Banishing the Men

ON A RECENT SBS Insight program discussing the federal government’s Intervention in the Northern Territory, Des Rogers, an Aboriginal man, pointed out that Aboriginal men had been completely disenfranchised. Tony Abbott added that in a welfare-dependent community, men had no role because there was no work. Rogers said there had been no engagement with Aboriginal men by the task force, that there was now no Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) program, and that the only facilities available for Aboriginal men were the prisons. Jenny Brockie, the moderator of Insight, added that it was Aboriginal men who were the perpetrators. Apparently she meant that they therefore deserved their disenfranchisement and banishment. Sue Gordon, the head of the Intervention task force, managed to point out that not all Aboriginal men were perpetrators.

It seems that the Intervention has become women’s business. Not only are most of the state and federal ministers and government representatives women, but so are most of the public servants. The magistrates, the social workers and the teachers reported in the media are women, and now the Aboriginal representatives on the Intervention task force are women.

It seems that governments developing policy with regard to women and children eventually submit to a clandestine force which surrounds these massive social changes in a fog of secrecy. We later discover that men have been disenfranchised. It has taken men at least ten years to claw back even fundamental justice with regard to family law in Australia, and two generations of children have been subjected to significant levels of abandonment. Government policy which becomes women’s business seems to take on an aspect of retribution and secrecy which would be considered inappropriate in other government initiatives of such magnitude.

The “them and us” rhetoric in Aboriginal politics seems to have changed from Aboriginal people versus white people to Aboriginal women versus Aboriginal men. So, now that it seems clear that the Intervention has sidelined Aboriginal men and has become Aboriginal women’s business, has it also become white European feminist business? What plans does the Intervention have for the Aboriginal men it is banishing from their communities? Who decided, and where, that the Intervention was to become women’s business? Is this another strategy of the Left to divide and conquer an intractable Aboriginal problem? Is it designed to hide the massive failure of the policy of self-determination?

Watching Julia Gillard admonish and humiliate the Liberal Party in parliament recently— demanding a division to carry a motion stating that the Liberal Party would never reintroduce the WorkChoices legislation—I was tempted to wonder whether a Labor government could be stupid enough to continue the failed self-determination policies under another name, by turning it into women’s business. Why have the media neglected to report this radical new initiative? Now that we have said sorry after a fraudulent report claiming a stolen generation, we are going to banish something like 20,000 men from their tribal communities without due process, for the crime of alcoholism and following tribal law. Have we learnt nothing?

The Aboriginal men who have been disenfranchised are descended from warriors and hunters. There is probably still a strong urge amongst young Aboriginal men to be warriors and hunters, the saviours of their people. This urge is misted over with misinformation about tribal practices and addiction, and so it is unclear. Ironically, under the policy of self-determination, recent generations of Aboriginal Australians have learnt not to trust their own thinking. Alcoholic Aboriginal men have now been abandoned and cast out by their own communities for the crime of practising traditional Aboriginal culture as they saw it. Some of their misinformation has come from the internationalisation of indigenous Left politics and some from generations of alcohol abuse by their elders, but much of their confusion has come from the dishonesty of the policy of self-determination.

The romantic warrior myth of the young Aboriginal man can now only find passage through left-wing politics or art. It is no longer possible to be a ringer or a stockman or a hunter, nor even, it seems, is it possible to receive the dole. They must be creative or disappear. The disenfranchisement and banishment of Aboriginal men by the Intervention may be the deadliest blow yet against the sustainability of many Aboriginal cultures.

This decimation of Aboriginal manhood has continued over the past thirty years or so. The self that has been determined by the free will of the Aboriginal men of the Northern Territory has fallen victim to alcohol and unemployment. It is a trap for young players—any of us could have fallen victim to alcohol and drugs and unemployment. That Aboriginal men straight from their warrior-hunter heritage have fallen victim to the dreaming of alcohol and drugs is not surprising. The reality of trying to adapt and survive in the ghettos of isolated settlements is a depressing alternative even to a life of alcoholism.

The Intervention has now become “women’s business” also because the welfare of children is women’s business and we are now beginning to attempt to save the children. Consequently, the men, who are the main perpetrators of the violence and the child abuse, will be driven out. Men who are not perpetrators will also be driven out in the cyclone of moral righteousness that always accompanies issues of motherhood. This will be the final blow for most of the Aboriginal cultures of the Northern Territory because men, and particular men, are central to their integrity.

HISTORY WILL DECIDE whether it has been the left-wing policy of self-determination and the accompanying lack of prosecutions under Australian law, particularly for sexual offences, or the right-wing ideal of integration that has done most harm to traditional tribal culture. There is however one thing for sure, and that is that every single contact with white European culture has integrated Aboriginal people to their present way of living and their present belief systems. What, then, do Aboriginal people want to take with them and what do they need to leave behind?

Most Aboriginal wealth is derived from government, and most of it is welfare. A significant proportion of the Aboriginal population is substance-dependent. Sexual abuse, child abuse, violence and alcoholism are considered to be normal in many isolated Aboriginal communities. The right not to work maintains currency in the form of a working-class resentment inspired by communists such as Frank Hardy. The male side of Aboriginal politics seems to be profoundly left-wing.

The women, on the other hand, seem to be more accepting of the Intervention as a good thing which can be managed to their advantage. Perhaps the women are not necessarily right-wing; perhaps they believe they can make a new community which can maintain their culture. Some believe themselves to be the original communists. They believe in education, and as Roger Sandall tells us, “literate mothers matter”.

Aboriginal culture will continue to integrate into Australia, as it has always done, and the sooner it loses the unacceptable sexual practices of tribal law the better. In the end, Aboriginal people will have to find a way to survive under the Family Law Act. Genital mutilation and leg spearing for inappropriate liaisons will also have to go.

