Apartheid without the D

It was an amazing party.
Incredibly silly brain bending stuff - creations of all kind happening everywhere in every possible form.

the room scattered with giant crawl-through vaginas and sphincters as a a turd took a flying leap from a high ladder into a toilet far below.

Lots of bum jokes, wee jokes, a giant elephant and inside out man.

My kind of stuff. completely.

Except, well.... when the 'joke' came. From a 9 foot foam pith helmet caricature of itself.

"What do you call Aparthed without the D?"

"A Partay"

And then the words echoing back on the white bubble in which the party was encased, literally, mirroring back on the mostly beige laughing faces, or the beige silent faces, or on the handful of less beige, more brown faces - whom I knew all by name - literally in this city where I know almost no-one.

And I realised where I was. In another white bubble created against the dark night of this suburb of colour where I live.

Apartheid - without the D - the death, the state sanctioned violence - but a whitey partay none the less.

I bought a drink and stepped outside the white bubble to stare into the dark night. I had felt so happy to find something of a semblance of what I left in Sydney five blocks from my house, and then the nasty shock of who I was and where I was hit me.

The white hot air balloon sheathe encasing a room full of groovey artie pale skinned hipsters, walling off a suburb of refugees from Angola, Burundi, Mozambique and other nations copping the fallout of white South Africa in the 1960s to the 1990s, and walling off the still very much living pain of apartheid, to enforce a metaphorical apartheid - where alternative culture becomes a way that whites do culture, and culture does whites, where to be white here, ensconses us and I mean me into an urban colonisation of culturally and socially mobile whites into cheap popular suburbs of colour.

And I wondered how different is this to the high paling fence separating my Mum and her Ngarabal neighbours, and the border clashes (lost footballs, broken bottles and roaming dogs) she regales me with and the bodily habits in hicktown of being not black, not brown in a racist town. (White people do not walk the streets in the country).

and if this is where I've ended up after 22 years of leaving the country then why bother leaving?

Maybe it was a one off. Maybe I was reading too much into it.

A month later I went to another artyparty 10 blocks from my house, in the heart of cool coloured suburbia. I'd already come down in the morning to stock up on fresh fruit and veggies in my Nanna cart, meat from the "thiem thit" store, lychees from the "Pham" store, weaving between the indochinese elders doing coffee on the street cafes and the African women in dayglo burquas lugging kids, groceries and themselves along the street, and loving food and people and food and life.....

A few hours later, the suburb is transformed, shops are closed, families are at home, streetlife is minimal. I climbed stairs to a white box above the major shopping strip to support my local indie artspace, because this is what I want to do. These are the people I want to meet, to collaborate with, to show/perform with.

Everyone looks eerily like myself - only thinner, and with more facial hair. The women all wore dresses. Not exactly genderqueer, and again, 95% white.

the event is fun, people are friendly. The art is a mixed bag and there is an MC entertaining the supportive community crowd.

and he makes a joke, about the "Local triads" . In the same suburb where 2 blocks away "Footscray By night" reinvented Karaoke as community cultural development and Vienglish detournements of men at work songs IN THIS AMAZING VIDEO which is the best thing I've seen all year and was made right near where I work....

And I want to fall through the floor with shame.

and I don't know where to start challenging these people or these spaces. to insist that there is a different way of doing whiteness in suburbs of colour than in the ghetto model which seems to prevail.

Have I described the street of white picket fences next to where we live? or the 3 suburbs south of the train line where all the white people go? or the goldfish shopfronts of gorgeous gourmet or bespoke designerwear which demarcate the white bodies from the brown bodies in the adjacent restaurants and shops?

I'm sick of whingeing about Helbournia, and whingeing about the white middle class on which I so precariously balance on the edge of, because I'm implicated in it, I'm part of it, and it in me, and I have to own this and work to make whiteness something other than a displacing privilege of bad power relations.

This is still not my home, yet in making it my home, in settling here, I'm doing my best to be an unsettling presence. To break the bodily habits of how whiteys do whiteness here, but it is uncharted territory, so strange and so hard sometimes.

Feeding time....

My brain is a bit schermuzzled lately, due to rigours of wjerking life and other stuff.
I've seen a bit of A R T - most notably Sarah Fields show (sigh) at Gallery Smith - not to mention Adam Norton's ghostly reminders of non-lieus past and present. I'm tempted to digress on a tangent of pataphsyics and nostalgia, but want to hold back, just a bit.
Recent delights included visiting the White Elephant Gallery garage sale and scoring a BAT SUIT! The perfect outfit for watching TV on the beanbag during a full moon! not to mention running around at night in. Once I work out how to cycle in it - BELIEVE ME I'LL BE UNSTOPPABLE!!!
And on a brief foray to my northern home, i had the joy of discovering PLUMP GALLERY, an artists' run space full of incredible delights. I saw the work of the running artist, Willurei Kirkbright Burney in 2006, and wrote about it here. So I was pretty delighted to see her running an entire space.

and oh! the divinity of sugar wax crystal dripping, chocolate doll music box turning, with freaky ninja dudes in background, multiply performative, hair in my cake, extreme delight was intoxicating and a perfect way to end my thirties.

