Why Warriors lie down and die Review

Why Warriors lie down and die

Book Reviews

Reviewed by Marion Maddox, Uniting Church Studies , Vol. 7 No. 1, March 2001

Don’t be deceived by its straightforward, accessible style: Why Warriors Lie Down and Die is no easy read. During two stints totalling twenty years as a community development worker in Arnhem Land, Richard Trudgen saw Yolngu(Aboriginal) communities deteriorate. He saw diseases once scarcely known, such as scabies, diabetes, heart attacks, stroke and renal failure, become endemic. In the early 1970s, Yolngu people ‘found death usually in old age;’ by the mid-1990s, elderly Yolngu had become a rare sight, with ‘people…dying in their early to mid forties or even younger, and at such a rate that life seems to lurch from one funeral to another.’

The book answers those who reduce the issue to more health dollars, sending in the army, or blaming Yolngu. Deterioration in health was merely a symptom of deeper changes:

"When I left Arnhem Land in 1983, ninety-five per cent of the work on Yolngu communities was carried out effectively by the people themselves. On my return in 1992, I found only a few Yolngu remained involved in meaningful work…These days, receiving welfare is the central Yolngu economic activity."

Trudgen’s diagnosis: ‘Yolngu had lost control of their own lives’ (p.7). To show how, he takes us back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to a searing narrative of large-scale murder, theft and repeated betrayal. Yolngu lost nearly everything: their land, a vibrant economy based on national and international trade, their families and sometimes even whole clans. But they retained their capacity to fight back, and sense of themselves as a people, living a coherent (if massively disrupted) life under their own law.

With all its problems, the mission era (1935-1975) in some ways preserved that sense: missions, by their nature, draw a sharp distinction between missionary culture and host community. Trudgen recounts with disarming candour the patronising and even fearful attitudes which often underlay the reactions of mission personnel-including himself-to Yolngu ways. But the missions recognised Yolngu as distinct from the alien Balanda (White) culture, which they were in some ways able to mediate, especially once mission staff began to learn local languages and understand aspects of Yolngu society.

The most serious loss of control, and resulting debilitation, Trudgen locates, ironically, in the late 1970s and 1980s-the very period when ‘self-determination’ became entrenched as official policy. Consequently, Trudgen’s analysis includes a caustic critique of the policies of self-determination, and even, at times, a tone verging on nostalgia for the missions. But those who welcomed recent calls for a return to policies of assimilation should draw no support from Trudgen.

The key to his interpretation is his emphasis on cross-cultural communication. Over and over again, Trudgen draws attention to the divergence between Yolngu and the dominant Anglo-Australian culture. He introduces non-indigenous readers to a people for whom English may be a fifth or sixth language. Life is structured around legal and cultural norms largely invisible to non-Yolngu. Even policies which officially recognise this difference, such as self-determination, are the products, not of Yolngu, but of European law. Thus, they involve organisations (such as community councils) and concepts (such as incorporation) which have no place in traditional Yolngu social imagination. They are built on western cultural assumptions (for example, tending to create a power-base of young, western-educated leaders, in tension with the established elder system). Rather than allowing the people more control over their own affairs, they destabilise the very mechanisms through which that control was traditionally exercised.

Trudgen demonstrates the extraordinary stresses of living ‘under two laws’-on one hand, told to ‘give up the old ways’, while, on the other, denied equal access to European law. Here, Trudgen joins an international debate. As a recent immigrant to New Zealand, I was taken aback by a local media furore over a suggestion by Minister of State, Tariana Turia, that colonised peoples suffer a cross-generational form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Those who ridiculed her speech should read Why Warriors Lie Down and Die. Reading Trudgen and thinking about Turia’s PR imbroglio, I was reminded of Judith Herman’s landmark study, Trauma and Recovery (Bandora, 1992) of survivors of trauma. She shows that one of the best indicators of successful recovery is remaining true, during the trauma, to one’s pre-existing moral and social values. Conversely, some of the most enduring damage comes from being forced to act against one’s own values. That is the coup-de-grace, which Trudgen shows being delivered to a weakened but resilient people. One generation’s damage was heightened by the next generation’s repair efforts. The mission had tried to stamp out religious and ceremonial ways of making sense of the world, but had left much of the kinship and economic structure intact. Official-model self-determination imposed an alien political and economic structure, but not the means to participate in it on an equal footing with members of the dominant culture. Instead, it further eroded the people’s sense of identity and reason for living.

Trudgen’s critique of self-determination is likely to prove the book’s most controversial aspect. Witness its creation of unexpected bedfellows: passionately endorsed by Aboriginal Resource and Development Services CEO Rev. Dr Djiniyini Gondarra and Council for reconciliation co-chair Dr Evelyn Scott, Why Warriors has received almost as laudatory notices in the Australian (21 November 2000) from the Liberal Party-aligned Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) think-tank. But if the IPA welcomes Trudgen’s diagnosis, it may have trouble swallowing his prescription. This is no back-to-the-future assimilation nostalgia, such as the IPA hailed in Geoffrey Partington’s Hasluck Versus Coombs (Quaker’s Hill, 1996). In sharp contrast to one-nation-one-law-one-culture conservatives, Trudgen wants all outsiders who work with Yolngu to learn a Yolngu language (if not enough to speak fluently, at least enough to appreciate the problems of cross-cultural communication). He wants the structures which facilitate ‘self-determination’ to reflect Yolngu social organisation rather than what works in Darwin or Canberra. Most controversially, he wants traditional Madayin law recognised by-and accommodated with-Australian law, so that the people are no longer left in perilous limbo between conflicting systems

The critique of official-model self-determination is not the only way Why Warriors defies expectations. As a non-indigenous writer’s account of life among the Yolngu of Arnhem Land, it does not mention any of the major recent Yolngu ethnographies such as Nancy Williams’, The Yolngu and Their Land (Canberra, AIAS, 1986), Deborah Bird Rose’s Dingo Makes Us Human (Cambridge UP, 1992) and Ian Keen’s Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion (Oxford UP, 1994/1997). Many of the indigenous names most familiar to non-indigenous readers are Yolngu; but Galarrwuy Yunupingu AM, Mandawuy Yunupingu, Murandoo Yanner and Gatjil Derrkura OAM make only passing appearances. Neither academic text nor social history, the approach of Why Warriors Lie down and Die is that of a community development manual with an emphasis on health services. Most readers will never have to implement Trudgen’s program to combat teenage petrol sniffing (ch. 14) or disabuse a non-English-speaker of medical advice that a life-threatening tumour is ‘something like a big boil’ (ch. 4). But the hands-on examples add persuasive power to an argument whose implications go well beyond health policy and far beyond Arnhem Land.

$29.95 AUD

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