Bad dreaming: Aboriginal men's violence against women and children, by Louis Nowra

Last December, when the Queensland DPP announced that no charges would be laid against Sergeant Chris Hurley for the horrific murder of Eric Doomadgee, a 36 year old healthy Indigenous man from Palm Island, I remember feeling sick to the stomach. (That decision was later overturned and Hurley is now charged with manslaughter). In my ignorance, and indignation, I overlooked the fact that women and children have been battered, raped and violated on Palm Island every single day, for year and years. Hurley’s crime was inexcusable, but so equally, is the perpetual assault on Aboriginal women and children.

Why does it take the intervention of a white man to expose the awful reality of the lives of black women? It’s a frustrating fact, but that’s how it is in an increasingly patriarchal Australia. Should we feminists stand up and say we don’t need or want men to speak for us? We can speak for ourselves? Maybe, in an ideal world, but in my observation contemporary feminists are enormously reluctant to speak about gender-based oppression within non-mainstream communities, for fear of buying into racism or going against the notion of (equal but different) multiculturalism.

So, I’m glad that the playwrite, Louis Nowra (Cosi, Radiance) took personal responsibility to write an essay which condemns the appalling levels of male violence in the Aboriginal community, and which sheets the blame straight home to men; “I have been driven to write about this because, as a man, I know that at its dark unwholesome core, it is a man’s problem.”

While we shuffle our feet, Aboriginal women are living daily with hideous levels of violence. And dying. Audrey Bolger, in her 1990 report, Aboriginal Women and Violence points out that the number of murdered Aboriginal women exceeds the number of Indigenous men who have died in custody. Why aren’t we marching in the streets?

Nowra’s essay is carefully crafted. He begins with his personal experience of domestic violence and his response to confronting the horrific evidence of Aboriginal men’s violence during a stint in Alice Springs hospital. He goes on to explore the traditional roots of violence in Aboriginal communities, the impact of invasion, the issue of “promised wives”, homosexuality and the use of customary law as a defence in the judicial system. Some of his examples of violence against women and children, including toddlers and babies, are profoundly distressing. And yet again, I was pulled up short by my own silly assumptions. Nowra writes: “Women remain victims of men’s versions of indigenous customs and culture.” Yes, it’s obvious – human rights must always come before cultural rights.

But Aboriginal women aren’t always victims. Nowra tells the story of several strong women who have fought back. But again, it’s women who are doing the work. Sometime soon, individual Aboriginal men, in large numbers, are going to have to stand up and pledge never to hit, rape or abuse another woman or child.

Nowra has been predictably accused of appropriating Aboriginal culture (in the title), racism in his generalisations, and even of using this issue as a money-making tool! (By publishing an essay in Australia – I think not!) He has also been criticised for not presenting concrete solutions. At the Gleebooks forum, an Aboriginal man who described himself as a health policy worker from NSW Health, made an angry attack on the validity of Nowra’s statistics, asserting that the problem was caused by failed government policy, and condemned the book as “unscholarly”. I just wish he could feel equivalent anger about the injustice Aboriginal women and children suffer.

Nowra mentioned to me afterwards that he has seen young Aboriginal men who stand up against this behaviour effectively ostracised from family and community. It's a risky business for men to stand against men too. But it's got to be done.

My only criticism of Nowra’s book is that it doesn’t even bother to question “why?” Why do men rape and attack women and children? What do they get out of it? He writes from the premise that if they can get away with it, they will. that an idle man is a dangerous man. That is deeply, deeply depressing.

Read this book and get angry.

Published as part of the NOW series by Pluto Press and available from Gleebooks

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Purple Hibiscus won the 2005 Commonwealth Writers Best First Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for 2004. Set in a sweltering and politically explosive Nigeria, the novel exposes the cold, calculated domestic violence of a patriarchal father towards his wife, his son, and the main character of the novel, his fifteen-year-old daughter Kambili. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivers a tremendously confident narrative drive by revealing the extent of everyday brutality bit-by-bit, violent act after violent act, until it is unbearable. The writing is at times almost clinical in description of barbaric, heartbreaking acts, and rich in its use of Nigerian words peppered through the English. The perpetrator is complex – like many perpetrators he has a shining public persona that hides a penchant for domestic tyranny. Papa Eugene is a fundamentalist Catholic, admired for his unstinting faith, adoring of God the father and Jesus the son, while he ostracises his own earthly father, Papa-Nnukwu, for holding on to traditional spiritual beliefs, and physically abuses his earthly son, Jaja, leaving permanent impairments. He makes ostentatious charitable donations, but allows his father and sister to live in poverty. Through the passage of the novel, with the help of her Aunty Ifeoma, Kambili awakens to the extent of her own terror, to the ways in which her every action, every spoken word, are measured against her father’s judgements, to the absence of happiness and laughter in her life. It’s a brilliant rendering of the magnetism of abusive power. Even when she is released from the overbearing oppression of her father, she wants to see him in her dreams, longs to hug him again. This enduring, irresistible, commonplace attraction victims feels for perpetrators is always a conundrum for me – why do these women keep looking for the approval of men who batter them? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie doesn’t offer any simplistic, binary models to explain domestic violence, fundamentalist religion or the struggle of post-colonial societies, just insight into their complexity. More power to her. This is a stunning novel.

Available from the Feminist Bookshop

Books in the Pink Mountains

Those lovely Pink Mountains folk maintain a terrific community website for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer people who live in and visit the Blue Mountains. They regularly publish book reviews on their site. There's also a really good guide to finding and purchasing bent books online.

Miles Franklin - Go Girls

Of the eight novels recently selected for the longlist for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2007, five are by women:
Beyond the Break by Sandra Hall
Careless by Deborah Robinson
The Unexpected Elements of Love by Kate Legge
Carpentaria by Alexis Wright
Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones
The award was established in 1954 with a bequest from Miles Franklin. It has been running since 1957, and in that fifty years it has been won by a woman 12 times (including an amazing four times by Thea Astley in 1962, 1965, 1972 and 2000) It's interesting to look back at the winners. Just one year on Roger McDonald's book The Ballad of Desmond Kale , seems completely unmemorable up against Kate Grenville's Secret River (which I think would have been the people's choice).
The shortlist will be announced on Thursday 19 April. The winner, who will receive $42,000, will be announced at a gala dinner on Thursday 21 June.

Helen Garner: What we say

I woke up early this morning with the Razor dribbling beside me and picked up the Australian Short Story edited by Laurie Hergenhan. In it Helen Garner has a pithy little story called What we say (originally published in Postcards from Surfers in 1985). Ostensibly about two women going to the opera to see Rigoletto, it describes the ensuing discussion with two male friends about the generalised difference in fundamental fears for men and women. In this case they nominate the fear of a daughter being sexualised for men, and the fear of violence for women. In amongst this talk there are some thrilling, almost throwaway, lines. She describes one of the men as: “His skin was pale, as if he had crept out from some burrow where he had lain for a long time in a cramped and twisted position.” Bookending this discussion is a short reflection on mothering teenage daughters – a wonderful counterpoint. It’s a sparkling, thrusting piece of writing. Now, twenty plus years later, where did Garner loose her way?