Mr Howard, Mr Brough and Australia's Aborigines - 5: Policy and Administrative Issues

Preamble: I wrote this post over a number of days. As I did I became more depressed to the point that I thought that I had best give it away. Then yesterday (17 July) I was further depressed by a piece written by Joel Gibson in the Sydney Morning Herald in advance of the Four Corner's story on Noel Pearson and Cape York. 

I missed the Four Corner's Program, but was later able to read a transcript. I also watched on-line, transfixed, the longer segment of Mr Pearson addressing the community at Hope Vale. You can find both here. I do recommend that you watch Mr Pearson speak. He is a quite inspirational stump orator of a type no longer common in these TV dominated, short soundbite, days. Certainly he inspired me. 

I do not want to write anymore on the NT issue. It's not just depression. Watching Mr Pearson reminded me again of how little I know about the complexity of indigenous life. In the past I did read all the earlier anthropological material. as well as some of the history of Australia's northern indigenous peoples. But I simply do not understand all the complexities involved, nor do I think that I can contribute much to a public discussion where my views (at least as I see it) are too far outside the dominant mind sets. 

I do still feel that I can write on New England indigenous issues. Here I know and love the country. Here, too, I have much greater understanding of the pattern of indigenous life over geography and time. I can also put it into a historical context that I do understand. So I can do something useful by making information available (a real gap), by discussing issues, by presenting the New England story. 

So while I have let the post stand, I will come back to the NT issue if and only if I have something really useful that I can say.

While I have great respect for the views of Marcel Proust, marcellous, I greeted his post on the Commonwealth Government's intervention in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities with some concern.
As with all his pieces, it is thoughtful and well written. The quote from and link through to Jack Waterford's piece on Fred Hollows and the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program are very worthwhile. Why, then, did I read the piece with some concern? I quote:

So I have watched with dismay as Mr Howard has garnered approval for the government’s latest initiatives in relation to Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. My own view is that the approval which Howard has won is very much akin to the public approval for “law and order”campaigns. Part of the reason for such approval is that everybody thinks that the target of such campaign is a “them” or “other” without really contemplating the systemic harm that such campaigns do to the legal system as it operates for everybody. In the case of law and order, the them is those “crims;” in this case it is aborigines. That is why in the end I am also sorry to say that the approval is ultimately grounded in a kind of racism, because aborigines are so readily the “them” in this equation.

I agree with Marcel's general point on the law and order issue. I do not agree with the subsequent link to racism. I think that this is wrong.

To my mind, it does an injustice to the public response, including the hundreds of professionals who have volunteered support driven by motives very similar to those who supported the National Trachoma Program. It also does an injustice to Mr Brough whose personal passion for change is now, I think, well established.

The Federal Government's response is flawed, perhaps fatally so But so, too, is the reaction to it, locked into a mindset that is damaging and denigrating to all of Australia's indigenous peoples - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders - and which also plays to political forces in the indigenous communities that we (the broader Australian community) have helped create.

These are strong claims, likely to raise blood pressures. In this post I want to explain the reasons for my conclusions as simply and as clearly as I can, drawing on the many posts I have written on indigenous issues to try to clarify my own thinking.

To any indigenous readers, in all my writings I have tried to be careful to make it clear that I am writing as an outsider, a non-indigenous observer.

I cannot comment on the detail of particular indigenous communities because I do not know them, just as I am careful in my comments about other communities that I do not know.

I can comment on policy issues because of my policy expertise. I can also comment on issues associated with indigenous history and culture where I have researched the matter and can give my sources.

Perhaps most importantly of all, I write from the perspective of someone who thinks that our indigenous peoples have actually done bloody well in working their way up from a position of huge social deprivation and find it sad to see this achievement tarnished, as it has been in recent years' by an overwhelming focus on failures. To my mind, we need to focus on building on successes.

Take just one measure to illustrate my point.

When I first heard Charles Perkins speak at the University of New England in 1964or 65, he was I think the first indigenous university graduate.That was only 42 years ago.

In 2004-2005, there were 9,100 indigenous people studying at university or some other form of higher educational institution. A further 20,100 were engaged in some form of post secondary study (TAFE, business college, skill center etc). In that year, 53,400 indigenous people (20.8 per cent) held a qualification at Certificate III level or higher.

For those who are interested, you can follow up these numbers and more in the June 2007 Productivity Commission Report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Key Indicators 2007.

Now you can cut these numbers in two ways. You can do as I have just done and look back to see substantial progress. Or you can compare the numbers with broader Australian community averages. This shows that there is some distance still to go.

But whichever way you go, this level of educational participation is a far remove from the world that Charles Perkins described in a hot room in the UNE Union all those years ago.

Moving forward, I now want to do three things.

First, I want to outline what I see as the three core reasons for policy failure when it comes to the various initiatives that have attempted to address the needs of our indigenous people.

Secondly, I will use the eye care case as a case study to illustrate some of the points because this is an area where I have a degree of personal knowledge.

Finally, I will point to some of the problems and confusions in the Government's Northern Territory intervention, including some thinking that I have done since my last post on this topic.

Reasons for Policy Failure

Gillian Cowlishaw, to my mind the pre-eminent academic analyst of race relations in Australia, contributes "Collateral Damage in the History Wars." In this essay she examines the differing but consistently negative impacts of the debate over "Aboriginal history" on the generations, old and young, of indigenous people in rural Australia who listen to representations of these history wars in the popular media. There are two sides to the debate about Aboriginal history, but neither of them takes into account the implications of their public disputations on contemporary Aboriginal lives. The older generation sees their memories of good times working on stations (for example) discredited, and their often friendly relationships with whites in those days discredited. The younger generation absorbs a message of strife, inequality, and persecution. Neither message fosters self-respect; both contribute to an understanding of Aboriginal people as passive agents, acted upon rather than acting.

This quote, taken from an extremely good post on Aboriginal Arts & Culture: an American Eye, provides a useful entry point for my remarks.In an earlier post I mentioned an article that I read in Oceania as part of my undergraduate studies on Aboriginal life. This was around the time I first heard Charles Perkins speak, and the article had a great impact on my subsequent thinking.

The article explored the relationships between views in the broader community about the Aborigines and Aboriginal views about themselves. Its core conclusion was that negative stereotypes about Aborigines held in the broader community were in fact mirrored, reflected, in Aboriginal attitudes about themselves.

This type of mirroring, reflecting behaviour is now well known.

If you tell someone that they are a failure, if you downplay their achievements, if you tell them that they are a victim, if you invalidate aspects of their past, they will finally come to believe and act in that way. That is what we have done.

Now this is just not my view. It is also a view expressed by a number of indigenous leaders.

Note that this does not mean that problems should be ignored. Rather, it is a matter of perspective.

This brings me to my second point.

Australia's indigenous people are not and never have been a single homogeneous group. They were not at the time of the arrival of the Europeans, nor are they today. There is huge variety.

I think that we all know this. Why, then, do we persist in so much language and in policy in trying to treat our indigenous peoples as though they were a single entity instead of focusing on their varying interests and needs? Not only is this disrespectful, but it is a major cause of policy failure.

Many of those involved in indigenous development have made this point.

Our Torres Strait Islanders want individual recognition for their unique features, pointing out that they are a minority in a minority in a broader community. In Cape York, Noel Pearson's concern has been to find the best way to deal with the particular problems of his own communities. Nationally, Fred Chaney has argued the need to recognise difference, as well the reasons why particular projects or negotiations have succeeded, others failed.

