strehlow and I am saddened that there should have been a falling out with the people he tried so hard to serve. The struggles of vanquished and dispossessed peoples to establish an identity and a livelihood within the culture of their conquerors passes through many stages. What may have been helpful at one stage is no longer so at another. It is not easy to be of assistance, particularly when governments, departments and institutions demand of those on the ground, who might have developed some real understanding of a specific situation, that their regulations and policies be followed. It is also not easy to help communities whose despair has taken on self-destructive and anti-social forms. It has become the fashion to malign white people working in Aboriginal communities. If white people refused to do this work their unhelpfulness would be criticized. It is, of course, true that the problems of substance abuse and the abuse of women and children, rife within many communities, must be tackled from within too and that government bodies need to be receptive to suggestions made by Aboriginal people, suggestions about how health and education and employment opportunities can be improved. It is sad that the helpless fury of many Aboriginal people is often vented on white people who are doing everything they can to help, be it in a clumsy or in a tactful and effective way, but this too is understandable. I am speaking from experience here; three of my children or their partners have had a professional involvement with Aboriginal people. Most of the time it was received cooperatively, even gratefully; twice one of them became the butt of misdirected resentments and consequently withdrew as soon as this was possible.

What of the wider population whom our government is supposed to represent? I think it falls into two groups. There are those in the south who have almost no personal acquaintance with Aboriginal people but, if they are on the left of the political spectrum or part of the ecological movement, are prepared to champion them  as underdogs or hold them up as models of good custodianship of the land. Their own strong love of the Australian landscape, its weathered shapes, its earthy colors, its unique flora and fauna, lets them presume that they will find allies and kindred spirits among Aboriginal people. They are frequently critical of technological change and nostalgic about a past in the lap of nature, reverent before myths and artifacts they perceive as its relics. They often feel real guilt about the destruction wrought by the white invaders whose descendents they are and would be prepared to make significant sacrifices to expiate this guilt and render undone what cannot be undone. They are heirs of the Enlightenment with its admiration of the “noble savage”. Their intentions are good though sometimes unrealistic and, unintentionally, patronizing. Many would jump at the opportunity to meet Aboriginal people at first hand, and many use their long service leave or retirement to approach this aim. While their naivety may be irritating to Aboriginal people whose artifacts they buy on their trips and cherish for evermore, they are a lobby group that puts pressure on government not to sweep Aboriginal matters under the carpet.

Then there are the people in Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory who have plenty of first hand knowledge of semi-urbanized Aborigines. They have observed dysfunctional families, alcohol and drug abuse, unreliable work habits, disrespect for private property and legal regulation, and though they all know some good Aboriginal people, who are doing their utmost to conform and assimilate and better themselves, they prefer to keep the Aboriginal community at arms length and are skeptical about the ability of these “primitive” people to fit into white society. Newspaper reports about conditions in outback communities do not surprise them; they feel that the government is throwing too much money at this unsolvable problem. Aboriginals ought to get their act together if they want to deserve help. They are impatient about reminders of white guilt; that all happened long ago and differs little from what happened in other colonized countries. People just have to accept the situation as it is and make the best of it, instead of blaming others. They are disturbed by any suggestion that land rights could impinge on their own property rights. In between these two groups, the nostalgics and the assimilationists, are the many who don’t have much of an opinion at all.

All the same, there are now a majority of Australians who would like to say sorry to the Aboriginal people. It is a civilized and Christian thing to do and it is fairly obvious that they were not treated well. The question is: what exactly are they supposed to say sorry for?  Should it be a regretful sorry for their forebears having mindlessly destroyed a culture which they were too ignorant to appreciate? Should it be a sorry for having inflicted invasion and war on the legitimate owners of this country while pretending for two hundred years or so that they had simply occupied vacant territory? Should it be a sorry that after this war no peace treaty was ever signed which would have restored at least some dignity to the conquered peoples, that these are still living in limbo, with no guarantee that the war is actually over and not being continued under similarly hypocritical guises? Should it be a sorry for the long neglect, interspersed with high-handed and misdirected measures, which has created a third world within a first world, a sorry for simply not bothering to care? Should it be a sorry for the racism which separated parents from their half-caste children, causing untold heart-ache, and which was quite seriously aimed at annihilating an “inferior” race, all the while members of this race were recruited to put their lives on the line to fight a regime whose most heinous crimes were racism and genocide? While Australia had no annihilation camps, believing that  the Aboriginal people would die out of their own accord and that the blackness could be “bred out” of half-blood Aborigines, it espoused theories that served its own selfish ends long after their absurdity had been recognized in scientific circles, again hypocritically cloaking self-interested cruelty with kindness. Should it be a sorry for having been the beneficiaries of the virtual demise of a race and culture, and still not being willing to make reparations?

