Out of sight, out of mind, but making the best of it: How outstations have worked in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands

Abstract:

This chapter discusses an exceptionally remote region of the Western Desert in which outstations have played a significant role. Outstations have not, however, necessarily or always been linked with self-determination here in the way suggested by the title of this volume, giving us one matter to disentangle from the start. But another question also immediately follows: was the arrival of self-determination necessarily such a watershed moment, as the premise of this volume’s title seems to suggest? That is, was there one basic trajectory that applied throughout remote Australia, within which at a certain point self-determination provided the compelling response? We do not suggest that self-determination did not make a big impact in the Ngaanyatjarra region, as elsewhere, and bring with it many gains, but we do wish to problematise the historical part that it played. We begin by considering some manifestations of outstation phenomena that came well before the self-determination era and accompanying outstation movement ‘proper’ of the 1970s. We will sometimes refer to the latter as the ‘winds of change’ movement, alluding to the national political associations and flavour that it had. We identify the first local manifestation of phenomena generically classifiable as outstations to have been the ‘summer holiday camps’ or ‘Christmas camps’ that are associated with Warburton Mission history from the 1950s through to 1972. Virtually the whole Aboriginal population of the mission, which was the centre at which most Ngaanyatjarra people settled, would go to stay temporarily at one of several camp areas out from Warburton, remaining for up to three months, while the mission itself went into ‘stand-down’ mode for the summer. A degree of mission support would be provided, but other than this, the people would live off the country and do whatever they wished. In effect, these were ‘intermittent’ outstations. They did represent at least partially a ‘return to country’ and a return to a life less influenced by the mission, but the people would go back in between times, and for stays of much longer duration, to the centralised mission world. Also, of course, such camps did not represent a decentralisation of the population as such, and a winding down of the influence of the mission as a place of colonial congregation, in ways that are associated with the outstation movement proper and with the accompanying notion of self-determination. In fact, during the heyday of the summer camps, the mission was increasing in size and to some extent in influence. The summer camps developed out of, and as a consequence of, the people’s increasing involvement with the mission, and in one sense, it could be argued, were a means of facilitating their increasing incorporation into the European world by softening what might otherwise have appeared as too drastic a step to take. But it could equally be argued—and this is much truer to the general Ngaanyatjarra view on the matter—that the people actively chose, for a long time, to become only partially involved in the mission environment, and that the summer camps represented one of the compromises that they negotiated with the mission to retain some autonomy while engaging in a gradual adaptation to a more sedentary, incorporated life. To better appreciate these and other matters pertaining not only to the summer camps but also to the subsequent period of the outstations proper, it is necessary to go back further in time to the beginnings of Ngaanyatjarra interaction with the ‘whitefella’ world.