Land, Work, and Bush Tucker

Robbie Thorpe, a Victorian Aboriginal activist, is standing in the old stone entrance to 136 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, in Melbourne. He has his arms held straight out against the side walls, as if crucified. He looks directly into the cameras of the local media who have gathered there. The Eureka flag is hung over the side of a mobile building platform, and the scene is surrounded by about twenty union heavies in fluorescent jackets, the Fitzroy Aboriginal community, and women with lots of tattoos handing out flyers. The words Genocide and Invasion are displayed on a big banner beside the Eureka flag. The tattooed woman gives me a flyer with the heading “Self Determination. Not Intervention” splashed across the top.

The building at 136 Gertrude Street has been under the control of the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service for about the last thirty years. It has become derelict and has been destroyed internally by drunks, drug addicts and small fires. The Gertrude Street Traders Group has long wanted to resurrect the building, and recently submitted a business plan to the Aboriginal Health Service for a bush tucker restaurant. The control of the building has now been handed over to another state Aboriginal authority, which has proposed renovating the building and creating a bush tucker restaurant which would train Aboriginal chefs and waiters.

However, the Robbie Thorpe group want the building used as an Aboriginal meeting place—to house the sacred fire. Their main objection to the restaurant is that it would be “demeaning” for Aboriginal people to serve white people food. So this is the basis for today’s demonstration—those holding the signs against “Invasion” and “Genocide” and “Intervention” view the restaurant proposal as an “Uncle Tom” idea which is integrationist and assimilationist.

White people have not only been serving food to Aboriginal people for the past two hundred years, but they have been growing the food as well. More than anything else, Aboriginal people have preferred white European cuisine to their own bush tucker, and by this one decision, have traded the Australian land mass for European settlement. It is exactly this food production along with the various developing technologies used to grow it, store it and cook it that have attracted Aboriginal people away from their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In 1787, the Aboriginal lifestyle could support about 500,000 people from the landscape. In 2007 the same landscape can support about 21 million people, with a much better quality of life, and for much longer.

Whether or not our ability to produce food and wealth has been good for the environment is another question. It is a question for which we may not yet have a definite answer, but which will undoubtedly confine us to reap as we have sown. Let us hope our mistakes have not yet been catastrophic. Many will argue persuasively that the food and wealth we have created have led us into sloth and greed, that we are fat and unhealthy, that our spirit and our souls, particularly, are weak. Yet we have placed one foot in front of another, proceeded to the next right thing, one government after another, zigzagging our way through some sort of Darwinian Scientific Christian Socialist morality towards our present position.

Overall, the present position, though not perfect, seems tenable. Our white European idea of something like democracy linked with the landscape of Australia has produced a better outcome for more Australians than did the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the original inhabitants. The Aboriginal people chose the right cuisine, we chose the right land, and we have both profited enormously.

Gayle and Mike Quamby have developed Australia-wide pilot gardens of bush tucker employing hundreds of Aboriginal people in isolated settlements. Their company, Outback Pride, processes, packages and delivers various bush tucker products to shops, supermarkets and restaurants. This excellent innovation needs support to expand and stabilise its business. There could not be a better investment for taxpayers’ money. Many of our tertiary institutions are now developing courses which are producing Aboriginal bush tucker chefs, and both the ABC and SBS have bush tucker cooking programs in the pipeline. It would seem that bush tucker may be the next big Aboriginal enterprise to hit national and international markets. Eventually, the bush tucker industry could be as big as the Aboriginal art industry. A bush tucker restaurant at 136 Gertrude Street is a timely and visionary concept which would help in the development of this fledgling Aboriginal venture.

Aboriginal philosophers and wise men from just about every tribe across the continent will tell you that we do not own the land, that the land owns us. This is the precise seminal difference between our cultures. White European society is based on our decision to own the land. You cannot own land which owns you, nor can you be owned by land which you own. Even if it seems so, you can always sell it. Most things which are owned by human beings derive from the ownership of land. If human beings remain owned by the land, they can own very little. It is the ownership of land amongst human beings that has created the modern world. Our consciousness and our intelligence demand that we take possession of the land and that we possess it as if it were an extension of ourselves. In that way, we have learned, we will best develop the Darwinian imperative of the evolution of our consciousness and intelligence to solve the problems of its potential. We are programmed for this even as we further program ourselves to curtail our excesses.

Interestingly, it is the vast new middle class who own most of the cities and a fair part of the land. This is a bourgeoisie made up of those whose wages are paid by the government, the government that is nobody, the enemy, yet everybody and ourselves. They are public servants, teachers, police, nurses, local government officials, even sub-contractors paid by government contracts. Their wages are paid by the taxpayer. Few of the new bourgeoisie actually generate true wealth. Most of them, now, do not make things—they do not manufacture goods or provide services that actually create wealth. The greatest product of the public service is public servants. Their greatest burden is boredom. They are forbidden creativity and sacrifice much of their individuality.

Most of the Australian public service bourgeoisie owns one house and many own an investment property as well—it is desperate to say sorry to Aboriginal people to secure its title absolved of any guilt created by previous governments and public servants—also to take up the opportunity of creating more laws and therefore more public servants. With “sorry” written in the sky by skywriters and on bumper stickers over a period of about ten years, the bourgeoisie walk across bridges with “sorry” blazoned across their chests waiting for the Aboriginal OK. “How many times and for how long do we have to keep saying sorry?” they might whisper to themselves. Reconciliation is a two-way process, and so far, it is still one-way. The bourgeoisie view work as a form of resentment and hate their bosses as they hate the right-wing white people who are invaders and perpetrators of genocide. They believe their wealth is a measure of their holiness, and they have forgotten that it has anything to do with the ownership of land.

