The time is right, I think, to revive an educational idea of 30 years ago. What we badly need is an Aboriginal Institute of Australian Studies, modelled on the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, so that the religions, languages, customs, kinship systems and skull measurements of this unique non-Aboriginal people become well understood before they, inevitably, pass on.
Thirty years ago, the idea was that such an institute might replace the Institute of Aboriginal Studies itself, but AIATSIS is by now such a valuable job creation program, vital to the academic economy, that this cannot be done today. Rather, the institute's basic idea - that the study of Aboriginal people by whites is a valuable thing in itself, for sheer learning's sake rather than immediate industrial purpose - should be applied to acquiring knowledge about non-Aborigines, for the benefit of Aborigines.
And, as with so many pursuits of pure learning, it might well prove to have some application, in just the same way that we owe the advent of Teflon to the US space program.
Indeed the study could help Aborigines understand just how it is that non-Aborigines engage in so many self-destructive and uneconomical pursuits, often simply refusing to recognise reality. Perhaps we need an external eye to record and document this, if only because we ourselves are so close to events, and so trapped within our cultures, that we simply cannot see what is going on.
This week I read a submission to an independent body reviewing the effectiveness of Mal Brough's celebrated intervention into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory last year. The inquiry is to report later this month.
The intervention led by a Major major-general and a stipendiary magistrate, each with a personal public relations adviser, plus an army of white bureaucrats chosen chiefly for having no background, history, understanding of or experience in Aboriginal affairs (lest they be contaminated by association with past failure) has spent, probably, about $1 billion so far in a crusade to save Aborigines from themselves, and, supposedly, Aboriginal children from their parents.
Those who conceived the mission did so with messianic zeal, inspired in particular by a well-researched report documenting the physical and sexual abuse and neglect of children. The report's actual recommendations were entirely ignored. But the finding served to invest the quasi-military operation with the air of a moral crusade so that anyone, such as myself, who expressed doubt about the mission, strategy or tactics could be accused of condoning child abuse. The syllogism - itself worth studying in the new institute's school of logic - ran like this: something has to be done. ''This'' is something. Thus ''this'' has to be done.
Vast clouds of bulldust rose in the sky as General Dave and an army of PR people, soldiers, policemen, doctors and white public servants flicked hither and thither in vast fleets of brand new Toyotas, weighing, counting and measuring things as they went, but, strangely, leaving most things unchanged and most people unmoved.
The PR apparatus specialised in self-serving anecdote, and a running record of its big fact: the number of children examined by doctors brought in for the purpose. Doctors, like others soaking up the funds, had noble ideals, but few had a good deal of experience with the pathology and problems of Aborigines in remote areas. This did not deter the Australian Medical Association's man on the spot much given to pontificating on Aboriginal health nor the AMA (which was pocketing a commission, much to its later embarrassment, for every person whose arrival in the scene was arranged).
Some medical specialists actually experienced in the local pathologies - because they work and practise in the NT - have released the results of their review of what was done. The resident pediatricians, physicians, intensivists, anaesthetists, gynaecologists, obstetricians and others conclude of the much ballyhooed 11,000-plus examinations - at an extra cost of perhaps $150 million that ''to our knowledge, only one child in central Australia has been identified with significant health problems that were not already known''.
The Toyota and aerial jamboree ''has been resource-intensive and disrupted existing health services, and any health benefit remains dubious as almost all health problems were already identified ... Many children were referred for unnecessary investigations at great cost and causing further disruption to services.''
Spent properly, $150 million could have transformed local health. It is several times what has usually been spent each year.
Another thing the new institute could study, for its own edification, is how responsibility and accountability occur in white Australia. Few Aborigines, after all, are capable of squandering public money on such a scale and, generally, when anyone - white or black - squanders it in an Aboriginal community at least several local Aborigines are lined up and shot, and the community itself is blamed and punished. Do the same processes happen in Canberra?
I expect not. As I understand it, some of the public relations talent is now focused on drawing up the citations for Orders of Australia - for gallantry, no doubt as much as public service - in forthcoming honours lists.
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