Genocide by suicide.(social problems )(Viewpoint essay)

I MUST BEGIN by declaring my interest with regard to Aboriginal politics. In 1974 as a leftie schoolteacher working at Katherine School of the Air, I helped Vincent Lingiari, Mickey Ringiari, Long Johnny, Philip Nitschke, and a few others, muster their first herd of cleanskins from Wave Hill Station. I became immersed in discussions with the Northern Territory Education Department to allow Aboriginal children based at Wattie Creek to be given access to the radio receivers necessary to enrol at Katherine School of the Air, and also to establish a Government School at Wattie Creek (now Kalkaringi). The following year, 1975, I attempted to establish a system of Adult Education on Melville and Bathurst Islands.

So, in order to address my thoughts to a human face, I would address them to Peter Murray, who was my teaching assistant at Snake Bay, Melville Island, that year. It is necessary that I focus on an Aboriginal face to attempt an authentic discussion, and to be allowed to speak in this difficult area, as a white Anglo-Celtic Australian.

Raimond Gaita is a longtime friend who taught me philosophy at Melbourne State College in 1970, 1971 and 1972. Although I have seen little of him during the last thirty years, we had caught up recently and I have attended his Winter Lecture Series at the Australian Catholic University for the past two years. Rai is an excellent teacher, who affected me with the difficulty of thinking and introduced me to Albert Camus at a pivotal time in my life. It was partly due to the thorough and radical thinking to which Rai introduced me that I went off to teach in the Northern Territory.

When I saw the list of lecturers and the topic for this year's series (under the title, "Whatever Happened to Reconciliation?"), I sent him an e-mail with regard to the responsibilities of universities, philosophy departments in particular, to present unbiased knowledge. As it turned out, Professor Peter Sutton's lecture was, I think, academically rigorous, creatively empathetic, articulate, poetic and artful. However, I was five-sixths right, as the other five professors in the series continued developing various aspects of an academic Aboriginal "romanticism" that has, without doubt, contributed to the situation in which Aboriginal Australians find themselves today. Each professor spoke carefully, and several clearly attempted to modify the excesses and vanities of their past positions. Dodson, Manne, Gaita and Brennan all, however, maintained their belief in the fundamental principles--self-determination, community consultation, land rights, genocidal intent, racism and invasion.

Finally let me place this lecture series in time. It was the day after the second lecture by Professor Mick Dodson that the Howard government declared the "State of Emergency" with regard to isolated Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Professor Peter Sutton's lecture had preceded it and the remaining four lectures were presented in the first four weeks of its implementation. After listening to all six lectures and having to accept the role of heretic to ask several questions, I decided to follow the Burke and Wills track up to Alice Springs while I completed this essay. I did this partly to clear my mind of the anger and emotion I felt, and partly to write within the Aboriginal landscape.

To suggest that pre-contact indigenous life was anything but Edenic and that traditional modes of socialization and social control may contribute to the contemporary problem of violence is to risk being accused of blaming the victims and excusing their oppressors.

--epidemiologist Stephen Kunitz