Note that I am not saying that we should not address specific issues on an indigenous wide basis where that is appropriate, simply that the current approach is badly flawed.

This leads me to my last and related point, one that I have made many times before, the need to carefully distinguish between indigenous issues that should properly be dealt with through indigenous policy and those issues that affect our indigenous peoples, but which properly belong to other areas.

We have a major problem at present in that policy towards our indigenous people has not only been locked into that policy ghetto called Aboriginal policy, but is also trying to deal with issues that, while they affect indigenous people, are in fact broader.

Again, I am not alone in saying this. Recently, Fred Chaney made the point that the problems faced by our rural and remote Aborigines are in part a sub-set of problems faced by all those living in these areas and cannot be addressed without action to address the broader problem.

This led him to advocate, as I have done in the case of New England's indigenous peoples, the need for effective decentralisation and action on regional development as a necessary requirement for improvement in Aboriginal conditions.

The Eye Care Case

"It's too bureaucratic, too top down, there's no plans to advance the community, 9 out of 10 houses that get built are unsuitable because of a one size fits all approach - but the current approach means that it's just easier to spend the money than to set objectives and monitor outcomes." Stakeholder feed back May 2006, Inquiry into the Community Housing and Infrastructure Program (CHIP).
"In one Western Desert Community we had 132 consultation meetings in three months ... it's a red tape nightmare". Stakeholder interview June 2006, Inquiry into the CHIP Program.

These quotes are drawn from my post on the PriceWaterhouseCoopers Inquiry into the CHIP Program. I will refer to this a little later in this section.

Australia is the only developed country in the world where blinding trachoma still exists.
We can stop this if we as a community care. Trachoma is entirely preventable. Although it disappeared from white Australia 100 years ago, it could take another century to disappear from Indigenous Australia if we do not do something about it. We can not wait that long. All Australians have the right to sight. The time to act is now. Do we have the will?

Professor Hugh Taylor, The Medical Journal of Australia, (MJA 2001; 175: 371-372).

Trachoma, sandy blight as it has been known in Australia, is a disease of slum conditions, of poor housing and hygiene. Chronic infection with the trachoma organism, Chlamydia trachomatis, can lead to blindness.

The disease was probably brought to Australia by the European settlers. The poor housing conditions of the early settlers, and the heat, dirt and flies of Australia, meant that sandy blight became widespread and well known.

By the late 1930s sandy blight had essentially disappeared even in rural areas as most Australians moved into proper housing with separate beds, running water and adequate sewerage and rubbish removal. Despite the disappearance of trachoma from most of the Australian population, it has remained prevalent among certain groups of indigenous Australians.

The late Father Frank Flynn, an Australian-born and London-trained ophthalmologist turned Catholic priest, worked as an Army chaplain in Darwin in 1941. He was the first to recognise the frequent occurrence of trachoma among indigenous people in the Northern Territory, and their welfare became his life's work.

After World War II, Ida Mann, an English ophthalmologist who had worked with Frank Flynn in London before the war, moved to Perth. She subsequently conducted extraordinary trips throughout the outback, examining and treating indigenous people with trachoma.

In the 1960s, the late Fred Hollows took up his position as Professor of Ophthalmology at the University of New South Wales and became aware of the importance of trachoma in Australia. First working with the Gurindji people at Wave Hill in the Northern Territory and then with the people around Bourke in far western New South Wales, he cajoled the Federal Government and the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists into establishing the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program (the "Trachoma Program").

From 1976 to 1978, the Trachoma Program teams visited every indigenous community in Australia (including some groups in large urban centres), examining over 62 000 Indigenous people and nearly 40 000 others (consisting of whites, Asians, etc, in rural and remote areas). It gave a clear picture of the number of people affected with trachoma and its distribution. They also treated nearly 40 000 people for trachoma and set up clear guidelines and recommendations as to what needed to be done to eliminate trachoma.

Jack Waterford's article referred to earlier provides a personal and graphic picture of the Trachoma Program.

Almost twenty years later, in 1996, Professor Hugh Taylor was commissioned by the Federal Minister for Health to prepare a national report into Aboriginal eye care. As part of his work, Professor Taylor visited may of the communities covered by the earlier Trachoma Program. He said later:

It was very satisfying to go back to places like Bourke and Broome and find that trachoma had essentially disappeared over the previous 20 years. Clearly, progress was being made — at least in the towns and larger communities.

In other areas, although the amount of trachoma had decreased and fewer children were affected, their elders still had scarred eyelids and blindness from the inturned eyelashes caused by trachoma.

However, I was devastated to find that in some other communities, such as Jigalong in the Western Desert, and Amata and Fregon in the Musgrave Ranges, the rates of trachoma in children had not changed one jot over the 20-year period.

Professor Taylor handed in his report to the towards the end of 1997.

The report painted a detailed picture of Aboriginal eye care problems, including the continued incidence of trachoma as well as the increased problems posed by diabetes related eye disease. The need for improved Aboriginal housing hygiene were central to his discussion of problems. Both the then Minister for Health and the Prime Minister agreed to address the need for improved eye care.

I became CEO of the Royal Australian College of Ophthalmologists at the end of 1997. Before that, I had had no knowledge of Aboriginal eye care issues. Now the first meeting that I attended was in Canberra with health officials to discuss the Taylor Report.

The College and its Fellows were very proud of the work that ophthalmologists had done and continued to do with Aboriginal communities. The College branches set up committees to develop responses, coordinated by a central committee. Bill Glasson, now an member of the Commonwealth Government's Task Force, was a key member of this central committee.

Differences between the states and territories were quickly apparent. These differences made it hard to develop a single coordinated approach.

In Victoria, for example, we had lots of ophthalmologists but very little specifically Aboriginal needs. By contrast, in the Northern Territory we had lots of need but very few ophthalmologists, so were were dependent upon the pioneering work of a few such as Dr Nitin Verma.

As an aside, Dr Verma is, I think, now in Tasmania, but has continued his work with the East Timorese, something that began while he was in Darwin and which has involved other Australian ophthalmologists including Bill Glasson.

In NSW Rosalind Hecker was commissioned by the NSW Government to prepare a follow report about NSW conditions. Her report identified pockets of need. She advised me of proposals to establish a remote area registrar position in Sydney that might then service at least the far west on a fly-in basis.

When I looked at the detail of Rosalind's report, I took a very different view, concluding that what we had was not an Aboriginal eye care problem, but a regional eye care problem with Aboriginal aspects. Solve the regional problem, and you would benefit all, while finding it easier to meet Aboriginal needs. Leave that problem un-resolved, and you were necessarily limited to partial solutions of the Sydney based fly-in specialist type.

I put forward a number of suggestions that I thought would improve regional eye care while meeting Aboriginal needs. I also thought that the time was opportune to do this, since we might be able to get money for hospital posts, always a difficulty in expanding ophthalmic training. In this context, my view was that we faced a looming shortage of ophthalmologists, one that was going to hit regional areas especially hard because so many ophthalmologists trained in Sydney and wanted to stay in that city.

My base proposal was a simple one.

To begin with, I suggested that we put a registrar training post in Tamworth. Tamworth already had a major base hospital, while there were local Fellows who could provide training, oversight and professional support. That registrar could then service Moree, an area with a population of 15,000 including a major Aboriginal population presently serviced on a fly-basis by ophthalmologists from Maitland and the Gold Coast.

