In Living Color
Painting the problems of Aborigines in black and white is no way to solve them, says a new book
July 22, 2002
By Lisa Clausen

Spend time in an Aboriginal community in Australia and you'll notice that while there are plenty of children, there aren't many elderly people around. They are missing because Aborigines die, on average, 20 years earlier than their fellow Australians (men at age 56; women at 63)--a gap three times larger than that between Maori and other New Zealanders, and six times greater than that between Native and other Americans. For Rosemary Neill, that statistic is a stark illustration of the crisis engulfing indigenous Australia--a crisis that persists despite decades of effort, talk and money. For, as Neill says, "there is no more telling an indicator of a people's well-being than longevity."

Convinced that most Australians remain oblivious or resigned to this catastrophe and its causes, the award-winning journalist with the Australian newspaper resolved to write a book. One publisher liked her ideas but, Neill recalls, said "she would only print them if I was Aboriginal." The rebuff confirmed Neill's suspicion that Australia's debate about indigenous issues is being strangled by dogma, guilt and finger-pointing. It reflected, she says, "that fear that if you are white and middle-class, and are seen to say anything that could be construed as less than positive about indigenous people or institutions, then you might be called a racist."

The book was published anyway--and in White Out, Neill contends that Australians need to take an honest, non-partisan look at why the policy of Aboriginal self-determination, set in train 30 years ago by the Whitlam Labor government, has so clearly failed to achieve its idealistic goals. It's the lack of open debate on indigenous problems, she argues, that has crippled the struggle for better living standards, even as funding has grown.

Discussion of indigenous affairs in Australia is pervaded by a depressing sense of deja vu. The same social and economic problems are documented year after year. Every other week, a new program is announced, with bold predictions of success. Rhetorical promises and calls for action seem endlessly recycled. Billions of dollars have been spent, $400 million alone on implementing the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal deaths in custody. Yet, despite progress in areas such as infant mortality and tertiary education, life for many of Australia's 400,000 indigenous people remains grim.

Why has progress been so slow? That "great unanswered question," writes Neill, "languishes uninterrogated in a kind of ideological no-man's-land." The reasons are many and complex--and far more nuanced than today's debates suggest. Neill argues that both sides of politics are in a rut: the left blames all of indigenous Australia's problems on past injustices and racism; the right blames them on Labor governments' policies of self-determination. Her point is neatly encapsulated in the case of the 1997 Bringing Them Home report, which examined the removal of Aboriginal children from their families between 1910 and 1970--and sparked a bitter verbal brawl. Neill challenges both sides: the report's supporters for claiming that the removals constituted genocide; and its critics, including the current conservative government, for denying the existence of a stolen generation. In such a polemical standoff, Neill argues, the case for both acknowledging the suffering caused by child removal and carefully examining its social and historical context had little chance.

Squabbles over the past, Neill says, have sidelined present troubles: "We have been far more willing to explore and attack the mistakes of the recent past than our own mistakes, but some of those mistakes could prove as ruinous as those of the assimilationist era." The growing number of Aboriginal children removed from their parents' custody today is rarely discussed; the reasons for children's high illiteracy rates and poor performance in English are not on the public agenda. Neill argues that there has been too little evaluation of the results of programs designed to better indigenous people's lives. Sometimes, she says, that's because of a reluctance to crack down on poorly performing Aboriginal organizations or projects out of "a fear of being seen as too punitive, too judgmental and of then being accused of racism."

Neill touches only briefly on the crucial problem of the lack of contact between black and white Australians. Most Aboriginal people live in cities, more than half in racially mixed households, and intermarriage is common. Yet millions of Australians have little or no contact with indigenous people. Too often, public discussion is led by the same commentators--black and white--while the voices of ordinary Aboriginal people are missing. At the same time, some anthropologists, journalists, doctors and healthcare workers have abandoned professional impartiality and become advocates in the debate. Neill shows how reluctance to publicize issues such as suicide and domestic abuse, for fear of reinforcing negative stereotypes, has further narrowed the debate. When conservatives use these issues to argue that self-determination policies are failing, liberals' self-censorship only deepens, she says, and "a never-ending cycle of distortion and denial is set up."

Neill doesn't pretend to offer solutions--she believes neither more money nor the abandonment of self-determination is the answer--but she argues that few will be found in today's simplistic debate. There are signs of a shift, she says, in the public comments of people such as Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson. But a radical new agenda must be found that is based on truth, however uncomfortable or complex, rather than on political dogma: "It's more important that we have the debate than seek to cover up things that many people would find unpalatable." If the cover-up isn't ended, she warns, most indigenous men in Australia will continue to die before they reach pension age.