Radical Hope: Education and Equality in Australia

Radical Hope

RADICAL

HOPE

EDUCATION AND EQUALITY IN AUSTRALIA

NOEL

PEARSON

Published by Black Inc.,

an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

37–39 Langridge Street

Collingwood VIC 3066 Australia

email: enquiries@blackincbooks.com

http://www.blackincbooks.com

Copyright © Noel Pearson 2011

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

e-ISBN: 9781921870248

Book design: Thomas Deverall

CONTENTS

RADICAL HOPE

Prologue

Even Keeling, No Excuses

Groundhog Day

If the Student Has Not Learned, the Teacher Has Not Taught

The Cultural Hearth

The Dialectics of Education Policy Debates

No Excuses On An Uneven Keel

Epilogue: Stanner Redux

RESPONSES

Christine Nicholls

Chris Sarra

Tony Abbott

Peter Shergold

Peter Sutton

Fred Chaney

Jane Caro

Andrew Leigh

Noel Pearson: Reply

Afterword

RADICAL HOPE

PROLOGUE

For what may we hope? Kant put this question in the first-person singular along with two others – What can I know? and What ought I do? – that he thought essentially marked the human condition. With two centuries of philosophical reflection, it seems that these questions are best transposed to the first-person plural. And with that same hindsight: rather than attempt an a priori inquiry, I would like to consider hope as it might arise at one of the limits of human existence … [Crow Indian Chief] Plenty Coups responded to the collapse of his civilisation with radical hope. What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it. What would it be for such hope to be justified?

—JONATHAN LEAR, Radical Hope:

Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006)

Some kind person, I don’t know who, sent me a copy of Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, and ever since I read it, this beautiful book has drifted in and out of my thoughts. Professor Lear is in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and has a dual interest in philosophy (Aristotle) and psychoanalysis (he was among the few in the late twentieth century prepared to make the case in defence of Freud’s legacy against the posthumous lynch mob).

Lear’s subject is the last great chief of the Native American Crow Nation, Chief Plenty Coups (1848–1932). Plenty Coups presided over that period of Crow history when the foundations of their classical culture were devastated and the Crow took up a sedentary life on reservation lands in Montana, lands which their chief had fought hard to maintain as the basis for a new life. Plenty Coups led the Crow people through one of those great doors separating entire epochs in human history: from the semi-nomadic life of the warrior-hunter to the domiciled life of an agriculturalist on a government-designated reservation. It is the inexorability of the devastation of the classical culture – foreseen by Plenty Coups in a dream vision – and the loss of it that is the most sorrowful part of the transition, not so much the violence. Violence was part of the old classical paradigm, inseparable from that apex of Crow self-actualisation, individual courage and extreme bravery. But the Crow had lost a way of life, one that the Crow and their neighbouring existential antagonists (the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Blackfeet and the Arapaho) had regarded as good from time immemorial.

Few epochs come to an end so suddenly without the people of the former epoch being utterly crushed in the course of change to the new order. Yet Chief Plenty Coups led his people through the door to an unknowable future, and he stood his people on their feet to contend with the new world.

Lear’s book is an act of ethical re-imagination of the questions confronting Plenty Coups in the most dire period of the history of the Crow Nation: the period when they would lose their old way of life, and stood at risk of losing themselves in the process. Lear’s philosophical reconstruction is based on the relevant ethno-historiography pertaining to the Crow, but the original provocation came from Plenty Coups’ account of his life, as given to a white man named Frank B. Linderman. The account dealt exclusively with Plenty Coups’ childhood and youth, and his exploits as a warrior and hunter in the period before the Crow settled on the reservation. He refused to talk about life after the time of his people’s move. Linderman’s account of this refusal in an author’s note at the end of his book haunted Lear:

Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems to have been broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. I have not told you half of what happened when I was young, he said, when urged to go on. I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides, he added sorrowfully, you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away.

It is not my desire here to reduce Lear’s project to a crude précis: it is best read in its own right. However, the death and resurrection of Crow ontology is the essence of Lear’s thesis about Plenty Coups’ courage when he led his people through a Valley of their own Shadow of Death.

