Paddy's road: life stories of Patrick Dodson.

Willis, Eileen

Paddy's road: life stories of Patrick Dodson

Kevin Keeffe

Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2003, 394 pp, ISBN 0855754486

In 1971, when I was teaching at St Mary's School in Broome, the principal decided to set up after-school clubs for the children--all part of a process of keeping them out of mischief. As part of that venture, I established a club called Aboriginal Heroes. From memory, only a few children joined since most of the other clubs focused on sport and art. We met once a week and set out to make contact with these Indigenous leaders through writing to them and following their exploits in the press. I had just heard of Patrick Dodson. He was at the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart seminary at the time so the children had to take my word that he was indeed a hero, given that my criteria were based simply on the fact that he intended to be Australian's first Indigenous priest. My criteria may have been narrow in conception, but my prediction that he would make a significant contribution to Indigenous affairs was not. This contribution is set out in Kevin Keeffe's Paddy's road, published by Aboriginal Studies Press.

The prologue of this thoughtful book sets the scene for the story of Indigenous land rights and Australia's first attempt at reconciliation and the man whose name became synonymous with the process. In this prologue Keeffe focuses on the political aspects of Dodson's life, in particular, his skilful handling of Australia's Prime Minister, John Howard, at the Renewal of the Nation conference sponsored by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1997. While Dodson was to resign from the chair of the Council some time later, at this event he is able to present a different vision from Howard, yet do so politely and respectfully. In recalling this event, Kevin Keeffe alerts the reader to some pertinent features that epitomise Dodson. Patrick Dodson did not fall into this work simply by chance; it chose him. The tragedies of his family's history, his vocation to the Catholic priesthood and his arrival in Alice Springs at the height of the land rights movement--stories that form subsequent chapters--led to the only possible outcome. For Patrick Dodson, the personal is political--the political is vocation.

The book is divided into three distinct sections that support this trajectory. The first six chapters focus on Patrick's ancestors: his great-grandparents Jilwa, Wanan and Joseph Fagan; his grandfather and grandmother, Paddy Djiagween and Elizabeth Fagan; and his mother and father, Patricia Djiagween and Snowy Dodson. While Keeffe has drawn on sound historical sources to provide this background, significantly he tells the story from the point of view of Paddy Djiagween, Fay Wade and others, rather than foregrounding Mary Durack, Daisy Bates or other post-colonial sources. In outlining the story of Patrick's grandparents and parents, Keeffe establishes Dodson's credentials as a bi-cultural statesman with a heart firmly imbedded in Aboriginal spirituality, tempered with an ability to forge strong and abiding working relationships with non-Indigenous persons. His grandparents and parents, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal were identities in their own right, and through their stories Keeffe establishes a family tradition of intelligence, tenacity and a fighting spirit. These qualities derive from Jilwa and Wanan, members of the Yawuru people of the Roebuck Bay region, and from Irish Presbyterian immigrants, John and Matilda Fagan and their son Joseph, who came to Australia fleeing the sectarian violence of Ireland in 1856. Paddy Djiagween, son of Jilwa and Wanan, is the key figure in shaping Dodson's Aboriginal identity in Yawuru Law. Joseph Fagan and his father, Snowy Dodson, are pivotal figures in shaping his views on the possibilities for sharing country with the white invaders. His aristocratic grandmother, Elizabeth Fagan, epitomises the tenacity of the fight for a rightful inheritance while his mother was a risk-taker of breathless imagination. Finally, while we read little about her, Fay Wade, his oldest sister, is surely a remarkable woman who saw to Patrick Dodson's survival when he and his four siblings were left orphans in 1960.

The second section of the book explores Patrick's time at Monivae as a secondary school student, school captain and prefect, and his entry into the seminary in 1968. The school years cement his Catholicism and vocation to the priesthood and provide a framework for his understanding of social justice, while the years in the seminary and after ordination are fertile ground for training in reconciliation, negotiation, compromise and diplomacy. This section also outlines his first tentative attempts at handling urban-rural and black-white politics at the Eucharistic Congress held in Melbourne in 1973 and his disheartening attempts to exercise a liberation theology in Darwin and Pt Keats. The section finishes appropriately within the heart of Australia, Alice Springs--a town that, in the 1980s, had a significant number of experienced Aboriginal leaders. Dodson credits Geoff Shaw, ex-Vietnam veteran and CEO of Tangantyere Council, as the Aboriginal leader who showed him the way forward, beyond clericalism and the church.

The final section deals with Dodson's work with the Institute for Aboriginal Development, the Central Land Council, the Federation of Land Councils, and the Royal Commissioner into Deaths in Custody and the Council for Reconciliation. While Keeffe completes the book at the point of Dodson's resignation from the Council, we know that he has emerged in recent months from a self-imposed retreat to join forces with Noel Pearson and other Indigenous leaders to find a way to work within the Howard government's framework of 'mutual obligation'. Many other vignettes of Dodson's statesmanship are interspersed throughout this book. Examples include his comments to a school-girl while on a visit to Ireland where he argues for liberating the oppressor as well as the oppressed, to self-deprecating asides to railway workers during his leave of absence from the clergy in 1979. Each of these vignettes brings the reader back to the politician and diplomat no matter what point in the story the reader has reached. Whether one is reading about his time at Monivae or the exploits of Snowy Dodson, Keeffe does not want his readers to forget that this is a political life.

The more inquisitive reader might be disappointed at the lack of personal detail, with only a few tantalising snippets of human frailty evident in this account. If this book has a weakness it is that each time you think Dodson is about to be revealed, he has disappeared behind a political statement. But it is hard to argue that this is fault. True to form, both Dodson and Keeffe are diplomats and the book serves its purpose well.

Reviewed by Eileen Willis, School of Medicine, Flinders University, Adelaide <Eileen.Willis@yqinders.edu.au>