I then suggested that we put a staff specialist plus a registrar at Dubbo base hospital. Dubbo, a very major regional centre, had been unable to attract an ophthalmologist despite the size of the local market and was serviced by the big ophthalmic practices in Orange. This approach would meet an already identified area of need, while the specialists in question could also more easily meet needs in the far west tha a Sydney based service.

Finally, I suggested a registrar position at Wagga Wagga base hospital. I also suggested that we look at a training network perhaps centred on Newcastle to provide an alternative to Sydney focused training, since it was clear that Sydney trained specialists were reluctant to leave the city on a long-term basis.

I thought that this proposal would meet Aboriginal eye care needs on a far more effective basis than alternative band-aid solutions, while also building regional medical services more broadly defined.

At this distance and working from memory, I do not think it fair to discuss in detail why the proposal was rejected.

Part of the reason lay in the perceived difficulty of attracting trainees and specialists to fill the posts in the first instance. Part of the reason lay in problems in providing the required on-going training support. Part, too, lay in the presence of existing interests that would be disadvantaged.

Whatever the reasons, the rejection meant that so far as NSW was concerned, Aboriginal eye car would remain in the band-aid class for the immediate future since the underlying, broader, causes of the problem were not being addressed.

I left the College at the end of 1999. In 2001 Professor Taylor complained about the treatment of his report:

.... disappointingly little has happened. In most places, little has changed, even though the problem has been clearly identified, strategies have been carefully laid out, verbal support has been given by leaders and there has been a lot of discussion with bureaucrats.
In areas with severe trachoma, one in five of the older people have inturned lashes, and about half of these are either blind already or will eventually go blind. It is a tragedy to see their children or their grandchildren suffering from trachoma infection, because you know that they are on the same escalator and will certainly suffer the same fate if things do not improve.

Now track forward six years to 2007.

In 1997 Professor Taylor had identified poor housing and hygiene as a core problem in remote communities in improving eye care in remote communities. Almost ten years later, the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report into the Commonwealth's Community Housing and Infrastructure Program cited at the start of this section provided a devastating critique of the failure to improve indigenous housing in remote communities. Now poor Aboriginal health in general has become a national scandal.

We are all to blame. I include myself in this because, pre-occupied with other College problems, I did not push the eye care issue in the way I should have when I could do something.

The Howard/Brough Intervention

The case study I have just given bears upon both my opening remarks and the Commonwealth Government's intervention.

It is now thirty years since the Trachoma Program started.This intervention had initial good results because it targeted a specific need. However, those results were only maintained where the supporting infrastructure was in place. Outside those areas, the problem persisted until today.

In considering this, we can see the way variations across country affected on-ground delivery. We are not dealing with a single uniform problem, but one displaying considerable regional variation. We can see, too, how longer term improvements in Aboriginal eye care and health more generally can be a subset of a broader problem extending beyond the Aboriginal community.

Taking all this into account, I now want to provide a consolidated assessment of the Howard/Brough intervention.

Access to Information

I have put this one first because it is central to public credibility on what is a fairly controversial initiative. If the Government is to gain and maintain support it must provide full information to the broader community.
I give the Government a fail here. Initially a wide range of information was provided so that an interested observer such as myself could access information direct. This is no longer true in that the official sites are not being updated. Now to get information I have to dig round in the media or rely on my own contacts.

Public Trust

I have put this one next because it links to to the information issue.

Based on the public opinion polls, the majority of the Australian community supports the intervention. Those strongly opposed to the Government have, as might be expected, painted this in election terms, in many cases linking it to Tampa. Many of those who have participated in past debates on policy towards our indigenous peoples have, again as might be expected, reacted strongly because the Government has tried to change the rules of the game.

A more fundamental problem for the Government is a basic lack of trust among many observers based on past Government actions. Here I am not speaking of broad policy thrusts, mainstreaming is an example, but of the cumulative effects of a series of past decisions.

As an example, I discussed the intervention with an indigenous colleague. She was negative for very different reasons from those appearing in the media.

Commenting that the Government talked about the importance of education, she went on to detail a couple of programs that had been cancelled even though (in her view) they were very effective in keeping kids at school. I had never heard of the programs so could not comment. The point is that she judged the intervention in the context of the cancellation.

Notwithstanding general public support, I give the Government a fail in the trust area for the same reason I gave it a fail on information. It has, I think, failed to realise the scale of distrust and hence the need to manage it.

Good Intent

I give the Government a strong pass in this area. I do believe that Mr Brough in particular has a passionate desire to see conditions improved.

Focus

When this whole thing started, I thought that the exclusive focus on child abuse was a mistake because it played into what has become a national pre-occupation, the obsession with child abuse. Now here I agree with Marcel. By typing things in this way, the Government turned a complex set of social and economic problems into a law and order issue.

I held off commenting because I hoped that I was wrong. My feeling was that the actual dynamics of on-ground delivery would force changes, and indeed this has happened.

Take the question of medical examinations. Within days of the announcement, Mr Abbott was qualifying the PM's original remarks, making it clear that parental consent would be required, that examination for sexual abuse was a specialist skill, that children would be given broad health screening.

I also felt from what I knew of Mr Brough, and I have actually read every press release he has put out since becoming Minister, that he had a much broader agenda focused on Aboriginal improvement.

I will now come down from the fence and give the Government a fail in this area, too, along three critical dimensions.

First, it has given our Aboriginal peoples a huge black eye. The Government's intervention was followed by action in the states as they responded to a perceived political imperative culminating the WA Halls Creek arrests.

Note that I am not making a comment on the WA Government's actions, although I do wonder why they took so long to act. All I am saying is that the combined effect is to damage the reputation of a whole people.

I keep on saying, I have done so time and time again, that our indigenous peoples are not a single uniform lot, but a group that displays at least as much variety as the Australian community as a whole. In our desire to help, in our collective obsession with child abuse, we have done them serious damage.

This brings me to my second point.

In my first post in this series I said that things would never be the same again. I was not referring just to certain of the Northern Territories indigenous communities, nor to the indigenous population, but to the whole Australian community.

The sad fact about the Commonwealth Government, one that I have mentioned before, is that it cannot tailor responses to meet particular geographic needs, but instead is forced to respond on a national basis independent of variation.

Take this case. To avoid the tag of being racist, the Government was forced to extend measures, rhetoric, to the broader Aboriginal community and then beyond. Now we have fundamental changes to our social welfare system that affect all.

I am not saying the changes are necessarily wrong, that's another issue. I am saying that universal application of changes based on perceived needs in a particular area or areas risks being badly wrong simply because needs elsewhere are likely to be different.

This bring me to my last point in this section.

By locking itself in the way it did, the Government not only gave the indigenous community a black eye, but also severely reduced the chances of achieving long term success. Crudely, it gave its opponents the chance to link everything back the single question of the reduction of child sexual abuse.

Take the issue of the permit system.

I had not focused on this issue at all. Now, having read all the arguments for and against as presented, it would take a lot to convince me that it's a good thing. Yet when I listen ito Mr Brough present his case, I know that he is in trouble simply because arguments about the permit system extend well beyond the question of child abuse as such.

Administrative Issue

As a former Commonwealth public servant I know and am interested in the fact that that an initiative of this type has to be supported by a major administrative uinderpinning if it is to work. I was especially interested in this question because of the sudden drop in the supply of information.

My feel is that the Government is in a degree of trouble here.

One difficulty is that the intervention happened so late in the Government's term of office. In addition to fueling mistrust, this has created major time pressures at a time when the detail of decision making has become more difficult because ministers are less accessible because of election pressures including travel.

