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Dave and Bess at home in Alice Springs: 'My wife's a fighter. If somebody has a go at her, she comes out swinging.' Picture: Adam Knott Source: The Australian |
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A survivor who keeps on fighting
Bess Price
IT is October 1960 and a newborn baby's cry breaks the silence of the central Australian desert on the outskirts of an Aboriginal settlement called Yuendumu (in the Northern Territory).
She is born as Warlpiri children have always been born, under a tree in the bush. Her skin name is Nungarrayi. She can also be called Yunkaranyi Jukurrpa, Honey Ant Dreaming, after the place her child spirit came from. But there is no romanticism here. It is a hard world that she has been born into. Central Australia is in drought. She is the ninth child her mother has carried; four have died in infancy in the previous decade. She is tiny, sickly looking, the "runt of the litter", as she will later describe herself.
Her mother, Clara Nakamarra France, makes a decision that is as old and harsh as the desert. She decides to leave the baby girl where she has been born, to be killed by a snake. The child survives only because an Aboriginal midwife known as Old Maudie intervenes, handing the baby to Clara's sisters-in-law to raise. It is the first intervention in the life of the Intervention Woman.
Bess Nungarrayi Price is sitting in a dry creek bed near Alice Springs. It is a warm autumn day and she is in the small shade of a burned tree, legs crossed under her skirt, feet bare, staring at the coarse sand. "When Mum gave birth to me, I think she had just had enough of giving birth to babies," she says. "Well, you can imagine … she's had all these kids and lost a few on the way and her body and her mind wasn't stable enough to look after me. I remember her telling me, 'I left you for a snake to bite you.' I just couldn't believe it at the time. I thought, 'OK, that's what you thought of me.' But I [also] thought, 'Well, I'm still here and I survived' … That's how my life began."
She pauses long enough for the memory, then pitches on through the tumult of her life: raised in humpies, promised in marriage at birth, pregnant at 13 to a young man who grew to like the taste of bashing her, falling in love with a white man, the death of a son whose memory casts her into silence.
She talks about the strength of her sisters, the wasteful deaths of her brothers and the apology from her mother, that she should never have left her newborn to be killed. She says she loved her mother and was with her when she died. She cries while remembering her father. "My father was wonderful," she says, reaching for a scarf that is draped over her knees and holding it to her eyes. "He was such a good man." While her mother was "the quiet one", her father was curious about how the world was changing. "My Dad, he just wanted to learn," she says. "He was eager to learn about white people and wanted to learn about how to get on and make changes."
Skip down to read further about Bess's childhood
At 51, Price is also hell-bent on "getting on and making changes". Over the past five years, she has become one of the most controversial — and determined — women in Australia. The publication in 2007 of the Little Children are Sacred report on the sexual abuse of children in the Northern Territory, and her outspoken support for the Howard Government's shock-and-awe response to it — troops on the ground, medical checks, income management, increased policing, new alcohol restrictions, the removal of customary law considerations in court sentencing and the threat of new forms of land tenure — propelled her to national attention. Price was given a platform and she used it to say that Aboriginal communities were in crisis.
"The intervention came and turned everything upside down for our people to take a look at what the real problems were, because they weren't admitting that there were all these problems and it was getting worse and worse and worse for our people," she says. "We were living in denial. There was petrol-sniffing, there was suicide, there was ganja. I have heard stories of people showing their children pornography … and child abuse. Our children were being abused."
She has been vilified by the progressive left and she has in turn accused them of not understanding the sometimes vicious reality of life in Aboriginal communities; of having a "Disneyland" idea of Aboriginal culture and too little concern for indigenous women and children. When opponents complained that the intervention (which has been substantially continued under the Rudd and Gillard governments) was degrading and racist and a breach of human rights, Price questioned whose human rights were imperilled. When they argued for a more nuanced and respectful approach, she said political correctness paved the way to abuse. "You need to listen to the voices that are usually drowned out by the strong, the noisy and the powerful," she says. "You need to find a way to listen to those who don't speak English, who are the most marginalised and victimised in our communities … If you really want us to have human rights then you have to find ways to protect the victims of black crime as well as white crime."
The criticism was swift and personal. When Price appeared on the ABC's Q&A program last year, indigenous academic Larissa Behrendt tweeted that she had been watching a show (Deadwood) where a man had sex with a horse and she was sure it was less offensive than Price. In the furious row that followed, influential indigenous academic Marcia Langton sided forcefully with Price, describing her as "a first-hand witness of terrifying violence against women" and describing her critics as "twittering sepia-toned Sydney activists" and "city-slicker Aborigines". The conservative magazine Quadrant called Price "an exceptional Aborigine" who "stands out against the pack in an Aboriginal industry suffocating with pretenders".
For her part, Price is politely dismissive of those who have spoken out against the intervention, which include peak Aboriginal organisations, the churches, welfare organisations, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, former Chief Justice of the Family Court Alastair Nicholson and former Supreme Court judge Frank Vincent, who have all described the intervention as racist. "They don't know anything about our people who live out here with the mangy dogs," Price says. "They're 'sophisticated' people. They think they know us and they think they can tell the rest of the world what is best for us."
