Genocide by Suicide

I must begin by declaring my interest with regard to Aboriginal politics. In 1974 as a leftie schoolteacher working at Katherine School of the Air, I helped Vincent Lingiari, Mickey Ringiari, Long Johnny, Philip Nitschke, and a few others, muster their first herd of cleanskins from Wave Hill Station. I became immersed in discussions with the Northern Territory Education Department to allow Aboriginal children based at Wattie Creek to be given access to the radio receivers necessary to enrol at Katherine School of the Air, and also to establish a Government School at Wattie Creek (now Kalkaringi). The following year, 1975, I attempted to establish a system of Adult Education on Melville and Bathurst Islands.

So, in order to address my thoughts to a human face, I would address them to Peter Murray, who was my teaching assistant at Snake Bay, Melville Island, that year. It is necessary that I focus on an Aboriginal face to attempt an authentic discussion, and to be allowed to speak in this difficult area, as a white Anglo-Celtic Australian.

Raimond Gaita is a longtime friend who taught me philosophy at Melbourne State College in 1970, 1971 and 1972. Although I have seen little of him during the last thirty years, we had caught up recently and I have attended his Winter Lecture Series at the Australian Catholic University for the past two years. Rai is an excellent teacher, who affected me with the difficulty of thinking and introduced me to Albert Camus at a pivotal time in my life. It was partly due to the thorough and radical thinking to which Rai introduced me that I went off to teach in the Northern Territory.

When I saw the list of lecturers and the topic for this year’s series (under the title, “Whatever Happened to Reconciliation?”), I sent him an e-mail with regard to the responsibilities of universities, philosophy departments in particular, to present unbiased knowledge. As it turned out, Professor Peter Sutton’s lecture was, I think, academically rigorous, creatively empathetic, articulate, poetic and artful. However, I was five-sixths right, as the other five professors in the series continued developing various aspects of an academic Aboriginal “romanticism” that has, without doubt, contributed to the situation in which Aboriginal Australians find themselves today. Each professor spoke carefully, and several clearly attempted to modify the excesses and vanities of their past positions. Dodson, Manne, Gaita and Brennan all, however, maintained their belief in the fundamental principles—self-determination, community consultation, land rights, genocidal intent, racism and invasion.

Finally let me place this lecture series in time. It was the day after the second lecture by Professor Mick Dodson that the Howard government declared the “State of Emergency” with regard to isolated Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Professor Peter Sutton’s lecture had preceded it and the remaining four lectures were presented in the first four weeks of its implementation. After listening to all six lectures and having to accept the role of heretic to ask several questions, I decided to follow the Burke and Wills track up to Alice Springs while I completed this essay. I did this partly to clear my mind of the anger and emotion I felt, and partly to write within the Aboriginal landscape.

To suggest that pre-contact indigenous life was anything but Edenic and that traditional modes of socialization and social control may contribute to the contemporary problem of violence is to risk being accused of blaming the victims and excusing their oppressors.
—epidemiologist Stephen Kunitz

Sutton tells us that he is prepared to run the risk Kunitz outlines because the time is over for tinkering around the edges:

“The trend of what is called ‘Indigenous disadvantage’ in Australia does not show enough signs of improvement in critical areas to allow for any further complacency about the correctness of existing approaches … too often, unhappily, these profoundly difficult questions are turned into a compassion contest, a game of proving that ego is less racist or less bleeding heart than thou, producing, at times, a subtle performance that masks what is in reality an exercise in the pursuit of one’s own virtue at the expense of what one knows. ‘Ideologuery’ paints people into political corners, which can have the effect of deafening others to what they say, or to what their opponents say. Worse still, the questions I address here have become an arena in which partisan politics often makes use of indigenous people as political footballs. If a serious and effective reappraisal of public policy and practice in this field is to occur, a politically non-partisan and non-ideological approach is of the utmost importance …
“A relative silence promoted by both the Left and a number of indigenous activists has created a vacuum in public discussion that has been filled in recent years by those pursuing the agendas of the Right, to put it in somewhat antique political terms. The use of racial criticism to exclude non-indigenous voices from debates—on the grounds that one’s ancestry determines what topics one is allowed to speak about in public—has in this sense backfired.”