A second difficulty is that the Commonwealth Public Service itself is less able to respond quickly than in the past.

My impression is that the first meeting of the high level Inter Departmental Committee set up to progress the matter ran into a degree of problems because the required information and coordination mechanisms were simply not there any more between agencies.

Staffing the Task Force also appears to have been an issue because the thinning down of the Public Service means that the required people resources are simply not readily available.

Then, too, there are major complexity issues. As an example, in trying to draft complex legislation in a short time period, the Government is reported to have put together a team of some twenty lawyers. They have to come to grips with complex issues, create a common understanding, avoid mistakes and all in a far shorter period than would normally be the case.

These are an outsider's views. But the problems are clearly substantial
.
The Government now has a maximum of around three months left before it goes into caretaker mode. Only so much can be done in this time.

My hope, and I suspect Mr Brough's too, is that what is done during this period will have sufficient depth and substance to provide a base for the Government's successor to carry work forward. My concern is that pressure and polarised views may make this impossible.

Manners and Society in Modern Australia

Musing about varying social structures in New England got me thinking about the role of manners in society.

I was brought up at the tail end of a period in which we were taught to stand up if an adult entered the the room, to call male adults sir (I went to a boys school with an all male teaching staff), to give up my seat on a bus for women and older people, to walk on the outside (road side) of a girl, to hold the door open for other people.

My immediate world was quite a complicated world in social terms, far more complex I think than modern Australia. Some of Judith Wright's writing presents part of that world, the grazing families, if sometimes in very jaundiced terms.

I was fortunate in that my particular family circumstances - son of an academic, a townie, but with country and city connections - gave me real freedom to mix across groups without worrying too much about the formalities of social divide.

Most of the writing that I have seen on class in Australia is, like Rick Kuhn's March 2006 paper, written from a Marxist perspective. This can be useful, but does not help much if you are interested (as I am) in the changing structure and nuances of Australian life and society. Here you have to try to identify, disentangle, the elements.

In mixing across groups the way I did I had to adjust to the particular manners of the group in question, to fit in, to learn the lingo so to speak. This did not mean giving away my own views. It did mean not arguing about things about which there was no point.

Sometimes this was difficult, requiring me to bite my tongue, when views were expressed that I disagreed with quite fundamentally.

Despite the differences between the various groups, there was still a unity brought about in part by what John Hirst as described as a democracy of language. This constrained the pretensions of some groups, influenced the behaviour of all.

Linked to this was a commonality in underlying core views. By this I do not mean quite what are called today "values". Expressed values could vary quite dramatically. Rather, I am talking about a common frame of reference created by common language and shared experiences.

We see ourselves most clearly through the eyes of others. The overseas students I mixed with could see both the weaknesses and strengths as well as our idiosyncrasies.

Because manners are a reflection of society, they change with changes in society.

The high point of Women's Liberation put a bullet straight through many of the things that I had been trained to do. I was firmly instructed not to walk on the outside, not to hold the door open, not to get up in buses. Women were equal and I had better get used to it.

I am not being critical in saying this, just observing the way in which social trends - in this case gender equity - manifest themselves in changes in manners.

Today I find that I have less understanding of the complexities of Australian society than in the past. Certainly many of the varying social structures that I knew have been swept away. But it is unclear to me at present just what has taken their place.

Part of the problem here may be that I simply have access to a smaller number of groups than in the past, so that I am less able to compare and contrast. Part of the problem may be that Australian society has simply become more fragmented.

In all this, I find two things of particular interest.

The first is the apparent resurgence of interest in manners and questions of etiquette. I have no scientific basis for saying this. Rather, I am responding to the apparent frequency with which these topics come up on radio or in the press. There seems to be a yearning for what used to be called common politeness.

The second is the apparent consistency over time in the core Australian character.

As I write, John Hirst is being interviewed on radio about his latest book on this topic. I have yet to read it, but based on the interview I both agree and disagree with him. I would agree with his core point, that there is something uniquely Australian that has been passed down over the generations.

I think that I can demonstrate this rather easily.

In 1957 John O'Grady writing as Nino Culotta published They're a weird mob, the often hilarious account of the experiences of a new Italian migrant fitting into Australian society. The book was a huge success.

Currently the Living Abroad web site carries an article providing advice to US people on the Australian character. The core elements are clearly the same, despite the passage of fifty years and the enormous changes that have taken place in Australia over the period.

I can see the same thing in my daughters and their friends. They have a clear picture in their minds as to what it means to be an Australian. This is not expressed in terms of broad visions or values, simply in the continuing capacity to recognise what's Australian and what's not. "That's an ozzie". was eldest's response to one TV story.

Just as is the case today, when I was at school and university this "Australianess" made many of our intellectual elites - Donald Horne and Germaine Greer come to mind as examples - very uncomfortable.

This is not a criticism.

While I have been critical of the role of our intellectual elites, I think it important to remember that one of their key roles is to question, to criticise, to present views that challenge.

When, as has happened a number of times in Australia's short history, one view becomes dominant, an alternative view will rise to challenge it. In all this, I think that the character of the Australian people provides a solid core.

Email from Zimbabwe

I was doing some web searches on Zimbabwe when I came across the following email reprinted on Letters from Africa. I am repeating it in its entirety because it provides one insight into that strange, Kafka like, world that Zimbabwe has become.

Drifting onto the Rocks and Burning the Boat

Yesterday the regime published in the state press the list of those productsthat are to be controlled at a fixed price. It covers all the basics from milk to cement. The prices shown are between 20 per cent and 50 per cent ofthe actual cost of producing and marketing those products. All other products produced by manufacturers are now price controlled in that the producer must fix their current prices at the level they were 3 week ago(18th June) and must from now on get the written approval of the Ministerfor any new prices.

June the 18th marks the start of this campaign. On that date they entered the parallel market for foreign exchange using billions of dollars in local currency just printed, driving the price of foreign exchange from about 100000 to 1 for the US dollar and 7500 for the Rand (the two most frequently traded currencies) to 300 000 to 1 or more; some trades were done as high as 400 000 to 1 for the US dollar and similar sorts of rates for the Rand.

As a consequence, since all imported items are priced at the replacement cost in foreign exchange at the parallel market rate, prices rose across the board. This pushed inflation well over the 15 000 per cent per annum level and created all sorts of pressures in the local economy.

When the exercise stopped after 10 days or so (I assume they ran out of cash), the foreign currency rates fell back to about 200 000 to 1 for the US dollar and 15 000 to 1 for the Rand. Many prices were adjusted downwards (fuel from 180 000 for a litre to 120 000) and business went back to"normal". They then unleashed the next phase.

This second phase is now well under way and is expressed in the wholesale arrest of business managers and Directors (nearly 2000 as of last night), the physical control of prices by thousands of Police and Militia - operating for the first 10 days without any legal backing at all and now the promulgation of new regulations that are just plainly unworkable.

Just take what they did yesterday to the beef industry. They had fixed the retail price of beef (for all cuts) at an arbitrary 90 000 or 120 000 dollars a kilogram (why the difference no one can tell me). In Beitbridge we were forced to sell our stocks at 90 000, in Masvingo, just up the road, they were forced to sell at 120 000. It did not matter really, just changed the degree of your losses. When the final rush of customers was over we had run out of stocks, lost many millions of dollars and could not find any farmers who would sell us cattle at a price that would allow us to operateat the new prices.

