Noel Pearson's book, Up From the Mission: Selected Writings is more than worth a read. It is a shaker. In the Kimberley, we are feeling its impact on the ground.
It has been well reviewed. This present piece concerns the following words of John Hirst in Australia Literary Review (Weekend Australian), of 3 June 2009:
Nor does (Pearson) explore whether Aborigines will want to be enthusiastic participants in the wider economy and society. Their communal and anti-materialist attachments might still be a bar, apart from everything else.
Again, Pearson is confident about incentives and if those fail he will 'crank up the engine of self-interest among the underprivileged'. 'To put it crassly,' he says, 'poor people need to become at least as greedy as those who are not poor.' Yes, this is crass.
So, for his Cape York constituency, Pearson sees self-interest (as he explained in a speech to the Centre for Independent Studies in July 2010) as 'the engine of development'. Not only is it 'relevant to any serious intention to close the gap on disadvantage, it is absolutely central'.
In this, he is urging his own people to a big mutation indeed.
In the traditional pre-'scientific' religious intuition referred to as the kinship system, everything in the wide universe was seen as having a place, a 'skin', in the totality. Everything was inter-related and inter-dependent. Self-interest as a mode of human being and living did not occur to the Aboriginal mentality. Nor could it, in the circumstances. In this, I believe, it was graced.
Here in the Dampier Peninsula, north of Broome and Roebuck Bay in Western Australia, good things have been happening, along the lines Pearson is proposing. The Howard family's Midlagoon is a popular tourist resort. The Sibosado family venture in Lombadina is again a seasonal attraction. The Cox family bakery in Beagle Bay is, similarly, a heartening success story, and exemplary.
Billard, close to Beagle Bay, is a Victor family project, backed by the government. It is feeling its way, with suicide-prevention its focus.
Each of these is getting out of what Pearson calls 'passive welfare' and into employment and self- (or family-) aggrandisement.
The question is: are the ancient kinship vision/experience and Pearson's self-interest reconcilable, or inevitably opposed?
Though he grew up in