iDIDJ Australia Didgeridoo Cultural Hub

Not seeing what is there: in eastern Arnhem Land, Frances and Howard Morphy tap into Indigenous people's own visions for their future and the future of the homelands movement.

Article from:Arena Magazine
Article date:April 1, 2008
Author: Morphy, Frances ; Morphy, Howard

In October 2005 we attended a meeting called to discuss regional economic development at a homeland settlement in eastern Arnhem Land. We will call it 'X'. It is the largest of the region's homelands or outstations, with a stable population of well over 100 Yolngu people. At the meeting were Yolngu from X and nearby outstations, together with public servants representing several departments of the Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments. The Yolngu considered the meeting important and had prepared carefully for it; 'government', it seemed, was at last responding in a coordinated way to the need, articulated by the Yolngu themselves, for a sustainable regional economy.

As is an established convention, the visitors were greeted with a welcoming ceremony. They were seated under the shade of an open shelter roofed with palm leaves. The singers gathered outside the entrance. Accompanied by yidaki (didgeridoo) and clap sticks, they sang powerfully. They moved forward in unison, the sound swelling as they came into the shelter, building to a crescendo with a rippling of clap sticks.

We recognised that the song was from one of the major sacred places nearby, a river mouth. It belongs to one of the great ancestral serpents of the region, associated with the seasonal cycle and the movement of water. His flickering tongue produces the forked lightning that signals the passage of storms from place to place in the monsoon season. At this river mouth he tastes the flavour of the floodwaters from the inland as they reach the saltwater, spitting the brackish mix far into the sky.

The community leader who was chairing the meeting began by explaining why that particular song had been performed. Although the other non-Yolngu in the assembled company did not have our background knowledge, the message he conveyed to them was clear. He said that the snake at the river mouth communicated to different groups of people, exchanging ideas. In swallowing the water and spitting it out the snake was taking in knowledge and then passing it on to other snakes for them to swallow in turn. He said that at this meeting government and Yolngu had come together like the snakes to swallow each other's knowledge so that they could understand one another better and be able to work together. There is always a symbolic purpose to Yolngu performances.

However, that was not the end of what he had to say. He continued by referring to a questionnaire the community had recently received from the NT government's inquiry on child abuse. He was concerned that the government representatives might be assuming that this was a problem associated with all Aboriginal communities. He assured them that this kind of thing did not happen at X. We were not sure at the time why he brought this up. Subsequent events have proven his prescience, and how good it would have been had those at the meeting taken more note of his words. For some months later, soon after the Little Children are Sacred report was published, it became the justification for a blunt instrument--the 'emergency intervention'--that would threaten to disrupt attempts by Yolngu to address what they had identified as their core problems.

The Outstation Movement

Communities like X developed into permanent settlements in the early 1970s as part of the 'outstation movement'. In eastern Arnhem Land this coincided with the building of the mining town of Nhulunbuy, close to the then Methodist mission of Yirrkala, where many Yolngu from the surrounding region had come to live since its establishment in the mid-1930s. Yolngu saw the development of the mining town as a major threat to their culture. In particular, they were concerned with the effect that alcohol would have on the young. Over 400 kilometres from Darwin, Yirrkala had been alcohol free until the development of the mining town. Yolngu had opposed the development of the mine, taking the Commonwealth government to court in what became known as the Gove Land Rights Case. Having lost the case they again went to court to try to prevent the establishment of a licensed hotel in Nhulunbuy. That case too was lost, but the desire to control access to alcohol has been a factor in Yolngu thinking ever since. The Laynhapuy homelands were established as alcohol-free communities in the 1970s and have remained so until today.

The homelands began with very little infrastructural support. The 'roads' were bush tracks passable only in the dry season, and the airstrips were cleared by hand. The first housing was built by community members from bush materials and corrugated iron. Radio was the only means of communication with the rest of the world. The economy was based on hunting and gathering, art and craft production, and pensions. They began small, but over the past forty years many of these communities have become well established, with an evolving but fragile regional economy supported by their outstation resource centre.

