:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

I’ve rejoined the masses in the daily routine of work. No longer is every day a weekday and every day a weekend. No longer am I working dawn to dusk on my own projects. I now have to rush out of the house to cram into a train to be at work on time. But this is a good thing. The work I’m doing promises to be extremely satisfying on a personal and altruistic level.

One of the election promises of our state premier was to connect classrooms with the latest technology and (as I understand it) update the curriculum to take advantage of these technologies. The concept focuses on interactive whiteboards (think traditional whiteboard on a PC) and videoconferencing. With these, classes can join together to discuss key issues, remote students can join classes not offered in their local school, classes can go on virtual excursions to places they wouldn’t otherwise afford to go (Great Barrier Reef, Ayers Rock, NASA) and students can meet peers from other cultures and share life views. It’s an excellent initiative to broaden the education and to open minds in the children in this state.

My job is to help the Department of Education make this all work. They currently support a modest number of videoconferencing systems, although they manage all the calls themselves, but the number is going to grow to 5000, more than twice the known install base of any organisation in the world. We’ll have to set up their architecture, policies and processes to scale for the new initiative and it has to be done quickly. This may give me less time to write in the near future, but I’m comfortable with that. Besides, it’s good to have an income again.

Let me drop the aboriginal child sex abuse issue for a while to tackle something really important. When I was in Belgium, I used to buy honey from a specialist shop that sold nothing but different types of honey from all over the world. I managed to try about ten types, but nothing compared with my memory of Australian red gum or blue gum honeys. The honey in Bhutan was delicious, but I still craved my gum honeys. Back in Australia, my long term hosts had their own preference in honey that was probably more driven by specials, so the craving continued.

Last month, when I moved into my own flat and began to stock the cupboards, I knew it was time. There was a shelf set aside purely for honey. Blue gum honey on the left and red gum honey on the right. I marched off to the supermarket to hunt down the old favourites, but ended up spending over ten minutes in front of the honey section going through all the different brands, unable to find a jar of honey that came from a particular type of tree. And then, finally I found it. There on the bottom shelf. Blue Gum Spreadable Honey. I bought a loaf of bread to go with it and raced home to try it.

You can imagine my disappointment when I opened the jar, stuck in the knife and found… no resistance. No sticky grabbing of the knife. No general motion of the surrounding honey to be first to leave the jar. The knife speared in and lifted out a chunk. I lifted the jar to my nose. It didn’t smell off. I spread the lump onto a slice of bread and took a cautious bite. It tasted like honey. But what had happened to the texture? I looked back at the jar and noticed the word ‘spreadable’. The small print read ‘spreads just like jam.’ What the %&^*?

Isn’t honey spreadable enough already? The sticky drippiness of it is half the experience. Why would anyone want to go and make it like another spreadable condement? No wonder it’s on the bottom shelf.

As soon as I turned on the radio this morning, I heard the newsreader saying that a new report has found that indigenous communities can manage themselves. How arrogant and condescending, I thought. But when I looked it up on the net, I instead found an article from last year that stated that this expectation that we ask them to take control themselves is the last great oppression. The writer raised some interesting points about the complexities of modern living and the difficulties of getting these facilities into aboriginal communities being too much to handle for a people with no interest in committee meetings.

Do they really need all the modern facilities? I’d like to say no, but then, if education is important to them, then how do they make enough time for the children to attend school when they have to find water and catch dinner? I’m painting an extreme picture here, but I think the question is valid.

The report mentioned on the news this morning seems to address these points. They can govern themselves, it says, if the greater governments don’t make things difficult with red tape.

Another article tells of a Victorian initiative to give indigenous council members training in governance. Presumably they came because they wanted to learn, since a number of them went on to take further study in the area. I’d be interested to see what effect the initiative on the communities these leaders returned to.

There are no simple answers, but surely we can guide our actions with the principles of

1. Let aboriginal leaders make decisions for their people
2. Give them whatever support they need to implement those decisions (within limits)

I’ve got a lot of issues to catch up on now that I have access to my blog again, but one that deserves immediate attention is the issue of sexual abuse of children in aboriginal communities. A report was released on the 30th of April outlining the issue to the Northern Territory government. It seems that aboriginal children are being sexually abused and then going on to sexually abuse their youngers in a self-perpetuating downward spiral. The report cites lack of education, alcohol and other drugs, lack of employment and pornography as major causes.