The pale pink socialism of the bourgeoisie is in denial of its capitalism. Its wealth hangs about its neck even as it devours Miles Franklin-award-winning historical novels manufacturing massacres and eulogising Aboriginal song language as the Australian Book of Genesis. It believes in equality and social justice yet develops programs for affirmative action and positive discrimination. It sees itself as Labour fighting Capital whilst buying Telstra shares and land.

That moment in time when mankind morphed from a nomadic lifestyle to a settled lifestyle was also the moment we learned to work. People work, eventually, because they fear they would go mad in boredom if they did not. Hollywood is full of rich people going mad through lack of work, as are the isolated Aboriginal settlements in the north. Not just the lack of work, but also the lack of freedom and creativity that the discipline of work offers with it.

Most of us can only find meaning as individuals in communities based around work. The co-operation of minds in the process of work and action has enabled us to become conscious of our consciousness. We become more aware of our similarities and needs.

It must have been a great leap of faith to believe we could stay in one place and survive, that we could own the land. The weather, the seasons, the water and the spirit, all possessed the indigenous Aboriginal peoples. They were owned by the land. Our ability to fly to the moon is based on our decision to possess the land. To build houses on it, to grow plants and animals by fencing it, to make clothes and keep warm, by manufacturing with it. We have therefore made the land valuable to our society by examining how it works, what it is, what it contains underneath the surface. It is, in fact, our consciousness of land that has given it value. Since the very first house was constructed we have been developing a belief that we are responsible for our own destinies. The point at which human beings decided that they would own the land rather than allowing the land to own them was the moment of an existential leap when we decided to take hold of our future. Human beingness began to recognise its own consciousness and celebrate its problem-solving creativity to manage a landscape into productivity.

We are driven to productivity, beauty and creativity as a consequence of life. Death ensures the contract. The ownership of land has allowed human beings to think outside of necessity, to develop culture, art, law and love that will keep us alive for as long as possible, because, deep down, we suspect that each of us has but one life. The more conscious we become, the more certain we are of our demise, and the more brilliant we make our culture. Desperate to expand the consciousness of our short lives, we seek further consciousness in land.

We needed to create language and conversation which remembered the truth and solved the problems of food and shelter with memory. We needed someone to hold the other end. We gained time to dream of ourselves within our landscape. The decision to own the land rather than allowing the land to own us was both inevitable and irrevocable. In a way it was the decision to seek God through science rather than submit to the land and thus to fate. Human beings will always seek to be gods, only some of our failures subdue us.

Yet we yearn for our origins. We somehow remember the Garden of Eden but not the snake. We remember the freedom of our nakedness but not the cold. Most of all we remember a time when we did not need to work. When we did not need to co-operate and submit to law. So we think we understand the nobility of the Aborigines—their yearning for their traditional lifestyle. But the past is not just another country, it is one which never existed. The vision of Rousseau and Coombs could be conceived only by looking back through the kind of mirror that civilisation and education could construct. Though there was some nobility in the traditional lifestyle of Australian Aborigines, from the time of first settlement till the present moment they have consistently and loudly made it clear that they want to get out of their desolation and into our civilisation.

There is an “eternity” ingredient in our make-up—though we know we will die, we seek to live forever. Human beings do extraordinary things to be remembered forever. We somehow cannot accept our own death any more than we can forget our vague dreamlike memories of an origin. We did not leave the Garden of Eden because we learned how to grow gardens, we left it because we learned how to lie. One of the greatest myths of Aboriginal left-wing politics is the lie that Aboriginal people wish to return their traditional tribal origins. They do not and they cannot.

There is no choice but to progress. We will progress better and more quickly without progressive politics and it will be true progression, not just something new. The rights and responsibilities of each Australian citizen must be the same, no matter what those rights and responsibilities might be. The reintroduction of the permit system by the Rudd government marks the end of the Northern Territory emergency. This is ideological recidivism condoning anarchy under the ruse of tribal law. To progress on a foundation of lies and misconceptions such as “invasion” and “genocide” is dooming the Aboriginal nation to resentment. Anger and resentment have failed in every attempt at revolution or statehood. There is no balm, no forgiveness, no cure for hatred. It continues to grow until it turns in on itself.

Australia has been held accountable by the left-wing bourgeoisie for its processes in settlement and its attempts to integrate Aboriginal people into mainstream society. Yet the same bourgeoisie cannot accept responsibility for the failure of its own laissez-faire, separatist, Coombsian process of self-determination. There is a clear connection between the process and the outcome. This moral connection cannot be broken by good ends being achieved by evil means, nor from bad outcomes resulting from morally righteous processes. If the end does not justify the means, then the means must also be held accountable for the end—self-determination is responsible for alcoholism, violence and child abuse. This process must be held accountable for that outcome.

It is not demeaning for anybody to serve food to anybody else and it is not patronising for anybody to have food served to them by anybody else. All power to the bush tucker restaurant proposal for 136 Gertrude Street, to Gayle and Mike Quamby of Outback Pride and to the emerging bush tucker industry.