In which the pond dreams on with the Caterists ...

It's with a heavy heart that the pond reports today that the Caterist might be on to something, because he takes the easy target of H. C. Coombs and gives Coombs a kick around the paddock.

Like the Lutherans that went before him, Coombs was deeply infested with what can only be called the virus of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's noble savage ...

This came back to the pond awhile ago while watching the toothy Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, and episode 11, The Worship of Nature, which it just so happens is available on YouTube:

Well that's distracted some - surely anything but a Caterist is a better way to spend the day - and it was left to the pond's current toilet reading, by Fernández-Armesto, to note the upsides and downsides of the notion:

In the mind of Jean-Jacques Rosseau, the idea of the nobel savage blended into that of the common man, and the idea of "natural wisdom" licensed that of popular sovereignty. Without the Huron and the South Sea Islanders, perhaps, the French Revolution would have been unthinkable.
Yet the savage Eden proved full of serpents....

And speaking of an Eden full of taxpayer-grant bludging serpents, what better way to segue back to the Caterist in full cry, though it takes a while to get to Coombs, because we must first endure a mention of Bill Leak as leading the resistance against political correctness.

What that does to help indigenous Australia must, perforce, remain a mystery, unless mocking people as useless failures is somehow designed to lift their spirits and improve their game ...

Now the pond has been to Yuendumu and seen first hand what a sorry town it was, and undoubtedly still is, despite the not particularly generous funding, and the much larger slice poured into bureaucrats and agencies determined to keep it as a business model for their own pockets ...

But it did strike the pond as bizarre that a Caterist should think it the place to set up a thriving business or three to cater to to passing traffic...

How the town could be compared to a country town in Victoria requires the almost mystical vision of a Rousseau.

Yes, the pond has also been to Pyramid Hill, which happens to have a railway station and some connection to the places around it.

Yuendemu is in the middle of nowhere - unless you happen to live there and then it might be the centre of somewhere - and the Tanami is not the greatest track in the world, and anyway, it so happens that the town was acreation of the Australian government and then a Baptist mission ...

Of what use is the comparison of chalk and cheese? Is it in the same order as heroic political correctness?

Well one thing's certain. If someone asked the pond to set up shop on the Tanami Road, first of all the pond would be asking for a grant. A big-hearted, generous, ongoing grant.

Not all big-hearted, ongoing grants are wrong. Where would the Menzies Research Centre be without the benefice of the Australian taxpayer?

But  now we must move on to Coombs, and just as the Baptists and the Lutherans and the rest of them produced many conflicts and unresolved cultural issues in the missions they controlled, so too did Coombs ... though you'd have to be as hare-brained as he was to think that Pyramid Hill and Yuendemu are somehow comparable ...

The pond is forced to make a few collateral comments.

First and most strangely, the reptiles dropped off the credit to the taxpayer-funded Menzies Research Centre at the bottom of the Cater story, and so we are deprived of the knowledge that in a few select areas, taxpayer grants do have a beneficial effect.

The pond was so anxious that the Centre had folded, or that the Caterist might have resiled from taking a government grant as a way of making a living, that it had to go check, but no, he still seems to be there.

And secondly it would have been honest for the Caterists to have acknowledged sources.

Now the pond isn't talking about a lengthy set of footnotes in a piece flung off while attending to the expenditure of taxpayer grants.

But at least a hint of further reading would have helped.

In the matter of identity, it would have been nice to reference Austin-Broos:

She at least mentions the Lutherans' yearning, and she is easy enough to find at the University of Sydney's Anthropology department here, and in the usual way, her book can be googled here.

And it's also clear enough that the Caterist has taken hearty chunks from Partington's unbalanced comparison of Hasluck v. Coombs ... as if Hasluck had any better a set of answers ...

And ...

It would have been possible to acknowledge the obvious debts ... and it's easy enough to find Partington at Scribd here ...

But at the end of it all, what do we have here?

Well we have the tired arguments of ancient white men, both sides having failed with equally mindless policies, being recycled by a taxpayer-grant devouring hack white, scribbling for the reptiles while on grant-based welfare, deploring the influence of welfare and grants on indigenous Australians,...

And then in turn this is being discussed by a white writer on a blog ...gobsmacked that anyone with even the slightest hare in the brain could think that somehow rural Victoria provided, at this moment in time, a market economy parallel and even a solution, to life in an out of the way part of the Northern Territory ...

And all of it done without any actual reference to what indigenous communities might think and feel themselves, which helps explain how a federal government could attempt to set up a Royal Commission and then wonder why some got agitated about a lack of consultation.

Is it any wonder that blacks keep on getting outraged and upset? As the Caterists and the pond keep on with the grand Coombsian notions.

It reminded the pond of the dog botherer's boast - noted in the last post - that the lizard Oz had featured the best reporting on indigenous issues for the past fifty years.

If the Caterist piece is supposed to be part of that proud tradition, how weird is that...

And we haven't even got to the bureaucrats and politicians who routinely parachute in for a quick visit, and just as quickly head off to write reports, divert expenditure or tip the whole thing upside down, yet again, just because they can ... in much the same way that the NT government has routinely made a mess of federal funding...

So what could the Caterists contribute to the discussion, apart from a fey "dream on"?

Well perhaps we could start with a treatise, "how to take a government taxpayer-funded grant in style, and treat it without shame as the natural order of things." That should come in handy not just for indigenous people but for anyone on welfare ...

Never mind, it's off to a few cartoons to take the pond's mind off the Caterists and on to the night's duty to stand solid with anyone except the ABS ...

And as well as finding them at the usual Fairfax places, it seems Pope has resumed tweeting here, and you can find Rowe tweeting here ...