In this connexion, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner’s 1959 essay Durmugam: A Nangiomeri comes to mind. Stanner first encountered this man from the Daly River in northern Australia in 1932 in the midst of a large spear fight involving a hundred men and as many supporters and seconds. Stanner’s vivid account of this event is superlative, but his description of his first sighting of Durmugam is like walking into the Galleria dell’Accademia and seeing Michelangelo’s David sprung to obsidian life:

In trying to sort out the encounters of pairs, my eyes were drawn and held by an Aboriginal of striking physique and superb carriage who always seemed pinned by an unremitting attack. He seemed, as far as any individual could, to dominate the battlefield. He was so tall that he stood half a head above the tallest there. His muscular power was apparent in his bulk but it was the grace and intensity of his fighting which captured my attention. His favourite posture was to fling arms and legs as wide as possible as though to make himself the maximum target. Having drawn and evaded a spear he would often counter with a dexterity and speed remarkable in so large a man. His fluent movements in avoiding injury – an inclination of the head, a sway of the body, the lifting of an arm or a leg, a half turn – always seemed minimal. I saw his spears strike home several times. As they did, the roars of exultation from his own side, and of rage from the other, would bring a rally to both. He himself stayed unwounded through the afternoon after a peerless display of skill and courage.

The battle died, as if by agreement, towards sundown and some of the antagonists began to fraternise, others to drift away. No one had been mortally hurt though many had painful flesh-wounds. There was some talk of continuing the fight another day. As I moved about making my enquiries, the tall Aboriginal came smilingly across and asked me in a civil way if I had liked the fight. I asked who he was and he told me that he was Durmugam, a Nangiomeri, and that Europeans called him Smiler. I then realised that here was the man widely believed by Europeans to be the most murderous black in the region.

His appearance at this moment was truly formidable. The glaring ochre, the tousled hair above the pipe-clayed forehead band, the spears, and something opaque in his eyes made him seem the savage incarnate. He stood at least 6 feet 3 inches, and must have weighed a sinewy 180 pounds. But his voice was musical, his manner easy, and his smile disarming. I was much taken with him. I noticed particularly how smoothly contoured was his body, how small his feet, how sensitive and finely boned his hands. Other men present were more heavily muscled but none had so large and so finely moulded a physique. His carriage was perfect, and he walked very erect, with head held high, and with quick, purposeful steps. Yet there was nothing truculent or overbearing about him.

Stanner traces his association with the man who would from then on become his new main informant (always one of the most exciting moments of fieldwork) to their last meeting in 1958, when the old man, now grey and with failing sight (but still erect, and still a striking figure of a man), was consumed with troubles – a year before his passing. Durmugam comes to mind because he is one of the recorded historical figures caught in these vital phases of history: the time of the collapse of the old and the onset of the new. A man with sharp hopes shared by his fellows (the vital will of the blacks to make something of the ruined life around them) – except that in this case Durmugam’s hopes would be unrealised.

Durmugam was born in the second decade of European and Chinese penetration into the Daly River, when the tribes of the region were already in a parlous state from disease, grog, opium, inter-tribal fighting and violence at the hands of miners and farmers (He remembers only two things clearly of his earliest days on the Daly, where his mother died at the copper mine – endless bloody fights between the river and the back-country tribes, and numbers of drink-sodden Aborigines lying out in the rain). There was heavy depopulation of the area (any anthropologist would find indirect genealogical proof that scores, if not hundreds, of Aborigines must have died. Many from unrecorded causes).

The High Culture of the Nangiomeri was on the ropes, and Durmugam, having been brought up by his mother’s brother, was bitter that he had not been told anything of the secret male culture of his tribe, as would have been the normal course of things in an earlier time (He had to learn this as a man from other tribes which shared it, or had known of it, and he felt there was some element of shame in such a thing).

