Dreaming and nightmares in Central Australia.(Television)(portraying Aboriginals on First Australians)(Essay)

I WAS GRATIFIED to be approached by the producer-director of First Australians, Rachel Perkins, who wanted to use material from my self-published account of some of the events in Central Australia in the 1880s, God, Guns and Government on the Central Australian Frontier, but there was also reason for caution. First Australians was a project of SBS Television and it was likely that its starting point would be SBS's house version of that compound of victimocracy, anti-Westernism and weird genetic theory that makes up ethnic identity politics. But its approach was also to be historical, and since Ms Perkins and her colleagues (from now on, "the producers") wanted to make use of my work, how could its virtue fail to rub off?

The Central Australian episode was based on three men, Moses Tjalkabota and, surprisingly, because they are not Aboriginal, the policeman William Willshire and the telegraph station master Frank Gillen, who had extensive dealings with Aboriginal people in the 1880s and 1890s.

I may flatter myself but I think I led the producers to Moses Tjalkabota. We have one marvellous resource on him, a memoir he dictated in middle age when he was blind, in his native Western Aranda language. This fluent and detailed memoir has only recently been translated by the retired Lutheran Pastor, Paul Albrecht. It is a historically accurate account of the early days of the Hermannsburg mission, from the perspective of a man who was a young child when the missionaries arrived, was baptised at the age of twelve and spent his life as a preacher and leader based at Hermannsburg.

In Tjalkabota's account we see one highly intelligent person's transition from the magical cosmology of pre-contact Western Aranda life to the more naturalistic worldview of the missionaries. (The missionaries themselves, as Biblical literalist anti-evolutionists, might have rejected my label for their cosmology, but it is fair when one compares them with the Western Aranda of the time.) It seems to me that it was Moses's intellect, more than the missionaries' material inducements, that led him to accept as a child a worldview that he found more competent to deal with the new social and material realities than the teachings of his parents. When he chose the baptismal name Moses he, or his missionary advisers, foresaw the leadership role that lay ahead of him.

While the producers have accepted the fruits of Moses's conversion, their version of the man demeans his faith. Instead the issues of cultural and religious change are prejudged by editorial assertions. The first comes in the title of this episode: "No Other Law". The point is amplified in the narration, which tells us that the Altjira (the pre-contact cosmology of the Western Aranda) "leads them in their life and is their law", apparently referring to all Aranda people today. Such a conclusion is neither historically accurate nor adequate as description of the current state of Aranda culture. It seems to be a product of an alliance between the politics of the middle-class urban Left and some of the big men of modem Aranda traditionalism. One such man, Max Smart, provides the comment that the missionaries "conned" the people, while claiming that Moses Tjalkabota was a both a traditional leader in the full sense and a Lutheran leader, denying the real struggle between the two worldviews.

Professor Marcia Langton considers the missionaries' purposes constituted a "mad vision". We are left to come to the obvious conclusion about how sane present-day Aranda Lutherans may be. And how sane would the first missionaries have been had they really afflicted the Western Aranda with "endless sermons in German"? In fact their policy was to learn the local language, and they translated into it and taught in it for several years before English was taught. That is why we have Moses Tjalkabota's memoir.

Moses was initiated as a Western Aranda man shortly after his baptism, when the missionaries' attention was fully occupied by the Swan-Taplin inquiry of 1890. To have refused would likely have proved fatal, and in the traditional way of thinking the important thing was to submit to the authority of the senior men. It seems that all young Western Aranda men were initiated during the entire period of the mission's existence. Initiation was, however, but the first step in a lengthy process of ceremony and instruction through which a young man became in time qualified to occupy the senior positions of cultural and political power. But according to Moses and also T.G.H. Strehlow, who interviewed the surviving senior men forty years later, young men of the period were not interested in, and not trusted with, the higher secret-sacred knowledge of their elders, a loss of faith that reflected a loss of the senior men's authority. The initiation experienced by Moses may be considered an attempt to maintain basic Western Aranda social structure in a world transformed. It is also true that in Aboriginal societies, as in others, cosmological faiths can lose their authority with an alarming swiftness, while the cultures of family, clan and community continue their dogged hold on our lives. It is true that traditional Aboriginal culture in Central Australia did not die, but it has been transformed, in several ways, with the traditionalism represented by Max' Stuart just one of them.