It is Price's determination in the face of criticism that has won her admirers within Aboriginal communities, government and among those who began as idealists and have become harsh realists. She is hoping to build on that support to become a conservative Country Liberal Party member of the Northern Territory parliament for the seat of Stuart, a vast electorate that's bigger than Victoria and spans the Tanami desert, the traditional home of her people, the Warlpiri. After a lifetime of voting Labor, she has become the latest high-profile disenchanted Aboriginal convert to the conservative side of politics. Her opponent is Karl Hampton, the NT minister for natural resources, environment and heritage, parks and wildlife, climate change, sport and recreation, information, communications and technology policy, and central Australia — and her nephew.
Price was recruited to politics by the indigenous politician Alison Anderson, a one-time minister in the NT Labor Government who switched to the CLP. Over a late-night coffee in Alice Springs, in a conversation punctured by the wail of rolling drunks, Anderson says she believes Aboriginal people are returning to the conservatism of earlier generations and that Price will be a formidable candidate. "Bess is a fantastic woman, you know," she says. "She's strong and I guess that strength is because of where she came out of. She was raised in a humpy at Yuendumu and the fact that she has her language, law and culture … that builds the foundation and the strength that she is showing to all of Australia today. You will see great things being done by this woman."
Yuendumu, a strife-torn Warlpiri community three hours northwest of Alice Springs on the Tanami Track, has been racked by internal violence over the past two years that has spilled viciously into the town camps of Alice Springs. It began after a young man was given a football jumper and subsequently died of leukaemia, which was attributed by some people to sorcery. In the mayhem that followed, a 21-year-old member of the Watson family, a father of four, died after he was stabbed in the leg with a knife. Traditional payback was demanded and avoided. Clans rioted. Families fled to escape violence and the threat of it. But still it goes on.
This is where Bess Price was born and raised. It is the epicentre of everything she believes is broken in Aboriginal Australia. A desert settlement of breeze-block homes and rubbish-strewn yards, it has the desolate look of the shadowlands about it; as she moves about the community, talking quietly in Warlpiri, she remembers it as a more vibrant and harmonious place in her youth. Too many strong people have passed away, she says. And too few have replaced them.
"We are tired of the feuding and the violence," she adds. "Most of us want Yuendumu to get back to normal." She talks to children in the street. Some of them speak only Warlpiri and she says she fears for them if they are raised without the ability to cope in the wider world or to communicate abuse or neglect. There is division in the community over the intervention, which she attributes to "misinformation". One of her uncles at Yuendumu, Harry Nelson, is an outspoken critic of the intervention, but she says kinship ties are stronger and deeper than political opinions.
A day's walk from Yuendumu, on an outstation called Kirrirdi, Price and her aunt, Tess Napaljarri Ross, pick bush raisins (yakajirri) and bush tomatoes (wanakiji) and settle themselves on chairs under a tree to talk, in English and Warlpiri. It ranges from the feuding at Yuendumu to a rose-coloured view of life before white men. "We walked in peace, through the days, through the nights," Ross says. "There was no problem, there was no hatred, just a good way that we were living. The old days was the best way of living our lives."
Price does not disagree, although her life has been its own ambivalent response. She believes the problems confronting the Warlpiri are the product of the chaos that followed the end of old ways. "Now we live in a world ruled by a new law that is not sacred, that does not accept that magic exists," she has said. "Now we are all equal citizens with human rights. Now we have property, houses, cars, grog, drugs, pornography. Now we live off welfare … The Two Laws, whitefella and blackfella, are based on opposing principles. My people are confused."
Price has sat in courts where both perpetrators and victims are members of her family. Her 14-year-old niece hanged herself. Her sister-in-law died from stab wounds to the head. Her granddaughter was killed in a town camp, stabbed by her ex-husband, Price's cousin. Three of her brothers drank themselves to death in Alice Springs town camps, which she calls places of sickness and self-destruction. "This is what we have to put up with every day," she says. "I think that us Aboriginal people carry all these problems with us, all these issues, all this trauma, all this sadness." In the year before the intervention, more than 30 deaths impacted on Price's family, which weighed heavily in her decision to support it.
While Gupapuyngu elder Mathew Dhulumburrk, at Ramingining in Arnhem Land, says people living under the intervention feel as though they're drowning, and Sydney activist Paddy Gibson says remote communities have deteriorated, Price says she wants to see a long intervention; she says it has brought improvements in housing, night patrols, child care, nutrition, community safety, child protection and employment opportunities. "And women now have a voice and a place in the community," she adds.
Asked about solutions, she sets out her manifesto. Real education based on real standards, rather than "culturally appropriate" standards; real jobs in the mining, tourism and pastoral industries; alcohol rehabilitation centres "in the bush rather than just in town where the grog outlets are"; and a tough approach on crime in a part of Australia where many of the victims of crime are Aboriginal women. "We still need to work very hard at reducing violence against women," she says. "Our kids still need to be protected from abuse and neglect. Communities need to be set up like normal towns with services and businesses to stop the drift to towns [like Alice Springs], which is disastrous for Aboriginal people and town residents." She says her people fill the jails without understanding the law, "what it is and why it is that way".
