March 9:
“…the old-time missionaries had to be very practical men…”
The fat, simpering white woman employed by the community as an art-craft teacher-supervisor is part of the corruption. Neither does she teach or supervise anything. With her endless supply of funding she has stocked the art place with everything under the sun, most of it lying under tables or stacked in cupboards, largely unused.
An old Aboriginal woman told me: “We don’t like that fat bitch. She properly lazy. She sit there on her fat arse all day talking to her friends. I do my art work at home. Not at her place. And I sell it to shops at Uluru or Alice Springs.”
I once queried the art’s supervisor about her daily classes.
She replied: “Oh, we don’t do classes as such. They don’t want to learn. They just come in here to do their own thing, or to gossip, make cups of tea – that sort of thing.”
“So why are you being paid all that money (roughly, $50,000 per year, plus free vehicle, plus free house, etc)?”
“To be an art’s supervisor,” she smiled with cynical sweetness.
Out of morbid curiosity, I looked at her phone accounts. Some monthly calls , local and overseas, were in excess of $12,000. Australian taxpayers unknowingly meet that cost, just as they pay for everything that is spent and wasted around here.
An ex-missionary called by recently on his way north. He was based here years ago, trying the “Christianise” the wild desert tribes. He failed miserably. I feel sure, like so many other missions, they produced “tea-and-sugar Christians.” While the missionaries dished out the tea and sugar and other supplies, the people probably went through the motions of being converted Christians. His eyes were sad as he looked around at the mess. He showed me where gardens and lawns once grew. Very hard to visualise now. The ransacked old church must have broken his heart. He said the old-time missionaries had to be very practical men and only the realists survived. When the southern churches sent up do-gooders, or youthful idealists with unreal expectations, he said they used to give them six months to straighten themselves out. If they were still starry-eyed after their probation period, they were sent back to the cities from where they came.
“You can’t work with such people,” he said. “They are more trouble than they are worth.”
Some of the “dreamers,” as he described them, used to go into a state of shock and have nervous breakdowns.
“It is interesting for me to see the prevalence of part-bloods hanging around,” he observed. “Back in my time, when there wasn’t much government money being thrown around like now, all the part-blood people wanted to be white and they were offended if they were lumped in with the Aborigines. Now, it seems, there has been a reversal of attitudes. Since the government started throwing money at the Aborigines, the part-bloods have come out of the woodwork, insisting they are Aborigines. Of course, we know why, don’t we? But we’re cynical old devils.”
As he left, he said: “Anyway, I wish you well. I hope God stands by you. You are going to need him.”
