Indigenous Australian Housing Problem - Essay Example

Running Head: INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN HOUSING PROBLEM Indigenous Australian Housing Problem [The Writer’s Name] [The Name of the Institution] Indigenous Australian Housing Problem Introduction Indigenous peoples’ struggle for recognition and respect is an important element in the continuing struggle for better outcomes in resource management. Better outcomes, however, cannot be restricted to the symbolic domain; they must also have an effect in the economic and environmental domains. In Australia, despite the resources allocated to targeted programmes, and despite the technical sophistication of experts engaged in service delivery efforts, concrete improvements in some key areas of Aboriginal health, education, employment, self-determination, incarceration, housing and rights have remained elusive. The depth of mistrust and the gulf in understanding revealed in recent resource industry disputes such as Century Zinc and Jabiluka serve to remind us of the gulf that continues to exist over resource-based regional development. They also serve to demonstrate that while there may be substantial technical challenges in such situations, there is a simultaneous conceptual challenge - how to think about needs, values and aspirations that refuse to treat things given ontological priority in our own taken-for-granted, common-sense view of things as obvious or desirable. For much of the period of white occupation of Australia the failure of indigenous people to take up opportunities to assimilate was generally viewed in racist terms, as demonstrating their biological/genetic unsuitability for `civilised life'. Both the state and sympathetic community groups were only able to see the problem as one of social advancement. The means for pursuing this end ranged from brutal social engineering to the more gentle but no less ethnocentric practices of paternalistic tutelage. In all of these forms of regulation, the assumption that Aboriginal people were culturally deficient was unquestioned. The norms of nuclear family life, of hygiene and childrearing, of education, neat clean housing, of neighbourly respectability are the ideological cornerstones around which assimilationist policies and practices were built. For Aboriginal people to escape from poverty and to acquire citizenship rights, they were required to observe these norms not to resist them. This paper will explore the social and cultural pressures imposed on indigenous people who were tenants of the NSW Housing Commission (HC) in the early 1970s, at the end of what is known as the Assimilation Era. (Greig, 2001, 189-95) Government Housing Policies and Indigenous Government housing helped to alleviate the vast shortage of housing created by the postwar baby boom and immigration program. In New South Wales, much of the new housing was constructed on broadacre suburban estates under the auspices of the HC. Estates constructed as part of HC programs included vast developments like those at Green Valley, Mt Druitt and Campbelltown, in the region of Sydney, and on the central coast to the north of the city. The HC was also responsible for many of the satellite developments in country towns. These places were not, however, simply places to accommodate the population overflow of postwar Australia. They were also social laboratories, part of a modernist reconstruction of the urban space. The state sought to design environments conducive to producing good citizens for a young growing nation. Prospective tenants from all social backgrounds--Anglo working class, migrant, indigenous--had to present themselves as worthy. They had to demonstrate that they were capable of living in a manner deemed respectable by those petty officials who exercised the power to grant or refuse them a place on the waiting list. After each aspiring tenant had lodged their application a Commission inspector was sent out to inspect the dwelling in which the applicant family lived. Eligible applicants were vetted according to need. It is in the determination of this need that the ideological complexion of the postwar public housing program was revealed. HC officers had considerable discretionary powers in assessing applicants' suitability for housing. Applicants firstly had to show that they were not adequately housed where they were. Factors taken into account included overcrowding and whether the dwelling was habitable and in an adequate state of repair. Secondly, they had to demonstrate that they were capable of meeting the Commission standards in the areas of `civic pride' (in maintaining the exterior of the dwelling and the garden), neighbourliness, living a modest and respectable domestic life, and that they were able to meet regular rental payments. The HC Tenancy Files contain the reports and notes written by the HC officers. These express opinions on the merits and shortcomings of applicants and tenants. Future housing constructed for Aboriginal people should be comparable to standard HC dwellings, and that responsibility for providing that housing should be shifted from the Aborigines Welfare Board to the HC. The state should build no more housing on government reserves and that Aboriginal people should be encouraged to live alongside non-indigenous people in the cities and towns. (Rowse, 2000, 185-91) In the same year, more than 90 per cent of the Australian people voted by referendum to amend the