MK rang me last week. She is my oldest Arrernte friend from Alice Springs and the inspiration of the educational program I came to Alice in 1988 to work for.
The Ntyarlke Unit at the Catholic High School was designed to provide secondary education for Aboriginal kids from Alice Springs Town camps who had little effective primary education and were already in trouble with the law or were heading in that direction. What MK taught me was that my role was to 'look after' these kids and assist in a process of guiding them to become strong Arrernte young men and women, effective students within a western education system and good Catholics, as she is.
I recently read again MK's book Iwenhe Tyerrtye — What it Means to be an Aboriginal Person where she talks in both Arrernte and English to her mixed audience about the process of growing up in two worlds. A most important concept that she says come from the Altyerre ('Dreaming') is found in the Arrernte word arntanrte-aremele, which means looking after, holding, nurturing or caring for.
She says: 'To go hunting for animals, to care for our children, for husbands to care for their wives, and wives care for their husbands. To share everything and to look after the ones who are sick. These are just some of the things we were created for.'
MK rang me after the 4 Corners program on the treatment of children at Don Dale Juvenile Detention Centre. She wanted to talk about how the government people in that place were not 'looking after' the kids who were put there.
In western lingo we talk about a 'duty of care', but for MK and Arrernte people it is more fundamental than that. Altyerre teaches that we must care for everybody, even the people who do wrong. This is not about western, whitefella law, it is about the fundaments of how it is, from creation.
Fr Brian McCoy SJ, the Provincial of the Jesuits in Australia, has written a wonderful book titled Holding Men. He recounts his experiences as a young priest working at Balgo Hills Mission in Western Australia and ruefully admits that the effect of the mission was to sever the essential connection between the generations within Aboriginal society by taking the children and placing them in dormitories.
He says: 'One of the practices that the mission heavily influenced was kanyirninpa [holding, looking after]. As kartiyas [Europeans] took responsibility for separating and growing up children, they prevented and wounded ancient ways of social integration and reproduction ... '
"What happened at Don Dale is just another 'massacre' and according to MK, Aboriginal youth have that same experience on the streets of Alice Springs every night."
Clearly McCoy and MK have the same process in mind — 'looking after' the children is the primary role of life. It is for this that we exist, to reproduce and provide the opportunity for young people to reach their potential.
MK and I continued our conversation. She said there should be education for young people 'about their rights'. She had moved her thinking across into the western domain, the domain of human rights under Australian Law and the 'duty of care' of police and youth workers and the government to ensure that the general rights of kids are not diminished. She was no longer just talking about Don Dale. She has lived in Central Australia for 80 years and Alice Springs for 50. She knows the texture of the town implicitly.
She knows that Aboriginal kids are not perfect — the Altyerre informs Arrernte that people do bad things, even during this sacred, creative time (as does the Bible, where the second story about humans is about one son killing his brother). But she also knows that when a young person makes a mistake they do not forfeit their right to compassion and care. She sees the behaviour of the whitefella system impacting in such a way as to alienate her grandchildren from their right to arntarnte-areme.
I recently collected another of my great friends from the renal dialysis unit and as I drove her home I told her that I had seen the new publication Every Hill Has a Story, a Central Land Council sponsored compilation of Aboriginal voices from across Central Australia, to which she is a multiple contributor. I wanted to talk of her contribution about growing up in the area around Arltunga and Ross River. She, however, had other things in mind.
Before I had finished she said softly and sadly: 'it's all about the massacres'. The last massacre of Aboriginal people in Central Australia was at Coniston in 1928, and my friend is not old enough to personally remember it. But what she was saying, I think, is that the general tenor of the many stories in the collection compels the reader to consider that the experience of Aboriginal people in Central Australia post Invasion has been one of 'massacre'.
How can she say this? Because the memory and the heartbreak of existence for Aboriginal people in Central Australia is a 'sedimented' history, laid down generationally, of invasion, physical attack, dispossession, social dislocation, cultural genocide and powerlessness. The massacres happened when the whitefellas thought they had no duty of care to the owners of the land they invaded. The blackfellas have sussed that such attitudes have not changed. What happened at Don Dale is just another 'massacre' and according to MK, Aboriginal youth have that same experience on the streets of Alice Springs every night.
Many people would say that the rules at Don Dale apply regardless of colour. The behaviour of the guards, however inappropriate, was not racist. But I think what happened there was racist. Racism is a lived experience of marginalisation and powerlessness experienced by a group because of their identifying characteristics. When black kids experience Don Dale they experience racism. And it is endemic and long lasting. It is ours to erase. We can only do it by 'looking after', 'holding' these kids close to our hearts and ensuring that we empower the people of the Altyerre to do the fundamental arntarnte-areme.
Mike Bowden has worked as a teacher and community worker in Alice Springs and Aboriginal communities in the Top End.