While the first white settlers in Australia were themselves largely people who had been brutally dispossessed, - convicts, victims of the Industrial Revolution and the Irish Potato Famine, Highland crofters, small rural landholders whose livelihood had been destroyed by the closure of commons and who had the sentence of transportation imposed on them if they stole to stave off starvation, freedom fighters outlawed in their own lands, refugees who desperately needed a new home and who were initially fighting for bare survival in a strange and hostile land, - this may serve as an explanation for their actions and attitudes, but never as an excuse for transferring their fate to others who were equally innocent. In the late eighteenth century conquest of foreign lands was still a semi-acceptable measure for increasing your national sphere of influence and supplying yourself with resources of land and produce that would improve standards of living at home. The colonizing countries all did it. If values have changed, does that mean we today have to apologize for the actions of our forefathers simply because they would now be considered unacceptable?

It probably serves no good purpose to sensationalize our guilt. We, today, have to apologize because of the hypocrisy with which the takeover of Aboriginal territory was initially conducted and, more relevantly, because of the continued hypocrisy and indifference with which its effects were ignored throughout the following centuries.  Because of this hypocrisy and indifference, more than anything else, we need to put together a catalogue of our sins and wrong-doings and publicly own up to them. And we need to promise that, from now on, we will be honest, vigilant and fair in our dealings with the Aboriginal people. We have continued to pretend that this country was legitimately colonized when our highest court has ruled that this was not the case, to pretend that it was always governed by the rule of law when we know that settlers and police often brutally ignored the law, to pretend that we adequately compensated displaced Aboriginal people by giving them barely remunerated jobs or assigning them to reservations, to pretend that we looked after them when we held them prisoner at these reservations, fed them a diet of  white flour, sugar and tea, and confiscated their earnings, to pretend that we offered them opportunities when we kept them away from employment and failed dismally to adapt our educational system to them,  to pretend that we valued their culture when we allowed missions to prohibit it and all the while secretly hoped to breed out or wipe out their race. Until we have come clean about our collective past, which lingers on into the immediate present, we cannot expect to be trusted or hope to be reconciled. Admittedly, we are in good company for most colonizers had similar attitudes and adopted similar strategies; but that does not make them excusable.

