“I
want to be good and have a nice family”.
 |
| It is images such as this with which the Kununurra Midnight Prowlers are associated. |
So
said Elise (not her real name), in a Radio National story about the “Kununurra Midnight
Prowlers”.
The
hopes of the young aboriginal girl said something about the endemic nature of
decency and the need to replicate that prevails in humanity despite seemingly intractable
disadvantages.
Elise
is one of a “family” of young aboriginals who gather on the streets of the
northern Western Australian town at dusk and as a “Prowler” roams the town’s streets
causing trouble, damage, drinking and smoking, and, as dawn approaches,
disappears.
To
“be good” and have a “nice family” are, or course subjective and from my view
and that of Elise, distorted by “white fella” values. Elise’s hopes might fall
well short of what many consider “good” and “nice”.
Her
hopes though should never be disparaged though for within them is something
that surges within all of us: a striking need to procreate and do it within the
norms of the culture in which we are embedded.
Therein
lies much of the trouble for Elise, for like most of her fellow “Prowlers”, she
lives astride two cultures; that into which she was born having been destroyed
while the offered replacement is ineffective, ineffectual and inadequate
leaving Elise and her fellows trapped and living in a vacuum - a detention
centre without the razor wire.
Elise
says she has stopped using marijuana and intends to break her smoking habit,
but the malaise of uncertainty brought on through living with two inherently
different cultures begets social havoc in Kununurra, and for Elise and her
fellows.
Elise
and her indigenous counterparts have been rushed, in what is a blink of time,
from tribalism where they had recognition and respect to the individualism of
modern western life where they have everything, but nothing.
The
chasm between what was and what is seems impassable to the likes of the Prowlers
presenting the Federal Government’s intended 400 plus truancy officers for
indigenous communities with challenges in which traditional solutions, or
disciplines, are unlikely to have much effect.
To
break a person’s connection with their culture is socially disruptive and so it
seems that in some way, regardless of whatever cultures align themselves, that
prime among the hierarchy of needs to be answered must be the preservation of a
person’s understood ways of living.
As
it stands the challenge is with the indigenous people, in this instance the
Kununurra Midnight Prowlers, but in reality it is with us, the “Johnny-come-latelies”
to this continent, and in ensuring our cultural connections, we need to modify
our behaviours and so allow indigenous people maintain theirs and live
fulfilled lives.
Living
close to their culture, they can be “good and have a nice family”.
