Michael Deibert interviewed on KDVS

An interview that I did a few weeks ago with KDVS host France Kassing was broadcast today on her Davis, California-based program It's About You. We touched on quite a few subjects including the situation with the McArthur River Mine in Australia, the effect of drug-related violence on the political process in Guatemala and, as ever, Haiti. Please listen to the full interview here.

Michael Deibert: Echoes of Obama on Australia Day

Michael Deibert: Echoes of Obama on Australia Day

(This article first appeared on the blog of the World Policy Journal and can be read here)

There we were, at a community meeting of indigenous Australians in the remote Northern Territory town of Borroloola, where dispersed communities of this frontier province come together only a scant few miles away from the Gulf of Carpentaria as it empties out into the Arafura Sea. Representatives of the region’s four main linguistic groups—the Gurdanji, Yanyuwa, Garawa, and Mara—were all here, discussing with a government minister and with one another the impact of a local mine that had, without consultation with the region’s traditional owners, expanded its operations from underground to open-cut. In the process, the company had destroyed sacred sites belonging to the clans and, so they feared, wreaked environmental havoc on the region’s fragile ecosystem.

In addition to the discussion of local issues, talk turned to the upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States. The assemblage approved, and, as one indigenous person told me in simply, “he’s one of us.”

Such has been the change of being an American abroad over the last few months, replacing the smirking frat boy of years past with a figure whom, as one Norwegian friend told me, “radiates dignity in a really intense way.” There is a new face of the U.S. global brand abroad, as I witnessed in my reporting travels over the last year, which took me to five continents and countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Spain, Japan, and now Australia.

Australia, my base for the next few months and which commemorates the arrival of Europeans in Australia today, has grappled with its own issues of racial division and violence since the first British settlers arrived in 1788, with the country’s Aboriginal population bearing the brunt of massacre and mistreatment since that time. In recent years, newer arrivals to the country from places like India, Lebanon, and Vietnam have also had to confront a hard kernel of xenophobia here which can be rather shocking to visitors expecting tropical bliss as depicted in tourist brochures.

Though it will no doubt pain and even perhaps offend many Australians to read the words I am about to write, while traveling around the nation and observing the deplorable state of the lives of its original inhabitants—whose communities remind me of some of the impoverished African villages that I have seen and who regularly fall at the bottom of the country’s quality-of-life indicators—it seems that a sombre reflection on the follies of the past, rather than macho braggadocio about “the lucky country,” might not only be a necessary but welcome theme on this year’s occasion, known here as Australia Day. With considerable tensions continuing between the country’s European-descended population and those of Asian, Arab, and Aboriginal descent, it is hard to see when Australia will perhaps have its own Obama moment.

The country’s current prime minister, Kevin Rudd, bravely apologized last year for the nation’s treatment of Aborigines, referring before parliament to “this blemished chapter in our nation’s history…the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering, and loss on these our fellow Australians.” It was the right thing to do, and, given this example, hopefully more and more Australians will begin moving towards this direction of openness and reconciliation.

History is a funny thing. The past is not dead, as William Faulkner once wrote and Barack Obama later reminded us, in fact, it’s not even past.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) and a regular contributor to World Policy Journal. His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.

Notes from Borroloola

In Australia’s remote Northern Territory, the small town of Borroloola represents for many, both theoretically and literally, the end of the line, only a scant few miles away from the Gulf of Carpentaria as it empties out into the Arafura Sea. Once a way-station for outlaws and all sorts of criminal drift from Australia’s southern reaches, Borroloola has nevertheless historically been of great importance to four of the country’s most important indigenous linguistic groupings, the Gurdanji, Yanyuwa, Garawa and Mara.

Visiting the region to examine the controversy surrounding a mining project, its affect on the local population, and what the results of decades of official neglect and indifference have had on Australia’s indigenous inhabitants (one of the oldest continuous groupings of humanity on earth), I drove down the thinnest ribbons of road, populated by a vast array of endemic flora and fauna that were bracing in its natural beauty, so different than the civic mistakes that pose as town in the south of the country. In Borroloola itself, I felt transported back to central Africa, not only because of the landscape but, alas, from the glaring lack of basic services to the original residents of what is ostensibly one of the world’s richest democracies. I must also, say, though, that I found a great dignity and awareness of history and tradition among the Aboriginal residents there, that gives me some small hope that this ancient and important culture will not be lost entirely, no matter what forces are arrayed against it.

For my travels in Australia thus far, in addition to the novia, I have had as company some fine books, the most relevant to my understanding of the places thus far having been National Geographic writer Harvey Arden’s quite beautiful account of his conversations with Aboriginal elders, Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia, the art critic Robert Hughes’ often hair-raising account of the country’s conquest by its white population, The Fatal Shore, and, by way of a gift from Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Murray McLaughlin in Darwin last week, Nicholas Jose’s Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola, an account of his search for the true history of an opportunely long-lost relative, the Borroloola hermit Roger Jose.

Back from Borroloola and now ensconced in Sydney once more, we await, with the rest of the world, the innaugruation of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. As one indigenous person told me in Borroloola, “he’s one of us.”