Why Warriors lie down and die Review

Why Warriors lie down and die

Book Reviews

Warriors: caught in a nightmare

by Nick Kerr

Reprinted with permission from Crosslight, Newspaper of the Uniting Church in Victoria, No.95 November 2000

The Yolngu (Aboriginal) people of north-east Arnhem Land, in Australia’s north, are caught up in a nightmare, according to Richard Trudgen.

They are facing the greatest crisis in health and education since European contact, he says. They have reached a crippling level of dependence. They have lost control over their lives. And they are giving up hope.

Moreover, most Balanda (non-Aboriginal) people who work among them do not have any special training in their language. They do not know how to communicate across the cultural and language barrier.

And most Australians don’t realise this crisis exists.

Richard Trudgen is a communication channel between Yolngu and Balanda. He heads the community education team of ARDS (Aboriginal Resource and Development Services), an arm of the Aboriginal and Islander presbytery of the Uniting Church’s Northern synod.

He works with the Rev. Dr Djiniyini Gondarra, a Uniting Church minister who is the chief executive officer of (ARDS) and the man who asked him to write a book about the crisis.

“I am tired of standing at the edge of an open grave, week in and week out,” Dr Gondarra had said. “Why are so many of our people dying so young?”

Mr Trudgen has followed up that question with the book Why Warriors Lie Down and Die, published by Aboriginal Resource and Development Services, Darwin, and printed by Openbook, Adelaide.

He worked in Arnhem Land from 1973 to 1983. When he was asked to go back in 1992, he found there had been enormous changes.

At the time he left, 95 per cent of the work on Yolngu communities had been carried out effectively by the people themselves. But by 1992 only a few Yolngu were in meaningful work.

Receiving welfare had become the central Yolngu economic activity. Hopelessness was leading to destructive social behaviour – neglect of responsibility, drug abuse, violence, self-abuse, homicide, incest and suicide.

“The people of Arnhem Land developed a high level of skill and a massive amount of knowledge in their own environment,” he says. “They were Djambatj mala (great hunter-warriors) … They survived for 40,000 years in a harsh land.”

When he first met them they had been proud, healthy and strong. They had also been good at figures and able to do calculations quickly.

“These skills could be translated into job skills as far as carpentry, mechanical work, office work and administration,” says Mr Trudgen. “We should be dealing with a higher skilled group of people today than we did in the 1970s and 1980s.

“Instead, we have seen these same communities deteriorate. They have lost their employment. They are suffering a massive health crisis. The death rate is more than five times the national average. They have given up hope.

He asked himself, “Why do these great warriors now give up, lie down and die?” And he concluded the basic problem was simple: “It seems that the Yolgnu people of Arnhem Land and the others who make up Australia totally misunderstand each other.

“That misunderstanding is driven by a massive communication gap. It is this that leads the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land to lose control of their lives and their own communities.

“They have no new knowledge about the world around them and which dominates their lives. They have lost control. And loss of control makes people explode into group hopelessness, because they just don’t know what’s going on. It seems as though others always win and they always lose.”

He says in Why Warriors that policies such as self-determination and self-sufficiency “failed to put control in people’s hands”. The problem was not the policies themselves, but the way they were applied. (page 218)

One example he cites is the people who have been through western schooling, then gone off and trained as carpenters. “And there they sit, unemployed, while contractors and even the army have gone in to build houses. What incentive is there for them to get their kids off to school the next day? None whatsoever.”

Things also started to fall apart with the policy on Aboriginal councils.

“They thought that, somehow, as soon as they had set up councils, it would be like a pipeline between them and Canberra. … And they thought that if they just got these councils, then everything would happen,” says Mr Trudgen.

But the voting for the councils was a foreign, Balanda way of doing things, and didn’t include the elders. Leaders who had dreamed of taking over their own communities ended up in conflict with outsiders.

Money was another problem. “In the days of the missions, the banks used to have one central agency to operate through. Now they were dealing directly with a number of councils.

“There were communication problems. The bank staff would ring the people on the councils. But there were problems on the phone. {Bank] staff were unnerved by the long silences. And the Yolngu were not used to speaking to someone they couldn’t see. How could they be sure there was really someone there?

“The banking system began to collapse. Then the banks withdrew their services. And the people’s careful saving habits, which had been built up during the time of the missions, just went.

Meanwhile, the politicians were saying, “It’s all up to the Aboriginal council. They’re now self-determining, self-managing.”

What they didn’t realise, however, was that the indigenous people didn’t know how the dominant culture operated. They didn’t know the basic rules and regulations – or even where money came from.

“It’s a bit like white Australians trying to understand an Aboriginal ceremony. We look at it and think it’s just dancing. We miss its cultural, political, economic and legal implications,” says Mr Trudgen.

“We understand our own ceremonies, like guards of honour and the opening of parliament. That’s because they grow out of our culture.

“If the Japanese had won the Second World War, taken over Australia and imposed Japanese as the new national language, Australians would have been horrified. But the Yolngu people experience something very similar in their daily lives.

Richard Trudgen has a message to the nation: “We must seize the opportunity we have, right now, to do something different so the indigenous people of this nation will survive into the future.”

He also has a message for the church: “The work that the church started in many places across this nation has not finished.

“Aboriginal communities are calling out for people – from tradespeople to people doing our sort of work in community development – to commit themselves, to learn their [Yolngu] language, to understand their worldview and stand beside them in the struggle.”

$29.95 AUD

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