Women's business
By Tracy Sorensen
Anthropologist Diane Bell tells the story of driving Aboriginal women to their home camp across the Central Australian desert. It was dark, and she took a wrong fork in the dirt track. Suddenly, she was told to stop and turn around. She decided to keep the car rolling forwards until she could find a good spot for a U-turn.
The old woman in the front passenger seat put her head down, "in exasperation I thought, but then from the back of the van came the voice of a young girl, 'Diane, you can't go down there, too much miyimi [son in law], no room.' As at the mad hatter's tea party there was plenty of room, but I caught the urgency of her voice and managed to turn around and return to the fork."
As an anthropologist and feminist, Bell made it her business to tune in as far as she could to the sensibilities of the women she was with: the notion that there was no room to move forwards in an endless expanse of desert did not seem absurd in the context of the traditional rule that mothers and sons-in-law must totally avoid each other.
From its pronouncements over the federal intervention against the construction of a dam on the Todd River near Alice Springs, it's clear that it suits the conservative Northern Territory government to remain with an attitude of belligerent ignorance.
What use is a stretch of land unless it has been capitalised? What value is there in dances, ceremonies and songs elaborating the dreamtime story of two women journeying from the south to the north, in a path which passes through the proposed dam site?
The NT government's appeal to racist ignorance was spelt out in a furious argument over the dam in March when NT minister for lands Max Ortmann stormed out of a meeting after telling an Aboriginal woman to "get off your fat bum and fix your grog problem".
Fortunately, in this case, the women won and the rednecks lost.
Meanwhile, the women's case reminds us of something feminist anthropologists and Aboriginal women themselves have being saying for a long time: that the common perception that ritual life in Aboriginal tribes was primarily "men's business" is utterly wrong.
As Diane Bell points out in Daughters of the Dreaming: "... it is women who keep the land alive and nurture the relationships of the living to the jukurrpa [dreaming]; it is through links established by women that knowledge is transmitted and ritual reciprocity established; and it is through women's interactions with the country that the jukurrpa is reaffirmed and activated. That desert society is a living, vibrant, dynamic culture is apparent when woman's ritual contribution to her society is explored."