indigenous politics
18 Jan 2008
Bonjour, Uluru
Wai, Palya?
Jenny Macklin is desperately trying to brush up on her Indigenous language skills after being shown up by a community theatre company, writes Jennifer Mills
Theatre company Big hART has a show in the Sydney Festival this month - but they also appear to be staging an intervention in Federal politics.
The Ngapartji Ngapartji (Pitjanjatjara for "I give you something, you give me something") theatre project narrates the effect of the Maralinga nuclear tests on the Spinifex people.
But behind the scenes, it's also telling another story about contemporary cultural politics. The show has been accompanied by a political dance-off of almost slapstick proportions, with the theatre company keeping one step ahead.
Celebrities such as Cate Blanchett have been tripping over themselves to be seen at the show and pollies like Peter Garrett tripping over celebrities in their rush to fill the seats (which are now sold out), no doubt wanting to be associated with a powerful example of Indigenous storytelling.
But the behind the scenes story of Big hART's approach to politics is an object lesson in political leverage. Ngapartji Ngapartji doubles as a lobbying organisation which aims to save Indigenous languages in danger of extinction. Some 150 Indigenous languages are spoken in Australia, where it is estimated there were once 300 - and of the remaining, 70 per cent are critically endangered (spoken by a handful of people).
Ngapartji Ngapartji producers regularly contact Government Ministers to advocate for a national Indigenous language policy to remedy this situation. They're also happy to offer advice (however unsolicited) about a few other things on their minds.
After last week's launch, SBS TV and Radio National both broadcast reviews containing a similar soundbite from Big hART, which stated that Kevin Rudd can speak Mandarin but neither he nor Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin would know "how to say hello at Uluru".
According to creative producer Alex Kelly, Macklin's office then rang Ngapartji Ngapartji and asked for help. Apparently, journalists had been calling demanding a "hello" in Pitjantjatjara. Her advisors also apparently rang Alison Anderson, the Indigenous Member for the remote Northern Territory seat of MacDonnell, to ask for a few words in her language, just in case they were harassed by journalists. They got the right woman - Anderson speaks a total of six Indigenous languages.
Macklin and Rudd were quickly offered the opportunity to redeem themselves. Macklin has been signed up to Ngapartji Ngapartji's online language course. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has also been invited to sign up and attend the stage show. What is the Pitjanjatjara word for embarrassing?
This approach is perhaps worthy of the project's central notion of reciprocity - if what one has been given over the years is bureaucratic shaming and a scrabble for image management.
‘The arts' has been on a back foot since 1996, desperately trying to niche-market itself in a very strictly monitored funding environment. With the change of government it seems that more aggressive strategies are being used, not just to get money for the arts, but to get political leverage for the issues being covered.
And even the money they get is not good enough, apparently; Big hART is now telling Government departments how best to spend their cash - and they'vestarted by giving some of it back. The company behind Ngapartji Ngapartji this week returned three quarters of a million dollars to the Australia Council, with company director Scott Rankin saying "you're not being wise about using the taxpayers' money, so we're going to be wise with it and give it back to you... please do something wise with it."
Rankin argued that the amount they were given was not worth the money it would cost to administer the grant under the Australia Council's complex acquittal procedures. He called the funds, from the new Community Partnerships/Key Producers category, "funding for failure" which "perpetuates mediocrity in the field of community arts."
Ngapartji Ngapartji already receives some of its funding from Federal crime prevention moneys: almost half a million from the Attorney General's Department over three years. The scale of the show - it involves, for example, an entire choir of Pitjanjatjara speakers who must be replaced halfway through the season to attend to family business - clearly requires a great deal of financial backing.
It remains to be seen if handing back the money will be an effective strategy, or just tarnish the project's organisers as a bunch of political ratbags. The Australia Council has stood by its decision, but Peter Garret has admitted there is too much "red tape" involved in arts funding, and he wants to "simplify it".
This kind of political manoeuvring leaves paternalistic approaches to Indigenous social policy in the dust.
Delicious
Digg
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Newsvine
Facebook
Kwoff
Discuss this article
To participate in the discussion Sign in or Register
I hope that New matilda contributors will not keep resorting to cheap shots like this one too much longer: there are around two hundred Aboriginal languages in use around Australia, perhaps fifty with more than a handful of speakers, but there would probably not be a single person in Australia who knows how to say ‘g’day’ in all of them, if only because many Aboriginal languages (what do I know? maybe all of them!) do not have an equivalent expression for ‘g’day’, or ‘hello’, or even ‘how are you going?’.