So what do they do? Yesterday they cancelled the licenses of ALL private abattoirs across the country, hundreds of them. In their place, they"instructed" farmers to approach their nearest Cold Storage Commission abattoir to make arrangements for them to buy their cattle, slaughter them and deliver meat at the "controlled" price to butchers.

Now I was the Chief Executive of the CSC when it was the largest meat processor in Africa. It has a superb network of 5 internationally registered Abattoirs capable of slaughtering up to 650 000 head of cattle a year. We actually handled over 700 000 head in one year during a drought.

We no longer have that sort of industry, but still kill between 350 000 and 400 000 head a year. The CSC however is hardly a player. Two of the abattoirs have not killed an animal for 15 years, the others are on a care and maintenance basis with a tiny throughput. You seldom see a CSC truck onthe roads and they are almost moribund.

Now, at the stroke of a pen, the Minister thinks he can order the closure of hundreds of small abattoirs that have taken the place of the CSC, open up the CSC works and supply the country overnight with its needs. If ever you needed to understand the extent of the stupidity of these so-called Ministers, this is it, and Mad Made is not even the Minister of Agriculture any more!

When I was at the CSC we handled up to 140 000 tonnes of beef a year, exported to many countries including the EU and employed 5000 peoplewith dozens of excellent engineers, accountants and managers - most with more than 20 years experience. That is all long gone, they do not have the physical, financial or management capability to undertake this exercise thrust on them at a days notice.

Yesterday we closed down our clothing factory in Bulawayo and told the staff to go home and come back next week when we might know what to do. The reason, all our orders from local retailers have been frozen - they simply cannot function under the new regulations. If there is no movement in a week or so, they will halt all buying and run down their stocks and then, like us, close down. We are affected immediately as we hold no stocks of finishedgoods - we manufacture to order.

When existing stocks of controlled items run out there will be nothing left.

That includes all the basic essentials - salt, maize meal, flour, matches and meat. When I wrote over the weekend about refugees flooding into SouthAfrica I do not think I overstated the probabilities. I now have no doubt at all and all of us may be the new victims. What kind of reception will we get?

I heard talk in Beitbridge yesterday that the South African Army has just shot 100 head of cattle straying into South Africa across the River. I also heard disturbing reports that they had shot 7 "border jumpers". It may or may not be true, but it does describe in graphic terms the sort of reception poor, homeless, impoverished and desperate Zimbabweans get when they try to escape to anywhere where sanity prevails.

As for the crazy guys at the helm here, they know their Zanu PF ship is headed for the rocks of destruction in the SADC talks and their aftermath, they have opted to burn the boat rather than face the music. The problem is, we are all in this particular boat - not out of choice but simply historical reality. If they are allowed to burn the ship around us like this, we haveno option but to take our chances in the water and swim to shore.

Do not think these Zanu PF guys are irrational or dumb. This is carefully planned and is being ruthlessly implemented. Just the same as Murambatsvina and at the same time we must recognise that they think they have a chance of success, even if it is small and their commitment to the SADC process is nil. Theirs is a plan to fight to survive and if they fail to leave nothing behind.

Eddie Cross, Bulawayo, July 12th 2007

Australian History - A New England Slice 2

I have transferred this post in its entirety to the New England's History blog. Those who are interested in following the development of the post can find it here.

I made the transfer for several reasons.

The post was taking an enormous amount of time, stopping me posting on other things. This time plus the time I spent on the initial posts on the Commonwealth Government's intervention in the Northern Territory meant that I was not posting on my other blogs. Traffic collapsed as a consequence.

The series does not really belong on this blog which is meant to reflect my broader interests, not just the New England slice. By contrast, on the New England History blog it both fits and also does not matter if I take time to finish posts.

New England's History is my Cinderella blog. It has a very different purpose.

While I would like to think that it will eventually attract readers (there have been just 306 visitors since the first post on 24 November 2006), my primary purpose is to build up a resource that will eventually help all those, however few they may be, who want to study New England history.

I struggle to find the time to do the work necessary to build this blog. The New England slice series made me realise that I have been going about things the wrong way. Because I am not trying to attract readers at this point, I can put up as many incomplete posts as I like.

Neil commented that I should write a text book on New England. Well, I have long wanted to write some books, but struggle to find the time. Part of my reason for blogging in fact is that this is one way of forcing me to find the time to write.

What I should be doing on New England's History is treating the blog as a work in progress device, simply a way of recording thoughts and progress in one key area of my interests. Looking at it in this way, I do not have to worry about just how rough or incomplete the analysis may be. The blog is, after all, a reference device for my own purposes.

If some readers find it interesting and want to become involved, then that is a plus, not an objective.

Australian History - A New England Slice 1

Photo: This is a photo of the North Coast Steam Navigation Company's Uralba in naval dress.

Built by the shipbuilder E Wright of Tuncurry in 1942, this was the last ship built for the North Coast Steam Navigation Company, the last wooden coal burner built in Australia and, almost certainly, the last ship built in New England for the coastal trade.

I have been gnawing away at the regional bone in a number of posts and feel the need to put the matter aside for the present with two final posts.

On 2 July in Australia's Regions - are they really different? I commented on just how dull I found Australian history, suggesting that this was due at least in part to our failure to recognise regional variations. I extended my argument the following day in my post Timgad and the Study of Australian history.

My first post drew comments from Adrian and Legal Eagle. My thanks to both. I have taken the liberty of repeating Legal Eagle's comment in full because it bears upon my argument.

Hear hear, Jim - I got totally bored by Australian history at school. Then when I was an adult, my mother did some genealogical research and discovered convicts on both sides of the family.

One forebear also brought Merinos to Australia along with Macarthur, but my forebear ate his, which explains why he is not in the history books. I am reliably informed by a friend with a rural farming background that Merinos are delicious...

He also had positive relationships with indigenous people, such that one or two indigenous men around Sydney renamed themselves after him. Seems to have been the one nice member of the Rum Corps, and accordingly he didn't prosper as much as others...

Anyway, the point of this meandering comment is that this history was all tremendously interesting, but I'd never seen it at school. Why is Australian history at school so boring?

I really enjoyed this comment written in Legal Eagle's usual light style.

Her argument drives to the heart of my concern with the teaching of Australian history, and I think that this applies to some degree at least to both sides of the history wars, its failure to explain and reflect to people the world that is theirs.

I could make my point by critically examining the NSW Australian History, Geography, Civics and Citizenship Test Scope Statement and Test Specifications from 2006 that Neil referred to in his post on Julie Bishop's history reference group. While I have my own perspective on the issues raised, I commend this post as a snap shot to anyone who is interested in the way in which the teaching of Australian history has become enmeshed in the culture and political wars.

As an alternative approach, I thought that I might kill two or more birds with the one stone by focusing instead on what might go into a New England history curriculum.

I have now had two goes at writing posts on the history of New England to set a context for some of the things that I am talking about. I still want to complete this, but the task is just too big at the moment. So an outline curriculum might go some way to filling this gap.

Equally importantly, I think that it will draw out the way in which the current approach to and debate about Australian history so conceals and distorts our past.

The Task

The New England Government has decided that there should be a New England Studies stream built into the school curriculum to give students an understanding of the world around them. As part of this, it had decided that school students should have the option of studying New England history as one discrete element in the school curriculum.

Your task is to sketch out some of the things that might go into such a curriculum as a base for discussion. You have been given the following writing instructions.

The course should provide an overall framework, dealing with major themes in an integrated narrative fashion that must be studied by all.