Sutton is in no doubt that the freedoms of a liberal democratic policy, with an emphasis on community self-management and indigenous self-determination have failed the Aboriginal population and led to a breakdown of social control in many, if not most Aboriginal settlements, particularly in the more isolated communities in the Northern Territory. These policies were first noticed to be failing early in the early 1970s by those in power in Canberra, “but were allowed to drift”. Sutton points to a disproportionate toleration of alcoholism, truancy and violence in Aboriginal communities by welfare workers:

“officials and community members turn a blind eye to what are sometimes massive school absenteeism rates, and continue with customary rhetoric about the important role of education in the liberation of indigenous communities from dependency.”

Sutton presented two models of reconciliation; the sacramental (the apology) made by everybody in Australia over the last ten years—from marches across Sydney Harbour Bridge to bumper stickers—but, due to the prime ministerial exception, the apology has gone unacknowledged and unaccepted; and the pietistic (that no being is reconciled without feeling reconciled). He points out that it is the communities with the least dispossession and the greatest wealth where the social breakdown is at its worst. He applauds Noel Pearson for daring to place the issues of land rights as secondary to the issues of health, education and employment. The commonsense, non-partisan focus of Pearson is Sutton’s greatest hope.

Professor Mick Dodson gave his lecture the night before the government announced the national emergency. He mentioned alcoholism, violence and child abuse twice in his sixty-minute presentation. Once was to confirm that he had asked the government to do something about it ten years ago, yet nothing was done.

The rest of the lecture was the slick rhetoric of a snake oil salesman, with small DVD grabs of good-looking middle-class Aboriginal kids saying positive but naive things about reconciliation. Dodson would speak for about three minutes, then a DVD, another five minutes, then another DVD, all with music and an assistant to push the buttons so that he would not have to take off his big black hat or wrinkle his superb suit. This was a “positive spin” lecture for the white chattering classes—it was not the kind of presentation and information that he would give to a United Nations audience in New York. He did not repeat his accusation of genocide with regard to the assimilation policies of Australian governments over the first half of the twentieth century.

There is a bit of the union bully in Dodson, though he wouldn’t see it—he is a lawyer and he is playing to win. What other government official holding such significant political positions as Commissioner for the United Nations, Commissioner for the Equal Opportunity and Reconciliation Commission, could have a private legal practice advising Australians on land rights issues? He wants rights—land rights, freehold title, and more money to build new Aboriginal housing. He wants “Reconciliation Action Plans” with business willing to “fully consult” with Aboriginal communities.

Well, I’ve got a business I could take to Alice Springs, but could he guarantee me twenty sober and punctual workers at my factory door every morning, five days a week, forty-eight weeks a year? I do not wish to have to pay “extra” rent for building my factory on Aboriginal land. I would want to make my business viable; therefore I would need to make the business decisions—not the community. This could be worked out, if there was common sense, good will and a fair return for all involved.

Dodson mentions the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Report, but fails to mention that it showed that Aboriginal men were less likely to die in jail than in their own communities, nor does he mention that almost all incarcerations were as a result of alcohol-related crime. He does not mention that over 52 per cent of the Northern Territory, Perth and many other significant sections of the Australian continent are now held under Aboriginal land title. He does not see these massive concessions as saying “sorry”. He does not consider this enough to “pay the rent”. He does not even consider it worth mentioning.

A man at the back of the lecture theatre asks Dodson, in a fairly clumsy way, if he does not now consider that “paternalism” might be a better alternative to the degradation and despair we see on our television sets each evening. Dodson takes the opportunity to remind the man that “paternalism” is another form of “racial discrimination” and that he has fought against “racial discrimination” all his life. For the first time in his lecture he becomes human and animated with emotion and ends up virtually shouting at the man. The white, educated middle-class audience turn around in their seats to stare at the unfortunate questioner, who then packs up his bag and leaves through the back door. Robert Manne makes a long statement to Dodson about the size of the task that Noel Pearson has taken on, almost gloating at what he considers is its enormity and complexity. He almost implores Dodson to censure Pearson as an unrealistic dreamer, but even Dodson resists this. It is like watching one snake oil salesman trying to sell to another.