Back in Melbourne I had the delight of attending the Peril launch at Hares and Hyenas. I wandered in just as Benjamin Laird started his poetry performance. I've linked to the printed version of the poems here, but I'm not sure how it conveys the richness of the words, shimmering and his voice's cadences and pauses actually worked to expand the spaces between the words, where meaning emerged and expanded beyond itself into other possibilities. My dear friends, this is the space of poetry, and probably the first time I've ever witnessed it being performed so eloquently.

Despite the lack of Schappylle Scragg stage birthing, this launch was mercifully free of pompous black skivvied white male poets driveeling stylised conceptualist xenophobic prattles. However there was a slightly similar beige shadow of cringe, passing over Rosemary's John's reading. I don't think I'm particularly enlightened on the racial front, but I'm regularly astonished by the continued exoticisation/eroticisation orientalist twang of other white writers. Is Edward Said really that obscure? or, you know, Belle Hooks? When pale hands type what blue eyes see about the bodies and spaces occupied by those with differently pigmented skin, surely it's not too much to expect just a little critical reflexivity? huh?

Funnily enough Lia Incognita's performed parts of her publish essay in a manner which did include a lot of critical reflexivity and aside from my ethnophenomenological gushings, made me wonder why it is that this attentniveness to positionality and the nuances of identity, and of self and others - only comes from those observers and writers whose position in the world is made so blatantly uncomfortable.


And Thuy Lich Nguyen's piece got me thinking about where I'm living and what I'm doing here. I wonder a lot about the Footscray whitewash, as I stroll scowling past the new wine bar on the corner - which looks like a weird apartheid fishbowl of white only clients, in a street full of south asian eateries, crammed with bodies of multiple hues and sizes....And as much as I like to laugh at the juxtaposition of Braybrook trailor trash and Yarraville gay boys rubbing shoulders at the central west plaza, or about the time I heard Parisian tourists in Braybrook Aldi, I look at my own pale skin, consider my own status and that of my professional partner in the home that we own, and I wonder about our own implication in the changes that are taking place here. hmmmm, but that is perhaps a story for another space.

Back to whingeing, I've witness a few celebrations of some of my Melbourne friends and aquaintances and connections; weddings, baby showers etc. significant emotional formal times - where biological and chosen families congregate to mark traditional moments in non traditional ways. And I wonder about this need for novelty, to break away from traditional ways of doing things, the ways parents or grandparents would have done them..... within contexts and social groupings that are entirely homogenous in class, sexual orientation and cultural/ethnic background. Renaissance wife were trying to discern the vomit factor in looking at the pictures of a straight white couple in a quasi Hindu Bollywood outfits for their straight white wedding. Not to mention the invocation of Hawaiian chants and singing among a circle of young white urban hetties - for god only knows what purpose. I didn't get to ask if any of them wanted to hold the party at Smorgys or in a Tiki Bar or some more established (and aesthetic) setting for white appropriate of Polynesian culture. and then I was totally bamboozled by THREE or FOUR references to gifts of African Beads as a way of honouring a woman's 'earthiness'.... Because, you know, I was in Australia at the time, with no Africans or clear reference to Africa or Africans that were evident, axcept for my random speculation that the referees thought Africans are dirt or dirty perhaps?

So - as my 2 year posting as a visual ethnographer among Culturally and Lingistically Diverse communities comes to an end, I'm still curious about how and where and why I am in the world as I am, and what kinds of connections I am/could be/want to be fostering, when so much racist inequality still exists and thrives.

Alien Invasion

I was pondering the doom and gloom of the impending APEC circus and wondering if I should maybe offer myself up lemming like to the spectacle of state sponsored terrorism - or if I should somehow miraculously organise a mass mobilisation in CROYDON - and then the missive below landed in my inbox.

a bit bloody full on.... err... anyone got any media /pollie contacts?

It also reminds me that being able to choose our exposure to police brutality is a bit of a privilege innit?


> > Subject: house raids without warrants in NT

FYI- This has gone to the 7.30 report and several newspapers. please circulate.

Dear Kerry O'Brien and 7.30 researchers,

I have just returned from the Northern Territory. I want John Howard to explain why house to house raids without warrants are being conducted by the AFP in all the Alice Springs town camps.

I also want to know why at least two of the senior women who toured major cities speaking out against a uranium waste dump on their traditional lands have been raided by the AFP on warrants issued by a Federal Magistrate in Canberra, their furniture slashed with knives, belongings damages, laptops and mobile phones seized, and phones tapped. I was told by one of the women that the warrant gave 12 hours access to her home, and that she was told that the measures were justified because of the security crackdown for APEC ministers. One of those women is an elderly grandmother.