Within this framework, the course must provide opportunities for localisation, for teachers and students to look at local examples so that students understood something of the history of their own areas and could see the relationships between local life and history and the broader world.

However, this should not be done in a rigid fashion. Students and teachers should have the freedom to select topics of interest and relevance to them within broad guidelines.

Recognising that history cannot be value free, the course should not be prescriptive, but should ensure that students have access to different views and are able to form and debate their own opinions. The course should make full use of writing, painting, film and other audio visual material drawn from across New England.

I will outline a suggested curriculum in my next post.

Regional Variation and Australia's Aborigines

I am using this post to pull together in a simple way a number of the points I have made on this and my other blogs in recent months. Rightly or wrongly, I feel that those who live in Australia's major metro areas do not understand the force of the points I have been making.

The first theme has been the need to recognise the importance of regional variation in Australia. I have made this point in the context of Australian history and of public policy in general. I have also made the same point in the context of our policy towards Australia's indigenous people.

The second theme is a New England theme, the way in which the absence of political structures to represent New England has led to political neglect and regional decline. I have argued this point in multiple posts, using very specific arguments and illustrations.

My New England focus, experience and passion has helped form my regional focus. In turn, this has been informed by my experiences in the power structures as a policy adviser.

Now consider the following map drawn from the census data.

Drawn from the census, it shows the distribution of our indigenous population across New South Wales relative to the total population grouped by statistical division. I hope that the map is readable, but won't know until I have posted.

My comments follow the map.

When you look at the map you will see a white spot on the lower right. That is the ACT and hence excluded.

Then you see a yellow patch on the right hand side a bit below centre. This is Sydney, an area where the Aboriginal population is between one and two per cent of the population.

Look north, and you will see that the New England New State area has the highest proportion of Aboriginal people in the country. This ranges from two to three per cent in the Hunter Valley to three to five per cent on the North Coast, five to ten per cent in New-England North West, ten to fourteen per cent on the Northern Plains.

This high concentration reflects the fact that this area was the wealthiest part of NSW in Aboriginal times as indeed it is today in raw resource terms. Herein lies my indictment of the Sydney Government as well as my support for New England separation and regionalism in general, the inability (as I see it) of Sydney to even recognise, let alone deal with in any coherent way, New England's problems.

Dealing with the Aborigines first.

Take the Inner Sydney statistical region. This area stretches from Botany Bay through to the Harbour and includes Redfern, the block, and La Perouse. In 2006 it had an indigenous population of 3,980, falling to 3,830 in 2001 before rising to 4,099 in 2006.

Now compare this to Mid North Coast. In 1996 it had an indigenous population of 7,928, rising to 10,071 in 2001 and then 12,198 in 2006.

Recently I had cause to review the the position of NSW Aborigines on a regional basis.

The city of Sydney, a slice of the Inner City Statistical region, had just 1,981 people claiming Aboriginal descent at the 2006 census. This includes the famous block. I found a page of organisations apparently dedicated to meeting the needs of this group, some of whom also served the 2,118 Aborigines in the rest of the Inner Sydney statistical region. In addition, the Sydney Government has a formal Minister for Redfern.

Now compare this to Kempsey on the Mid North coast.

In 2006, this local government area had an Aboriginal population of 2,540 out of a total population including coastal sea change areas of 25,913. To match Sydney, Kempsey would need more than a page of welfare organisations and one and a quarter Government Ministers. It has neither.

This is crazy stuff. I do not know whether or not Sydney's small numbers of Aborigines are well served by so much attention, nor to what degree Kempsey's Aborigines are disadvantaged.

What I do know is that when you look at the numbers, the improvement of the condition of New England's Aboriginal people is not, as it is in Sydney, a peripheral issue, but a core public policy issue. Rather, it would be if we had our own Government. This links, in turn, to the need for real economic development that will benefit all New Englanders.

In an earlier post on the New England Australia blog, I spoke with some bitterness of Professor Vinson's conclusions that the majority of NSW's poor towns were to be found in New England. How could such a rich area have been reduced to this?

There is, I think, a strong correlation between economic deprivation and the relative size of Aboriginal populations because New England's Aborigines are most vulnerable to the changes that have taken place. I do not want to overstate this, but the correlation is there.

Our Aborigines tend to be less well educated, so declines in job opportunities in particular areas hits them hard.

Our coastal Aborigines, and here New England has some of the largest tribal groups who have retained links to their cultural past including language in a way not seen elsewhere in NSW, risk being marginalised in their own territories because of rising real estate prices brought about by sea-change.

Then we have the problem of internal Aboriginal migration across New England that can, as in Armidale, threaten to make local Aboriginals a minority among the Aboriginal population in their own country. I do not have earlier data to fully support my case, but over the ten years 1996 to 2006, Armidale's Aboriginal population grew by 199 (by comparison, the City of Sydney grew by 137) from 1074 to 1273. Much of this growth came from continuing migration.

I will stop at this point because this post has actually taken me a very long time to write because of the need to do data checks. However, I hope that I have at least made the point that there are major regional variations that it is necessary to take into account in looking at history and in developing policies and programs.

Postscript

Neil (Ninglun) made an interesting comment on this post:

On Aboriginal population figures: there must be a certain fuzziness there, don't you think, though how much I am not sure. After all, the census simply tells us where they were on a given night of the week in a given year.

As you well may know, the Aboriginal population of Sydney would have that night included however many people from Moree and many other parts of the country. I know that in Redfern/Waterloo there is constant coming and going, and Aboriginal people aroound the city that I have talked to from time to time have hailed from all over, including Central Australia. Just a thought.

Neil's comment links to what may be a real issue with the numbers. For that reason, I thought that I should record the comment on the main post.

Like Neil, I was actually a little surprised at the small number of Aboriginal people in the City of Sydney and, more broadly, Inner Sydney, although the numbers were not huge at the last census either.

The first thing to note here is that the biggest concentration of Aboriginal people in Greater Sydney are in fact in Western Sydney. This includes people who used to live in Inner Sydney but who moved out for a variety of reasons.

The second thing is that the very noticeable Aboriginal population in the Redfern/Waterloo area does include a number of people from out of town who stay for varying lengths of time.

There are in fact two measures in the census, location on the night of the census plus place of usual residence. Now the population figures I quoted are based on usual place of residence, not location on the night of the census. I tried to get the second to cross-check but was unable to do so.

The numbers on the night of the census would almost certainly be higher than numbers measured by usual place of residence because of the presence of visitors, some of whom may in fact be longer term stayers even though they still give home as the usual place of residence.

I do not think that this affects the argument I was putting, but it is still a point to be aware of.

Australian Election 2007 - a very good election campaign

For the benefit of my international readers, there will be an election for the Australian Parliament later this year, probably in November. While the date has yet to be announced and the formal campaign begin, electioneering is well under way.

Unlike the intellectual bankruptcy that marked both sides in the NSW election campaign, this has to my mind been a remarkably good election campaign so far. I say this because I feel that, unlike the supermarket politics of NSW, there are a series of real policy debates underway.

It takes two to tango.

Under Mr Rudd, a rejuvenated Labor has been setting out a series of policy ideas that have a degree of depth, that do not simply attack the Government, that attempt to carve out a new direction for the country. As a consequence, Labor has too some degree been able to set the policy agenda in a way we have not seen in Australia for many years.

