Cambodiacious

Having a great time so far in Phnomh Penh, although the banana blossom salad I had for dinner last night has created a bit of ruckus (nothing huge) and is a timely reminder to be a bit more careful with food.

Khmer food is very salty and not very spicy, luckily I got a good dose of Malaysian sambal on the epic that was the low cost carrier journey to get here.....

Cambodia is a bustliing hive of construction activity there is some serious rebuilding activity going on here. I have been travelling about with a really nice group of turkish travel agents and a chinese woman from beijing and who speaks excellent american english.. They are all leaving to go to Siem Reap today and I am off to the monastery to teach english to the monks and do a cooking class tomorrw... then I need to take a deep breath and dive off into the countryside by myself, which is a little scary, all the more reason to do it, I will be making my way down to the Cardamon Mountains to see if they smell as sweet as they sound....
much love and merry christmas, janine
PS - No escape from chrissy here, there is no way cambodia was going to miss the party!!! Santa hats everywhere....

dis-combob-ulat-ed....

...is how you feel when, suddenly, you get 'home' unexpectedly, dip your toes in the Indian Ocean at sundown and then suddenly, with no prior planning, dunk your head in the Pacific at sunrise.

After feeling homesick for a number of weeks and a little bit disorientated and, both perturbed and disturbed! by my experiences in Native Title I came home to be with my family on hearing the news of my uncle's passing. It was a strange feeling. After pining for 'home' for quite some time I got back to Wollongong only to feel like something had irrevocably altered and that the grounding in people and place (thought to be a necessary pre-requisite for homesickness) had evaporated. Gone. Illusion. It was, well, discombobulating (to use a simple word).

The tinglings about the desert, native title work and the people and places I have had the privilege of experiencing and meeting over the last few weeks started on the plane. As excited as I was to fly over a lush green south coast landscape, absolutely drowned in water after seeing nothing but browns, reds, yellows and salty dams for days on end and as I felt that familiar feeling of moisture and abundance wash over my skin and soothe my eyes (I get this after a day in Canberra) there was a niggling yearning inside me to turn back and once again scuff my bootheels in the red dust of outback WA.

As you have done nothing but hear me complain about native title work on this blog maybe it's time to explain some of the good things and the reason for a kind of infectiousness that I feel about doing work with a native title rep body.

It's humbling to work alongside people from whom there is so much to learn about life. Groups that conduct business according to relationship building and mutual benefit rather than at an arm's length. That it really does make a difference getting people all the way to remote places at time and cost to discuss a mining tenement for five minutes rather than by email or phone. It can demonstrate who's committed to treating traditional owners with respect and who is not.

Working alongside people that recognise what they have capacity to fight for and walk away from what they do not ... and who know this limit! this comes from age and experience struggling in circumstances often far more onerous than anything I have likely encountered in my life. And who defend the personal and communal right to be self-determinate with all they have, smelling bullshit and patronising attitudes from miles and miles away.

Working with people who under the most trying and offensive of circumstances will often respond with humour, good grace and a hell of a biting wit.

Plotting in my head that this is just a stage on the way to self-determination and treaty and that I am not just another white lawyer benefiting from the 'Native title industry'.

Knowing that it is a privilege to work alongside these groups and that while I bring some skills to the bargaining table that the traditional owners can be bringing so much more that sometimes they are willing to share. The most important thing I think I can learn is how to build relationships based on respect. This appears to be the singularly most important aspect of working in indigenous communities and while it goes both ways, I still think this white-middle-of-the-road-young-law girl has an incredibly lot more to learn. There's a job going in Perth, maybe it's time to pick up 'home' and move.

Reflections on Native Title

It's like the shimmers of heat that appear in the distance on a hot road; teasing you with a resemblance to a sparkling lake of cool refreshing water but disappearing suddenly as you approach; evaporating into thin air leaving only a small memory that makes you feel, maybe, possibly, slightly cooler as you imagine diving into, submersing yourself in that lake while in reality your head pounds from the extreme heat.

If there is one thing I have learnt from my time out here it's to adjust my expectations. If you adjust your expectations you can find ways to feel like you are making progress in a system like native title. Deals that I would have thought were awful and would shudder at advising communities to accept suddenly appear more of a triumph if you lower your expectations and remind yourself that any deal can be a good deal for people that have nothing and who have virtually no recognised rights or power.

Native title is an incredibly racist system of recognition. It is the ultimate colonising process. White laws expect claimants to jump through legal loopholes (with almost no funding to do so) often only to be told at the end of the fifteen year journey that you are not who you say you are... or to quote that favourite phrase from Yorta Yorta 'the tide of history has washed away' your rights - meanwhile even if you do get native title rights recognised, they are a bundle of rights that for instance that might allow you to hunt on pastoral land but not live there. But then if this right to hunt is recognised the courts will often force you to enter into an agreement with the pastoralist negotiating terms such as how many dogs you can have and how many firearms and what type. how many people at any one time and you may not be allowed access to dams (these are 'improved areas' because they are fenced). (talk about mirages on horizons in the middle of hot stinking cattle stations!) Other times the relationships may be good and then it seems that a whole world of potential freedoms and recognised rights can be enjoyed by mutual recognition and respect.

But after the last three weeks which I have spent with various claimant groups in the outback it seems that our nation still has some ways to go. A prospector can still bring shiny worthless rocks and 'wow the crowd' who will then agree to almost anything... pretty impressive if you dont have much and you can take a bunch of shiny rocks back home as presents. At least that's something concrete because even if you are able to negotiate a royalty payment how are you going to keep track of who owes you money and chase the defaulters, particularly if over your large claim area you might have thousands of these little 'agreements' to issue mining tenements (they usually get issued anyway if you say 'no'). Of course the government funding that pays for your native title lawyer doesn't extend to trusts and financial and business planning assistance. And geez as a claimant you must be dog tired of all these years and years of meetings with nothing to show for it.

But then there are those who have big mining going on in their country and who will likely get quite a sizeable sum. The government then seems to expect you to spend this compensation money (that you get as recompence for a great big whopping hole in your country and extinguishment of your rights) on salary for a teacher and any medical services you might need; services that in other places are provided to the public. It also means that suddenly there are boundary disputes and people clamouring to get mining deals on their land so that they can get a dialysis unit and an aged care facility too.

BUt what I really wanted to talk about was expectations...and the lowering of them. A lot of the native title claimants that I met were simply looking for respect. Sometimes all that is needed is a sign recognising that they are the traditional owners. sometimes they just want the shire council to ask them before a new road goes in so that they get the opportunity to rebury their dead when it cuts through a burial ground. (sometimes in places that grandparents are buried so not even always that old) sometimes they just want to be involved in discussions about development and occasionally they want to be able to fish and camp and teach their kids bush skills when almost the whole of their country is a national park and they are not allowed. Symbolism is huge and even going through the motions of making symbolic gestures that indicate respect for the traditional owners of this country will go a very long way... Kevin Rudd understands that, which is why he said 'sorry'. I know that there is still so much work to be done but out here the struggle for repect and simple symbolism continues.

To illustrate - Here's a sign. Good start you might think. It was erected several years ago. It's spelt wrong. Can we get the shire to change it to Malgana? To do so has and will waste precious little resources that are supposed to be allocated to native title work. You would think it would take a simple letter, but no, nothing, no action for many years and the group continue to raise it as an issue. See what I mean by lowering expectations. To get the sign altered would be a success. I won't even bother saying anything to the white dude who just came into the meeting and said 'it's my land' about a million times.