Constitution so as to transfer from the States to the Federal government the power to legislate in the area of Aboriginal affairs, and effectively to grant Aboriginal people full citizenship rights. Ethnographers helped the state to mediate the interaction between discrete cultures, to manage this early contact. But by the mid-twentieth century, the difficulties of the frontier had receded somewhat. The major problem confronting those involved in administering Aboriginal affairs shifted from one involving fragile and often violent dealings in remote areas with those deemed external to society, to an internal problem of race relations. Although frontier type relations still existed away from the population centres of the south-east of Australia, more political attention was directed at the issue of how to deal with Aboriginal people who lived on the fringes of white cities and towns, and who were engaged in endemic conflict with white communities. Politicians and administrators, working with the advice of their academic informants, sought ways of encouraging indigenous Australians to move away from communities on reserves and camps and to embrace the `Australian way of life'. Although the circumstances of disaffected urban youth and of Aboriginal people were very different, both were subject to official efforts to persuade them to move away from their sub-cultural communities and enter the social mainstream. The scholarly analyses of the resistance of urban youth and that of Aboriginal people to assimilation were informed by similar functionalist assumptions. Ethnographers’ Approach to the Issue Ethnographers have mapped out similar patterns in the way in which Aboriginal people in small remote communities have interacted with contemporary housing bureaucracies. Housing in Halls Creek in the north of Western Australia suggets that many of those indigenous inhabitants who were given conventional public housing modified them in ways that were viewed as wantonly destructive by white bureaucrats. Such changes indicate efforts to bring living spaces--designed around rigid anglo norms--more into line with traditional lifestyles, to ensure the continuation of social and cultural arrangements, the nature of which most non-Aboriginal people were unaware. In spite of a policy regime ostensibly based on self-determination, the practices of the housing bureaucracy in Western Australia were largely assimilationist. This is also true of the ways in which indigenous Australians responded to the HC. Certainly, the processes of assessing applicants and the surveillance and regulation of tenants were such as to exclude many who wished for and needed good housing. Yet in a struggle to retain their culture, Aboriginal people often actively opposed the standards of the HC. Ironically, this opposition condemned many to remain in or return to life on the margins, as reserve or slum dwellers with few prospects of social or political advancement. (Sayer, 2001, 168-71) In the early 1970s the HFA program provided the opportunity for Aboriginal people to move into suburban housing as never before. Although demand for this housing considerably outstripped supply, it did mean that many of those who had previously lived on reserves or in dilapidated inner-city housing, with few chances to obtain better living conditions, were now able to enjoy a standard of housing which had been available almost exclusively only to non-indigenous Australians up to this time. (Scott, 1999, 145-52) However, the HFA was not a program based on any new-found pluralistic tolerance of indigenous culture. In spite of the liberal sentiments expressed by public policy-makers, Aboriginal applicants were measured against the same yardsticks that were applied to mainstream applicants. They had to demonstrate that they were both eager and capable of making the transition to a suburban lifestyle, one of solid nuclear family values--modesty, privacy, strictly delineated gender roles, hard work, cleanliness and moral rectitude. Many of these standards were alien to Aboriginal people. Some strove, and were able to demonstrate their willingness and ability to embrace the Australian dream. (Lattas, 2003, 240-67) Others were ambivalent about the process. They wished to escape the appalling circumstances of slum housing but they also wanted to retain their links with their people and their way of life. They resisted many of the pressures and expectations placed on them. The ST files demonstrate clearly that one of the central assumptions of the early town planning movement--that people are socially and moral uplifted and transformed if they are given a better environment in which to live--is incorrect. While some Aboriginal people sought to escape and to sever links with communities, most strove to retain their culture and links to community and to resist the social engineering pressures which were placed on them. They sought to unpack their cultural baggage in a new location. The strength of this residual culture is not immediately apparent from the Special Tenancy files. Commission officers, and hostile neighbours sought to depict the non-conformity of HFA tenants as being at best a consequence of complete cultural demoralisation, or at worst a sullen and cantankerous disposition towards white society in general. Yet those actions often had a hidden cultural logic which was not apparent to outsiders. The Issue as a Political Challenge The intense localism of much of the