Despite its long years in Government, Labor's opponent remains an experienced and well disciplined force determined to pursue its own agendas. As Mr Howard said in answer to a question, if the Government went into caretaker mode as electioneering began, they would effectively waste one third of their three year term. This Government will continue to govern until the last possible moment, the issuing of the writs and the beginning of the formal caretaker period.

The result has been a fascinating contest.

In saying this, I am not talking about the daily round of exchanges as the attack dogs on each side attempt to find the throats of their opponents, although this too has been more interesting and somewhat less personalised than the recent Australian norm. Rather, it is the policy debate and the Government's responses to that debate that hold the real fascination.

Mr Rudd's remarkable early success in setting the policy agenda has triggered a remarkable and very interesting response as the Government attempts to remake itself, adopting a Labor policy here, altering its own policies there where Labor attacks are clearly gaining traction, restating positions in an attempt to establish clear differentiation.

In turn, this has forced the opposition into a similar process, refining its existing policy positions while announcing new ones. As both do this, debate shifts.

This is real debate at a level I have not seen before in Australia. The supermarket superficialities may still be there, but the core is a battle of ideas, a battle that has already changed the Australian political and policy landscape for the better.

Mr Howard, Mr Brough and Australia's Aborigines -4: NORFORCE

Graphic: NORFORCE'S operational Territory in red.

On 28 June I ran a post referring in part to the story of NORFORCE, the Australian Army unit deployed to support the Government's Northern Territory intervention. I did so because no one seemed to have noticed the significance.

Just to refresh your memory. NORFORCE is an elite Army Reserve Unit whose role is to provide reconnaissance services in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley Region of WA.

The unit has two distinctive features. First, it is the NT's premier local military unit. Secondly, it is 60 per cent indigenous drawing many of its soldiers from the areas affected by the intervention. In this sense, it is a powerful force for Aboriginal advancement.

Now you would think that all this would make its role a matter of interest. But at the time I wrote I knew of no-one who had spotted the significance.

I have not attempted to quantify all the blog posts written about the intervention since it began, but it must run in the thousands. But I decided to do a check on posts discussing NORFORCES's role, excluding those that just mentioned the name in passing. I found:

• July 4: a comment on the Permaculture discussion forum.
• June 30: a comment by Kev on the Road to Surfdom.

Note that I am excluding passing references. Note, too, that Google blog search is imperfect. Even so, it is a remarkable result.

I am left with this feeling, that everybody is so busy imposing their own views that they have not bothered to stand back and look at the facts.

Perhaps I am wrong. I would be interested in your comments.

A later PS

Since the Iraq War we are all used to the idea of embedded reporters. How about an embedded reporter that can report on the NORFORCE experience?

Timgad and the Study of Australian History

Photo: Ruins, Roman city of Timgad, modern Algeria

Sunday night I watched the continuing story of the Roman Empire on SBS. This program focused in part on the remarkable ruins of the Roman city of Timgad in North Africa. It also discussed at some length the way the Romans achieved social integration in a vast and ethnically diverse empire.

I have done a fair bit of Roman history. Three years ancient history at school, half of which was about Rome. Then another slab in the History 1 course at New England. I also did three years Latin at school plus one year elementary Latin at University as an extra, courses that I fear left little impact.

The SBS program reminded me how little I really knew about the Roman Empire. The courses had a strong military and political focus and were very City of Rome centric. We actually learned little about life and politics elsewhere in that vast, sprawling imperial domain. I in fact learned more here from novels.

I was musing about this in the context of an earlier post from Neil (Ninglun) about Julie Bishop and the attempt to establish a national Australian history curriculum. I thought about commenting when I first read that post, but decided not to say anything because my views are, perhaps, simply too far to left field to be of any relevance to the debate.

In my last post I talked about my early frustrations and boredom with Australian history, about the failures to recognise regional variations in Australia. I later concluded that this was due to a centralised, rigid, education system that imposed a uniform curriculum across NSW. There was very little room to localise.

Australian history, or the study of, has a lot to answer for in my case. Once I started work in Canberra, my past interests fell away to some degree in the excitement of a new world. I was always conscious of my past, of the knowledge that Australia was not a simple uniform whole, and indeed this did and does temper my policy advice. But the past became just that, the past.

My postgraduate studies in Australian history re-ignited my interest, because they became to a major degree an exploration of the world from which I had come. Investigating that world meant pulling out and looking again at things that I had believed but largely put aside, at the forces that had formed the world I knew.

My benighted PhD was meant to be a political biography of my grandfather focused on his political and public life. It would have been very easy to have written a conventional political biography. Certainly this would have greatly enhanced my chances of steering through the academic minefields that can be associated with this type of writing.

Instead, as I explored David Drummond's life through the prism set by my own life and experiences, I came to the conclusion that his public life could only be properly understood if set in a regional context.

The hardships and failures of his early life that saw him become a ward of the state created a need for belonging and a desire to succeed. His own lack of education, his experiences as a farm labourer and then as a farm manager, his role in rural politics, created a passionate interest in education in general and country education in particular. But beyond all else, it was his involvement in the cause of Northern New South Wales that gave form and structure to his life.

Central to this, I think, was the fact that he there found acceptance and success, a cause.

So instead of writing a conventional political biography, the thesis became in large part the story of an area and of the interaction between a man and the area that he had adopted as his own.

I also became very aware as I looked at the interactions among the various regional movements of the historical and cultural differences between various parts of Australia. These may not be as spectacular and grand as in some other places, more often they are tempered nuances. But they are still important.

Why, for example, are voting patterns so different between southern and northern NSW? The answer here goes back in large part to early ethnic differences in chain migration, Irish in the south, Scots in the north.

Again, why is the history, focus and role of the cultural elites so different between Sydney and Melbourne?

I became interested in this one in part because of my interest in Australian cultural history, but also because there were a number of threads that bore upon what I was writing about. One of these was the differences in power structures between the two cities, the fact that the Sydney power elites were never able to establish the same dominance as their Melbourne equivalents.

Many years ago I read a book on the growth of American thought. It is a long time and I do not have exact details, but I think that it was Merle Curti's 1944 magnum opus. I found it a fascinating book, in part because the writer brought out the nature of the regional differences within the US. I wondered at the time why no-one had written an equivalent for Australia.

Linking this back to Julie Bishop.

If we are to have a national history curriculum in Australia, then it follows that that curriculum will almost necessarily focus on what are perceived to be key national trends, events or narrative. In other words, it will select the things that are perceived to be both common and important. It is highly unlikely to deal with the things that I am most interested in in terms of either topic or broader focus of study.

Australia's Regions - are they really different?

Over on the Regional Living Australia blog I was complaining about the failure of regional areas in Australia to properly capture and present their special features, always trying instead to measure themselves against some external model. "The difficulty in all this, I suggested, "is that we get a sort of metro blandness and uniformity imposed across the whole country, one that catches everyone in the same mental trap."
This drew the following comment:

Hi, I'm an American. I was surfing the Internet, trying to learn something about Australia's diverse regions from a cultural perspective as opposed to a merely geographical one. All I turned up was information on Aborigines. Where's the Australian Paul Bunyan? Where's the Johnny Appleseed? Where are the pictures of Eskimos contrasted with lumberjacks, miners, farmers and fishermen? You are right. I almost had to conclude that Australia has no regional flavor at all. (Search for "regional flavor" and you will turn up many websites on wine, but none that pay more than lip service to culture.)

I will respond properly on the Regional Living blog, but could not resist a short opening comment here.
I know from my own experience that Australia's regions are different.In fact, they are becoming more so. Why, then, do we not recognise this?