As these outstations have grown in size so too have the problems at the communities near the mining town. Living near Nhulunbuy is associated in the minds of Yolngu with dysfunctional levels of alcohol and substance abuse and violence that threatens the social fabric. There is a high death rate among young people and extremely high levels of youth suicide. In marked contrast, the youth of homeland communities--if they stay there--do not die from alcohol -related disease or violence, and youth suicide is rare.

People want to live on the homelands for a number of reasons. The foundational one, from which all else flows, is that they are living on their own country, the source of their spiritual identity and strength. It is also a question of scale. In these small communities, and in the absence of alcohol, it is possible for effective clan leaders to bind the community to a common sense of purpose and thus to exercise authority over the young. These are safe and secure places to raise children. However, the homelands are not isolated from the main communities. A complex web of kinship links those on the homelands to those at Yirrkala and the homeland communities are seen as part of the regional mix precisely because they are acknowledged to be free of the violence and chaos associated with alcohol.

In the Laynhapuy region and the hub settlement of Yirrkala about half of the regional population lives on the homelands. They are visited throughout the year by kin from Yirrkala. While some of the homelands have populations of less than thirty, X and four other Laynhapuy homelands have substantial populations and would be regarded as small country towns if they were in regional Australia. They have, however, received relatively little recognition and support. Government policy has been--and is still being--directed primarily to hub settlements like Yirrkala. A general and long-term problem with government policy has been the tendency to view homeland communities as if they are disconnected from the regional system of which they are a part, and as much more isolated than they really are.

Yolngu who live in their homelands do not consider themselves isolated, nor do they want to be. Many of their aspirations resemble those of other Australians living in rural areas distant from major population centres. They want reasonable housing and infrastructure. They want access to efficient health services and good education for their children, and they want to see the development of local and regional economies that will support the population in the long term. Homelands people have been asking for intervention in these areas for a long time, but they have not been heard.

At X there is an average of eleven people to a three-bedroom house. Yet last year's allocated housing budget allowed for a single new house in the entire Laynhapuy region, and one of the last dictates of the Howard government was that no new housing would be built at homelands communities anywhere. For the past ten years the X community has been asking for better resources for its school and for full-time, fully qualified teachers to be based there during the week. With seventy children, the school-age population of X is substantial by rural Australian standards. The Laynhapuy Homelands School, based at Yirrkala, has worked hard to address educational needs in its region but it has never had sufficient resources, nor has it been able to respond to the particular demands of local communities. One of the primary objectives of the October 2005 meeting was to discuss the building of teacher accommodation at X. Finally, in 2008, it looks like this will happen. But the children, it seems, will continue to live in overcrowded houses.

As for economic development, the community itself has generated significant resources through its participation in the art and craft industry and other enterprises, while fishing, hunting and gathering make a substantial contribution to the diet and health of the community. People are also employed in teaching and through heath and aged-care programs. Municipal services like refuse collection are carried out by Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) participants. The Laynhapuy region has recently been declared an Indigenous Protected Area and the associated Yirralka Ranger Program, with its new ranger station at X, now employs over forty men and women on CDEP wages. Ranger programs have been an important initiative across Arnhem Land. They are playing an increasingly significant role in the control of exotic weeds and feral animals, in the maintenance of biodiversity through controlled burning, and even in coastal surveillance. They also provide a springboard for the development of cultural and environmental tourism and education programs, and other potentially income-generating enterprises such as commercial harvesting of native flora and fauna.

The atmosphere at X in the year before the intervention combined considerable hope with ongoing frustration at the difficulty of getting government action that responded to the community's own perceptions of its needs. X certainly required housing, education, health and development assistance but an intervention based on the assumption that the abuse and neglect of children was taking place on a major scale in all communities was unlikely to address the range of problems experienced, especially in places where there was no evidence of child neglect. Indeed many of the emergency measures were likely to exacerbate rather ameliorate existing problems.

