This is no Hurricane Katrina!

There has been alot of attention in the media recently directed towards remote Indigenous Communities in Central Australia. This is a subject close to my heart, as many people know. Having lived in Central Australia for 8 years and spent almost 5 of those teaching on a remote Indigenous Community, the issues, circumstances and people being focused on by the media are personal to me. I am unashamedly emotionally invested in the debate. The Aboriginal men that I know, almost as well as I know my own brothers, are not sexual abuse offenders. They are not drunks. They look after children as much as the women do. The Community where I teach is functional. The school where I teach had an average of 45 students attending each week last year. The Senior men have just negotiated an agreement to develop a fruit farm and an arts centre to provide employment for members of the Community (see Centralian Advocate, Friday March 23, 2007). But you will struggle to hear that story in the media. It's not controversial enough. But it DOES exist.
Yes, Indigenous Communities in Central Australia have problems. These Communities are located in the middle of the Australian Outback. They are remote, they have limited essential services and the services they do have are maintained by a revolving door of 'whitefella' workers who rarely stick around long enough to achieve real development or empowerment for the Community members.
The Northern Territory is a complicated place. There is a North/South Divide, and then within the South an East/West divide and a Town/Bush divide/ I have lived in the place 8 years and am only beginning to understand the complexity and how to respond to it.

Mal Brough was in Central Australia this week. He arrived on Wednesday and left on Saturday and in that time visited at least 3 seperate remote Communities. He would have spent at least half that time travelling between them! Time well spent? What makes John Howard or Mal Brough think that they can go in, or worse still send others in, for only a few days at a time and hope to come away with any kind of understanding of what is going on there?

The recently published "Little Children are Sacred" Report was researched and written over the past 8 months. During that time the Committee visited and met with an impressive list of remote Communities, people and organisations. By their own admission they did not go everywhere and they rightly make no apology for this. With their timeline it would have been a geographic impossibility. On page 38 of the report it states:

"The Inquiry made a number of visits to Alice Springs
to meet with various organisations and individuals.
Remote communities visited by the Inquiry included
Yuendumu, Papunya, Kintore, Docker River, Mutitjulu
and Hermannsburg."

Exploration the contact history of these Communities would reveal a great deal about the reasons why these types of Communities are suffering greater problems than others. (For more info read "Crossed Purposes" by Ralph Folds) The problems are not recent or new. They are the result disconnection with country and culture which is effectively disconection from yourself. Tradtional Indigneous people don't see themselves as seperate to the land but as part of it. It is something we 'whitefellas' will never fully appreciate. So when you get forcibly removed from a part of yourself, all you are left with is a painful hole and for many the best option is pain relief in whatever form is closest to hand.

No these problems are not new. This is no Hurricane Katrina! This is the 200 year drought!