In August, Kerryn Pholi wrote a Spectator article, Cartoon heroes, with a sub-title ofThe indigenous grievance industry has found a new villain
It commences:While non-Aboriginal Australians squirm with guilt over their ‘privilege’, a cabal of middle-class Aboriginals have proven adept at pretending their own privilege doesn’t exist.
It started with Stan Grant’s ‘boiling’, ‘simmering’, ‘pulsating’, and ‘coursing’ fury at the ABC’s exposé of abuse within the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre:
‘This is an anger that comes from the certainty of being. This is an anger that speaks to my soul… this week my people have been reminded that our place is so often behind this nation’s bars,’ Grant said.
‘Our’ place behind bars, Stan? Unless mangling of metaphors becomes a criminal offence (what exactly does ‘the howl of the Australian dream’, mean anyway?), Stan is in as much danger of being incarcerated as I am. I note that Stan was venting all this anger in the course of accepting an honorary doctorate of letters at the University of New South Wales. The man certainly knows his way around a thesaurus and apparently he can even type with fists ‘clenched in rage’, so the honour is well-deserved.
Stan went on: ‘This week Australia is Aboriginal boys tear gassed, locked down and beaten. These are the images on our television screens. The boys who look like my boys.’
Please. The boys in the Don Dale centre might ‘look like’ Stan’s kids, but that is where the resemblance ends. Unlike the Don Dale kids, Stan’s boys have experienced parenting, nurturing and safety. In his speech, Stan said his teenaged son ‘wondered at the difference between himself and the boys on the screen.’ Despite all their missed schooling, the NT boys could probably enlighten Stan’s son on their differing life experiences with great eloquence, perhaps whilst relieving him of his lunch money and shoes.
A few days after the Four Corners report, Bill Leak drew a cartoon depicting an Aboriginal cop telling an Aboriginal deadbeat dad he should talk to his miscreant son about ‘personal responsibility’. The dad says ‘Yeah righto, what’s his name then?’. And then a whole lot of people lost their minds. ‘It’s a racist stereotype!’ they said. (Clearly they were upset about the depiction of the Aboriginal dad, not the Aboriginal cop.) Then came this impressive leap of logic:
‘Bill Leak is saying all Aboriginal dads are hopeless drunks who don’t know their own kid’s names! What a racist!’. Perhaps if Leak were thoughtful enough to provide footnotes explaining that his cartoons don’t necessarily represent the entire world in all its rich diversity, he might have been spared a week-long headache. Or perhaps Leak has a quaint faith in his audience’s ability to interpret a political cartoon in an intelligent way.
Predictably, a bunch of middle-class Aboriginals felt that they had been unfairly represented by Leak’s cartoon. They felt personally insulted because the figure in the cartoon was Aboriginal, and they too were Aboriginal. Never mind that these educated, successful Aboriginal movers-and-shakers were a world away – in terms of class, culture, community and actual geography – from the pathetic figure in the picture. This cartoon, they decided, was somehow about them.
The "indigenous grievance industry"? I wonder what the result of that would have been had the Bolta written it?
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