Hi Bob,
Good to hear from you again. Thanks for providing the opportunity to expand
on the idea of a covenant of partnership
NO CHANCE OF SUCCESS
I am sure that you are right. What i am putting up has no chance of succes.
At this time and and in these circumstances. And it is this time and these
circumstances that people like me work to change. We don't work within the
constraints imposed by the existing Anglo-Australian system.
Maybe a long way down the track it may have a chance of success and if
steps are not taken to go down that path now we will never get there.Maybe
it will never get up, but in the process it will call something else into
being which would not otherwise happen. It may disappear like dust
tomorrow.
While i would like to experience such a generalised bi-cultural partnership
between Australia's peoples in my lifetime (beyond that which i have
experienced at a personal level already) i have to be content with the
thought that life is endlessly
reborn even if Bruce Reyburn is most definately a one lifetime trip.
ROLE OF CULTURAL WORKERS
As a cultural worker i seek out forms which try to avoid the known problems
in two very different Ways coming together (such as polar opposition and
apartheid or domination and assimilation). A partnership is a healthy
relationship in this situation.
Do you agree with that much? Has an apparently equal partnership a chance
of success in your opinion. Not much i would have thought - at this time
and in these circumstances. Yet if you look at the Reeves Review of the NT
Land Rights Act, even a respectable QC like Reeves is talking of
partnership in an official report presently before the Standing Committee
of Federal Parliament. (now calling for submissions by the way)
DEEP EQUALITY
I question the basis of weighting the 'equality' if it does not provide
a distinction in this particular relationship and thereby provide a space
for difference. Equality is not to be confused with exact equivalance.
Equal on
whose terms?
First Peoples have to be able to have space to live according to their
cosmologies/core cultural values - without retreating into the false
security of separatism. The pretences required to prop up the preferred
image of many Western people is a source of killing stress.
What do First Peoples require for an equal partnership? Good question to
put to them in their various forums. I suggest that there is a world of
difference between a monocultural Western definition of equality and that
originating with First Peoples.
We could talk here about the difference between superficial equality and
deep equality. Deep equality is a balanced relationship between two
galaxies of values. It is unlikely to take the same form as a notion of
equality which
originates from one culture only. Possible i suppose, but highly unlikely.
SENIOR - JUNIOR
Elder and Younger partners, First and Second partners , Original and what
unoriginal partners? How do you retain a (to me) vital distinction which
respects the place of First Peoples as our Brothers and Sisters in life and
which also avoids the notion of second class citizens for people who came
and continue to come from overseas.
Australia's First Peoples - having had to suffer for so long under curious
Western ideas of 'backwardness' and "stone age' and "primitive' and
'savages' and so it goes on and on - are, in cultural terms freed of such
obsolete baggage, the senior people in Australia. Is that a problem?
First Peoples occupy a different place to more recent arrivals (post 1788)
and it is another act expropriation i suggest to attempt to force them be
accepted on terms which deny their indigenous rights by imposing a
monocultural notion of equality.
First Peoples are not merely another ethnic group in Australia and that it
is another pretence to say that, provided they are treated as well as
another
ethnic group then Anglo-Australia has fulfilled everything which can
realistically expected of it. Nah, not good enough.
NOT A DISGUISED SURRENDER TREATY
What i propose is an offer of partnership (and therefore of an ongoing and
complete relationship) which does not attempt to insist that the
non-negotiable basis of this offer is the complete surrender of our
prospective partner's very core of Being.
I am sure that there will be many people who continue to play the Western
defined notion of equality game and continue to concieve of Australia as
having a moncultural norm at its core. But this is the time of strange
attractors - we have to imagine a bi-cultural arrangement which avoids
becoming too distant as to breed mistrust and too close as to encourage one
partner being totally eaten by the other.
Until cultural workers turn their full creative powers to this task, it is
unlikely that it will become part of a new way of thinking and relating
despite the thousands of lived 'experiments' which make up the real lives
of people. Their experience is continually expropriated by the monocultural
norm since we lack alternative cultural forms for interpreting things in
the healing direction.
YOUR QUESTION - YOUR ANSWER?
As to your question "Can you (for that matter, do you) acknowledge
that Settler Peoples do also have something to contribute to the
partnership beyond penance and recompense for what has happened."
Yes. Of course. But first things first. We have a dreadful situation - a
mess - to be cleaned up and put right. What we have to contribute will
emerge from that, But what do you suggest? My mental resources are limited
and stretched.
I never get around in sack cloth and ashes and i do not enourage others to
do so. I am most resistant to attempts to place me in this position by
people who regard this approach as a means of using me as a means of
satisfying their curious and ultimately unhealthy psychic needs.
Rather, activate the rainbow warrior within and, calling on the very best
of energy (cosmic; creative; practical) ask "What really needs to be done
to heal life in Australia?"
If you feel the need to change my thinking (it is no news that i have no
monopoly on right answers) the challenge to you is to come up with
something better.
Over to you, Bob!
Bruce
1 March
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