Not surprisingly, as anyone knows who has tried to learn an Aboriginal language, there is/was a multitude of expressions relating to proper social relations with kin, and to all the economic pursuits of a hunter/gatherer life, and not so surprisingly no expressions relating to planting, reaping, machinery, horses, cattle, sheep, money, grog, tobacco, clothes, the Western economic and social system generally. And not too many expressions signifying greetings, since pretty much everyone who you saw was kin in one way or another, and if they weren’t, you may have greeted them in a completely different way, perhaps accompanied by aggressive physical action. Aboriginal languages were/are spoken by a very limited range of people who are kin to each other, and even in the early days of the Invasion, Aboriginal people moving around looking for work tended to speak English to each other, if only because the subject matter of their conversation tended to revolve around Western economic and social matters.
Like any other languages in the world, Aboriginal languages can only be kept alive by being spoken, by being used as means of in-group communication. They cannot be kept alive by being confined to dictionaries which are taken out of a cupboard every few months or years, given a good hose-down and put, very reverently, back into the cupboard. Use it or lose it, is also the rule for languages, everywhere. Even the French are very worried about the future of their language in competition with English.
I admit that it must make many people feel awfully superior even to Jenny Macklin by being able to sit back like this and criticise, and even more so if they actually know what ‘wai, palya?’ is supposed to mean. As we chuckle condescendingly into our chardonnay, and lay back in our ergonomic chairs, air-conditioning quietly working in the background on these thirty-degree days, we should reflect that even you and I, dear reader, may not know, or may have forgotten, how to say ‘owyagarn?’ in Murngin, or Gwipupinggu, or Barkindji, or Wongai, or Narungga, or any of a few hundred other languages.
Yes, ministers - especially Labour ones - should be able to deliver a bit better than their predecessors, but many spectators will demand that they perform miracles, otherwise we will castigate them just as quickly as we did the previous mob, and these inevitable policy failures should restore the natural order of things, which is that nothing will ever work, nobody will ever be good enough, all policies are, underneath the rhetoric, crap, and if only governments listened to us, all would be rosy. Go on then, get into politics: get into government, give it a go, see how easy it all is.
This year, I look forward with some dread to a vast amount of pompous pontificating and spectator sniping, but I guess we will get through it somehow. I have my own reasons for being very wary about the new government’s Indigenous policies but I hope that some of New Matilda’s readers will be civilized enough, and adult enough, to focus their criticisms on principles, not personalities. i.e. to try to post a comment which does not have a single personal slag of a minister, but which analyses and probes and tries to trace the defects in principle or policy, and also tries to propose something better, or at least, since we are not all politics lecturers, something towards something better. Welcome to 2008.
Joe
I just want to make a quick comment on a few things that Joe has raised in his lengthy and considered response to the ‘Bonjour, Uluru’ article.
It refers to a spate of recent articles in the mainstream media refering to the ignorance of non-Indigenous Australians of Indigenous langauges that also “took a shot” at the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Jenny Macklin.
Jenny Macklin was taken aim at because she is currently the Australian figurehead for Indigenous affairs. No one is saying that she is a bad person, and in fact her response to the issue indicates the opposite. The point being made is that almost no attention is paid to Indigenous Languages in Australia. This is not a personal attack on an individual but a point made legitimately by referring to the relevant person in public office.
Small special interest groups in most contemporary democracies lack the financial armory and profile to get a sideways glance from a journalist or editor. They are left with only their wits and the strength of their conviction to get a guernsey in the mainstream media. More often than not this will involve public lobbying of Ministers. I’m sure that even Jenny Macklin would understand this.
Indigenous languages are not a high profile issue, they are barely on the political agenda despite their importance. Becoming bogged down in an argument about a tactic that was used in the media to generate some profile for Indigenous languages ignores the real issue that we need to address – that is making supporting and protecting Indigenous languages and culture a part of national strategy to address Indigenous disadvantage.
