Skyes, Roberta B. --- "Book Review - Worlds Apart: Life on an Aboriginal Mission" [1994] AboriginalLawB 35; (1994) 3(68) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 29

• Book Review-Worlds Apart: Life On An Aboriginal Mission

---

Book Review -

Worlds Apart: Life on an Aboriginal Mission

by Pat Keating

Hale & Iremonger, 1994

160 pp

Reviewed by Roberta B Skyes

In 1962, Neil Keating, along with wife, Pat, and their five children, drove to Yarrawina (a thinly disguised town in the north-west New South Wales) to take up an offer of a promotion in the education system. The school was located on an Aboriginal reserve, and although on their arrival it became immediately obvious they had been expected to live in a nearby town and for Neil to commute daily to his work, instead the family moved into the seriously dilapidated quarters provided by the department on the edge of the Aboriginal community.

With only a small generator supplying power for lighting, Pat was obliged to struggle along, caring for her under-schoolage family without modem conveniences - refrigerator, washing machine, iron, etc - utilising an old fuel stove in the kitchen and a wash tub in the back yard laundry. However, her own privations became minuscule beside those of her Aboriginal neighbours. When she discovers Aboriginal children taking away quite ordinary fare in the form of scraps from her rubbish bin, as small luxuries, she realises she is unable to play 'Lady Bountiful' but must somehow tread a fine line between that role and acknowledging the conflicts inherent in her situation. She is saved by the warmth, understanding and companionship of her new Aboriginal friends.

Pat quickly observes not only that many white people who worked with Aborigines heartily disliked them, but also that very few were qualified for the jobs they were doing anyway. She chronicles some of the catastrophic results which occurred when, inevitably, Aboriginal people in desperate life-and-death circumstances were met by the ignorance of people who had almost complete power and control over them.

Her own family, she found, were not immune. On two occasions when medical personnel were informed that the Keatings lived on the Reserve, they were assumed to be 'Aboriginal' and treated accordingly. She and her children received charity, not medical treatment, and her insight in perceiving that she was only able to correct the situation - though not before one of her children had been traumatised as a result - by asserting her 'non-Aboriginality' was remarkable.

Reserve life was not completely bleak, and Keating's book has managed to capture some of the ironies. A regular procession of religious denominations seeking converts each organised baptisms for their new recruits, thus creating an opportunity for two young Aboriginal girls, particularly, to wear pretty dresses and be stars at a party centred around them. Little wonder, then, that the same girls became 'converted', many times, ensuring for themselves popularity and a steady stream of parties at which to laugh and sing.

The few highs enjoyed by the Aboriginal community, however, are eclipsed by the lows, quite apart from the excruciating and relentless poverty of Reserve life, isolation, and all that this entails. The naive Keatings find themselves treacherously exploited by the local police in the latter's efforts to hijack young Aboriginal males into the criminal justice system - and further they find themselves unable to do anything about it. Listed as complainants on fake charges, the trials for which are held hundreds of miles away and without the Keatings (despite appearing on the charge-sheets as the victims of these non-existent crimes) being informed of the hearings, they learn too late the outcome of having signed at the bottom of a police page without ensuring that nothing else could later be added to the page without their knowledge. Their ignorance, also, costs the Aboriginal community dearly.

Worlds Apart is an eventful book which takes a hard look at the conditions under which Aboriginal people lived in the 1960's, and at the roles played by a variety of white people who contributed, in one way or another, to those conditions. When the Keatings, with their 'Softly-Softly' approach, still manage to rock the boat, they are not really surprised to receive a highly unusual mid-year offer of transfer. Though cognisant of the fact that this offer was more a bureaucratic rebuke for their behaviour than a genuine career advancement, they accepted and, unlike their Aboriginal neighbours, were free to move on.

What bothered me constantly while reading Worlds Apart was not the details of deprivation and injustice, which I had observed first hand on numerous occasions, up to and continuing into the 1990's, but rather why did Mrs Keating wait 30 years to document the events to which she was an important, and potentially powerful, witness. The evidence shee is prepared to give now, in 1994, would have stood the Aboriginal movement in good stead had it been tendered even twenty years earlier. This first hand report, had it been timely, would have constituted vital support for changing the situation instead of being mere recountal of events in the past, and for this reason only, and despite the wealth of informative material it contains, my overwhelming response to the book was profound disappointment.