:: One People, Many Cultures ::



::Living Together in Respect and Friendship::

Returning to Australia from Bhutan, I’m often frustrated by the way we seem to replace responsibility for control. I’m not sure whether it’s enforcing rules to compensate for a lack of responsibility or if responsibility is lost because we have laws to compensate. Either way, I think it’s sad.

People are no longer as free to live their lives as they see fit. It’s apparently not ok to take pictures at the beach because you might use the photos for illegal purposes. I would have thought that it would be better to trust people to do the right thing, allow us our freedoms, and take action against the few who abuse it. Sure there have been a number of paedophiles arrested recently, but does that mean that we should stop living our lives?

We’ve also recently been limited to 40km/h in school zones at certain times. This is presumably being done to reduce the number of accidents involving children, but isn’t it just teaching kids that cars will slow down for them? In actual fact, the limitation only applies at the beginning and end of the school day and only within 300m of the school gate. What about the rest of the walk to school and evenings / weekends? If our children get used to cars moving at 40km/h, aren’t they more likely to misjudge traffic moving at 60km/h at other times / other locations? More of a concern, won’t they learn that they can step out onto the road and expect traffic to stop?

Children in Bhutan carry their baby siblings on their backs all day from about 4 years old. They learn responsibility early and few (no?) babies are lost to irresponsible children, yet these children still know how to have fun. In this, I like the Bhutanese approach. Isn’t it better to introduce children to the real world early and teach them to take responsibility for their own actions?

Strangely, given my desire to take more interest in Aboriginal issues and to keep this blog up to date, I have failed to mention the Social Justice Report that appeared in June ’07. It was a major news item at the time and one of the few headlines that encouraged me to follow the news. Key findings in the report include alcohol and child sex abuse among Aborigines.

Alcohol abuse has been a concern as long as I can remember, but paedophilia is new. The Howard government jumped on the report and set new laws and security in place to address the issue. Within weeks alcohol was banned in certain Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, as was pornography, and police and military were assigned to enforce these laws as well as to ensure that children attended school.

I have no love for ‘human rights’ as I’ve said before, but I can understand the measures being taken in response to violation of Australian values as long as it’s done without discrimination. If laws against alcohol and pornography were implemented Australia-wide and included people of every race, then the laws would have some merit. I would still question the further reduction of trust in people, but at least it wouldn’t be discriminating.

Two things surprised me in the months that followed. First, that the move was supported by some Aboriginal spokespeople and second that the Rudd government, outwardly the government most supportive of ethnic equality we’ve had, failed to retract the laws. Looking back, Tania Major, an Aboriginal girl elected Young Australian of the Year at the time of the intervention, had reason for supporting the move as she was sexually abused herself, and it may have been her decision to speak out supporting the move that earned her the award.

Rudd is more surprising. I can see no reason for his government continuing to support the intervention, yet support it he does. The government is now making moves to take further control of certain Aboriginal camps.

Protests were held yesterday, on the second anniversary of the laws, to oppose the intervention. According to reports, only 100 people turned up to the Sydney protest. The rain was blamed, but I find it sad that avoiding rain is more important to us than the discrimination of our fellow countrymen. Or perhaps, like me, most people simply didn’t know about the protest.

I remember going to a baseball game in Japan and being amazed at the coordinated chants of the crowd. They were very complex, each a whole song, and lead by a chant coordinator in each stand.

I was lucky enough to attend the Australia – Japan World Cup qualifier in Melbourne on Tuesday evening with a mixed Australian / Japanese group. A couple of times the (mostly Australian) crowd broke into a chant that awed my Japanese friends. The chant was a simple oh-ay oh-ay so it wasn’t obvious at first what caused their reaction. After a few minutes thought, I realised that each stand in Japan had run their own chant in their own time, but the Aussie crowd picked up the chant stadium-wide with no coordination to create one synchronised wave of sound. Perhaps the score was a reflection of the quality of chants.

I’ve ignored this blog during the uni term, but now it’s over I realise that there were many interesting points I could post. It’s anthropology after all. The first discussion that comes to mind regards racial identity. Aborigines, for example, are being asked to prove their Aboriginality to receive land grants and other benefits. The right of providing those benefits can be argued, but that’s another topic. Instead, I want to question what it is to be Aboriginal.

If a person has only one Aboriginal parent, are they still Aboriginal? What if only one grandparent was? Or is it less about blood and more about upbringing? Is someone raised in an Aboriginal community Aboriginal? What if a (hypothetical?) full-blood Caucasian person grows up in such a community, learning to live off the land, to paint Aboriginal style, is involved in ceremonies, provides for his/her family in the Aboriginal way? Could they be considered Aboriginal?

Some would say that being Aboriginal means less these days, or in certain towns, because they follow western ways – living in houses, buying food from a supermarket. In the Australian Journal of Anthropology, Lorraine Gibson recites an encounter between a white Australian and an Aboriginal elder carving out a canoe for a traditional museum. The white man discredits the work because it’s being done with a chainsaw. The Aboriginal responds by asking whether the other drove to the museum in his horse and cart.

Why shouldn’t a culture be allowed to evolve, making use of advances available around them, and still be considered to be the same culture. Does Aboriginality imply a stagnant culture? If so, isn’t every culture doomed to extinction? And with today’s rate of progress, wouldn’t the concept of culture be meaningless? I’d hate to think so.