Despite periods of political interest in Indigenous languages, mainly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there is currently very little focus on the part of the state, territory and federal governments to support communities to revitalise, reclaim and maintain their languages. I am not saying there is no attention paid to this issue, as the example of the NSW government has shown, but considering the depth of desire in Indigenous communities to protect their languages and culture and that this can lead to improvements in other areas of disadvantage, not enough is being done.
No-one is arguing that dictionaries are the only way to keep a language alive. Yes, if you don’t use it, you will lose it. And that is why so many Indigenous communities across Australia are working so hard to protect and use their languages. They are not sitting around waiting for handouts, but they could certainly do with a hand.
Language is a very complex issue for everyone in the world, especially those whose first language is not one of the major languages, i.e. those spoken by hundreds of millions: everyone, I mean everyone, must get a handle on at least one of the major languages (English, French, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Tamil, Cantonese, German, Portuguese, Swahili, Japanese, Farsi), if only to be able to understand the news on TV, but more importantly to be able to access education to the highest levels, to access the economy, to be able to have any input into general society, and so on.
But speakers/knowers of the 100,000 minority languages around the world OF COURSE may also feel a desperate need to know and use their own birth-language. So how to manage the two imperatives ? Obviously, one way around it is to require all children to learn a second language in school, perhaps from upper Primary, as students do in many parts of the world, Europe, India, many African countries. But also parents must use the language with their children, there must be imaginaitive ways to introduce and enthuse children in using a non-dominant language without making the crucial mistake of assuming that it is somehow either innate to them or their destiny to learn it, or displacing the language that they will be using in their economic and social lives, in their careers, in their interaction with others who may not speak thersame non-dominant language.
Dominant languages are pretty powerful things: if a language is in very active use across entire societies, all day and every day, in all levels of society and all walks of life and all facets of education, then there is no point in trying to compete with it: for example, is there a single school text-book above Grade V level written in a single Aboriginal language yet ? Would that there were, but there aren’t. How much would it take to translate just one text-book ? A few years’ salary for a linguist ? Then a print-run of a few hundred ? So how much time and money for the whole corpus of text-books in the same language ? Then how much expertise, time and money for a hundred languages ?
So, in order for Indigenous kids to get the good education that they deserve and desperately need to survive and prevail through the twenty-first century, they need a full grasp of the dominant language. No ifs or buts. That’s life, that’s how it goes. It’s not a better language, simply the one with the text-books, the TV programs, the media, the common discourse - the lingua franca in Australia. If the kids have time and inclination, they can learn their full birth-language as well - Australians may find bilingualism almost impossible but not many other people in the world do - and that’s just a function of being a small minority, a small part of 2 % of the total of a small-population country.
Now: do we curse the realities of the world or do we do something about it ?
Joe
Joe, as usual, wisely ignores the path of ideology and political posturing, and takes the shorter journey of appraisal of reality, and matches this against real knowledge and experience.
And, in terms of my own distant experience, he is right.
Without well-spoken English language and numeracy skills, Aboriginal children have no future. Genuine independence requires genuine survival skills. They do not get these because their parents do not send them to schools, and because teachers are not properly prepared for the job.
I could add a few other obstacles that the idealists would not be aware of:
Multilingual programmes in schools were an abysmal failure (NT). Indigenous language use and development belongs in the home. If it cannot be supported in the home it is going to fail anyway, and has no cultural legitimacy.
Second, there are few enough teaching skills on the education market as it is without spreading human resources thinner by adding Aboriginal languages. And, anyway, the average NT community has five distinct languages; many have seven. Which do you choose to teach in your class? thus disadvantaging and humiliating the speakers of the other languages.
Third, there are important considerations of etiquette in using Aboriginal languages, which classroom teaching cannot address.
Fourth, language use cannot be separated from family/clan authority and this is being destroyed quite fast enough without linguistic meddlers adding to the chaos.
Fifth, I have yet to meet a linguist who actually spoke another language or who appreciated that language is the window to the culture; a pane easily broken. And I have never even heard of a linguist who spoke Aboriginal languages, unless it was the handful who live full time in Aboriginal communities, and have done for several years. Clearly, such linguists would have done their apprenticeship and so I would take their opinions seriously; even if I disputed the anthropological and educational legitimacy of their class room activities.
