A CULTURE OF COMMUNITY

Reducing the gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people

Lead researcher: Professor Claire Smith| College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

Main photo: Claire Smith's lifelong friend and colleague, Ngadjuri elder Vincent (Vince) Copley

You can never be sure what someone else is thinking. This is the number 1 lesson archaeologist Professor Claire Smith has taken away from 30 years of working with Indigenous communities. Of course, it’s a lesson in humanity: people can, and will, surprise you. It’s for this reason that archaeologists working with Indigenous cultural sites are always accompanied by, and consult, an Indigenous person. It’s the way Claire was trained to operate—although it was a new and unusual idea at the time. The Indigenous person can offer their unique perspective and, importantly, steer archaeologists away from secret or restricted-access sites. This way of working collaboratively also means forming friendships that last generations. These are the relationships that have seen Claire shift her focus from recording Indigenous rock art sites, to how she can make a positive impact in Indigenous communities in the areas of health, education and employment.

Claire doesn’t have a grand plan. Her research comes out of working with the same people for decades. After so many years, they will phone her up and say, ‘Are you bringing those students up? This year I want you to…’ write down an elder’s oral history; investigate who lived in 60s housing developments; look into current graffiti responses to government policy and intervention.

History is important to Indigenous people. They are oral historians—part of the oldest oral history tradition in the world, which can be traced back 60,000 years. In a world after colonisation and the devastation of Indigenous cultures, valuable cultures, ideas and ways of thinking are disappearing every day. Many are already lost to us forever. Claire thinks of herself as a tool to record the things people want recorded and help redress wrongs of the past. For Claire, it is also an experiment in letting go and seeing where Indigenous people will take her research. What are their priorities? What is important for them to record? How do they seek to fight the inequalities they experience?

That said, the best ideas come from conversation—from embellishing on each other’s thoughts to come up with something entirely new. It’s an intellectual richness that you can’t achieve on your own. When Claire and long-term friend and Ngadjuri elder Vincent (Vince) Copley put their minds together, they create projects with the power to truly make a difference.

When information is power

When Claire first met Vince, he wanted to get to know his country—Ngadjuri land in the mid north of South Australia, extending from Gawler to Orroroo—better. Each year Claire would lead ‘field schools’ where she took her Flinders students and any visiting post-doctorate scholars to help record sites—people from around the world: Romania, Croatia, Serbia. After years of work, the Ngadjuri people now have a great database of hundreds of sites which they can use when liaising with governments, developers and anyone else wanting access to their land. Even Claire, who doesn’t keep copies of the data, must request information through the same channel. Information is power. For the Ngadjuri people, the database gives them control over cultural information, how it’s protected and how (and to whom) it’s distributed. It also gives them a source of income as governments and developers seek information for their projects.

^{_{Our argument of shared intellectual property—particularly in the verbatim parts of a researcher’s field notes—is a global first. That’s where you get to be internationally cutting-edge, when you engage with people so closely that a new idea comes out.}}

Who owns our stories?

Vince Copley is the grandson of the last initiated Ngadjuri man, Barney Waria, who knew that Indigenous knowledge and culture were dying. With each generation, more was being forgotten. So, Barney told his stories. Stories about life when he was young, about sport and food, spirituality and cultural customs, songs and dances and art. He told them to an anthropologist-in-training, Ronald Bernt, who wrote them down word-for-word.

Many years later, after both men have died, Ronald’s field notes containing Barney’s words are stored at the Berndt Museum at the University of Western Australia under a 30-year embargo that will lift in 2024. The embargo was meant to protect Indigenous people from a government that couldn’t be trusted to safeguard, or even to respect, Aboriginal cultures in a pre-Mabo era. Today, it is an unfair barrier against Vince who seeks to get to know his lost loved one and ancestor’s history, and fill in the gaps of his cultural knowledge and identity. Vince is now an old man himself at 82-years-old, and he would like to read his grandfather’s memories and pass them down to his adult children before he dies.

For many years it was a heartache Vince struggled with on his own. But a conversation with Claire and her anthropologist husband, Gary 'Jacko' Jackson, led to a groundbreaking thought. Why should these verbatim notes belong entirely to Ronald, when they are the words, memories and experiences of Barney? Should there not be a shared intellectual property? It’s this argument that Claire, Vince and Jacko put forward in a recent Conversation article, sparking the interest of several lawyers offering to take the issue on pro bono.

^{_{After a while you can’t remember if your grandma was that grave or that other one, and a generation on from that (and generations are short) uncertainty grows.}}

Losing the people you love

All of Claire’s projects come from the heart: both hers and the community. That’s certainly obvious with Claire’s burial project in Barunga, NT.

If you’re an Aboriginal person in a community in Northern Territory, where you are buried is not recorded. There are no numbers or names. Almost every member of Barunga, a remote NT community, doesn’t know where all their loved ones are buried. They don’t know where to mourn. Sometimes they don’t know where to dig new graves.

You forget where people are buried. Claire admits that she has forgotten—that she has returned to visit graves, realising with horror that she can’t remember the row.

The community of Barunga started burying their dead in the 1960s. Prior to that, they practiced traditional lorrkon and rockshelter burials. Claire and her team are identifying newer graves by relying on community memory—by simply asking, who was buried here and when? The older ones can only be detected by a ground-penetrating radar and marked so they can be respected, even if we can’t know who was buried there.

