 Book
Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Balanda
By Mary Ellen Jordan
Allen & Unwin $24.95
She was a balanda in Maningrida, pleasant sounding words, but Mary Ellen Jordan found that 14 months living as a virtual foreigner in the Arnhem Land coastal community was anything but idyllic.
It was a place where Aboriginal people set up 'kitchens in the dust,' took their televisions outside and approached life in very different ways than outsiders might expect, even those who visit such places anticipating surprises.
'When I decided to leave Melbourne for Maningrida, I thought that Balandas like me [the term comes from the Indonesian for foreigner, a derivation of "Netherlander", after the Dutch colonial masters], would be working alongside Aboriginal people, assisting them to run their community organisations,' she recalls.
'I came here to do this, with good intentions and the expectation of being of some use. I thought that self-determination meant that Aboriginal people would be in charge, and that with funding and support from white Australia, things would get better for communities like this.'
Instead she discovered 'nothing here is that simple' and by the end of her sojourn, and the book, has concluded that 'the best I could say of the role of the Balandas, was that we were paternalistic' and the worst that the system 'prevented Aboriginal people from taking responsibility for themselves and their communities.'
Along with some predictable findings, such as 'grog did all kinds of damage,' the author offers a range of valuable insights gained from her involvement with a book about women's weaving and the compiling of biographies of local artists for the Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art & Culture.
Remaining 'strangely isolated from the community' gave her time to reflect on a society wracked by 'domestic violence and alcohol abuse, health problems like diabetes and heart disease, economic problems, language loss,' 'reading her to observe that, 'Before I went to Maningrida, it hadn't occurred to me that 'solutions' that came from the outside could be so ineffective.'
Speaking by phone to a distant friend, a former student activist like herself, she tried to explain the social problems caused by welfare dependency: 'I imagine a suburb of Melbourne, with 1500 long-term unemployed people, whose lives were run by a separate class of salaried workers. It just wouldn't happen.'
The sad thing is that it does happen in many Aboriginal communities and, as Noel Pearson and others are pointing out, it doesn't work. This is an insightful account of one such society and the cast of characters who sit on both sides of the cultural and economic divide.
* Books reviewed are available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street and Lismore Shopping Square.
- Books available at Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore and at Lismore Shopping
Square.
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