Type:	Journal Article
Title:	Disappointing Indigenous people: Violence and the refusal of help
Other Titles:	Public Culture
Authors:	Cowlishaw, Gillian
Year:	2003
Citation:	No 1; Section 103 Vol.: 15
Notes:	Recent revelations about extensive disorder, violence, and misery in Australian Indigenous communities dealt a shocking blow to a nation that deploys, with pride and passion, images of Indigenous people in its self-representations. The condition of Indigenous people has often been considered a major touchstone of Australia's moral standing in the international arena (e.g., Whitlam 1985: 466). It has been sadly observed that "settler society" consists of immigrant peoples from Europe who tend to cling to the coastal rim and have only a superficial relationship with the vast continent whose heart is inhabited and owned by Indigenous people, with their ancient, spiritual, and nurturant relationship with the land. This romantic orientation, though only one aspect of public perception, underpins a national goodwill that reached a high point in May 2000 when massive numbers of Australians marched over city bridges in support of "Aboriginal reconciliation" and urged the prime minister to apologize to Aboriginal people for the wrongs they had suffered. Since then a series of revelations about crisis levels of distress—domestic violence, homicides and suicides, drunkenness, child neglect, and sexual abuse—in Aboriginal communities has been widely publicized in the media and in some scholarly works (see Martin 2001; Pearson 2002; Sutton 2001). The widespread public interest in these issues reflects a pervasive and growing disillusionment among those more closely involved with policies of self-determination and the disappointing results of recognizing native title and Indigenous heritage. Concerned debate now centers on how to rescue Aboriginal communities from violence rather than on how to recognize land rights, heritage, and culture. I want to examine how we, the concerned citizens of contemporary Australia, are imbued with desire in relation to chronically unequal and needy others, even when they appear to refuse to recognize their need and reject the proffered succor. The unremitting and solicitous national discourse about Aborigines is imbued with urgency and instrumentalism and replete with competing theories of cause and remedy. This discursive field is an unstable mix of the romantic and the statistical, a surface imagery that mirrors the nation's desires and fantasies
URI:	https://anrows.intersearch.com.au/anrowsjspui/handle/1/14224
ISSN:	8992363
Physical description:	Pages 103-125
Appears in Collections:	Journal Articles

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