Those who are involved in this attempt at reconstructing traditional Aboriginal culture under the banner of “women’s business” have to recognise that they are in fact attempting to construct a way of life for Aboriginal people. It is unlikely that one in a hundred of all the white European professionals working with Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory would have any idea that this is what they are doing, and overwhelmingly these positions are held by feminist women. The white European feminist narrative has great faith in the benefits of social engineering, as we have witnessed in our education system over the past three decades. They will relish the chance to reinvent traditional Aboriginal culture. At least after this final reconstruction the beatings will stop. But this will almost certainly be the final chapter for many traditional tribal Aboriginal cultures.

The main reason the Intervention has been seen as so radical is because it took so long to admit that the policy of self-determination had failed. This is a result of leftwing politics being unable to tolerate dissent. However, it is also because it was supposedly such an “empowering” policy that nobody, left or right, could easily object to it. When it was instituted, the expected outcome was a Coombsian idyll of traditional hunter-gatherers operating on their own land supported by the Australian taxpayer. It was not envisaged that it could lead to an unacceptable outcome. The extent of the unacceptability of the outcome and the resultant decimation of Aboriginal culture has still not really dawned on most left-wing intellectuals. If it were not for Noel Pearson, Australia’s greatest contemporary intellectual, they would be even further behind.

The extent and the fallout of the failure of self-determination will eventually have a profound effect on progressive Left thinking, if for no other reason than that it is a failure of process rather than outcome. Once again “communalism” and communist thinking has led to a kind of self-imposed gulag run by tyrants righteously lecturing us with wagging finger on their idée fixe, with regard to the end not justifying the means. Labor governments in the Northern Territory placed this ideology before the facts that were staring them in the face for years before the Intervention. If we had once failed to destroy traditional tribal Aboriginal cultures by taking the children, we now will almost certainly destroy them by banishing the men.

Aboriginal men in these settlements have been no less the victims of the policy’s failure than have the victims of child abuse. What will prevent Aboriginal alcoholic men—driven from their homes by the Intervention task force into towns with no detox facilities, being arrested and locked up in jail, mad with addiction and abandonment—from suing a future government for compensation? For thirty years we watched these isolated Third World ghettos develop in our country, and we did nothing because we had washed our hands of their fate. “You decide,” we said. Now we don’t like their decision.

So now we are asking Aboriginal people in isolated settlements to develop a community which can still be called a traditional community, without Aboriginal men. We still want to do it with consultation, but no alcoholism, violence or child abuse will be tolerated. You may self-determine, but only within certain limits. So, in reality, we will tell you how to live.

THIS IS A SIGNIFICANT moment for Aboriginal people. Now is their opportunity to decide who they will be in the Australian social landscape. This should be the first attempt by Aboriginal people to shelve some aspects of tribal law as past cultural history and attempt to live under Australian law. This should be done openly and transparently, without the permit system, and there is no reason for this step to destroy traditional Aboriginal culture.

Roger Sandall has referred to the word civilisation as having “forced the doors of the dictionary of the French Academy in 1798”. Yet since the early 1970s it has also been the elephant in the room. The need for culture to yield to civilisation has been the great Satan to left-wing thinking. Yet here it is: Aboriginal culture decimated by self-determination, yielding to a white European narrative, this time the feminist narrative.

Can the women’s movement, which now controls the Intervention, make new traditional Aboriginal communities that can survive in contemporary Australia? Should such a massive change to traditional Aboriginal culture be informed by this one aggressive paradigm? How will positive discrimination, affirmative action, anti-discrimination, property and custody arrangements, equal opportunity and sexual harassment clauses affect traditional tribal Aboriginal culture? Can Aboriginal people adapt to the Family Law Act? White Australian men are still having great difficulty adapting to it after thirty years.

What is left of tribal culture, still within memory, will be completely disenfranchised. Without its destruction, none of these new feminist imperatives has a chance of success—and neither do the democratic ones, the freedom-of-speech ones, or the human rights and social justice ones. Unless the isolated Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory are prepared to integrate under the new women’s business Intervention, they will be condemned to die in the inferno they presently occupy. As a direct result of the abandonment of Aboriginal people by the clever left-wing process of self-determination, Aboriginal people must now integrate or disappear.

Just as the process of self-determination inadvertently helped destroy Aboriginal culture, so will the women’s movement further destroy the fundamental structure of traditional tribal Aboriginal society. Through the income management program, wealth has been redistributed to the women in order that it get to the children, and this single move will change Aboriginal hierarchies and communal property rights, just as the massive redistribution of wealth from men to women changed the structure and direction of Western society. Men, whether perpetrators or not, will be given little access to Aboriginal wealth. It is likely that the incarcerated Aboriginal male population will increase significantly, and male Aboriginal alcoholics will be made to die of their disease in jails due to the lack of proper detox facilities.

That Aboriginal men will die as a result of this statesanctioned banishment is obvious, but that it will be enforced by their own Aboriginal women is less so. It will be the wives and mothers and aunties who will drive unwanted and wanted, perpetrators, alcoholics and innocent Aboriginal men out of their own communities, to appease the police and the doctors, the social workers and the teachers, the white European feminists and academics who know the power of banishment and shunning, and who all want a low-maintenance, peaceful community in which the kids can go to school and values can be re-established. Everybody can suffer the unemployment and isolated boredom in silence, but at least in peace.

This banished generation of Aboriginal men will land amongst Aboriginal communities all over Australia. You can already see them in Smith Street, Fitzroy, “shellshocked fallen angels” in the words of the late poet Shelton Lea, who lived most of his life believing he was Aboriginal and was the patron saint of the dispossessed.

This article forms part of Patrick McCauley’s work-in-progress provisionally titled “Australian Landscapes from the Factory Door”.