Arelhe-kenhe Merrethene: Arrente traditional healing.

Jones, Jilpia Nappaljarri ; Canberra, John Thompson

Arelhe-kenhe Merrethene: Arrente traditional healing

Veronica Perrurle Dobson (compiler) 2007

IAD Press, Alice Springs, xix+89 pp, ISBN 9781864650334

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There is now a mountain of literature on Indigenous traditional healers and even more on so-called bush medicines. That on traditional healers began with Howitt, continued through Elkin (who coined that famous term 'men of high degree'), then continued with the Berndts and culminated with Cawte's study of Yolngu healers. Indeed, it is more than a century since Spencer and Gillen focused on healing within Arrente society.

So, here is a small volume dealing with the same topic. Can such a repetition be justified? Well, yes.

The author, or compiler, as she prefers to call herself, is a senior Arrente woman. We recently visited Alice Springs and, although unable to meet her, learned of the high respect in which she is held, both as an Arrente-English translator and repository of Arrente culture. She also occupies a senior position in the Institute of Aboriginal Development in Alice Springs.

The book is in three parts: the largest on plant medicines; the next (the first part) on traditional healers, commonly known as nunkarris (ngangkarl), but in her Arrente language, angangkere; and, finally, there are a few pages on the causes of present-day Aboriginal ill-health. To have all three topics within the same cover allows some integration and this helps to justify this publication. We were tempted to compare another recent publication by Indigenous writers on traditional healing, Ngangkari work--Anangu way (Anon. 2003), but, without being derogatory, tend to regard that book as better suited for the coffee table. Dobson's compilation is far less glossy but has more meat.

Dobson states that she wrote the work in Arrente, then translated it into English. The introduction is in both languages. Yet, on reading the work, we got the uncanny feeling that we were not reading but listening to the voice of the author speaking directly to us. This is how it should be and may even justify instances where she repeats herself. We found compelling the photographs that show the use of leaves put into sand to tell how help was summoned for a sick person.

What the author tells us about the angangkere comes from her family and others of the Eastern Arrente. It is interesting how little has changed since the observations of Spencer and Gillen and the similarities with traditional healers across the continent, where they still exist. She does make some very specific points. First, that angangkere derive their powers from their own Country and, second, that they are effective only in their own Country. This explains how angangkere feel confident enough to function in Alice Springs Hospital, although she doesn't spell out whether other traditional healers from the Anangu language groups, for example, are able to work on their own people in the same hospital.

Her emphasis on the intimate connection between spirit, body and land is not new but worth reiterating, particularly as she does it with passion. She relates the circumstances in which the spirit can desert the body, but does not mention a not-infrequent problem of placating an unsettled spirit when a person dies in a hospital away from his or her Country.

More importantly, Dobson emphasises that angangkere cannot heal so-called lifestyle diseases introduced after the European invasion, such as diabetes, kidney failure and cardiovascular disease. When these healers begin to drink alcohol excessively, their power diminishes until it is lost, and she laments that around Alice Springs the number of angangkere has fallen because of this.

Both reviewers have been trained in Western health care and can only surmise that much of the success enjoyed by the angangkere is the result of both the placebo effect and the Hawthorne effect. The Hawthorne effect can be simply described as 'the laying on of hands'. Yet the results of massage the author describes are not negligible. We were fascinated by her account of how, as a child, the angangkere cured what appeared to be pus in her middle ear by applying external suction and allowing drainage.

The section on plant and other traditional medicines has the authority of someone who has been intimately involved in finding and preparing these remedies for many years. She gives the Arrente names and the common names, as well as the botanical names, of these plants. Some, like fuchsia, lemon grass and meat ants, are widespread. Others are more localised to Central Australia but, in general, anyone wanting a education in 'bush medicines' could read with profit her descriptions of their applications to skin, internally, as inhalants, as washes and for smoking and regard them as applicable to much of Aboriginal Australia. Given the high prevalence of skin infections in many Aboriginal communities, scientific trials of these skin preparations would not go amiss.

In the last section of the book Veronica Dobson delivers a robust attack on the current lifestyles of her people and how they lead to ill-health and death. Indeed, in very few pages she sums up the problems from her personal experience. Her brevity makes a refreshing change from the volumes of research papers, theses, books and reports that have emerged, usually from the non-Indigenous community, which attempt to say the same things, but rarely as plainly as our author.

It is curious that she omits one factor; that is, smoking. The photographs show a very fit-looking, white-haired woman in her own Country. Perhaps this omission confirms that she shares the same attitude towards tobacco as many of her people and explains why anti-smoking campaigns to stop Indigenous smoking, first launched more than 20 years ago, have been such dismal failures.

This is a book that can be profitably read by all health care workers going to work in remote Aboriginal communities or even used as an essential part in an orientation course towards this end.

REFERENCE

Anonymous 2003 Ngangkari work--Anangu tray: Traditional healers of Central Australia, Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankuuytjatjara Women's Council, Alice Springs.

Review by Jilpia Nappaljarri Jones and John Thompson, Canberra <jtjnj@ actewagl.net.au>