Two takes on social problems in Central Australia.

Peterson, Nicolas ; Merlan, Francesca

In the months following the enactment of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (1) (the Intervention) in June 2007, one set of reactions was to claim that the extent of the social problems in the Territory that had provoked the Intervention was being exaggerated. Initially, most attention focused on the extent and levels of child abuse and somewhat less on the much better documented issue of domestic and interpersonal violence.

Some of us felt this view was misplaced 'problem deflation'. It sat uncomfortably with our direct and indirect experience and knowledge of what was going on in Alice Springs and Central Australia more generally. There were, however, some grounds for the view that the situation was being exaggerated because of the considerable self-censorship by informed individuals and many organisations in Central Australia concerning the extent of the social problems, especially as they related to life in the town camps.

As a result, we approached several people with long experience working with Aboriginal people in the region, and asked them to write about an aspect of the social problems with which they were familiar. Two of these people were Malcolm Frost and Jane Lloyd. Frost is a psychologist who worked for the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress health service for five years on issues of violence, mainly with male perpetrators. Lloyd is an anthropologist who has worked for many years for a women's organisation on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, and more recently as Principal Specialist for the Australian Crime Commission on Indigenous child abuse and violence.

Malcolm Frost sees the high levels of Aboriginal violence as a result of 'a critical mass of self-generating human psychological dysfunction based on normal human responses to traumatic circumstances'. That is, although he mentions arguments for and against the view that violence is a 'cultural' (transmitted, learned) dimension of Indigenous life, he regards the focus on the issue of cultural specificity (2) as deflecting from the urgency of recognising and dealing with the problems. Although he recognises a clear tendency for some to see this as a failure of Aboriginal culture or agency, he believes that some of these consequences repeatedly emerge in circumstances that have resulted in people losing control of the context of reproduction of their lives, as have many Indigenous people over the past few decades. Frost first presents material supporting Indigenous views that people within their communities get 'flogged' whether they do nothing or the wrong or right thing in problematic circumstances. He points to the issue of negative attributions of responsibility to persons under conditions of dense relationality and interdependence that are prevalent in Indigenous communities. He also presents cases to illustrate the widespread problem of 'jealousing' (limited trust and associated aggression), child sexual abuse (together with the stacking of the deck against victims), and the kinds of insecure attachment produced by domestic violence.

Frost does not undertake here to describe or theorise the broader and longer-term circumstances that have led to these outcomes. This is an extremely important task that should not be forgotten. Frost's perspective here, however, is on the day-to-day situations that he was to deal with as a psychologist, and their impact upon Indigenous people. This is precisely one kind of close-up, experience-near perspective that is typically not clearly represented in wider critical social analyses. It is one that is extremely important to developing better capacity for working with, rather than on, or at a great distance from, Indigenous people and communities.

Jane Lloyd describes the high rates, and particular characteristics, of domestic homicide in the cross-border region of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia. The regional population has unbalanced proportions of young and older people, as is common across Central Australia. There is also a high incidence of violence embedded in domestic relations, and widespread acceptance of this violence as normal. She gives examples of domestic homicide cases that reveal its most common character: women as victims of ferocious homicidal assaults. These typically involve multiple wounds from prolonged assault with force, usually fuelled by alcohol but nonetheless often premeditated, preceded by similar violent episodes, and facilitated by the reluctance of family and others in the vicinity to intervene.

These two papers provide an empirically grounded glimpse into some aspects of the social problems that are a part of Central Australian Aboriginal people's daily lives and are rich ground for reflection on the complexity of the issues facing policymakers and service delivery providers in the region. They make it unequivocally clear that there is no room for problem deflation and that critique from the high moral ground uninformed by any glimmer of understanding of the lived complexity looks like what it is: gratuitous self-indulgence.

REFERENCE

Sutton, Peter 2009 The politics of suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

NOTES

(1.) This was a package of changes to welfare provision, law enforcement, land tenure and other measures introduced by the Australian federal government under the coalition ministry of John Howard in 2007, most immediately in response to claims of rampant child sexual abuse and neglect in Northern Territory Indigenous communities. This policy was continued by the Rudd Labor government.

(2.) One that has been vigorously argued in Australia, stimulated in large part by the appearance of The politics of suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus by Peter Sutton (2009). He argued that Aboriginal remote community conditions are dire and that government policies (including self-management in the 1970s, the equal pay decisions, granting of land rights and access to 'sit-down money', the homelands movement, bilingual education, and a plethora of other policies concerning health and community development employment projects) have led to no discernible improvement in living conditions; and that the bureaucracy dealing with Indigenous issues, as well as anthropologists, has resisted acknowledging the brutal realities of daily life in those communities. He also identifies what he sees as many cultural continuities in Indigenous behaviour, arguing that these are not adaptive and, on the contrary, are often positively destructive, in current circumstances. Contention has, justifiably, pivoted around the question of whether the behaviours he describes may be adequately identified as 'cultural' transmissions or are the consequences of specific colonial and postcolonial conditions in interaction with engrained social dispositions. The arguments are reminiscent of those around the 'culture of poverty'.

Nicolas Peterson and Francesca Merlan

Australian National University