I have also been told by town camp residents that the AFP has set up surveillance on all households in the town camps,and have photographed without consent, every Aboriginal child in those town camps. In the 1990s the AFP were successfully taken to court for exactly the same violations in Redfern.
Please report on this disgraceful conduct, and pursue a full explanation from the Howard Government.
regards,
Jennifer Martiniello
Member, Advisory Board
Australian Centre for Indigenous History,
Australian National University

It's time to SCREAM

I've posted up some of the stuff I've received about Johnny H's new ruse to resume indigenous genocide/ecocide policies in central australia because actually it makes me so heartsick that I can barely speak.

I can't even laugh about it, or turn it into fodder for CACA or schappylle scragg and
I think it is the appropriation of child sexual abuse in the interests of really nasty racism, that is breaking my heart the most.

So i'm joining the posse and heading down to cnutberra myself on saturday morning - straight after kooky for the: protest 11am on 14 July, Tent Embassy to Parliament House Canberra.


I'm *sick* of the way I "cope" with AUSSIE fascism largely by avoidance: avoiding the media, avoiding talking about, reading about, thinking about and admitting how bloody terrible it is.

i HATE how the mass media lies, and my attempts at indifference form a silence that enters into me. the way that my disgust and rage at the racism of the current government destroys my own capacity to articulate the words that might break this horrible deadening violence.

I'm not denying that there is most likely shocking levels of sexual violence in indigenous communities - but if I really thought the men in suits of canberra gave a flying fuck about children and women getting raped I'd be tempted to think that running tanks into northern territory communities *might* have some purpose - other than dispersing, dividing and destroying aboriginal society even more.

I'm also always amazed how the mock moral outrage about sexual violence gets used among men in their own games of power and status. I *don't* see any difference between jailbirds bahsing and raping 'rock spiders' and so called 'good' men condemning and legislating against what are usually weaker, more abject, black, poor, inept, drunk men ... Sexual abuse of women and children occur at every level of australian society and in every suburb, including marrickville and mosman.

white middle class men don't call their kids 'cnuts' in the middle of the street, they don't hit them in public and don't throw loud drunken parties where the neighbours call the cops - but they DO beat their wives and fuck their daughters and their sons. and they do it a lot. the only thing that stops them is allowing white women and children to have enough financial and emotional independence so they can fight back/get out and get over this kind of crap.....

I keep thinking about the old Reclaim the Night chant: "break the silence about sexual violence" - and it makes me want to do a detournement:
"about racist violence"
"about eco-violence"
"about legal violence"

and it reminds me of che guevara's deinfition of solidarity: recongising that your own liberation (mine from the silence of childhood sexual violence) depends on fighting for the liberation of others (native title and indigenous self determination).

as a feminist, it is absolutely in my interests to STOP the tanks and defend indigenous communities right to heal from two centuries of genocide and dispersal and to maintain connections with each other and with their land.

who's coming on saturday?


Call to rally in protest at Howard's military interventions on Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory - please forward to your networks and join us on 14th July 2007 at 11am, marching from the Tent Embassy to New Parliament House, Canberra.


When questioned about the detail of the Government's plans for Indigenous communities in NT Howard said yesterday (Wednesday) that they were working on it? and the legislation would be ready in a few days.? - Legislation????? -Since when does it require legislation to provide a comprehensive community based response to the 97 recommendations of the Little Children are Sacred report?? Since when does it require legislation for teams of doctors, nurses and counsellors to work in Aboriginal communities with those communities? Only if Howard is about to make his stated grab for the lands of up to 70 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory would legislation under the federal race powers act be required. He has made no secret of the fact that if he deems it necessary the Government would compulsorily acquire those lands.


Mal Brough also stated yesterday that, still in spite of the recommendations, he is still pushing for sexual health tests of Aboriginal children, saying he is looking into ways in which parents could be 'encouraged' to give parental consent. Coerced would be a more appropriate term, especially as Brough says a pecuniary solution might be considered. Does he really think we will sell our children's safety and wellbeing? It is becoming horribly clear what the role of the army and police is to be on those communities, to take over, quell dissent and protest at the legislative theft of their lands, and remove dissenters from their lands once the legislation is passed. The WA Premier is to be congratulated on his level-headed approach in refusing to send police and sending health care and counselling teams instead. His clarity in seeing through the agenda behind the Howard solution is commendable and we call upon the Leader of the Oppostion, Kevin Rudd, and all other State Premiers to follow his example, and to reject Howard's proposed legislation.


And let's send our thoughts and voices of support to those 30,000 plus Aboriginal men and women whose jobs, education programs and vocational training through CDEP in urban and major rural centres, will be gone on 1 July, eliminated by John Howard. To act in a manner that disenfranchises, discriminates against and willfully disadvantages a race of people is, by definition, racism. It is to take away people's Human Rights and their rights under Australian Common Law.