Out of Place

Mary Ellen Jordan Balanda: My Year in Arnhem Land. Crow’s Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2005.

Reviewed by Liz Reed

The word ‘Balanda’ derives from the Macassan word meaning ‘Hollander’ and has become an Aboriginal word to denote non-Aboriginal people in the ‘Top End’ of the Northern Territory. The word clearly situates non-Aboriginal people as the outsiders, and Mary Ellen Jordan’s choice of it for her title perhaps unconsciously resonates with the overall impression of how she and most of the other non-Aboriginal people she encountered in her fourteen month stint in Maningrida remained very much the outsiders to that community. Although there as a part of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (ATSIC)-funded ‘self-determination’ program, Jordan soon comes to appreciate her complicity in the inherent contradictions of her political/ethical desires and the reality of how Balandas like her perpetuate colonialist control, regardless of an individual commitment to the principles, rather than simply the veneer, of self-determination.

Helen Garner in her cover endorsement of the book describes the writing as ‘perceptive’ and a ‘brave … take on Australia’s deepest dilemma’, thereby throwing the focus on ‘Australia’ by which she clearly meant white or non-Indigenous Australia, as is frequently the case with this raced name. Unwittingly Garner’s endorsement points to many of the problematic dimensions of Balanda, which – perhaps despite Jordan’s intentions – perpetuates discourses of the ‘problem’ of Aboriginality.

The strongest impression gained from this book is Jordan’s determination to try to understand the society into which she intrudes and carries the baggage of being a well-meaning and politically committed Balanda from the south. Not surprisingly, only glimmers of understanding emerge: Jordan appears on some levels to be able to accept that this is how it inevitably remains, whereas on other levels there is a struggle for more clarity and a desire to be able to suggest tangible answers to the questions she poses, to herself as much as to the readers. These readers are by implication also Balandas; there is little to suggest that Jordan is writing for an audience dissimilar from herself, which makes the questions both easier and harder to resolve, it seems, but also ensures that the gaze remains firmly on the failure (or impossibility as she increasingly sees it) of Balanda attempts to be of use to Indigenous people. Thus, whilst Jordan acknowledges her own privilege and that of the other Balandas she encounters at Maningrida, this awareness remains partial and does not encompass the question of her privileged speaking position in relation to Aborigines and Balanda. Nor does she ever quite transcend the enduring Eurocentric notion that ‘we’ should ‘help’ Indigenous people.

This is a fascinating and at times quite frustrating book; as Jordan notes in the opening lines of her ‘author’s note’, Balanda is ‘a subjective, personal account’, in which she has blended aspects of personalities she encountered at Maningrida, in order to ‘create typical characters, rather than depicting actual people’ (vii). Nonetheless, I wondered at various points in the book whether permission had been gained from any of the persons who had been merged into these ‘typical characters’, as it seemed only too likely that they could be easily identified by the at times fairly precise details about them. There is nothing in the author’s note or acknowledgements on this point, which seemed to suggest that such approval or permission was not regarded as necessary, and the absence of clarity on this important ethical detail remains a fundamental concern.

Jordan’s writing is at times very evocative; the title Balanda not only literally applies to the non-Aboriginal population at Maningrida, as described by its Aboriginal inhabitants, but also serves to situate Jordan and her experiences ‘out of place’ – up there, in the north, on land that she identifies as Aboriginal. It also identifies Jordan as ‘white’ or non-Indigenous, a realization she appears to have only come to by virtue of being ‘out of place’, away from Melbourne where she and her friends endlessly debated ‘Aboriginal issues’. By being Balanda in this way, Jordan is able to explore the philosophical but also the increasingly personal (and possibly unresolveable or unanswerable) questions that attach to this status, as she learns ‘what it means to be a Balanda’ (9).

But I kept wondering where on earth Jordan thought she was when living in inner Melbourne if not on Aboriginal land. As a settler Australian I was amazed that this apparent discovery was not explored by Jordan in relation to the Aboriginal land to which she ultimately returned in Melbourne, and was disturbed that she continued the habit of exoticising and locating Aboriginality as being ‘up north’. This was a pity also because her exploration of the specific meaning of ‘being Balanda’ in Maningrida suggested some interesting potential for thinking about cross-cultural engagements.

Jordan is able to offer some important insights into the realities of ‘self-determination’ and her role (and that of other white workers like her) as what she terms ‘modern day missionaries’ (36), away from the safe distance and idealism that ‘southerners’ all too often hold onto tenaciously. On the other hand, there seems a tendency to extrapolate from her own experiences, to a comprehensive analysis of self-determination as unworkable, a generalization that is not likely to match the experience of many other ‘Balandas’ in other parts of Australia. And she takes no account of the role of Indigenous people in successful self-determination programs elsewhere in the country, to which a passing acknowledgement would have sufficed. Thus ‘self-determination’ itself is framed as the problem, a dangerous generalization in this ever-increasingly conservative period. She links it to current discussions of ‘welfare dependency’ and seems to regard the connection as sufficient in itself, without any interrogation of the utility of this latest catch-phrase about the ‘Aboriginal problem’.

While, then, I found this book at times frustratingly uneven, Jordan is to be commended for the often sensitive manner in which she interrogates not only her own implicatedness, but the dilemma itself. Thus, she does not shy away from provoking questions about what she comes to see as a form of ‘covert assimilation’ (92) in which she and other Balanda are inextricably bound up. Her exploration of this, and her probing of her own idealistic and idealised vision of making friends with Aboriginal people with whom she’d drink ‘cups of tea and chat, as I did with Balanda friends’ (53) is particularly impressive, all the more so because she is prepared to consider that there may be no answers, or at least none that suited the Balandas among whom she lived, who included ‘mercenaries … and misfits’ (36) many of whom quite frankly did not wish to engage with the questions she raised, and become quite hostile to her for doing so. But she does not seem able to take the next step, as a Balanda or its equivalent around the country, and ask the fundamental questions about what this means in contemporary Aboriginal Australia.

