Horse

You can lead a horse to water, but it's really hard to drown one - sometimes you can take all the right steps and still not get the result you want. A visiting friend bought Jenny a blow up pool but try as she might, Jen was never going to be able to stop it from becoming a stagnant puddle of red mud, mosquitoes and canine skin disease. Still we spent most of the day drinking beer on the verandah, dangling our feet and fishing for larvae. I stopped when I reeled in a four-pounder - that's dinner sorted.

Visitors came and went throughout the day but conversation tended to linger around work - it's a little depressing at times but that's pretty much all that happens around here. If it didn't happen at your work, it happened at someone else's. Sometimes someone will go on an adventure out of the community and that can be relived in excruciating detail. Fortunately these re-tellings are usually given while half-drunk, so details are forgotten and one anecdote can be stretched out to three or four gatherings. You often find yourself making that face, as if politely listening to a joke you've already heard. It's usually followed by supportive laughter, and mimed attempts at suicide.

Jenny had just returned from one such adventure, and it had been a fortuitously interesting one, so we had plenty to talk about. She'd been to some community, to do some course by some guy (my fastidious attention to detail is suffocating). It gave us all the opportunity to talk about our favourite topic - how we, the country, deal with the Aboriginal situation. It is often claimed in these parts, 'the more I learn about the Aboriginal situation, the less I know'. I think it's more a self-protection mechanism than an actual belief. It's like working your way through a packet of cigarettes and saying that you're 'not really smoking'.

I was sitting around Big Mouth with Jojo, knocking back 3/4 lattes and 'not really smoking', when I first heard about the new fad in scholastic sponsorship. It is in vogue at the moment for prestigious schools in Melbourne and Sydney to bring an Aboriginal kid out from a community, give them food, board and a full education then send them back in the hope that they can use their skills to be the new leaders of the community. It sounded like a new 'Stolen Generation' to me, right off the bat, but what do I know?

Seemingly, the communities very readily offer up their kids - it is understood (dogmatically insinuated?) that an education is the way forward. But word was (and is) that the posh schools are struggling with the kids, the kids are struggling with the big-city system, and that the time and distance is just alienating the kids from their culture and, perhaps more importantly, their community. This was one of the things that guy that Jenny had seen had been talking about.

He'd used the analogy of a university. To take an undergrad out of the system, teach him 'the new way', then send him back to the university at the level of professor and expect him to be accepted by the academic community is absurd. In a hierarchical environment, as communities are, change and ideas must begin at the top and filter down.

I liken the situation to the failing plight of inter-galactic aliens. They keep abducting hicks out of America's southern states and expect that they'll pass on the wisdom of the cosmos to all mankind. Come down and talk to the president directly or don't bother. You're just making a fool of the hicks, and yourselves - what's the word for 'dicknose' in your language? Because you are one. Dicknose.

The Aboriginal people are in a time of massive transition. The way to manage that will differ from community to community - perhaps even from individual to individual. This management can not be simply offered to a community, it has to be slowly integrated into the way of life. That is, supposedly, why most Balandas are here.

The average contract for any Balanda position here is about 2 years - perhaps 4 for some teachers. The Aboriginals are very conscious of the ephemeral presence of white workers. Apparently there are slurs fro white people that equate to ‘bird’ – we fly in take what we want and fly out – and to ‘tissue’ – take one out of the box, use it throw it away, get another one out of the box.

We just don’t stay long. It's almost impossible to work your way up the hierarchy in that time, and even if one did, what is the good of their influence if it is offered only in passing? I praise the people who spend time in communities - it's something. That's better than nothing, isn't it? More importantly, I am beginning to understand the personal conflict that they suffer.

What a good Balanda will realise, the more they learn, is that it would take a life long commitment to a single community to have a lasting influence in helping the transition of the Aboriginals therein. The confusion comes when they realise they never had that intention. They have a life somewhere else that they had fully intended on returning to. The confusion comes from the conflict between what needs to be done and what they are willing to do. Anyone can lead a horse to water. Few have the conviction to stay until it is confident enough to drink without fear of drowning.