When I first started reading Australian history at school I found it all incredibly dull.

There was lots about convicts, explorers, squatters, the doings of the Sydney and later Sydney/Canberra Governments, very little about the world in which I lived. Here I was reliant on the occasional local newspaper supplement.

I knew that Judith Wright was a local writer, but only because my mother had known her and we knew the family. When I did come to read her earlier poetry as well as books such as Generations of Men I found real resonance. This was my country talking too me.

Later as pursued my reading and research, as I became involved in political and community activities in different parts of Australia, I discovered and came to know and understand to some degree the fascinating nature of regional variation across Australia. Yet somehow this was and continues to be suppressed.

To avoid the charge that I am just beating my usual parochial, regional drum, take Sydney.

Growing up, it was the case that Sydney was different from New England with its multiple regions linked by geography. But even in Sydney there were variations between the Inner, Eastern, Northern and Western Suburbs. As an outsider, I explored and enjoyed those differences.

Today, Sydney is fragmenting into a series of zones or regions that are very different from each other. Increasingly, or so it seems to me, people seem to stick within those zones, rarely moving out unless there is a very specific reason to do so.

Everybody in Sydney knows that this is the case. There is even some recognition of this, as in the popular parodies of the "Westies". My wife and daughters laugh at these. I just cringe. Perhaps I have lost my sense of humour or, perhaps, I wish I had the literary ability to apply the same blow torch to the Eastern Suburbs. Or the Inner West.

This has become a somewhat meandering post. My point is that as we track forward in Australia, we need to recognise and celebrate our differences, not just the official uniform pap served up to us by our thought leaders and their various institutional manifestations.

June 2007 - A Good Month for Conversations

I also love reading the stuff written by others whom I consider to be friends-via-the-blogosphere. I don’t know how they came across my blog, but I’m glad that they did. Sometimes I think it was through comments that I put on other people’s blogs. When people comment here, and I generally follow them back to their blog, and that’s how the network builds up. Anyway, guys, I’m glad that you got here, and I’m glad that I got to know you

This quote comes from a rather nice post by Legal Eagle on the reasons why she began blogging. My congratulations on her appointment to Club Troppo’s editorial committee for their missing link segment.

My congratulations also to Thomas on climbing up towards the 700 visitor mark over June. Well deserved.
While I do not have final traffic figures for June yet, it seems clear that the total number of visitors to this blog will be down from the month before. On the other hand, the number of return visitors is well up, while June has been a good month for conversations with 54 comments including my responses.

I thought therefore that I might report on the comments and in so doing thank those who participated.
Bank in April, I wrote an introductory post on Australia’s water wars. This drew a response from anon, in fact I think Judith M. Melville from the A Clarence River Protest blog challenging some of my thinking in regard to the linkages within New England. This led to a discussion in part on the question of regional identity.

On 24 May I carried a post about blogging and the sense of community which led Marcel Proust in early June to slip me via a comment a link about the court case involving the Hinton Collection, something that it still on my list to write about.

On 6 June, I wrote a story expressing surprise at the involvement, inappropriate I thought, of ICAC in investigating the risks of cheating in the NSW Higher School Certificate. This drew supporting comments from Neil (ninglun) and Marcel.

On 11 June, my post on Prisoners and the Right to vote drew supporting comments from Neil (ninglun) and from Stephen Clark. I had not had contact with Stephen before, so welcome and my thanks. Lexcen, on the other hand, took the counter view, arguing that it was appropriate that prisoners should have their voting rights limited.

My 13 June post, a Chat with Friends, drew supporting comments from Neil (ninglun) and Lexcen,, while my follow up post A Chat with Friends 2 drew a very nice comment from Adrian. Marcel Proust took the opportunity to ask about the story I had yet to write on the Hinton Collection case.

On 15 June in Drat you Neil, I feel obliged to respond, I allowed myself to be dragged into a meme started by Kanani on ten obscure or little known facts about myself. Neil (ninglun) and Thomas responded, linking back to a discussion we had had about blog layouts. Kananii, too, joined in, wanting to know more about poker machines and India.

In my post of 17 June, Talk Among Yourselves – a note, I made the mistake of suggesting that while I was working on another project, I would post some short gossip posts. This led David Anderson to comment "gossip, juicy gossip, dirty gossip... I will be interested to see how this develops considering the international nature of our readership."

I fear I have let David down. I have neither completed the project nor provided gossip, juicy gossip, all swept away by Mr Howard and Mr Brough.

My post of 21 June on NSW HSC and Kitchen Conversations, the last before the deluge broke, drew a long and very thoughtful response from Thomas on his experiences with the HSC, one that he has agreed that I can run as a full guest post on this blog.

On 22 June Mr Howard and Mr Brough made their dramatic announcement on Commonwealth Government intervention in Northern territory Aboriginal Affairs. I commented on this first in my post of 23 June, Mr Howard, Mr Brough and Australia’s Aborigines -1

Tiwidownlands responded with several very helpful comments pointing to some of the complexities involved, These were welcomed by both Neil (ninglun) and myself, with Neil later posting a long extract. In responding, I got a bit into lecturing mode. To compensate, and because I believe that it is very much worthy of support, I am going to do a full post on the Tiwi Downlands project. Who knows, some other members of our blogging community may be willing to help.

This first post also brought a rather nice compliment from Will Owen of Aboriginal Art and Culture: an American Eye. As I have already said, I had not seen this high class blog before. All those interested in Aboriginal art and culture will find it fascinating indeed.

My post of 24 June, Mr Howard, Mr Brough and Australia’s Aborigines -2, brought a compliment from Legal Eagle as well as comment from Daniel. It also brought a very good long comment from Jane. I cannot give a link here because although Jane is obviously a blogger, I cannot trace her back because her profile is private.

The Howard/Brough stories were picked up by Jonathan at Family Life who asked people to read the comments as well. This got me thinking.

How do I encourage/reward people who take the time to really comment?

I really value the comments even when, as sometimes happens, I do not agree. Some of my blogging friends have very different views from mine.

I need to find some way of featuring thoughtful comments. Perhaps the answer is to run them as special posts as I propose to do with Thomas's HSC comments.

Postscript

Hey, who says blogging isn't fun!

Earlier in this post I referred to Jane's comment, saying that I could not give a link. In return, Jane said "Who could resist outing themselves after such a compliment?" Jane, or Jane Simpson to give her her full title if I interpret the site correctly, is one of the bloggers on an academic blog, Transient Life & Cultures. Jane is, to quote from her bio:

I teach linguistics in the Linguistics Department, and work on the Australian languages Warumungu and Kaurna. I'm also a long-term fan of the documenting and archiving work of PARADISEC and the Resource Network for Linguistic Diversity.

No wonder she seemed to know what she was talking about! I felt as pleased as punch since this fills in another gap, the linguistic one.

To explain for Jane's sake.

Perhaps the best overview of all the posts I have written on the Australian Aborigines is here, although the post is written from a New England perspective. Just because I have tried to be careful in my writing on indigenous issues does not mean that I do not have my own perspective. It's a bit different, though, from much commentary because it combines my regional biases with my public policy experience.

We have discussed across blogs in this small community of ours the role that blogging plays in forming opinions. This normally does not come from immediate impact, although the role of blogs in circulating information and opinions should not be underestimated. Rather, it comes from the exchange of views over time among people with many different skills, values and ideas, forming and circulating views that then percolate.

Jane fills a gap. So welcome, and do continue to contribute!