Wednesday 19 October 2005 — Ngukurr.. end of the dry season?
It rained today!!! First rain of the wet season!!!
Banjo, and everyone else, was greatly excited!
On a hot morning, I left Ev and Banjo at the pool. Ev thought that the mothers from the creche, there with their bigininis, might be embarrassed if I was there. Another pool rule? - hey they have lots of rules at the pool... OK here is our first lesson in Kriol! Kriol is an entirely serious respected language, across the top end, shared by many indigenous peoples across the top of Australia.
Anyway, these are the pool rules:
POOL RULES |
Public pools in remote communities are a valuable public health initiative... compromised a bit by the fact that at this ferocious end of the dry season the chlorine is burned out by about 9am. Anyway, there was a nice group of ladies and babies gathered. Ev joined them and I walked off down the road to the school. I had the camera with me now, to record serious things!
At the school, I found four girls mixing cement, under Simon's supervision, and placing mosaic tiles. They are finishing a mosaic garden map of the totemic geography of the whole area here – the 'country' of all the local peoples, their skin names and the animals that protect it all.
Social responsibility up here is tied to kinship obligation. But I have to tell you, on my second day, just keeping track of family is hard. The girl on the left said to me: "No, I'm not your abija, I'm your amri. That girl over there is your abija. And that one is your apunini and that one is your gagu." [This will be clearer when you read the text of my 9am email, below]
I asked the girls whether the cement on their hands would not burn. "Naah," they said, "Won't hurt blackfella skin, not good for whitefella though."
The purpose of my visit to school was to do a task at the request of Simon the art teacher, to make a stand for rolled canvasses at the Art Centre, to free up table space for painters. I had help in this work especially from Vivienne and Sharona and later Shanine.
It was Shanine, while we were together sanding the pvc pipe above, who explained to me that she was Bindi's daughter and that thus I was also her abija. Sharona, in the khaki t-shirt above and below, was, said Shanine, also my grand-daughter. I asked Shanine what, if she called me abija, should I call her. "Abija," she replied to my foolish question. "The same?" I asked, persisting foolishly. "The same," she said. And so it dawns slowly on the whitefella from the free society without responsibilities between people... These words are not labels for people, they are names of relationships, names of responsibilities. You think you are cutting and sanding pvc pipes and you discover wisdom from a girl.
I must acknowledge and respect that to arrive here and immediately be placed in correct kinship circumstance reflects the fact that Bindi and Matumba and Banjo have been here nearly two years. Nonetheless, this is, as I have known since my first anthropology lectures 44 years ago, the way all outsiders are placed when they enter an aboriginal community. How well this should maintain culture; how easily, though, from the ignorance of and abuse by the outsider, does it tear down culture and society. As much as we modern outside-people may find it hard to comprehend a society bound together in this way, so people living in this society must place outsiders in relation to their social structure for there to be any coherence of life. When you begin to grasp this, you begin to grasp the ridiculous destructiveness of the simple notion of any policy of 'assimilation'... when, from the perspective of a young child in that society, not just some elder or mystic, our imposed outside 'society' has so little structure. The pursuit of issues such as Aboriginal health and Aboriginal community development can only be in that context.
So to understand this world we need to move from the object-focus of 'this is me, that is my grandchild, these are the obligations' to the relationship focus of 'that person and I are [one relationship of a whole web of relationships that sustain the whole world] and we have these responsibilities together'.
I began the previous paragraph with 'to understand this world.' We can, if we drop our western civilised species-chauvinism (I am man, I look out at a world I command), see a whole world in which the people are part of the land and relationships with totemic animals are not arty-farty or cultist or superstitious or mumbo-jumbo. Those of us in the outside may for example, say we 'respect the environment' and get upset when blackfellas say "you will never ever understand the land." Perhaps the point of discordance is in this: that whatever attitude outsiders take towards the land, we conventionally objectify the land, we work off attitude to the land rather than being driven by relationship with the land. There is a counterpoint to thoughts on US strategic policy written a few days ago here.
But I didn't think all that out at the time.
We were busy with practical stuff and it was hot work as you can see from the whitefella... I am writing this now in the context of my learning process, because I know I am, in terms of any undertanding of this world here, looking in from the dust clouds beyond Pluto.
My abija Sharona, about the same age as Cat was when she used the band saw at the AME School,
wanted this piece of timber end reduced to three very small pieces.
Sharona then found three dishes, filled them with wood-shavings, topped them with the saw-dust of PVC
and the wood blocks we had made and, pleased with herself,
left these three pseudo-breakfast bowls on the work bench.
...and then suddenly it was raining for the first time in months, and everyone raced outside rejoicing, including Bindi and some of her girls...