Rai Gaita is now very much in the public eye in Australia. Through his writing, he has become a kind of public moral philosopher. He has not just made stories, but has also presented his own life as a story, a story with philosophical overtones. In Romulus My Father, Gaita presents his own father as a man who suffers evil rather than does it, and a man who harbours no malice or little malice for his lot. Romulus, above all things, is not a resentful man.

Gaita accepts the history of Australia as one which includes all Europeans as invaders. Yet I would still see Cook as an explorer who would have had no idea that he was invading Australia. He certainly saw Terra Australia as terra nullius. He just landed, made friends, traded stuff and set up shop. His mind was not concerned with invasion, but it was concerned with the welfare and the human rights of the Aborigines, right from the start. I believe Keith Windschuttle has it about right on this issue. Nothing, especially the reactionary publication Whitewash, edited by Robert Manne, has seriously threatened his academic rigour.

I saw Windschuttle face an astoundingly hostile audience at the Victorian Trades Hall Council in Carlton just after the publication of Fabrication and he handled each angry question and each personal insult with scholarship and integrity. It was an impressive performance under almost revolutionary duress that even left Gary Foley speechless. No such difficult questions or statements were put to these six professors, in fact questions of dissent were actively discouraged by the moderator, and I was heckled several times while trying to put a difficult question. This fear of dissent that the Left continually displays in all forms of media, together with its support for the very doubtful academic standards of historians like Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds, is extremely disappointing.

Australia was first “invaded” in about 1970, when humanity emerged from the dark decades of war and depression. The new enlightenment of the seventies oppressed the past with its new consciousness and human rights; but from 1770 till 1970 there was no invasion. Gaita considers all Australian government assimilation and integration policies up to about the 1970s as genocidal, at least in intent. He is appalled at the way Australians have treated Aboriginal people. For him, there is a racist culture in contemporary Australia which “denies” both massacre and the violence of early and even more recent European settlement. Gaita supports the recommendations of the Bringing Them Home report, including the damning indictments made against Australia and Australians with regard to the United Nations definition of genocide.

In his essay “Genocide and Holocaust” Gaita agrees with the author of the Bringing Them Home report, Mick Dodson, that there is a case for Australia to answer with regard to the UN definition of genocide. He debates whether or not the word should apply to the Australian government policies which resulted in what has become known as “the Stolen Generations” and he seems to decide that we may be guilty of minor intent to commit genocide. He even considers that it may diminish the “ultimate” genocide—the Holocaust—to use the word in such an extended fashion (a frivolous fashion, I would argue). However, in the end, Gaita considers that Australia has something to look at with regard to its treatment of Aborigines and with regard to its “racism”, though he wavers on using the word genocide.

I considered the position of my friend, Rai Gaita, whilst driving between Innamincka and Birdsville in a landscape where there is a huge amount of nothing, in any direction you care to look. It is the farthest horizon I have ever seen—even the ocean does not seem to have a horizon as far. I am a white man from the city, an invader, and the previous night camped on Coopers Creek, where Burke had died of starvation. I had slept lightly, waiting for first light to relieve a deep existential kind of loneliness. I was consumed in the huge silence under the stars, dreaming lucidly and sleeping fitfully. I had made this trek to find a space in which to think about the six professors.

Gaita quotes Socrates often, and he considers the Socratic statement, “It is better to suffer evil than to do it” as a necessary and central truth. But who is “doing” evil and who is “suffering” evil under the last thirty years of the policy of “self-determination” and “community consultation”? The communities which are in the process of disintegration through alcoholism, addiction, violence and child abuse must be considered the victims—these are the people suffering the non-interventionist, non-patronising, non-paternalistic policy of self-determination. Whilst self-determination is an “end” for left-wing politics it is a “means” for Aboriginal people—a “means” which has led to an epidemic of alcoholism, violence and child abuse. Some may say such outcomes are evil, and that those who peddle such processes also have a case to answer.