As a young man he was initiated into the High Culture that was still vital on the distant Victoria River (He was given his first bullroarers. He began to learn too of the lost secret life of the Nangiomeri) and this became the defining object of his life (As he told me of these experiences, in the sequence of his life-story, it was as though his mind and heart had suddenly unified).

While the High Culture of the Victoria River mob remained strong, the first phase of contact had ruptured and reduced the High Culture on the Daly:

Many of the preconditions of the traditional culture were gone – a sufficient population, a self-sustaining economy, a discipline by elders, a confident dependency on nature – and, with the preconditions, went much of the culture, including its secret male rites. What was left of the tradition amounted to a Low Culture – some secular ceremonies, magical practices, mundane institutions and rules-of-thumb for a prosaic life.

Stanner describes the revival of what he called a new High Culture in the 1920s, through the emergence of a cult of which Durmugam and other young men were adherents (It is clear these young men were fired, and also felt under some command. Durmugam was one of a group of three who seem to have set about remodelling their lives and their culture). When Stanner first visited the river in the 1930s, the cult was spreading (I should think that no scrap of European prestige remained. I found an unshaken belief that Aboriginal ways were right, even at the level of the Low Culture).

But by the time Stanner returned in 1952, following a long absence after 1935, he found Durmugam an aged man and he and his fellows’ dreams of maintaining their High Culture had turned to dust (I had the impression that the traditional culture was on its last legs … the High Culture had not prospered; many of the young men openly derided the secret life). His subsequent visits during the 1950s found Durmugam in steadily worsening mood (I noted too, for the first time, an element of desperation and pessimism for the future. At the same time, there were signs of antipathy in him towards Europeanism and a deepening attachment to the old Aboriginal ways).

It was the breakdown of the old law that confounded Durmugam and gave rise to his problems:

He was filled with angry contempt for the young men of the day. They can throw a spear, he said, "but can they make one? Can they find their own food in the bush? He told me of a conversation with one youth who was deriding the bullroarer. Durmugam told him that it might cost him his life. The youth said, with a shrug, If I live, I live; if I die, I die. I asked Durmugam what he said then. Durmugam said: Well, fuck you." The use of English for expression in such crises had become common in the area. It was a means of appeal to a wider world, a new code, and a new scale of values.

Stanner’s last visit in 1958 saw the old man in deep troubles. His favourite wife had run off with the son of his first wife (a great humiliation to a man still alive). A married daughter had been abducted by a youth whom Durmugam had long befriended and he had lost contact with his granddaughter (the apple of Durmugam’s eye). Another wife had been sexually assaulted by a number of men (on the ground that she had illicitly seen a bullroarer in Durmugam’s camp – a pretext, he said vehemently, a lie. Would he, who knew the dangers, be likely to have a bullroarer there? They were all hidden in the bush).

He was unable to resort to justice under Aboriginal law for these grievances, yet none of his appeals to the authorities could right these wrongs for him either (The young men were ‘flash’ (out of hand, conceited), not listening to anyone, not caring for anything. Much trouble would come from this, trouble for everyone. He grieved over the unfilial conduct of his son. Who ever heard of a son running away with his mother? Who ever heard of a son helping another man to abduct a married sister?).

In discussing the wider context of the official policy of assimilation, Stanner notes that the old contempt of previous generations of white Australians for Aboriginal people had by this time receded in favour of a new solicitude which animated the new policy, and he pinpoints the locus of Durmugam’s crisis:

But old contempt and new solicitude have a common element: a kind of sightlessness towards the central problems of what it is to be a blackfellow in the here-and-now of Australian life. For this reason hundreds of natives have gone through, and will go through, the torment of powerlessness which Durmugam suffered.

Durmugam passed into a new epoch whose defining condition was the torment of powerlessness. Stanner observes:

The secularisation was far-reaching and corrosive, psychically and socially. The young man’s remark, If I live, I live; if I die, I die, had seemed to Durmugam monstrous. To him, how a man lived and what he lived for were of first importance. But he himself had in part succumbed. He now spent much time playing poker for money (there were five aces in one of his packs