Going back

I woke up this morning with a voice in my head saying ‘you can never go back’. I’m not sure if it was part of a dream or my subconscious trying to send me a message, or maybe I was overhearing a voice outside the room!
Whatever it was that voice has been ringing in my ears all day. Partly that’s because I’m back in Alice Springs after an absence of nine months and cant get over the change that has happened in that time. Almost all of the banks have changed locations, some restaurants that have always been there have closed and others have opened in their place, there’s a Gloria Jeans coffee shop and friends tell me Target is about to open in a couple of weeks!
All in all it’s a little disorienting. What feels even worse is that the tone of the town has changed, and those who have watched it happen say that it has been in the last 6 weeks that it has been most noticeable. The town itself is noticeably quieter. Streets are empty and shops and restaurants sparsely populated. But it is a surreal quiet, a law abiding, scared quiet. A quiet that speaks of other things under the surface. For example, last night I walked to the house of some friends, and for the first time perhaps ever used the Todd River footpath at night, by myself. I knew it was OK to do this because I had been hearing loud boasts from locals about how clean and safe things are now. Before, the Todd River used to be a common place for Aboriginal people to gather and camp around fires if they had nowhere else to go. It’s fair to say that a lot of drinking also accompanied these gatherings and there was quite a lot of broken glass and rubbish left in the riverbed and on the surrounding banks. Apparently mounted police were brought down from Darwin a few weeks ago and they have been patrolling the riverbed ever since. What no one is able to tell me is what has happened to all these people. They have obviously been rounded up and moved on somewhere else and these are rumours of groups gathering at the town limits. No one seems to care too much about this though because on the surface everything is ‘better’.
The story at Utopia is no better. Finally seeing my friends for the first time yesterday gave them an opportunity to tell me about all the changes that have taken place. There are now three police officers posted out at Utopia. The local joke is ‘two Federal police and one local to make sure the other two don’t get lost!’ Apparently they have decided that their main job out there is to do licence, rego and grog checks for every car that passes. I’m sure that on the surface this seems like a reasonable use of their skills and resources. In a context like Utopia though, where the population is dispersed and the people rely on (often un-roadworthy) cars to get to the Health Clinic and the one and only Store for food, the implications are more severe.
And at the school the new Principal is jumping through the hoops being set before her by the powers on high and is step by step undoing all of the programs and routines we put in place over the course of 5 years. The Community teachers don’t know what they are supposed to be teaching and the introduction of a second Visiting teacher at Mulga Bore has only led to conflict between the two ‘whitefellas’ and absolutely no consultation with the Indigenous staff about what they want for their school.
So I end my time in Alice Springs questioning my decision to ‘go back’, knowing how much the people out there would love me to ‘go back’ but knowing that if I do I stand a good chance of ending up bitter and sad at the futility of all of my efforts.
The only thing that hold me steady is that no matter how much Indigenous people may want to ‘go back’ to a time when they were not poor and dispossessed and patronised and alienated, ‘go back’ to a time when they lived as they pleased on their own country without anyone telling them they couldn’t, no matter how much they may want that, it is not an option. They have only to move forward. My question then becomes how do I help them do that with integrity and self assured identity, without loosing myself in the process?