The Left has provided the Aboriginal people with power over their own destiny, but has neglected to “empower” them. So enamoured are they of their own “progressive” agenda of liberation, they forgot to educate the very people they wished to liberate. It is these policies together with the romanticisation of the Aboriginal people that have developed the levels of disintegration we see today. The “Ecological Aborigine”, “Noble Savage”, “World Famous Painter”, “Rock Star”, “Hollywood Actor”, “Mystic Elder” and various other lucrative sitcoms have been created and described for the pale pink chattering classes. The novelists, the playwrights and the poets (mainly white) have been given awards for these fantasies, though the romanticism has left many Aboriginal people psychologically abandoned in welfare-dependent isolation, uselessness and alcoholism without any real idea of themselves. Self-determination is a “means” to an “end”. The “end” is utter social disintegration. The intended “end” was a Coombsian traditional tribal culture operating in the isolated outback where land rights would allow these people to be supported by the taxpayer as a form of reconciliation for the invasion and the suffering. It became clear thirty years ago that this was impossible. Geoffrey Bardon, the founding father of the Pintubi Tula Aboriginal art movement, recorded with poetic precision the demise of culture to alcohol and welfare in his magnificent book Papunya: A Place Made After the Story in 1973.

Does an honourable means such as self-determination justify this appalling end? Can the precious “processes” of left-wing thought really continue to maintain their sanctified position without ever taking note of the damaged outcomes they are producing? This is the dreadful orthodoxy which affects our education system, which affects our family law system destroying our own families, our art and our literature are shot through with this same vanity, and yet we are comfortable in our moral and spiritual holiness despite the tragic outcomes. Do we suffer evil as we ignore the massive generational alcoholism that disturbs our laissez faire Coombsian romanticism? We do not suffer as much evil as we do, by not having the courage to intervene in these death throes of traditional tribal Aboriginal culture.

Would Gaita consider the wasted life of one Aboriginal man suffering from the disease of alcoholism with the same seriousness and compassion as he showed with regard to his own father’s mental disease? I think he would. So, to imagine whole communities of urban, rural and isolated Aboriginal alcoholics who have also been shouldered with the responsibility of the future of their own communities in dealing with white bureaucracies, and fading, brain damaged, alcoholic memories of tribal culture, is to imagine the third level of the Inferno where the people are buried up to their necks in hot mud and crying out for water.

Make no mistake, we have bought Australia from the Aboriginal people for unlimited alcohol. We have maintained and eulogised alcohol. We have sold alcohol to the Aborigines as “the white man’s dreaming” since the very first days of settlement, and the very first Aboriginal alcoholic passed the disease on to the rest of his race as surely as the Europeans passed the flu virus on to the Tasmanian Aborigines. In isolated settlements hundreds of miles from any towns, Aboriginal people have been placed in houses and provided with food and drink for long enough to lose their nomadic way and their hunting skills. They have been required to do nothing—to become “existentially bored” in the words of Robert Manne. But man cannot do nothing. Sitting all day he cannot sleep, and so he must do something. He would rather do alcohol and violence than do nothing, at least then there is something to fight against, something to want.

I drive beyond Boulia to the edges of the Simpson Desert where the Aborigines say the Min Min lights are the spirits of their ancestors. I camp a couple of kilometres off the track to Alice on the banks of the Georgina River near Glenormiston station just near the Queensland–Northern Territory border. There is a huge, very old (maybe 150 years) paperbark tree, sandy banks and heaps of firewood. It looks like the local swimming hole. I throw my line into the muddy water at sunset as a nearly full moon rises. I feel abandoned here. I know nothing here beside my fire in Aboriginal country. If I died here, I could not be buried in my own land—pull the earth of my own home up around me. I am no one, nobody knows me. I no longer know myself (this must be how Aborigines first felt in their houses and their towns—existentially lost in white man’s country) and yet there is a kind of faith that I should be here tonight—camped in the country of the people I am writing and thinking about. I seek permission from their elders—the spirits, to help free their ancestors from desolation. So I make myself accept my vulnerability out here. Here in the night, mature lithe beautiful Aboriginal women with a particular smile coo to me with their fleshy thin curves—a wild night of erotic dreams is a powerful message.

