#12: "Doreen Kartinyeri: My Ngarrindjeri Calling" by Doreen Kartinyeri and Sue Anderson

[sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com]

Doreen Kartinyeri: My Ngarrindjeri Calling by Doreen Kartinyeri and Sue Anderson (2008, Aboriginal Studies Press)

"This book is not a comprehensive account of Dr Doreen Kartinyeri's life, and particularly not of the Kumarangk affair. It is the way Doreen saw it; they way shee remembers or doesn't remember it. Certain issues and evens were simply not important to her and so don't feature strongly in her account, if at all. It is Doreen's personal recollection of events in her life, and some episodes may be remembered differently by others."

This quote - from the first paragraph of Sue Anderson's "Afterword" to the book, co-authored with Kartinyeri but published after her death - sums up what might be considered the second in a series of "questioned history" reads. Only in neither case (the other being Show Way, so far) am I questioning anything.

I remember the day the High Court judgement in Kartinyeri v Commonwealth was handed down. I took the copy of The Age to the bench where my friend Pennie and I generally met for lunch, and we cried together as we read that all the judges except Kirby and Gaudron JJ had rejected Kartinyeri's arguments. And we railed at the system together, too.

This book tugged at the heartstrings. There was little in this book that I didn't know, intellectually. But what hurt was sometimes Kartinyeri's own... naivete? Trustingness? Her faith in whitefella law actually hurt. Probably because we really hadn't and probably never will live up to it. And knowing that if it had been Men's Business rather than Women's Business there might have been a chance…

I ended up changing the order of the authors listed on GoodReads because to me it sounded much more like Kartinyeri's voice. It is from her point of view, but even more importantly, it is in her voice. For the greater part of this book, I've been reading it while at other times of the day listening to a Mosely audiobook, and the connections between the two have been a little startling to me. One of those connections was about language. I'll admit I found the first few chapters of the Kartinyeri book extremely hard going, in part because of the tendency of Kartinyeri to jump around a bit in her thoughts. As I read further I grew to apprecieate what she was doing, and how the narrative reflected her thought processes.

For anyone who even vaguely remembers the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Case, I'd recommend getting your hands on a copy of this book. I had already decided that if I was ever nearby, I would *not* travel over that bridge: my parents (who *have* been to Goolwa) made the same decision. Reading this book has only strengthened that resolves.

We have a hard-headed whitefella culture, worshipping money over all else. For my own sake as much as for Kartinyeri and her people's, I wish and pray that it were otherwise. And I pray that Kartinyeri now rests in her own conception of peace.

Comments

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

Any chance of some expansion on this. I've been reasearching on the web for the last few and I'm still baffled.

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

Here, check this out to get a rough idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindmarsh_Island_bridge_controversy

and then this for the chronology:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AboriginalLB/1996/64.html

[b-writes.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[sweet-adelheid.livejournal.com]

The chronology finishes in 1996 with the release of the Matthews report. Following that (roughly, and without specific dates as I haven't the time right now):

* Change of Federal Government in Australia
* Federal Government passes the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Act, overriding any legal impediments or objections to the building of the bridge.
* Dorreen Kartinyeri and others go to the High Court of Australia arguing that the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Act is an illegitimate use of Commonwealth powers under the Constitution
* High Court decides in the Commonwealth Government's favour. (Pennie and I are appalled by the judgment, amongst many others - Kartinyeri v Commonwealth becomes a key case in Australian constitutional law that I certainly studied and as far as I know is still studied and cited, mostly out of context (~sigh~ but that's law for you))
* Bridge is built
* The Bridge developers sue a number of whitefellas (who were involved in Robert Tickner's original 25 year ban on the bridge) for compensation in the Federal Court. As part of that, Judge von Doussa realises that he has to weigh evidence as to whether or not the Women's Business was fabricated - as was charged by the Developers. Von Doussa finds, among other things, that there is not compelling evidence that the Women's Business was fabricated, and further ('cause I've just looked up his judgment) that just because whitefellas find something hard to understand doesn't mean it's not true. (Fabulous line).
* In 2001 around the same time as the von Doussa judgment, the bones of two females, probably a mother and daughter, more than 200 years old and thus definitely indigenous people and probably Ngarrindjeri, are found while work is being done on the Goolwa wharf. The remains are returned to the Ngarrindjeri people for proper burial, and the discovery of the remains prompts a formal apology to the Ngarrindjeri people, particularly the women, for the way the Goolwa area council behaved towards them in relation to the bridge affair.