The policy of the Howard government running parallel with the intervention, and indeed preceding it, was to remove support from homeland centres and 'encourage' movement into major settlements such as Yirrkala and Nhulunbuy. The economic rationale was that services could be provided more efficiently and employment created more easily in such townships than in the remoter homelands. The cultural rationale, finally spelled out by John Howard in Hermannsburg in the run-up to the election, was that there is no future for remote Indigenous people apart from full assimilation into the mainstream. The problems with this as a 'solution' are multiple.

The Intervention: Undermining Local Initiatives

CDEP, which had become the mainstay of employment in the homelands and a potential building block for the regional economy, came under threat through the intervention. One of the emergency measures was to quarantine 50 per cent of people's social security payments, ostensibly to ensure that the money would be spent on essentials, not squandered on alcohol. The CDEP wage, however, was not classified as a social security benefit. The proposed solution was to summarily abolish CDEP and transfer some 8000 people to unemployment benefits, with the promise of converting some 2000 former CDEP jobs into 'real' jobs. This measure would have created far fewer jobs than had previously been supported under CDEP. For example, the Yirralka Rangers were to be offered six paid positions, to be shared among the forty or so people who were paid as rangers under CDEP. And in a final, related measure, the government lifted the 'remote area exemption' on unemployment benefits. Thus all the newly 'unemployed' on the homelands would risk destitution unless they moved to the main settlements to make themselves available for employment there.

Fortunately the abolition had not been implemented in eastern Arnhem Land by the time of the 2007 federal election, and it is now in abeyance pending further reforms. But this whole episode is symptomatic of policy failing to articulate with local contexts and, rather than building on local initiatives, cutting across them and undermining locally initiated attempts at regional planning.

One meeting held in October 2007 at the Laynhapuy Homelands School headquarters in Yirrkala, shortly after the intervention measures were beginning to be felt there, seemed to typify and encapsulate this problem. The school had been told to expect a visit from a group representing a consortium of Commonwealth and NT government departments and the Indigenous Land Corporation and Aboriginal Hostels to discuss the idea of building a hostel for secondary-school age homelands children in the region. While waiting for the visitors the large group of Yolngu and non-Yolngu teachers, Laynhapuy employees and Board members who had gathered, discussed how to conduct the meeting. The consensus was that the visitors should be allowed to speak first and that the meeting would then respond. People were concerned to know how this new plan would mesh with the secondary program that the Homelands School, after many years of struggle, had recently established at 'Y' homeland with the assistance of an interstate Rotary group. Rotary had built the classrooms and was beginning on accommodation for children attending school through the week from other homelands.

When the visitors arrived, they launched without further ado into their own proposal. The Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and the Indigenous Land Corporation were planning to finance the building of three hostels in three mining towns--Borroloola, Weipa and Nhulunbuy (or possibly Yirrkala)--so that Aboriginal children from remote locations could attend high school in the mining towns. Each hostel would cost $10 million; they would have many amenities, including swimming pools, and staffs consisting of houseparents, tutors, a cook, and grounds and security workers, thus providing employment for up to ten local Indigenous people. There would be recurrent funding of $1 million per annum for each forty-bed hostel.

The response of the meeting was measured, articulate and probably disconcerting for the visitors. They were informed politely that Laynhapuy already had a secondary program, at Y and that this was where the Yolngu wanted their children to be educated. The offer was fantastic, but the last place that the homelands people wanted their children to live was in the mining town: 'That place is poison for our children'. Yirrkala was little better. A hostel in Nhulunbuy would need a high barbed-wire fence to keep drinking relatives from bothering the young people. Integration of Yolngu children into the Nhulunbuy High School had been tried before. Within one semester all twenty children had disengaged from the school completely, alienated by their experiences there. How about building the hostel at Y, in support of the secondary education on offer already there? The visitors promised to take this idea back with them, but expressed doubts that it would be viewed favourably 'because of issues about infrastructure'. After the meeting, the senior Yolngu teacher who has been the driving force behind the Y enterprise was close to tears. 'They are prepared to spend all this money but they do not respect or understand what we want for our children, and what we have tried to do for ourselves. To hold out this hope and then take it away again--it's cruel.'

Assimilation, or Yolgnu Visions of the Future?