It is no longer good enough for philosophy and philosophers to sit on the morality of statements such as “the end does not justify the means” or “it is better to suffer evil than to do it”. The tight moral logic does not help us in our demise with how to morally reconcile with Aboriginal people, nor in how Aboriginal people can properly reconcile with us.

Peter Sutton had made some mention of the Aboriginal people who are taking advantage of the significant opportunities available to them, but there was no reference from any of the other five professors to the talented and vastly expanded Aboriginal middle class. Ordinary Aboriginal Australians who are posties and plumbers, shop assistants and apprentices, as well as the artists, actors, footballers and rock stars, are actually doing very well indeed. It is the Aboriginal colours and designs that define Australia to the cultured Europeans and Americans. It is Aborig-inal art that achieved the biggest art commission in Australian history at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and it is Aboriginal footballers who are the class act in the game of marngrook known as Australian rules football.

The Aboriginal population is growing faster than the white population, and Aboriginal culture is the brand name that the rest of the world wishes to buy from Australia. Yet the Aboriginal middle classes have swallowed their own ambit claims, and believe much of the ideology, rhetoric and historical narratives written for them by the white Aboriginal romanticists. They believe in their own crucifixion as outlined by Lyndall Ryan, Mick Dodson, Robert Manne and Rai Gaita. They believe in the white middle-class thirty-something divorced academic falling in love with the young, strong, intelligent twenty-something noble savage driving a Pajero across the Stone Country. Let us hope that the new Aboriginal leaders under the care of Noel Pearson are not so wide-eyed to Hollywood and blind to their own working classes as is this current generation.

Professor Paul Patton introduced the notion of a “veil of ignorance” described by the philosopher John Rawls in his book A Theory of Justice—in which all parties drop their ideological positions, their religion, their gender, their age, their race, their academic titles and their intellectual vanities, to sit around the campfire and find a creative, positive and necessary way forward. It is not only Aboriginal politics, but also issues with regard to the environment, gender and family which need a much more closely reconciled and academically rigorous debate on which processes and outcomes are acceptable. The real reconciliation which needs to happen in Australia is a reconciliation, a new non-adversarial logic, between the Robert Mannes and Keith Windschuttles of this world. We need Rai Gaita to spend some “quality time” with Peter Sutton and come up with some philosophically sound and definite guidelines as a way forward for Aboriginal people. Yet between the shadows falls the orthodoxy—the dreadful orthodoxy.

At present, a better debate between the Left and the Right (a less tribal debate) seems impossible, and Robert Manne said as much when I put the question to him—“there are real differences in our thinking”, he said of Keith Windschuttle. There seems to be a dangerous divide developing here, and there is only Noel Pearson, alone, standing out there in the outback; perhaps Marcia Langton and Warren Mundine are climbing over a fence nearby.

The Bringing Them Home report has encouraged and developed a language of resentment which the process of reconciliation and land rights has been unable to silence. I know at least a little of what it is like to have your children stolen by a law enacted by the state. The Family Law Act stole my children for the crime of marriage failure and because of my gender. Yet on the Family Law Act, Manne and Gaita are silent. Surely if they are going to be consistent about the state taking children from their parents, they would have to include this much larger and current attempt at “gender genocide”. Perhaps it is the fact that these children are being taken from their fathers rather than their mothers that is the difference?

The “stolen generation” were children taken from their mothers in what was then a patriarchial society. Children were the property of their fathers. It is only since the introduction of the Family Law Act that we have developed a domestic matriarchy in which children appear to be the property of their mothers. So Manne and Gaita may well view the taking of children from mothers as a far more heinous crime than taking children from their fathers. However, their lack of compassion and utter silence on this similar and current stolen generation can only be understood as an ideological/ political choice, or an example of the reverse racism and sexism to which they choose to be blind. It was the Left which established the Family Law Act and maintains the bias of the Family Court, even in the glare of massive family breakdown. The feminist Left demands a domestic matriarchy, as it remains the central access women have to wealth and essential to the emancipation of women. The Left remains aligned with the demise of fatherhood and as such complicit in the breakdown of the family and caught up in an even paler shade of pink.