Jordan tells us that she went to Maningrida partly because of how little she ‘knew about Aboriginal cultures and a desire to learn more’ (25). She observes that like many other white Australians, she knew something of the ‘complex spirituality’ and ‘deep relationship to the land’ arising from the ‘Dreaming’, and retains her respect for these ideas at the same time as she comes to see that they are also comforting stereotypes that provide nourishment to sympathetic whites, many of whom are reluctant to confront the realities that flow from their own influence on these Aboriginal cultures. In spite of the peeling back of these preconceptions, Jordan is unable to overcome her desire for Aboriginal people to behave in certain ways that would make them more appealing to her. Therefore, all the familiar signs of dysfunction are reproduced in this book – the fortnightly ‘wet’ weekends when the barge from Darwin arrives with supplies, including ‘grog’, leading to what appears to be acknowledged as inevitable fighting and violence towards Aboriginal women, the drifting into ganja-induced stupor by bright teenagers, and what she seems to regard as a generalized male oppression of most Aboriginal women.

What readers don’t ever learn (and this point is important, bearing in mind the southern white audience that the book primarily addresses) is the ways that Aboriginal women – all over Australia – are struggling to define and provide their own responses to these questions, and the role of Aboriginal men in such responses also. Jordan seems surprisingly unaware of the extent to which, including in academic writings by Indigenous and non-Indigenous women (eg the ‘Bell-Huggins’ debate of the 1990s), the question of speaking positions and violence towards women has been interrogated. Similarly, the ways in which Balanda at Maningrida drink their illicit but covertly allowed spirits and wine also brought by the Darwin barge, are presented as problematic for the hyprocisy that surrounds their being allowed, but Balanda consumption of ‘grog’ at Maningrida is represented as benign, further emphasizing Jordan’s focus on ‘problem drinking’ by Aborigines, which is puzzlingly generalized, given her passing rejection of the stereotype of the ‘drunken no-hoper Aborigine’ later in the book (146).

As a young single white woman, Jordan is literally ‘out of place’ in both Balanda and Indigenous circles, and this opens the way for a quite extended discussion of the sexually threatening Aboriginal male, with her account of her own very frightening experience of being harassed by a young man who repeatedly requested sex with her (118ff). Jordan’s initial encounter with this young man arose immediately following a discussion with one of her Balanda friends, Alice, about two particular Aboriginal men, one of whom had been jailed for sexual assault of his daughter, the other for killing his wife. In terms of literary style, this conversation effectively serves as a device to set up Jordan’s extended account of his threat and her fear. The unevenness of this book was evident again in her account of this episode – on the one hand she writes of how she was afraid of every young Aboriginal man she saw (as they all looked like this man, Rodney), but at the same time she was ‘ashamed of this feeling, thinking that I was being racist’ (123). For a while Jordan questioned whether she would return to Manigrida from a trip to Melbourne that coincided with this period; she did return, but her fear of all young Aboriginal men and her concern about what this revealed about her racism remained unresolved in the book. As Jordan’s father also died during the time she was being threatened by nightly visits from this Aboriginal man, readers learnt of her father’s violence and the fear with which she and her family had lived before her parents separated, but his violence was represented as individual, whereas the Aboriginal man’s was linked to the wider problem of community-based violence.

On her fourth day in Maningrida, Jordan was taken by some Balanda friends to see the dancing for a ceremony to which they had been invited, and was ‘in awe watching this’ and trying to work out what it was about (30). During one of the breaks in the dancing, she also has her first experience of ‘bush tucker’ (kangaroo tails, probably bought at the local store, she was informed, which seemed somewhat to diminish the pleasure of this). She observed the Aboriginal ‘kids, in bright American basketball singlets, run to drink from their bottles of Coke and chatter amongst themselves in a language I couldn’t understand. It struck me as the ultimate postmodern scene: an Aboriginal kid with a kangaroo tail in one hand and a bottle of Coke in the other’ (31), and she was excited to be surrounded by children who didn’t speak English. But after a few hours her attention wavered, and she walked home. Over the following months of being disabused of and critiquing her romantic idealism and good intentions, she comes to regard such a scene as exemplifying all the ‘problems’, the coke now being a symbol of drug-addiction, and the high rates of diabetes and heart disease, leading to early death (73).

The conflicted interpretations of this ‘globalised’ scene reflect the ways in which many of Jordan’s perceptions presented in Balanda remain quite binary, perhaps partly because of the ways in which society at Maningrida is clearly separated along Aboriginal/Balanda lines, not because of animosity but because of ‘foreignness [in which] it was hard to find many similarities in the ways we lived’ (53). Towards the end of the book she wrote of how the year at Maningrida had changed her thinking about Aboriginal people, during which they effectively became human ‘rather than stereotypes of the spiritual’ (186), and that she was leaving the place at which, paradoxically, she ‘now felt at home’ (200) because she had got better at living there. The stories she would tell, she was aware, would arise from her confusion, and she was unable to find good endings for them, ‘instead they unraveled in [her] hands’ (213). This was not such a bad note on which to end, given the extent to which it suggests that Jordan’s thinking about the meanings that might be derived from her time in Maningrida will be ongoing, and may over time untangle.

Liz Reed teaches at the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University.