If carried to their logical conclusion the policies instigated by the Howard government would enforce a movement into the main settlements where the health and social problems confronting Indigenous people are often at their most severe. And these policy settings have not yet been entirely overturned. People live in the homelands partly because it is a safer and healthier environment than the hub settlement near the mining town. They have no good grounds for believing that conditions will improve in the short to medium term in the larger settlements, and indeed the logistics of providing enough housing for the influx from the homelands would place enormous strains on the housing stock and infrastructure of settlements like Yirrkala. Most importantly, people live in homelands communities because of their profound attachment to the places that are the wellspring of their identity and creativity. They feel a deep sense of responsibility for their country. Policy predicated on moving people, en masse, away from these places would prove difficult to implement. More importantly, it would be fundamentally destructive of community, of people's sense of identity and place in the world.

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the possibilities for a sustainable eastern Arnhem Land economy. However, it is important to note areas in which opportunities lie. This is a region of enormous environmental richness. Yolngu occupation of the land has ensured that it remains a region of great biodiversity, relatively free from exotic species. And in the coming era of carbon trading the potential for using returns from carbon 'taxes' to maintain the rich forested environment are considerable. The high environmental values of the region make it an ideal location for environmental and educational tourism, of the kind that X is keen to develop. However the unique asset that the region possesses is the culture of the Yolngu people, which the homelands have helped to foster and develop.

The achievements and contribution to the wider Australian society of the Yolngu of Yirrkala and the Laynhapuy region, who numbered perhaps 750 when the Methodist missionaries arrived in the mid-1930s, and who today number just under 2000, are testament to the resilience, richness and vitality of their culture. The greeting ceremony at X with its subtle message of exchanging knowledge shows the adaptability of Indigenous concepts and genres of communication in new contexts. Indigenous cultural performance, in addition to its aesthetic qualities, expresses ideas in powerful ways and adds to the richness of contemporary Australian culture. It is a great irony that Australian society at the highest level seems to recognise the distinctive contribution of Yolngu culture--Yolngu dance movements and song featured prominently in the historic opening ceremony at Parliament House on 12 February--while simultaneously failing to recognise that resources are required to nurture that culture.

We are at a crucial moment now in the development of Indigenous policy in Australia. Despite the new government's welcome emphasis on the need for 'evidence-based' policy, there is a lingering agenda, dominated by ideology rather than evidence, that neglects lessons from history, the complexity of social change, and the agency of Indigenous Australians. The very places that should be seen as part of the long-term solution to problems of connection between Aboriginal people in remote areas and wider Australian society are represented as the problem. This neo-assimilationist view shows no understanding of the history of the homelands settlements and the trajectories they have followed, and has a very partial view of the visions of the future that homelands people are creating for themselves.

Many of the issues that have finally become part of the public debate--health, housing, education, employment--have been matters of concern to Yolngu and other Indigenous Australians for a long time. Governments have chronically failed to provide sufficient resources and support to facilitate sustainable long-term development in remote Indigenous Australia, yet they project the resulting 'deficit' entirely onto Indigenous people and their communities. They fail to recognise that locally generated components of the solution are already in place, such as the self-regulated control of alcohol and the relative absence of violence in the homelands. Yolngu people have long seen weekly boarding as the solution to the provision of secondary education, but the Yolngu solution at Y receives little acknowledgment and meagre support compared with the grand, centrally conceived plan for hostels in mining towns.

The criticism of outstation communities that characterised the last stages of the Howard government was based on opinion and anecdote rather than evidence. There is not enough hard comparative evidence--it has not been deemed worthy of collection--but what does exist indicates that in many regions the small homeland communities are healthier and more socially cohesive than larger communities, like Yirrkala and Wadeye. Australia should value these communities' significant contribution to cultural life, their role in environmental maintenance and the great potential they have for the development of differentiated regional economies. The intervention should be recalibrated--quickly--to support rather than undermine their viability.

Frances Morphy is a Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research and Howard Morphy is Director of the Research School of Humanities, both at the Australian National University. They have a relationship with the Yolngu of Yirrkala and its surrounding homelands that goes back to 1973.