Life on the West Island - Chinks of Light

In 1968, eminent West Island anthropologist W E H Stanner presented the respected Boyer Lectures, detailing what he called “a cult of forgetfulness” practised by white citizens about the destruction of Indigenous culture, the killing of Aboriginal people and the stealing of their land.

Professor Robert Manne of Melbourne University wrote that Stanner’s lectures …revealed both the richness of Aboriginal culture and the deliberate forgetting of a violent and cruel history among white Australians. Stanner’s understanding came from an empathy and direct interaction with Aboriginal culture, and it was on his advice that former PM Gough Whitlam poured sand from his hand into that of Vincent Lingiari when handing the Wavehill Station back to the Gurundji people.

But 55 years after Stanner’s seminal lectures, the results of last week’s referendum would seem to indicate that the cult of forgetting is still with us, concealed within “the great Australian silence.” A strong majority of voters opposed the Voice referendum. However, according to detailed analysis, over 75% of First Nations peoples in remote communities voted “Yes” and in total, six million West Islanders voted in favour of the proposal.

This week has seen a new “great Australian silence” as Indigenous leaders and “Yes” supporters observe a period of mourning following the failure of the referendum. They fear that the country has turned its back on reconciliation and that the severe disadvantages suffered by First Nations people will be perpetuated. However, some optimistic analysts feel that the angry referendum campaigns have at least put Indigenous affairs at the forefront of national policy discussion.

But while it is too early to identify rays of hope, there are a few little chinks of light appearing. One of these is that a large majority of voters have said that they want to see action to embed “truth in advertising” for election and referendum campaigns. The recent campaign was notable for a huge amount of disinformation, much of it coming from the “No” side. A major problem was that much of the false information was spread by social media, but some large media organisations disseminated false data and reported outrageous distortions and lies as if they were verified facts. Among the most common of these were:

• The whole proposal is based on a land grab (ironically, it is true that First Nations disadvantage arose in large part from the grabbing of their sovereign land by colonists and settlers);
• You could lose your house and/or backyard (this is demonstrably untrue, since the High Court decisions on native title specifically do not apply to private property where title has been issued to the landowner, but is a repeat of the outrageous scare campaigns around the Mabo and Wik cases);
• Aborigines did not suffer any disadvantage from colonial settlement (numerous authoritative histories have documented contemporary accounts in white newspapers of massacres and “hunting parties” which killed many thousands of the original inhabitants, not to mention mass deaths from introduced diseases including influenza and smallpox);
• There are no continuing detrimental effects from white settlement (all the statistics on Aboriginal health, housing, education, employment and life expectancy show significant disadvantages and that there is little progress on “closing the gap.”);
• The Voice will introduce race into the Constitution (race is explicitly detailed in the Constitution, which already specifically allows the government to make laws to the detriment of Aboriginal people);
• The Voice will give Indigenous people a right of veto over the parliament (this is a ludicrous claim that an advisory body could have a veto);
• The Electoral Commission is intervening to deliberately advantage the “Yes” campaign by not counting crosses as “No” votes (the procedure followed was as normal and the courts dismissed this slur on the AEC); and
• Aborigines want to set up their own military forces (no evidence for this over-the-top lie was ever produced by the Liberal Senator promoting it).

In light of the lies and distortions, at least two federal parliamentarians have introduced bills to attempt to ensure truth in political advertising, including in social media. Opinion polls show that over 80% of voters support this move, including three quarters of those who voted against the referendum proposal. But will it be enough to fix the conscious distortions by right wing sources such as Sky News and the Murdoch media? Or the hateful campaigns of neo-Nazis and avowed racists?

Perhaps another slight sign of progress came in a quirky news report late this week about a simple initiative in a remote primary school with mostly indigenous students:

WA Today reports the 50 students at remote mining town Fairbridge's campus just weren't coping. Then one of the students had an idea — chicken therapy. Hey, it worked for me, the kid figured, so they brought their chickens Penny and Maggie into the playground. Teacher Jayde McKenzie said, let’s give it a try it for a few days. School attendance is now at 86% — which is extremely high for at-risk youth, the paper says.

“The kids just fell in love,” McKenzie says, adding she was blown away by “how quickly many re-engaged at school”. The WA Association for Mental Health was so impressed by the results it gave Fairbridge a $900 grant for a coop. Kids are fine to leave classrooms at any time to work inside the coop (with support staff nearby) or just sit down with the chickens to decompress. Penny and Maggie are very empathetic, McKenzie says, almost like a therapy dog. Often they will just nest in a kid’s lap “and listen while they talk to them”, with no judgment. It’s more like issues that a kid might not want to tell an adult, McKenzie says, adding that she encourages Australia’s teachers to think about Fairbridge’s clucky approach.

So could chooks and truth get the West Island back onto a path to Indigenous reconciliation? Perhaps these little chinks of light might be a start.