Finally, the nearest phrase to gidday in any Aboriginal language is ‘where are you going’. This does not denote consuming interest in the passersby’s destination; although incurable love of gossip may form a secondary motivation. The greeting is usually uttered by the person sitting, thus assuring the passersby that an ambush is not about to occur, or that he is being spied upon. The significance of this is that the traditional Aboriginal greeting is made to avoid conflict; which is, itself, the imperative of all Aboriginal culture: avoidance of conflict with nature, with spirits and with people. Aborigines do not, however, segregate these entities.
It is a pity that people have not learned to value the genius of Aboriginal culture in avoidance of conflict, and of the mechanisms for precipitating consensus, which also prevent conflict.
They may well have been humanity’s most astute and advanced social organisers, and were almost certainly the most advanced in terms of applied philosophy; at my estimate, about eight thousand years ahead of the Chinese, who promptly collapsed into fuedalism..
Yes, English-language immersion in the most comfortable way possible, right from the very beginning of schooling, even in pre-school if necessary. Aboriginal language teaching should be pursued very actively, and funded accordingly, within the community outside of the school. The business of the school is to prepare children for operating most comfortably in the world with the broadest possible range of opportunities. Otherwise, another generation will be ruined.
Racists of all colours will deny the right of Aboriginal people to access the full range of opportunities, and couch their opposition in terms of cultural preservation. By all means, everybody should learn their family’s language(s), but not predominantly in school: the business of school must be taught in, and all children must be thoroughly comfortable and familiar with, the lingua franca of a country and in Australia that is English. It’s not a better language, but it is the lingua franca. Textbooks are written in it: are they written in any Aboriginal languages and will they ever be ? No, I don’t think so, regrettable as this may be. What language is higher education in ? English. What language are the media in ? English. If Aboriginal people are ever to catch up culturally (using the word in its sociological sense) then they must grasp English fully. Even East Timor has adopted English as one of its official languages, in order to be plugged into the rest of the world.
Language is not just a possession, it is a means of communication. Not too many people outside of Australia (or inside it, for that matter) can communicate with an Aboriginal person in her or his language, and it’s been like this since the Invasion. Regrettable, tragic, but true.
Now, I expect hostile responses from smug people, comfortable in their use of English, and probably totally ignorant of any Aboriginal languages.
Tony, there are many people, linguists,at least down here in SA (but that is to be expected) who speak many Aboriginal languages, some wonderful anthropoligists like Peter sutton, who is the last speaker of many languages, and Greg Wilson who is heading up to the Pitjantjatjara Lands this week. Rob Amery and Mary-Ann Gale have done terrific work in Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri languages. I can’t answer for more backward parts of Australia than SA (Sydney, Melbourne, Oodnagalarby), but there may be linguists there as well.
This is true, Joe. In the past 15 years there has been a dramatic increase in learning Aboriginal languages and in terms of day to day communication, this is terrific. It now must become an official prerequisite.
Where it becomes problematic is when this has happened after the people with the appropriate knowledge have passed away; generally speaking this was twenty years ago in the NT and Kimberly, but longer ago elsewhere . A fair measure of gullibility has led to opportunistic exploitation by Aboriginal individuals.
Well-known examples are the thigh-spearing evidence on offer in the Centre, with their presentation of punishment. In fact, this was done from a distance and, far from being punishment (not a component of Aboriginal culture), was a conflict resolution ceremony… once blood is spilled all dispute must end.
It is curious how, even after the subliminal message of the Makarata experience was described so beautifully in Ten Canoes (was that the name of the movie?), hardly anyone picked up the message.
Now we have people claiming paedophilia was endemic to Aboriginal culture, that screwing underage girls was an acceptable part of the promised system; that neglect of children is a purely European concept.
And, perhaps, the belief that kadaitja and galka were hard but noble law men and healers, is the oldest of wild misinterpretations. They were, of course, sorcerers and hired assassins. They still are.
And the entire concepts of Aboriginal Law and Land Ownership are utterly alien to Aboriginal culture, and reflect our own absolute miscomprehension of the history of European law.
It will get worse because linguistic proficiency is only the first step to cross-cultural knowledge. Access to the right people, and in the right circumstances is the next. Thirdly, understanding western culture is also essential. We need to know exactly what is core human behaviour and what is cultural; something anthropology has failed miserably to achieve.
In most localities the opportunity to listen to the culturally wise passed a century ago. We can now only compare with regions that have often conflicting interpretations of what once was. And those who learned most, are always those who are heard least.