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Why Warriors lie down and die Book Reviews
Review by Tony Stephens The Sydney Morning Herald, October 25 2000, Insight p.13
Many Australians think of Arnhem Land as an idyllic place, an earthly paradise by the Arafura Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria. They think of technicolour waters, changing from azure blue, to cobalt, to turquoise, to aquamarine before washing white sands. They think of black saltwater children splashing through green-fringed lagoons to spear the prised barramundi. They think that the people of Arnhem Land missed out, to their good fortune, on the confrontation between black and white Australians that went on in most other parts of the continent. They think of Yothu Yindi, increasingly so since the band performed to international audiences at the Olympic Games closing ceremony and the Paralympic Games opening ceremony, and how the group married their song lines to a rock beat. Richard Trudgen knows that most Australians think this way. He is sorry to disillusion them, but feels he must. Trudgen first went to Arnhem Land as a young man in 1972. He hoped to use his skills as a mechanic to help the Aboriginal people, and has lived there on and off for twenty years, changing from mechanic to community worker. He has learnt the language and the culture, and the people of Arnhem Land asked him to tell their true story. Trudgen knows how grim their story is. They live in a land where health is poor, unemployment rife and life short and often brutish. ‘How can you live in paradise and hang yourself?’ he asks. ‘How can you have this idyllic life and sniff yourself to death? This is a wake-up call to Australia. If we don’t wake up we won’t have anyone left in twenty five years to do what Yothu Yindi has done.’ Trudgen’s wake-up call is his book, Why Warriors Lie Down and Die, which is launched in Sydney tomorrow by Evelyn Scott, chairwoman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. Scott says: ‘This book has been a long time coming, but it has definitely come at the right time.’ Why Warriors looks at why the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land face the greatest crisis in health and education since European contact. It provides a new analysis of this crisis, suggests that it exists because the people have lost control of their lives and offers examples of how they can regain that control. The book is not without hope, but the author believes things are getting worse rather than better. Trudgen looks at the crisis from the other side of the cultural/language divide, the side where the Yolngu people live. Djiniyini Gondarra, political leader of the Golumala clan and a member of the Reconciliation Council, writes in a foreword: ‘We have been conquered in many different ways.’ He says that, after white people destroyed Aboriginal trade with the Macassar’s, the indigenous people ended up on missions ‘just to survive.’ Many young Yolngu people have had Western educations, but this has not solved the community’s problems. Gondarra says that Trudgen, working with the Aboriginal Resource and Development Services, introduced an education system in the Yolngu language, ‘built on how we saw things from within our own cultural framework rather than Balanda (non-Aboriginals) telling us in a foreign language what they thought we should know…I started to see that we could really understand the Balanda world in the same way we understood our Yolngu world.’ ‘This is not really a Yolngu or Aboriginal problem, but a problem that exists when cultures and languages collide.’ Trudgen says that the Yolngu started to lose control of their own lives at the turn of the 20th century, and this process ‘is now reaching its devastating climax.’ The Yolngu had traded for centuries with the Macassar’s, who came in their boats for pearls, trepang and turtle shells. However, by 1885 white officials had divided Arnhem Land into II pastoral leases. Whites shot at blacks and offered poisoned horsemeat. All of this led to what Trudgen calls the First Pastoral War, from 1885 to 1893, when the whites packed up and left in the face of Aboriginal resistance. The Second pastoral War began nine years later, when the pastoralists persuaded some southern Yolngu clans to join them, providing arms. Trudgen says that ‘murderous traitors and their vicious leaders’ would catch a family group in the open, ride at them and shoot the family in the backs of their heads as they fled. The whites left again after five years, but the South Australian Government, which then legislated for what was to become the Northern Territory, revoked the licences for the Macassar’s to fish for trepang. Trade