We are divided, un-reconciled and resentful even after the peace and compensation has been paid. It has not been accepted and more is required. No point of arrival is in sight. The Bringing Them Home report has contributed more towards inaction than it has to action. It is one of the major reasons why Aboriginal children who have been suffering abuse from their own families over the past ten years have been left to suffer that abuse.

Alcoholism is a disease that Australia has eulogised. Both Aboriginal and white Australian alcoholism, particularly in the Northern Territory, has been not only tolerated, but promoted. Frank Hardy remained an unapologetic alcoholic until his death. Much of his work in the Northern Territory when writing The Unlucky Australians—whilst organising properly communist unions (not, at least, the pale pink of the chatterers) to support the Wattie Creek strike, was also supporting him in being able to drink the way he wanted to, which was daily and often to unconsciousness. The Northern Territory has long been an excellent place for whitefellas to indulge their addictions, and these are the examples that Aborigines follow. We have viewed alcoholism as a form of freedom and egalitarianism, a larrikin cultural identity, rather than a disease.

Abandoning the alcohol eulogy in the Northern Territory will be an extremely difficult task for Australia. We have used the Territory as the backshed of our country where some people believe they can retire away from the demands of sobriety and civilisation. The task of curing inter-generational indigenous alcoholism has never been achieved anywhere in the world, and it is extremely doubtful that we will make much headway here in Australia, even by declaring a state of emergency and significantly reducing access to alcohol.

Alcoholics have usually lost any hope or wish for a sober life and cannot even imagine it. If they can, they imagine a life of constant pain and unhappiness—yearning for oblivion. Alcoholics do not wish to stop drinking, even under the most tragic circumstances, and will do anything, go anywhere for a drink. Alcoholics view alcoholism as a spiritual disease. It is a lifelong disease to which there is no cure. Even after not having a drink for ten years or more, an alcoholic can suddenly bust for no reason and go straight back to blackout drinking. Trying to heal alcoholism through addressing social disadvantage, which has been the policy of the dreadful orthodoxy for the past thirty years, is like trying to cure cancer with aspirin.

Reducing access to alcohol will almost certainly drive the alcoholics into the major towns. Isolated settlements will be reduced to some women and children, with very few men. If there is any policy which can empty the Northern Territory of its traditional owners, this is it. It is unlikely that there will be enough non-drinking citizens, black or white, to replace them. Without alcohol, it is quite possible that large areas of the north of Australia will become uninhabited.

So we are now confronted with genocide by alcoholism—genocide by suicide. The process of self-determination has arrived at an unjust, brutal and—yes—evil end. Self-determination has allowed and contributed to an epidemic of generational alcoholism, violence and child abuse within the Aboriginal nation. The Aboriginal nation lives within the Australian nation. So in our heart, we are sick. It is doubtful whether a massacre by gunfire could be worse than massacre by alcoholism. There is a significant level of abandonment inherent in this policy. Self-determination is a sophisticated motor to hand someone who has not even been taught how to drive.

I don’t think it is useful for language to entertain levels and nuances of genocide: major genocide, minor genocide, intent to genocide, the ultimate genocide, ethnocide and so on. Genocide must be clearly, accurately and absolutely defined simply because it must be absolutely defeated within us. You are either an alcoholic or not an alcoholic, it is impossible to be a little bit alcoholic. Similarly, it is either genocide or it is not genocide, it is impossible to be a little bit genocidal. Australian Aboriginal policy has been insensitive, clumsy, incompetent and unsuccessful, but it has never been genocidal. We have not yet been guilty of genocide. The UN definition of genocide has allowed dilettantes, wordsmiths, lawyers, romantic novelists, poets and philosophers an exercise in intellectual vanity for the entertainment of the chattering classes. Under a cloak of thoroughness and goodness and piety they have sought to be “inclusive” and have even brought the word itself into disrepute. If Dodson, Manne and Gaita do not seek to have this legal matter heard before the International Criminal Court, then it remains simply their opinion, an opinion which enables the words frivolous and genocide to be used in the one sentence.

