"No Liquor. No Pornography.” Assessing Australia's paternalist intervention into the lifestyles of indigenous Northern Territory residents ...

From THE ECONOMIST online

Sprawling through dusty red desert, the ochre-coloured hills of the Larapinta Trail might have suited John Ford as a backdrop for his great Westerns, if he hadn’t come across the American west’s Monument Valley first. The road from Alice Springs is breathtaking. Wild horses graze on grass from recent rains. Wrecked cars are casualties of the dead-straight road’s mesmerising dangers. Then, as I pass the boundary leading to Wallace Rockhole, an aboriginal settlement, a big blue sign by the road jolts me back to my journey’s purpose: “Warning. Prescribed Area. No Liquor. No Pornography.”

My destination is Hermannsburg, a former mission. The Lutheran church founded it on the Finke River in 1877 in what was, and still is, one of Australia’s most isolated frontiers. Now home to about 800 Aranda people, who hold title to the land, Hermannsburg is one of 73 aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory that are subject to one of the most dramatic and controversial federal-government takeovers Australia has seen.

Four years ago Nanette Rogers, a court prosecutor in Alice Springs, gave an explosive television interview. She lifted the lid on a dark world of violence, sexual abuse and alcoholism in some of the territory’s remote aboriginal communities. She told of two babies being raped. She spoke of a “malaise”, “entrenched violence”, and of aboriginal people being “overwhelmed time and time again by a fresh new tragedy”. Once a public defender, Ms Rogers said she became a prosecutor because she was “sick of acting for violent aboriginal men”.

Her words sparked a chain of events that has divided Australia ever since. In June 2007 the conservative government led by John Howard announced a “Northern Territory Emergency Response”, which became better known as “the intervention”. Legislation that had banned racial discrimination in the territory was suspended, troops were sent in, and alcohol and pornography were prohibited in the “prescribed communities”. Half of every welfare payment due to the communities’ residents became subject to a kind of quarantine, obliging the state to “manage” their income.

Human-rights activists were outraged. They branded Mr Howard’s action a return to the white paternalism that had prevailed in this territory 34 years ago, before aborigines won their battle for land rights. Indigenous people comprise about a quarter of the Northern Territory’s population, compared with 2% in Australia as a whole. To those critics’ dismay, the Labor government headed by Kevin Rudd has continued with the intervention. After almost three years in power, it has yet to fulfil its pledge to reinstate the anti-racial discrimination law (although legislation to do so is now before parliament).

Yet the territory’s hidden horrors reflect a perplexing side of the indigenous Australians’ long struggle for self-determination. Why should violence, as Nanette Rogers maintains, be so entrenched in parts of aboriginal society? Some trace it to the nomadic way of life they led thousands of years before white settlers pushed them off their lands. Others put it down to a burning resentment at that dispossession, and a void filled mainly by booze and drugs. As the intervention reaches its third year this month, Hermannsburg is a good place to start testing its results, especially among those it was designed to rescue: aboriginal women.

Tourists now swarm through the old mission’s whitewashed buildings. Hermannsburg was the birthplace of Albert Namatjira, an Aranda tribesman whose brilliant landscape paintings of central Australia 60 years ago brought him fame (but not fortune). Bob Durnan, a white health worker here, opposed the intervention at first. Now he supports it. He has watched Hermannsburg’s school attendance rate climb from 50% to 80% in just three years mainly, he reckons, because the community’s women wanted change.

One of them joins us. Mildred Inkamala climbs down from a four-wheel-drive vehicle talking on her mobile phone. Ms Inkamala’s own story makes her something of a charismatic figure. Trained by the Hermannsburg Lutherans, her father was a noted evangelist. Sixteen years ago she and her husband, Carl, went to Sydney to be cured of alcoholism. Both are now members of the MacDonnell Shire, the local government body covering their region. Resisting pressure from some of her own people, Ms Inkamala has worked as a court interpreter, translating between English and the Aranda language in murder trials against men.

She points out a bank of the Finke River where an 18-year-old youth, high from sniffing petrol, once raped and murdered a young girl (he is now in prison in Alice). Then she tells me she now supports the intervention, mainly because it has put an end to “humbugging”: men putting pressure on women to hand over money for alcohol, drugs and gambling. Instead, one half of their “income-managed” welfare payments are logged to a “Basics Card”, which they can use only to buy such items as fresh food and children’s clothes. Ms Inkamala has her own perspective on the violence. “Our ancestors respected each other,” she says. “They looked after kids. Whitefellas’ grog has made the change.” 

Inevitably, bootleggers are still finding ways of smuggling grog in, despite the prohibition. With a paid job of her own, working for the Northern Territory’s family agency, Ms Inkamala is not income-managed. Her friend Kathy Abbott from Wallace Rockhole, who receives a disability pension, is automatically managed. Is that fair? Ms Abbott says if the system helps women more vulnerable than her, she does not mind. I take a snapshot of Mildred, Carl and Kathy outside the old Lutheran Church, with healthy-looking children playing nearby. In some quarters at least, the intervention is being embraced as a fresh approach to stubborn problems. The big test will be where it goes next.

(This is an instalment of a correspondent's diary about Australia's "intervention" in its Northern Territory, published on The Economist online)