Wadeye: Failed Aboriginal Town as Cultural Triumph. By Patrick McCauley.

I decided to take a teaching position at the isolated Aboriginal community of Wadeye in the Northern Territory …

Wadeye has a population of about 2500 in its general vicinity. The main settlement has an airstrip, a Catholic school, a swimming pool, a Catholic church, a store, an art centre, a museum, a post office, municipal offices, a mechanics shop, locked petrol bowsers ($2.60 per litre) and a Centrelink [welfare] office. The main street is surrounded by about a square kilometre of solidly-built kit-type houses in various states of repair. Many have been looked after, some even improved with green lush gardens; others, perhaps most, are vandalised, graffitied and surrounded by garbage in the deep terra cotta dust. Most have things like prams on their rooves and mangy dogs hanging around in packs.

Wadeye is one hour’s flight south-west of Darwin — about five hours by road in the dry, via Daly River. …

Trendy education failed:

Wadeye’s Catholic church and the school sealed their fate with a bilingual policy that dominated from 1972 till the mid-Nineties, so people over about forty years of age, who were pre-bilingual education (pre-self-determination, pre-alcoholism, pre-invasion/genocide/stolen generation, pre-apology and pre-“racism”) can still read and write. People under forty, however, cannot speak English, are functionally illiterate and have little idea of numbers. …

Stay in your cages, white people:

You need a permit from the Northern Land Council to enter this settlement, and you need permission from the big men here to enter any country which is outside the settlement, off the road to the beach or the road to Daly River, or even the road to the tip. So you are caged in from the moment you arrive.

You live in a “donga”, which is a shipping container. The donga is caged, the school is caged — the whole town is caged and locked in. Whitefella teachers walk around with backpacks containing their valuables and great bunches of keys around their necks in the thirty-eight-degree heat. The settlement is caged because of the enormous number of break-ins and the mindless vandalism perpetrated constantly, often by children.

Drugs:

Since about 2002 Wadeye, somehow and to its credit, has been a “dry” settlement in which alcohol is illegal except for those people who have an alcohol permit — overwhelmingly white workers. Marijuana is the drug of choice for the locals, and though the flights in are fairly strictly policed with sniffer dogs, there seems to be significant “gunja” in the community. The white locals who have lived here for a while say the settlement is less violent and there are fewer break-ins when there is sufficient “gunja” — if the dope runs out, the trouble returns. …

Media lies:

The ABC, SBS and academic Australia have created a brutal narrative that has slaughtered our art and our story through a religious ideological belief system based on resentment and blame, yet masquerading as compassion.

Not long ago, Kerry O’Brien convinced a governor-general of Australia (Sir William Deane) to apologise on live television for a massacre (not far from Wadeye at Mistake Creek) that was proven to have been perpetrated by an Aboriginal man. Neither of them apologised to my people for this profound cultural insult, yet this too is racism — serious, popular and pervasive.

It is this spin that is now murdering the people of Wadeye. There is a local television station and you can get SBS and the ABC — all of which constantly reaffirm the invasion/genocide/stolen generation/racist version of Australian history. …

O’Brien reports on an Aboriginal girl who was raped and murdered after checking herself out of an Alice Springs hospital without the knowledge of the nurse—the nurse is blamed for her demise, not the Aboriginal man who perpetrated the crime.

A twenty-nine-year-old Aboriginal man commits suicide after his love affair with a sixteen-year-old girl is outlawed by police — the police are blamed for his death. …

School:

The school where I am working attempts to teach children to read and write, but exaggerates its attendance figures. It needs to be constantly employing new teachers, as they often only last a matter of days or weeks before they are overwhelmed by the extent of the problem, the complete lack of discipline and the primitive circumstances under which they must work and live.

The children who attend school regularly or even irregularly are often tired from lack of sleep, or are hungry and irritable. The school feeds each child breakfast, morning tea and lunch, every day. The teachers are, without exception, exhausted from the huge demand of teaching classes of children, many of whom would be on Ritalin if they were city kids.

The teachers live in a constant low-level fear fuelled by intermittent dog attacks, the hardly suppressed resentment and violence within the community, the total lack of respect, mindless vandalism, foul language and “motherfucker” mentality of the children, the difficulty in obtaining basic food supplies and the insufficient, caged and very basic accommodation, … the lack of being able to go for a decent walk out of the township, and lack of sleep due to the all-night noise. …

There is an unstated assumption that all teachers be apologists — that they accept the black-armband orthodoxy. The teachers hoard and hide supplies of teaching materials in secret places. …

Expensive experts in health and education, politicians and public servants arrive on almost every plane to tour the school and community like saviours. There is a discipline policy which is unworkable and unrealistic, with ideas of negotiated “contracts” and “draw your anger”-type activities — and also because the community in general views school like work, a whitefella imposition. …

The most influential teacher in the school … is exhausted and bullies both the kids and the teachers at times. She informs me that English is not the first language of this country, and we have no right to expect these kids to speak English at school. …

The people of Wadeye mostly treat whitefellas as their servants. First thing in the morning, my students demand that I get their breakfast, and then throw a tantrum if I don’t pick up the rubbish they throw on the ground. …

Any utterance of the word no to the kids at school will produce a tantrum which can go all the way to physical violence if not handled sensitively. Last week three of the “transition” kids I teach (average age about twelve) wrecked the library as three teachers tried to herd them, screeching with laughter, out the door.

Money corrupts:

Centrelink pays unemployment benefits to almost the entire community of Wadeye without ever breaching a person for not making an effort to find work. In the rest of Australia, people must apply for jobs every week or they lose their benefit. …

There are millions of dollars worth of claims presently before the United Nations from Aboriginal people for various accusations of racial discrimination manufactured by a largely white Aboriginal legal industry. The Aboriginal leaders are painfully consumed in an uneducated anger fed by misinformation and ideological groupspeak, reinforced by the vast majority of public servants and teachers who are allowed to enter the community. …

Whites must pay for everything:

Isolated Aboriginal people, like those in Wadeye, have come to be expected to fail in order to achieve further government funding.

These Aboriginal people are confined by the remnants of their culture to isolation as “noble savages” with no real idea of themselves as individuals, or the real value of money and work, or the value of things like houses.

Many Aboriginal people in Wadeye believe that all Australians are given a free house by the government as a right of citizenship.

The indigenous co-principal says it is quite possible to live from birth to death in Wadeye without needing to speak English or to work.

“This is my country,” the kids tell me. They have seen and heard Kerry O’Brien on the ABC, they watch Living Black and Message Stick — and they believe in their victimhood. Money is not a problem here. We must pay.

Read it all.

These people sound like great assets for the Australian community, and we can all feel proud of how our taxpayer dollars are being spent. Asking them to conform to the same rules and expectations as the rest of us would just be racist, so this glorious triumph of a town can only grow and grow. You get more of what you subsidize.

Meanwhile, a massive retinue of leftist government workers are being well paid to “fix” it. It’s obvious who the real beneficiaries here are, and who set up and defends the situation.

Cultural triumph? No, government job triumph … and too bad about the mascots.