Genocidal accusations for what Gaita and Manne term the “absorption” policies of the Australian government are a vanity of academic opinion to oppose any form of assimilation because this would threaten their absurdly purist notion of “multiculturalism”. The Greek and Italian cultures have flourished in Australia, and many would argue that they have been improved and expanded by their Australian connection. Culture does not fade easily—it is, in fact, almost impossible to destroy, as the English found out in Ireland. It is an arrogance for any culture to believe that it could consume another culture. Culture is the actual resilience itself. Culture is made as well as possible to survive beyond all things; that is its purpose. To be so undeniably beautiful that even those who conquer its people are wooed and entranced by it.

The Aboriginal culture is enormously strong and vibrant in this country—it is arguably stronger and more cohesive now than it has ever been. It has a huge media presence, its own television station, countless radio programs, its own newspaper offline and online, special and particular access to the ABC. The Aboriginal population is now about 500,000 and growing faster than the white population. Its footprint is easily the largest in all of the Australian multicultural image. Land rights need to be seen as a deal which has delivered Aboriginal Australians democracy, freedom from hunger, relative peace, roads, cars, houses, cities, electricity and internet lines connecting it to the rest of the world. We live better, longer and with considerably less violence than we ever have in history before. This is potentially a magnificent deal for Aboriginal people.

Dodson, Manne and Gaita throw the accusation of “racism” around very lazily. They all referred to Dodson’s comment that the Howard government was “racist scum”, and the word is central to the fundamentals of their accusations against Australians. Again the dreadful orthodoxy pervades our thinking. The word racist, together with the accusations of “sexist” “misogynist” and “homophobic”, have created a vacuum of ordinary conversation and a void in any form of interrelation between these groups in our society. The exclusiveness and exceptionalism through which these minority groups now view themselves has created a tribal mentality which has divided Australian society. Our art, literature, poetry, Miles Franklin Awards, premiers’ awards, Australia Council awards, are all vetted for orthodoxy by the pervasive tentacles of the orthodoxy police.

After returning from the Northern Territory in about 1976, I read an innocent poem I had written with the title “Black People Do Not Hide” at a poetry reading at the house of Nigel Robarts, the Sydney poet. The poem was intended to bring visibility to the invisible Aborigines in places like Sydney. Robert Adamson was there, and about halfway through my reading, he interjected, accusing me of being a “racist”. He threw a tomato at me before I wrestled him to the ground (we were allowed to do that sort of thing in those days).

Influential social commentators like Dodson, Manne and Gaita reinforce this nonsense. They will view this essay as racist because I have deliberately focused on the problem of generational Aboriginal alcoholism. They would hear what I am saying as discriminating against Aborigines because of their race, and therefore they would not allow me to say it. This essay would have no chance of publication in Meanjin, the Monthly, Overland, Eureka Street or any of the other Left-driven literary magazines. Yet the problem remains for Aboriginal people that they must find a way to heal generational alcoholism or remain in despair and desolation.

I asked Professor Frank Brennan SJ about the Doomagie case, which he touted throughout his excellent sermon as an injustice. I asked him whether he knew that Mr Doomagie was a suffering alcoholic and as such had an enlarged liver which was extremely vulnerable, and whether he thought that, in part, Mr Doomagie must also bear some responsibility for his own death? Professor Brennan thanked me for the “spirit” of my question, but declined to answer it. I also asked him what he would do with regard to generational Aboriginal alcoholism, and after mocking the alcohol ban proposed by the state of emergency, he again declined to answer my question.

Our dislike of talking about alcoholism is different from the way in which do not like to talk of, say, cancer. We see a morally culpable dimension to alcoholism, so we either romanticise it (as with Henry Lawson) or we don’t mention it, in case we might be seen to have been complicit in our otherwise innocent tragedy, or that it might ruin the reputation of a worthy man (as with Frank Hardy). Much madness is related to alcohol and substance abuse which is never diagnosed as such, because the medical profession also suffers from the dreadful orthodoxy, and seeks the causes in social injustice.