New cemeteries legislation is being drafted in the NT and when it is released, experts expect it to require that graves be recorded not just in towns and cities. At that point, people and resources will be needed to mark and record graves in areas that have long been neglected. It’s a positive step forward, but the idea of consultants being paid to go into communities and do this work drives Claire crazy. Why not train and pay Indigenous people, for whom the unemployment rate is rising—pushing them even further from the national average for non-Indigenous people? You don’t need to be an archaeologist to use a tape measure and a data base, and Aboriginal people are better at interviewing other Aboriginal people than those without a shared culture. That’s why Claire has established Grave Concerns—training a group of eight Indigenous people in archaeological techniques, using the births and deaths registrar, and everything else they need to know to record graves. When the new legislation comes into effect, they’ll have the skills to do it—and not just for their own community. And when the next person dies, the community will be able to say ‘This is grave #172 and in that grave is...’

Professor Claire Smith

Lost in translation

Claire loves photos. She loves looking at the faces of the people she’s met and loved. As she takes you through the family folders on her laptop, many of those faces are of people who’ve died young. Two thirds of Indigenous people will die before the age of 65, compared to 19% of non-Indigenous people. Indigenous children are two times more likely to die during early childhood as non-Indigenous children. Australia has set seven targets (laid out in the Closing the Gap report) for improving the lives of Indigenous people in health, education and employment by 2031. In the Northern Territory, we’re on track with just three of them.

Again and again, Claire sees her Indigenous friends dying from preventable diseases, denied opportunities, and discriminated against. Just recently she lost a dear friend: Margaret.

Margaret had diabetes and needed dialysis. If they’d said to her, ‘If you don’t go on dialysis you’ll be dead in three months,’ she would have done it. If they’d told her husband, she would have done it. She was intelligent. But she didn’t know she was going to die in a few months. Nobody told her clearly. She spoke just enough English to hide how little she understood.

It’s not an uncommon story. Claire has plenty like it. It’s a terrible consequence of the language and cultural barriers between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.

There’s a death avoidance culture in medicine and nursing in this country, and Aboriginal people don’t want to talk about it either. So we don’t. We talk in euphemisms. We say someone ‘passed’ (Did they pass by? Visit for an hour?) or that they were ‘lost’ (Is someone out looking for them?). Put the two cultures together and you have two systems of avoidance. We think we’ve communicated information, but we haven’t. It’s this loss that’s taken Claire a long way from recording rock art. Her next big project—the focus of the rest of her career, she promises—will be focused on closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in health, education and employment. Claire is pulling together a team of Flinders researchers to work with the Royal Flying Doctor Service to bring the services Aboriginal communities want into remote communities. They are driving a new and unusual employment structure where Aboriginal people are trained and employed to oversee their family’s health—drawing on already strong social bonds to create a healthier community. She hopes this work will help prevent stories like Margaret’s.

Friends that become family

Until this year, Claire’s house has been overrun with people. Jacko, who is 78-years-old, finally exclaimed, ‘Claire, I don’t want to be cooking for 10 people when I’m 80.’ He wasn’t exaggerating. At one point they had 12 people living in their humble suburban Adelaide home. It’s an unofficial refuge for their Aboriginal friends—people who are now family. They come for the city’s health care, jobs and schooling, and the love Claire and Jacko have to give. Just recently, the couple have seen three Aboriginal kids graduate from primary school. Claire and Jacko first worked with the kids’ great-grandmother on one side and great-great grandfather on the other. They’ve been living with Claire and Jacko since they were five, six and nine years old. Now two of them have amazing scholarships to Melbourne Indigenous Transition School where they’re learning tennis from Evonne Goolagong Cawley and dance from Bangarra Dance Theatre.

Next year Claire and Jacko will take in more kids; neither of them can resist. These young people are Claire’s hope for the future. They know their community. They regularly visit home, they speak Kriol, and they are equally competent in both cultures. Claire takes them around the world. She recounts a time she was strolling through Prague with Jasmine Willika, who came from the tiny community of Manyallaluk to undertake an archaeology degree at Flinders—a degree she will finish next year. The young Aboriginal woman, who Claire has known since birth and who Claire now teaches at university, said to her, ‘People say Paris is the city of love, but I think the city of love is Prague.’ Jasmine has been to Paris, Prague, Jordan, Japan, New Zealand… she no longer needs Claire to travel or to seek out the life she wants. For Claire, that is success.

How to make a change

You can’t untangle your work and relationships with Aboriginal people, and Claire would never want to. She plans to be buried in a marked, named and numbered grave in Barunga—in the corner right in front of where everyone parks their four-wheel drives. And in the meantime, she’ll keep trying to whittle away at the inequality gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.

She likes to say that it all comes down to what you can do within your own lifetime. The change you can make is so little, the needs so great, the challenge so overwhelming and the possibility for success so minimal. To make a difference, Claire does the little she can and trains others to do the same. Together, they can form a movement. Of course, most of us would say Claire is doing a lot to enact change. She’s influencing the lives of the people around her and setting up projects and ways of doing things that could make a difference on the large-scale.

Her husband says, ‘If you do nothing, nothing changes. If you do even just a little bit, it’s a lot in comparison to nothing.’ Claire doesn’t want to do nothing.

^{_{People who work long term with communities are uniquely placed to act as a conduit to help solve their issues, and that’s where I think we should be focusing our efforts.}}

Professor Claire Smith is a Professor of Archaeology at Flinders University. She previously lectured at Columbia University; is a former Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow with the American University, Washington, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History; and has been a visiting scholar at Cape Town University, the University of Denver, Lock Haven University and Kyushu University. As the twice-elected President of the World Archaeological Congress (2003-2014), Professor Smith established the Archaeologists without Borders and Global Libraries programs. She has raised over $3.8 million in funding for humanities research projects. Her areas of expertise include culturally informed sustainable development in Indigenous communities, Indigenous archaeology, rock art, gender, archaeological ethics, global archaeology and socially mediated terrorism.