Musical Dispatch from the Front – Erasure – November 2015
Frank Baarda
Ngurrju mayi?
I’m starting this Dispatch with a song by the Alvizar family from Michoacan in Mexico:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL5xH441fyI
♫ ♫ ♫ Heraclio Bernal. Voces del alma alvizar
A flyer flew by:
‘Information Notice: Upcoming Demolition at the old Yuendumu Mining Store’
The very same Yuendumu Mining Company I spent 45 years trying to manage.
I stopped working for YMC on the 50th Anniversary of its existence (21st February 2019). I’d hung in there an extra decade after retiring age, in an ultimately failed attempt to keep those corporate vultures (the administrators and receivers) at bay.
Portents of YMC’s demise were the removal of the prominent anti-Intervention sign and the killing of the Tree of Knowledge. In October 2019 YMC went into receivership.
It didn’t take long for the vacant buildings to decay into sad dereliction.
To quote the Information Notice:
“The old buildings and workshop have been assessed by a structural engineer who advised they do not meet the standards of the Australian Building Code”
A rather disingenuous excuse as the buildings predate the formal implementation of the Code.
The flyer also has:
“Yuendumu community members have also reported the buildings are unsafe for children”
I’d like to know who these community members are, and what children they refer to. I asked a number of Yuendumu residents if they had seen any children endangering themselves by playing at the old Mining Company site. Like myself, no one had. The YMC yard is not the children's playground of choice.
The flyer furthermore states that “The old clinic building was built …”
In 1974, YMC installed itself in what had been the nurses’ quarters (not the old clinic as stated), next door to the Hospital which has been erased from memory. It won’t be long before YMC will also be erased from memory, as if it never existed.
A generation of Warlpiri children is growing up, with no awareness that their parents and grandparents had taken part in a move from paternalistic assimilation to self-determination. From subservience to mutual respect and participatory dignity.
Concurrent with this reversal of what I consider to have been Yuendumu’s Golden Age, there is an erasure of all physical evidence of that optimistic time.
I repeat what Napoleon is reputed to have said "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
I have no way of knowing for sure if this erasure of history is a deliberate policy of Australia’s colonial enterprise or simply a result of ignorance and incompetence.
Oi vey,
Shalom,
Frank
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmAOBosGlHY&t=3s
♫ ♫ ♫ Yusuf / Cat Stevens – Morning Has Broken (Official Lyric Video)