In preparation for the Strehlow conference I was given the paper of a German anthropologist. Underlying its somewhat impressionistic catalogue of accusations was the supposition that Australian guilt was comparable to German guilt for the genocidal holocaust of the Jews and others perceived as aliens. I do not want to stress differences in scale, brutality and historical period here. What is more important, in my opinion, is a difference in the nature of the guilt incurred. The guilt of the Germans was initially that they snobbishly shunned politics as beneath their dignity, ignored their democratic responsibilities and allowed their democratic rights to be eroded, in the hope that the firm hand of tyranny would bring them the comforts of order and prosperity. Once democracy had been lost, the guilt of the great majority of citizens was cowardice; they tried not to notice what was happening in order not to endanger themselves, their families, their jobs and their possessions by speaking out. The guilt of those, who were victims of the depression and the disorder that had hounded the Weimar Republic from its inception, was that they wanted a scapegoat for their woes and were prepared to accept anyone at all, no matter how absurdly unlikely, to vent their anger upon. Unlike the Aboriginal people, the Jews were no strangers whose language and culture were unknown to the Germans; Christian religion was built upon Jewish thought and culture and the Jews had been suspiciously eyed compatriots of the Germans for centuries, always at hand to be pelted with blame when the urge arose. Finally, the guilt of the victors of Versailles was that their desire for revenge made them blind to the fact that revenge begets revenge and humiliation awakens the desire to return the humiliation. Characteristic of all parties was a selfish short-sightedness, a studied irresponsible blindness, that placed comfort or emotional satisfaction above all else. Of course there were criminals in Germany, who committed barely imaginable atrocities - on a smaller scale these existed in Australia too - but the guilt of the majority of people was this short-sighted and selfish obsession with their own comfort, convenience and emotional satisfaction. And, of course, there were also ideologists who preached dangerous doctrines of racism and nationalism; like all the western countries, Australia too had its racists and its nationalists. But the general populace have a propensity to ignore doctrines unless they serve their purposes. Unlike the Germans, the Australians were not usually politically lazy or irresponsible; their guilt lay in the sanctimonious pretence that they had always been a civilized, legitimate and fair society when it was blatantly obvious to all who cared to look that, when it came to the Aboriginal people, this was not the case. It is important to be precise when ascribing guilt; we all find it difficult to admit wrongdoing and confessions will only be achieved if  ascriptions are accurate. It is our own specific sins that we need to avoid in the future, not sins we never committed and which are irrelevant to the issue at hand. 

There are also important differences between Australian and German racism. Misled by Darwinist doctrines of human progress, Australians tended to regard Aboriginal people as so primitive that they were little better than animals and could be treated like these with impunity. Between Germans and Jews there was, if anything, a relationship of jealous rivalry. The Jews as the “chosen people”, as the nation from which Christ had arisen, as the first capitalists with the economic advantages this gave them, as the first internationalists by virtue of their ultimate homelessness, as a people who trained their children to be intellectually competent, competitive, hard-working and successful in their careers, as a bicultural and bilingual group with the edge this gave them over their mono-cultural compatriots, as a closely-knit and mutually supportive community, - appeared to have advantages over the dominant culture that could not be tolerated.

And, finally, there is another important difference between the Australian and the German situation. The Germans annihilated their Jewish people; for better or worse, they are no longer part of German society. If Germans today want to make good, they resort to such things as championing the Israeli cause over the Palestinian or honoring and acclaiming Jewish intellectuals and writers or possibly even going to work in a kibbutz for a few months. In Australia, however, we are still all part of one nation and that means we still have the opportunity and the need to learn to live together. We can’t be too hard on ourselves and each other but must recognize and acknowledge good will where it shows itself and be constructive in our criticisms. Things like the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games must be assessed within their complex context. White workers in Aboriginal communities can be both out of place and useful or even necessary. We need to talk about such things, argue about them, but with mutual tolerance. What will be required eventually is a difficult mix of separateness and complementarity  and union, but above all respect that has been honestly earned. We have tried this approach, probably with more success, in relation to other ethnic groups in our now multicultural society.

  

Let us, as Australians, say sorry for our hypocrisy and indifference and, in doing so, clear the way for our good intentions to be recognized and for a genuine cultural interchange, from which both parties should stand to benefit.  It is important for us to look around and discover what we can admire in the Aboriginal way of life and how we can learn from it. This does not necessarily entail going back to a now almost extinct Dreaming culture. Studies like the recent examination by Heather McDonald of three Christian missions to Aboriginal people in Halls Creek, “Blood, Bones and Spirit”, show a highly intelligent dissection and evaluation of Christian doctrines by Aboriginal proselytes. McDonald’s study reveals an admirable comprehension by native people of their own values and needs,  a perspicuity which tends to lead to very conscious choices. It is a long time since white Christians in the churches approached religious teachings so constructively. Or, to give another example: if Northern Territory councils have now adopted Aboriginal burning-off practices, the origins of such effective land management should be widely acknowledged. In practice, the road to reconciliation will be a long one that will involve innumerable small steps taken by innumerable well-meaning people on both sides of the racial divide. But it cannot begin without an honest apology. Perhaps we will even require a formal peace treaty to give closure to the past.