From Hunting to Drinking: the Devastating Effects of Alcohol on an Australian Aboriginal Community.

Turner, David H.

From Hunting to Drinking: The Devastating Effects of Alcohol on an Australian Aboriginal Community David McKnight Routledge, London and New York, 2002, xii + 239 pp, ISBN 0415271509

Reviewed by David H. Turner, Trinity College, University of Toronto, <dturner@trinity.utoronto.ca>

I think that a better title for the book would have been a line from one of David McKnight's Aboriginal collaborators, commenting on the state of things in his Mornington Island society: 'Drink More Powerful than Song'. Then perhaps add a subtitle: 'From Hunting to Welfare Dependency'. Hunting and Drinking? Two different orders of things.

The book is about the degradation and degeneration of the Aboriginal way of life on Mornington Island in the southern part of the Gulf of Carpentaria over the 30-year period of McKnight's association with the people there from 1966. Mornington Island is the traditional homeland of the Lardil people, although other Aborigines from elsewhere now make their home there. It is fair to say that the book is nothing if not upfront and personal about the situation on Mornington. As McKnight says on page 6, 'Mornington Island now consists of a community of individuals who are bereft of a social identity except in negative terms ... they are nothing and are no one'. And on page 115, 'Men and women are literally drinking themselves to death and in the process community life is destroyed'.

While this all may be true I am not so sure of the ethics of dwelling on the pathologies of contemporary Aboriginal communities at the expense of people's dignity. What purpose does it serve, particularly when the people you are writing about are supposedly your friends? McKnight says that in writing about the problem he is doing something about it, but this may be an academic's dream-wish rather than a realistic assessment of the impact of one's work. Could we write about the same situation in a Sydney suburb, naming names, giving dates? I think not.

That said, the book contains some real insights--and some real bones of contention. The background information is familiar to anyone who has worked with Aboriginal people in Australia: a traditional culture more or less well integrated and organised; the coming of Europeans and, in particular, Christian missionaries; the dormitory period, with parents separated from their children; a period of adjustment and some confusion; withdrawal of the mission and establishment of a government council; access to beer, underground at first and then through a canteen; progressive decline of the traditional culture; and increasing violence and disorganisation. And through all this, as McKnight so aptly puts it, 'it is nevertheless passing strange that while Aborigines could see totemic spiritual beings who were not there, White Australians could not see the Aborigines who were very much there' (p. 20). By 1966 the elders were worried that the young people were going to abandon traditional marriage rules and marry for love. These young people could neither hunt nor work in a White man's world. Nor were they initiated. These fears were well founded. With alcohol as a stimulus, the homicide rate increased dramatically, from but one between 1914 and 1978 (and that was accidental) to 15 since 1976. Twenty-seven cases of suicide, a practice seemingly unknown prior to White contact, were reported between 1958 and 2000 (p. 124).

Accounting for these trends is no easy task. McKnight locates these factors: welfare dependency, where behaviour is not accountable 'as long as they (the Aborigines) continue to play the role of drunks' (p. 4); the advent of the shire council, whereby governance is by White careerists who are detached from the people and indifferent to their culture; racist attitudes which blame Aborigines for their own misfortune; inappropriate Aboriginal responses to White ideas and structures based on language and cultural differences, reinforcing racist attitudes among Whites and increasing Aboriginal feelings of inadequacy and powerlessness. Drinking is intertwined with all these factors, being a means of escape, a means of mustering enough courage to stand up to Whites and, paradoxically, an excuse for taking out their frustrations in this regard on each other.

McKnight suggests that one means of improving the situation would be to eliminate the shire council and introduce a form of governance more compatible with Aboriginal traditions of decision making. There seems some merit in this suggestion as it would help to alleviate feelings of powerlessness and dependency. On the other hand, we have what McKnight calls the strong sense of 'personal autonomy' among Mornington Islanders which would seem to be an impediment to any concerted collective action on their part. I must admit to being confused about this point in McKnight's account, particularly as he seems to feel that this 'personal autonomy' is characteristic of Aboriginal Australians as a whole (p. 37). If he means by this the self-sufficient, self-determining individual, then I must disagree, as my own experience over most of the Northern Territory is just the opposite. This may be something in the process of becoming in the midst of the degeneration of traditional cultures, but to attribute it to the traditional culture is, I think, a mistake.

As is McKnight's rather cynical view of Aboriginal sharing: 'it is to the advantage of a hunter to be generous because he cannot always consume what he has caught so he might as well share it' (p.66). To say that the Kaiadilt abandoned the taboo of surrendering one's own kill during a famine in 1947 because 'if they had continued to observe it they would have starved to death' (p. 66) makes little sense, as retaining the taboo would have meant that no one would have been able to horde food and therefore everyone would be fed from the meagre supplies available. My own view is that these views on sharing stem more from McKnight's liberal assumptions about how economic systems work and less from Aboriginal culture. My own experience is that Aboriginal people give without reflecting or calculating in terms of either selfishness or reciprocity. This giving establishes a part of themselves in the other. Even personal identities are not discrete, self-contained units, containing as they do strands of other's from one's grandparents' lines which become intermixed with one's own.

If he is under-generous to this aspect of Aboriginal culture, McKnight is in my view overgenerous to the Presbyterian missionaries who operated on Mornington Island. I do not think it is good enough any longer to say that things would have been much worse for the Aborigines had the missionaries not come to act as a buffer between the traditional way of life and the alien one that was to come. These missionaries were there basically to ensure their own salvation through 'good works' and the Aborigines' through conversion. The first motive was often misplaced ('what is good for me must also be good for you') and the second often brutally oppressive, what with the suppression of ceremonies, the enforcement of monogamy and choice in marriage, and the ubiquitous dormitories. Better the initial agents of contact had been persons interested in learning from Aboriginal people and adopting aspects of their culture into their own.

I am still at a loss to understand what the missionaries were bringing to the Aborigines that they did not already know? Love your neighbour, love your enemy, do unto others? Aboriginal people not only understood these as moral precepts but also did a much better job of putting them into practice to achieve a stable accommodation of different peoples over a whole continent over a much longer period of time than did their Christian counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. And the missionaries have not left; they are still there in various official and non-official capacities, waiting for the final collapse of Aboriginal culture so that they can pick up the pieces and finally achieve what they originally arrived to do. Perhaps some Aboriginal Australians look back on the mission period as a kind of golden age when order prevailed, but then they were born and raised in the mission period and knew of little else before. The anthropologist need not share the romantics' view.