Editorial comment. This dispatch has been chosen to end “Our new community” series.  It talks about change within the Walpri and wider communities.  It was first published on 20/8/2010. (Note 1: to translate foreign text copy and paste into “google tranlate”.  Note 2. Walpri are a group of indigenous people originating (broadly speaking) from the Tanimi Desert region North West of Alice Springs in Central Australia.

Yasu! Καλημέρα φίλοι μου

Warlpiri society has made some amazing adjustments in the more than three decades I have lived in Yuendumu.
So has mainstream society.
Recently, a newly appointed officer in charge took over at Yuendumu Police Station. She and her partner make no secret of their lesbianism. Two decades ago she would not have been appointed. She would probably have lost her job the moment she peeped out of the closet. Isn’t it great how much more tolerant Australian society has become?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sb4AdU6rbFc
In 1971 my sister became an unmarried mother. Several times she was approached in the hospital with a form to sign away her daughter: ”Are you sure you want to keep this baby? Aren’t you being unrealistic?…” She was 21. The girl in the next bed was 16, and suffered even greater pressure. Both had supportive parents and got to keep their babies. Many parents disowned their wayward daughters. They forced them to have backyard abortions or they gave the babies away and locked their daughters up in a convent, depending on which end of the Christian spectrum they belonged to.
Unmarried mothers these days are not only tolerated, but supported . Isn’t it great how much more tolerant Australian society has become?
Around the same time in Yuendumu, Napangardi was 15 when she gave birth to twins. Compulsory taking of children was no longer acceptable, so she was able to stand her ground against the authorities that had decided without consultation that one of the twins should be given away. Napangardi continues to be happily married and has five grandchildren. These days Napangardi would be encouraged to keep her twins. Her husband would be in trouble, and so he should, fancy putting someone up the duff just because you fancy them? Isn’t it great how much more tolerant Australian society has become?
When a girl under 16 has a baby, the law, the almighty law, requires the authorities to be notified.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WutcqTlgRI
Pregnant Warlpiri girls are known to stay away from the clinic so as not to get their boyfriends into trouble. It is their contribution to statistical outcomes. Their little bit to help Close the Gap.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANDbq0N0MzU
A while ago two young Yuendumu men (18 & 19) were charged and convicted with sex with a minor. The sex they engaged in was straight and consensual. They have been forever stigmatised and their future severely restricted. They will never ever be able to take on teaching or work with youth. The injustice of it all! They will not be able to become scout masters or be in charge of a children’s choir nor is the priesthood now within their reach. The mainstream will elude them. They are criminals.
One of them is one of Yuendumu’s best young footballers, he might have become the next Liam Jurrah. Now the AFL wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot bargepole, after all they are so squeaky clean.
He’s a criminal. Isn’t it great how much more tolerant Australian society has become?
Here’s a song suggested by my sister. She was eight years old when it was a hit. She knows all the words. She sang them to me on the phone. All of them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abEJIdE-LJo
“… Do we have the right to question?….” σίγουρα δεν είναι!
Three decades ago promised marriages and polygamy were common in Warlpiri society. Many of these marriages were very successful and there are many good reasons for people living a hunter-gatherer existence to have such a social fabric. Yuendumu society no longer lives a hunter-gatherer existence, although much of hunter-gatherer values and Weltanschawuung persist.
When a young couple fell in love, their families would be shamed and the young couple banished from their parental homes. They would run away. The girl would be chased by a party of old men that would go into Alice Springs with boomerangs and spears and attempt to bring her back to the husband that she was promised to. Such face saving punitive parties became ever less frequent, and increasingly old men felt less compelled to insist on their conjugal rights.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxw_lDchA3A
Young couples are no longer ostracised. They are welcomed into their extended families and their babies well looked after.
As I said before Warlpiri society has made some amazing adjustments. All of this without an “Emergency Response”. Without much Intervention.
“Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does not destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo……..It is not change that will destroy culture but power.’…… Poly-kala! Junga-nyayini
— Wade Davis; Radio National, Big Ideas program; The Massey Lectures, ‘Century of the Wind’, 25-2-2010
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbnJo88kuP8