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Frank
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Although the local clan members were born, grew up and lived for decades alongside a major multinational mining and smelting enterprise, and although managers of the industry tried time and again to employ and train them, the Aborigines were not interested in white man’s work. When journalist Paul Toohey of the Australian Financial Review was at Nhulunbuy in 2014, he asked how many of its employees had been recruited from the local clans. “In all the years that Rio had mined bauxite and refined alumina on the Yolngu lands,” he reported, “the operation has produced only one qualified Aboriginal apprentice.”
The consequences of this lethargic culture were described frankly in 2012 by Steven Etherington, who spent twenty-three years as an Anglican vicar at the Oenpelli community in Arnhem Land:
Tribal Aborigines are a “kept” people: they are no longer required to grow or find their own food, are never required to become educated, never required to build their own homes, or buy their own vehicles. They are never required to accept global human rights standards, or even to adhere, in practice, to many of the laws of the state … The vast majority of adults are never required to learn anything, or to do anything. Erosion of the capacity for initiative and self-help are virtually complete. Most adults spend a large part of their time drinking or playing cards, paid by some form of unemployment or social security benefit. Most buy food from take-away sections of the community shops. The majority do not cook meals any more. They are not under any pressure to learn English beyond the basics needed to interact as dependants of the state.
This is the real legacy of Galarrwuy Yunupingu, the purported hero of the movement for land rights. The economic system he has installed in the Gove Peninsula will come to a dead end once the mine shuts down. Unlike the white miners, managers and tradesmen who can move on to other projects with their skills intact, the Aborigines will be tied to the existing land by their traditional culture and habits.
The Yunupingu view of how to manage economic affairs was based on using politics to gain the right to charge rents to big corporations. He persuaded politicians and the news media to influence the judiciary to support his view of Aboriginal economic activity. Of the rents paid to community organisations under his charge, very little was ever spent on investment and very much on conspicuous consumption by the local Aboriginal elite. Yunupingu acted like an aristocrat from a feudal society, the Lord of the Manor doling out morsels to his grateful tenants. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/08-online/galarrwuy-yunupingu-lord-of-the- manor-2/
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