Building more than water tanks

Most of us with strong opinions on the rights and wrongs of Aboriginal Australia have never been in the remote places where these are most pronounced. As a new MP, I was in that position; so given the importance of Aboriginal Australia in our national story, I decided that I should become better informed.

That started in 1994 and 1995, spending a week each year in and around Alice Springs. It continued with regular week-long trips to outback Australia, as employment minister in the Howard government, especially to Cape York; and then as health minister, to the APY lands in South Australia, for which my departments had “whole of government” responsibility for coordinating federal services.

Early in 2008, after becoming shadow minister for Indigenous affairs, I called Noel Pearson, confessed that I’d visited dozens of Aboriginal settlements over the years, but had hardly spent longer than 18 hours in any of them, and asked if he would sponsor longer trips where I could actually be useful as opposed to being a glorified tourist. I was conscious of not being a “seagull”, the term I’d first heard years earlier in Wujal Wujal, to describe “white guys who fly in, shit on us, and then disappear”. What followed, in subsequent years, was three weeks as a teacher’s aide in Coen, 10 days as a truancy assistant in Aurukun, five days as a builder’s assistant in Hope Vale in 2011 and a long weekend (along with about a dozen business leaders) refurbishing the Aurukun school library.

Then as PM, I took about a dozen ministers and departmental heads to East Arnhem Land in 2014, and in 2015 to the Torres Strait, so that – for a week each year – remote Australia was not just the government’s focus but its main location. Although nothing can really substitute for fully-lived experience, immersion-even-for-a-week gives a far better sense of the reality on the ground than meetings and briefing papers, plus flying visits.

After leaving Parliament, what I had always intended to happen most years, was interrupted by COVID, and then the Voice campaign. So I was very grateful when Nova Peris, the first Aboriginal Olympic gold medallist, the first Aboriginal woman in Parliament and former Labor senator, agreed to have me visit Bawaka; a former outstation, described as “arguably the most iconic site in East Arnhem Land”, where her kinsman, Timmy Djawa Burarrawanga, is the traditional owner, and where her foundation is supporting a water project.