THE FAILURE OF ABORIGINAL SEPARATISM.(social policy, Australia)(Statistical Data Included)

IMAGINE THE WHITE spiritual father and mother of Aboriginal separatism, Nugget Coombs and Judith Wright, sitting down during the 1960s to ponder the future of their adopted people. What profound disappointment in their own lives could have led Coombs (echoing similar sentiments by Judith Wright) to write, "despite its relative poverty in material terms, Aboriginal society may well be capable of providing a superior quality of life"? Why must white intellectuals, in assisting Aboriginal people in their struggle, first deny the dominant culture any claims to greatness because all cultures and civilisations are of equal worth, and then proceed to claim superiority for the Aboriginal culture?

Like William Lane before them, Coombs and Wright and a thousand staff and students in universities around Australia set off to find their own New Australia, not in the wilds of Paraguay, but in the Aboriginal lands of Australia. Manning Clark described William Lane as a man "who wrote with all the extravagance of a man who was all heart". And so it is with the white romantics who have fed the intellectual fires of Aboriginal separatism in Australia.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Aboriginal activists Patten and Ferguson argued that the objective of Aboriginal policy was to achieve equal citizenship with whites. In this sense, their politics were assimilationist. More recently, Aboriginal activists have expanded their claims beyond equality to self-determination and even sovereignty in political, cultural and economic terms.

The Aboriginal struggle for identity in the political realm is a struggle between the establishment of a pan-Aboriginal politics and the recognition of the enormous diversity of Aboriginal Australians. In the cultural dimension, the struggle is between Aborigines as one part of a multicultural Australia and Aborigines as an entirely separate or "other" culture. In the economic dimension, it is a struggle between dependence and independence, between welfare recipients and Aboriginal capitalists.

At its most radical, self-determination is said to be part of what the anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw calls a "modernising project", "the last in a long series of initiatives which, while progressive in logic and intent, in fact operate to reproduce the racial inequality which they seek to expunge". Such a critique comes very close to a rationalisation of all failures in Aboriginal policy. It suggests that failure stems from the white man's lack of understanding of black culture. Self-determination is only self-determination within the bounds of white liberal democracy, and success is measured by white measures of success. The ultimate fear, according to Cowlishaw, is that "we are all destined to share the same culture".

The tendency in this postmodern world to be denied the tools of comparative analysis, especially cross-cultural comparison, is somewhat debilitating. It seems we can never understand the "otherness" in other cultures unless the "others" say we do. Add to this the political desire to regard all stories in the hands of the oppressed minority as facts, and all facts in the hands of the privileged majority as stories and you have a recipe for ignorance. I propose we be bold yet sensitive, and talk about matters that concern people of the other realm and observe things we regard as good or bad, sensible or silly, productive or unproductive.

Aboriginal policy can be characterised as a struggle between separatism and assimilationism. The term "integration" incorporates both dimensions because it tends to assume economic assimilation but cultural and perhaps political separateness. In a similar manner, self-determination may be a policy that has elements of both separateness and sameness. Like Cowlishaw, but for very different reasons, I too believe self-determination (as with reconciliation) is a clever political device designed to enable the process of the modernisation of an ancient people to take place, under the noses of the chatterers and scribblers who fight over the intellectual meal of Aboriginal politics. I embrace the modernisation stream, but in a way that would let Aborigines decide for themselves. If Aborigines want an identity that rejects the "modern" then so be it. They of course must suffer any consequences. In fact, the path that Aboriginal people will choose will be a mixture. Some things will be kept or regained, some abandoned; some of the "kept" will be harmful, as will some of the "new".