With regard to Aboriginal alcoholism I would suggest the following eight points be developed with the aim of creating a self-sustainable core of sobriety in the Northern Territory.

• Offer incentive payments (positive discrimination) to all non-drinking alcoholics, with about two years of sobriety, for any and all government jobs available in the Territory: chippies, plumbers, builders, teachers, public servants, doctors, nurses, lawyers, labourers and magistrates. Provide incentives to all private contractors who employ sober alcoholics.

• Establish large long-term detoxification units in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Katherine and Darwin which can provide extended care to Aboriginal alcoholics, and which are staffed and resourced adequately.

• Rescind all state and territory responsibility for Aboriginal affairs and create a national department responsible for all Aboriginal affairs, answerable directly to the prime minister.

• Develop Darwin University into a specialist Aboriginal education university with significant campuses in Katherine and Alice Springs running education from primary school to tertiary degrees, with a special and major focus on developing excellent teaching practice for Aboriginal communities.

• Alcohol-free isolated communities which may be reduced to small numbers should receive ongoing practical support from the government and the army. A five-year plan to populate and develop small business throughout these communities.

• Large-scale scholarship programs in government and private secondary schools in the south to be offered to isolated Aboriginal adolescents together with foster-family support systems.

• Mandatory six-month placements of all HECS-funded graduates (doctors, writers, poets, teachers, engineers, nurses, scientists and politicians) in isolated, semi-isolated and urban Aboriginal communities.

• Freehold title and a “build your own house” grant with absolute individual ownership to all Aboriginal families willing to pick up a hammer. Australian white law to rule in all matters, and the rights of the individual to be maintained.

Australians have always loved the Aboriginal people, though they may not have always liked them. They have fallen in love with the Aboriginal culture, the painting, the dance and the song, and they want it to live. They want a survival of traditional tribal Aboriginality in modern Australia. Yet to seek this is like age seeking youth. Traditional Aboriginal culture that can survive within modern contemporary Australia is not the same as tribal traditional Aboriginal culture that has no knowledge of the modern world. The current orthodoxy relies remarkably on the concept of “the noble savage” which historians, writers, novelists, poets, anthropologists, linguists and social commentators have romanticised, ignoring the savage and focusing on the noble. Justine Ferrari notes in her article “Aboriginal Violence was Sanitised” (Australian, July 7-8) that

“the memoirs of the first Aboriginal Justice of the Peace, Ella Simon, were similarly sanitised by Sydney publishers Millennium Books in the late 1990s so that a baby ‘stuffed head first down a rabbit hole and left to die after it fell ill on walkabout’ was allegedly edited to read ‘left under a tree to die’.”

Barry Hill in Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession compares the song language of Strehlow’s book Songs of Central Australia with “the lyricism of the Song of Songs and the gravity of The Torah … culturally speaking, Songs is Australia’s Book of Genesis”. It is between these polarities of fact and romanticism that the ordinary Australian must find reconciliation with his country and the Aboriginal people. Though Aboriginal people have a special place in Australian culture, they do not have an exceptional place.

The very last question to Robert Manne at the end of the series was from a young girl who asked what we in Melbourne could do right now to help the Aborigines (this was typical of the type of question the audience asked all through the six weeks of lectures). Manne answered by telling her to vote Labor at the forthcoming federal election so that Noel Pearson would be able to return to his true left-wing roots and have cause to attack the Right again. Gaita had introduced Manne as “Australia’s greatest public intellectual” and in his concluding eulogy, he said that Robert Manne had gone some way, at least, in bridging the divide between the Left and the Right. On both these counts and with this whole dreadful orthodoxy, let me say that I dissent.

As I leave Alice Springs, I hear the ABC newsreader announce that today is the first day that drinking alcohol has been banned in public places, including all the camps. The next news item announces the final withdrawal of British troops from Ireland. I don’t go to Uluru because I don’t feel like being treated like a hated tourist right now. I pass by all the road signs announcing “Ayers Rock” and delight in the magnificent size of those big black desert eagles as they feast on fresh roadkill.

Patrick McCauley is a Melbourne writer and poet.