We sat, perhaps 200 of us, Australian and overseas visitors, atop Ubirr Rock to watch the sun set over an ancient land. The sunsets in Kakadu are spectacular. It's as if the sun is absorbed into the landscape. The sky, trees, rocks and wetlands are all bathed in an orange glow. The beauty of it silences us all.
From Ubirr the wetlands, verdant and abundant with birdlife, stretch to the fringing escarpment whose rocky cliffs look to be crumbling with age. In a place so full of the beauties of nature, one feels keenly the absence of its traditional owners. For us to experience this view, they lost their land.
I recently visited the Top End. The Northern Territory is not like down south. Its vegetation is different, its weather is different, its people are in many ways different. It's a place that many Australians know little about. The wartime secrecy surrounding the bombing of Darwin seems to have never been entirely lifted. I never knew, until I visited the city, how many Japanese raids — over 60 — it experienced.
The Aboriginal presence in the NT is much more obvious than it is in Melbourne or Sydney. I feel sad and a little angry that I have to travel several thousand kilometres across the country to fill in the absences about Aboriginal history that Australians of my generation — schooled in the '70s and '80s — were never taught.
I don't know enough about Aboriginal history, culture, economy and environmental practices because I wasn't taught about them at school. I'm afraid that, in the very recent past, this ignorance has reached the highest levels of our political leadership.
The Howard approach to 'practical reconciliation' always betrayed a profound ignorance about the reasons for indigenous disadvantage, but also an extremely shallow understanding of how societies function. At an individual and societal level, lack of power — that is, lack of control over one's life — is deeply destructive. Disempowered communities quickly become frustrated and dysfunctional. Disempowered individuals retreat into despair or lash out in anger — dysfunctional communities, even nations, do the same.
One of the biggest problems for Australia's indigenous people is lack of power. The destruction of ATSIC, even though the organisation was a flawed vehicle for indigenous empowerment, only exacerbated the problem. 'Practical reconciliation' and the intervention into indigenous communities also reinforce disempowerment by doing things to or for indigenous people, rather