stopped. Trudgen says the Yolngu fought their third war in twenty years when British ships with Asian crews and Japanese vessels arrived. Unlike the Macassar’s, these visitors came to take rather than trade. The Japanese were particularly interested in pearls and mother-of-pearl shell. They were also interested in Aboriginal women. Crocodile shooters came, too. Yolngu began suffering from new diseases such as smallpox, measles, scarlet fever and tuberculosis. Malaria swept through Arnhem Land in 1917. Missionaries brought medicines, but also dependence. Trudgen met in 1978 an old man who had survived a massacre fifty years previously at a place called Gangan. A Yolngu family of the Dhalwangu clan were enjoying life beside a billabong near the Koolatong River in south-east Arnhem land when attacked. Murderous campaigns such as this led to what Trudgen calls the Fourth War. ‘Many of the coastal clans were pushed to the point of extinction,’ Trudgen says. ‘Everywhere Yolngu were being…assaulted, their women molested and raped, their traditional estates pillaged.’ The enemy this time was the Japanese, and it meant that the Aborigines had sustained fifty years of war and uncertainty. The early missionaries saw their job as being to save Yolngu from ruthless whites, to ‘civilise’ them and teach them about the white God. When the Aborigines lost the Gove land case in 1971, allowing bauxite mining on their land, the old warriors thought their world made no sense any more. They wondered what had happened to their creator spirit and their rule of law. Trudgen writes: ‘This deep sickness caused by this thinking made many of these old warriors lie down and die.’ He says the ‘mission days’ from the end of World War II to the early 1970s were a time of stability, with Yolngu taking to industry and trade. However, well-intentioned policies like ‘self-determination’ and ‘land rights’ delivered little other than confusion and disillusionment. Trudgen blames poor communication between black and white and particular decisions such as the banning of the crocodile skin trade. Traditional leaders lost control of the clans to outsiders. The 1970s dream of self-determination turned into a nightmare in the 1980s and 1990s and the nightmare is intensifying, Trudgen says. Many Yolngu are just giving up. Self-mutilation, suicide and attempted suicide are all on the rise. Domestic violence, alcoholism, drug abuse and homicides are increasing. Apathy and general social disintegration abound. The launching of the book has come at a particularly poignant time for the people of Arnhem Land. The body of a thirty year old woman was buried at Nhulunbuy, on the Gove peninsula, at the weekend, after delays due to traditional burial practices. Gavin Makuma Yunupingu 26, had been charged with her murder at Ski Beach in August, remanded on bail and sent to an isolated Aboriginal outstation in the Western Desert in the care of his family. The victim was Gavin’s first cousin, a ‘sister’ in Aboriginal relationships. Yunupingu’s father is Galarrwuy Yunupingu, Australian of the Year in 1978. His uncle is Mandawuy Yunupingu, Australian of the Year in 1992 and leader of Yothu Yindi. Both men sat in the court. Gavin was the lead vocalist and co-writer on Ghost Spirit, a Yothu Yindi song recorded more than a year ago, before he left the band. “Where once elderly people with walking sticks were a common sight”, Trudgen writes, “now almost no old people exist. Many are dying in their late 30s or early 40s. Other Australians know little of this reality and of the long and destructive history that the Yolngu have suffered, a history that leaves the once great warriors of Arnhem Land not dreaming of a brighter future, but thinking only of a nightmarish past. It is a history that leaves them in a crisis of living.” Trudgen believes there is nothing Yolngu cannot learn. The only limitation is the capacity of the teacher to teach. He urges that teachers be trained in the language and culture. He says welfare has imprisoned the people. Their economic life, “once so wide-ranging and vibrant with commerce and trade, has been reduced to sitting around waiting for social security cheques….” “The cost of being different has been so heavy on Yolngu that there is a real question whether they will make it as a social group through the next century.” Trudgen will be accused by some of having taken a one-sided approach to his book. He says it is one-sided, in the sense that he approaches the problems through the eyes of the Aborigines. This is the only way, he says. Besides, the book is well documented. “We knew we would be shot down without documentation.”
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