Australian Notes

Wednesday, 10th June 2009

President Obama’s speech in Cairo combining ‘a new beginning’ for Muslims of the world with reassurance to old allies like Israel was a fine balancing act.

Some 18 years ago, a student named Stephanie Jarrett saw David Bradbury’s documentary State of Shock, which tells the true, terrible and sometimes moving story of an Aboriginal man who murdered an Aboriginal woman in North Queensland. The film changed Jarrett’s life, but not in the way Bradbury intended. It presents the murderer in an ‘understanding’ way — as the victim of the white man, the missionaries, the mining company and the booze. These destroyed his traditional way of life and left him a broken and often vicious drunk. Jarrett was moved to sympathise with him, until an Aboriginal companion, a woman, said to her: ‘What about the woman? She’s dead. He killed her.’ Jarrett then began the research into violence among Aborigines which has preoccupied her as a sociologist in the years since. She found ‘the white man’ is only part of the problem. Her paper, published this month by the Bennelong Society, is the most comprehensive study of the subject yet to appear. Her title sums up her bleak, rebarbative theme: ‘Violence: An Inseparable Part of Traditional Aboriginal Culture.’ She has concluded that violence against women, often of a horrific kind (as evidenced by paleopathological studies) predates contact with ‘the white man’. It lingers today where Aborigines are not yet absorbed or integrated into modern society. (To check almost daily reports of violence, look up www.indigenousviolence.org, the database organised by the philosopher and mathematician Jim Franklin.) Jarrett sees the Intervention, for all its imperfections, as the first step in a long journey which will only be made longer by the persistent fantasies of the Noble Savage school. She is outspoken on the retaliation inflicted on whistleblowers of all kinds (nurses, teachers, public servants, whether black or white), the beatings, rapes, even shootings, not to mention destruction of property. Yet she has blown the most penetrating whistle of all. Jarrett has more courage than most of us.