The descriptions in Mary Ellen Jordan’s Balanda: My Year in Arnhem Land will resonate for many of us who have lived in Aboriginal communities. Jordan has managed to capture many of those early impressions and conversations that people experience when first living in a remote community: the weather, local store, accommodation, ever-present dogs, and, of course, local people. Jordan has come as a balanda (a Macassan word for white person) to live in a remote Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land. There is much for her to experience within a community of people who speak other languages before English.
What I particularly liked in the beginning of the book was Jordan’s willingness to arrive with a ‘patchwork of understandings and confusions’. She manages to capture well her intrigue and interest, where so many securities and predictabilities are removed and so much can be ‘different’. Her sensitivity to a new place is well articulated and evocative. As any veil of possible romance is lifted, one can get a sense of what it might mean to live in a remote community, joining a minority of white staff (although a dominant minority in many other ways), in a time and place that do not simply or quickly accord with university and city living. As a challenging experience, it also raises self-scrutiny. She is not just a female balanda in an Aboriginal world; she brings her own history with her.
There is a significant shift, about halfway through the book, when Jordan describes being assaulted. It is a Sunday morning, and she is confronted by a young Aboriginal man. She has been in the community for only a few months. A couple of days later she hears that her father has died. It is not the assault that touches her vulnerability, but the memory of her father. Fears, deeply etched within her since she was a little girl, surface at the memory of his death. She leaves for a three-week break, and returns to give the community a second chance.
Jordan finds that coming ‘with good intentions’ is not enough. It’s not just the isolation from family and the familiar that she finds difficult, but a social and communication divide. It is a divide that accentuates her feelings of difference and helplessness. It also accentuates her fears. Despite the efforts of Valerie to draw her into the world of local kinship and be a ‘sister for her’,