Nicolas Rothwell; 3/9/08
Our Right to Take Responsibility; By Noel Pearson; Noel Pearson and Associates, 2000
Coercive Reconciliation; Edited by Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson;l Arena Publications, 2007
Beyond Humbug; By Neil Westbury and Michael Dillon; Seaview Press, 2007
Gradually, persistently, over the past decade a revolution has been pushed through in our understanding of remote Aboriginal Australia and its many difficulties. It is a revolution that came from deep roots and had many participants. It was based on engaged, heartfelt observation and clear, precise analysis. Above all, it broke the colonial flow of ideas: it was the first shift in our picture of the traditional Aboriginal domain achieved and disseminated by indigenous intellectuals. This revolution placed alcohol fair and square at the heart of the present-day indigenous crisis, as cause, not mere attendant symptom. It identified the controlling vice of passive welfare as the poison rotting away Aboriginal communities. Paradoxically, with these two bleak conclusions, which have been derided and resisted by many critics, black and white, it restored a degree of power and potential to indigenous people and gave an explanation of their failure, under the conditions of seeming freedom they now enjoy, to thrive. Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson, the originators of these ideas, were viewed, throughout their early, tumultuous years on the political stage as radical activists, if ones of a particularly able, driven kind, burning with a desire to win land rights and obtain recognition for Aboriginal native title. They were campaigners, possessed of fierce devotion to their cause. But there was always a broader, more questioning aspect to their immersion in the thought-codes used by mainstream Australians to describe and administer the protean, elusive, unruly Aboriginal world.
See: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,24246848-25132,00.html
Tags: Aboriginal, Australia, Reconciliation