political domain in indigenous affairs represents another challenge to the far-reaching rethinking of conceptual and political building blocks of just and sustainable regional economies. (Rowse, 1998, 56-69) The economic reality of many remote indigenous areas is that there is a backlog of basic infrastructure and service provision (including housing, health hardware, transport and communications infrastructure) that will be overcome only by a revolutionary about-face from the neo-liberal bureaucrats who guard the public pursestrings. Governments often anticipate that large-scale resource projects may address some of these needs, although conservative political forces have opposed regulation to ensure such projects negotiate with local people as a matter of right, or invest in meaningful benefits for affected communities. At a time when Australian bureaucratic and political élites are seriously considering dismembering public health and welfare systems to facilitate greater levels of efficiency, discipline and control, allocation of massive public funds to undoing decades of trauma, neglect and abuse in indigenous settlements is unlikely. Inevitably, competition for resources (public funds, investment capital, tourist interest and so on) between indigenous areas is likely to be intense. And within indigenous groups, there is no guarantee that equity and the public good will drive successful indigenous operators in hybrid systems that continue to devalue many aspects of indigenous epistemologies. There is, therefore, a scale politics to be considered. Remote indigenous areas are no more isolated from new globalising economic relations than the rustbelt and sunbelt industrial regions that characterise the post-modern global economy. Taking local indigenous epistemology seriously cannot involve denial of wider scale political economic processes. Indeed, one of the key challenges to remote and rural community leaders is to come to terms with complex material and ideological conditions as a basis for moving on. But neither can we pretend that the Dreaming is merely cultural and without economic relevance and meaning. The value and effectiveness of the good neighbour programme contributions to these communities, although significant, is limited by the enormous back-log in provision of even the most basic infrastructure such as water, housing, health hardware and so on. (MacDonald, 2000, 195-201) Conclusion A long history of frontier hostility, bureaucratic and missionary intervention, reprehensible neglect and deliberate marginalisation of indigenous interests in Western Australia has imposed massive human and environmental costs on Aboriginal people. In facilitating primitive accumulation on the scale represented in the Argyle case, the Western Australian government has reinforced policies that shaped the colonial frontier.( Ross, 2003, 219-23) Different groups value elements of the landscape and the environment in quite different ways. The idea of co-existence reminds us that displacement and marginalisation are not the same as extinguishment or extinction, and that dismissing the value that one group of citizens places on various ecosystem components is fundamentally discriminatory and unacceptable in a society committed to intercultural tolerance and reconciliation. To tackle these complex issues, it is necessary to provide some conceptual clarity and clear tools that allow Aboriginal community members to construct their own way of seeing them. Drawing on a range of anthropological and other research, the following can be identified as core goals of many Aboriginal groups: • Caring for country; • Caring for people; • Caring for culture. In many Aboriginal organisations, there is a clear statement of goals that reflect these ideas. Many groups would, for example, identify the following as important strategic aims for their community organisations: • Moving back to country; • Looking after the law; • Getting recognition; • Security for the community’s future; • Getting good services where people want to live. Such goals provide pointers to a view of development as those activities and interventions that help to bring together Aboriginal people, Aboriginal country and Aboriginal culture in ways that produce better practical outcomes i.e. recognition, health, opportunities, environmental care, housing, mobility, family relationships and so on. References Greig, A. (2001) The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of: Housing Provision in Australia 1945-60 Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. 189-95 Lattas, A. (2003) `Essentialism, Memory and Resistance: Aboriginality and the Politics of Authenticity' Oceania 63(3): 240-67. MacDonald, G. (2000) `A Wiradjuri Fight Story' in I. Keen (ed) Being Black: Aboriginal Cultures in Settled Australia Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.195-201 Ross, H. (2003) Just for Living: Aboriginal Perceptions of Housing in Northwest Australia Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press. 219-23 Rowse, T. (2000) `Are We All Blow Ins: A Review of Black, White of Brindle: Race in Rural Australia' Oceania 61(2): 185-91. Rowse, T. (1998) White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 56-69 Sayer, A. (2001) Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach London: Hutchinson. 168-71 Scott, W. D. (Management Consultants) (1999) Problems and Needs of the Aboriginals of Sydney: Sydney WD Scott. 145-52 Read More