Once it had a chance to read the report, the NT government admitted that it hadn’t done enough to address the issue and, as advised in the report, requested urgent assistance from the national government. The issue was taken up and suddenly became a top priority. Actions I’ve heard taken include:

1. Vastly increasing the number of police in the communities
2. Making school attendance compulsory
3. Controlling of spending so that half their earnings must be used for food
4. Banning of alcohol
5. Banning of pornography
6. Removing the permit system for controlling entry

Now, the situation is bound to be far more complex than I understand, but here are my thoughts on these actions.

This not just an aboriginal issue. The report itself says, ‘Sexual abuse of children is not restricted to those of aboriginal descent, nor committed only by those of aboriginal descent, nor to just the Northern Territory. The phenomenon knows no racial, age or gender borders. It is a national and international problem.‘

Although the report states that ‘It is critical that both governments commit to genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for Aboriginal communities,’ every action I hear is done without such collaboration.

Giving aboriginals their own space is the one thing we’ve done right. If individual aborigines want to join white society, they should be welcomed, but if they choose to keep their own culture, we should let them. It’s been 200 years since we took their land and we still haven’t come to a mutual understanding. I doubt we will while we continue to impose our lifestyle on them. Giving them money to buy the vices of our civilisation but not giving them equal right to jobs or fair justice is taking the side of evil.

Imposing values on another culture never works. Cultural change must come from the people themselves. If sexual use of children is considered normal in aboriginal culture, I’ll keep my opinions to myself. But most comments from aboriginals (all through the media, unfortunately) agree that they don’t want it. The very causes that are cited in the report are all western influences. We’ve created the problem ourselves.

But taking away their control is only going to make the problem worse. If alcohol and pornography are to be banned and white people allowed unrestricted access to their sacred lands, what do they have left? How are they meant to respect themselves? Improving education is a great initiative, but if it’s forced on them, how likely are they to accept it? How much stronger will the animosity be between our cultures?

What’s pornography got to do with it anyway? I heard an interview on the radio with a religious nutter who says that there’s plenty of evidence to say that pornography causes sexual violence and that common sense agrees. I know of no such reports and can’t say I see the connection. If pornography depicting rape and child abuse is available, then viewers might come to see it as normal behaviour, but those are banned nationwide anyway. Does watching consenting adults have sex make anyone want to rape a child?

It seems to me that our government has two choices. Either give the aboriginals all the rights and rules and support that other Australians have, or let them manage their own affairs. To impose new laws on them only is only going to increase the divide and outrage them anew.

If we make these rules on spending and banning of alcohol and pornography, then they should be nationwide. Protection should be given to all children, not just aborigines.

If we must differentiate, work with the local leaders to create the plan. Then, rather than sending in the military to police aboriginal communities, we should be making trained security professionals (police, military, security guards) available to support the communities’ own nominated law enforcers.

The government is using this to demonstrate decisiveness before the election, when they should be using it to demonstrate compassion and a willingness to cooperate with the aboriginal culture.

It’s taken a while, but I’m finally starting to feel like I’m home. The problems of moving in seemed endless – missed calls for white goods delivery, missing boxes in the shipment, missing parts of just about everything I unpacked, missing stereo components, no signal for wireless internet, skyrocketing phone bills just to name a few – but they’re getting less bothersome now. I even have a real broadband connection of my own and now even the ability to watch my DVDs from every country.

I have to say that I’m disappointed with Australian customer service. I remembered it as being better than the bureaucracy of Bhutan and the uncaring Belgian style, but Optus has shown me that no country is perfect. After making me wait a couple of weeks before even attempting to activate my phone line, they put me through a couple of days of long mobile phone calls to tell them that I didn’t in fact have a phone line yet. The final insult was when they told me that I might be charged to have a technician come out to look at the problem, when in fact, it hadn’t been jumpered properly in the exchange – something I’d suggested could be the cause.

Now it’s time to get really serious about living my own life and finding the income to enjoy it.