Indigenous violence a bad dreaming, says playwright

INDIGENOUS communities must disown the violent aspects of their traditional culture or face "cultural oblivion," warns the prominent playwright and screenwriter, Louis Nowra.

INDIGENOUS communities must disown the violent aspects of their traditional culture or face "cultural oblivion," warns the prominent playwright and screenwriter, Louis Nowra.

In a blunt, provocative book titled Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men's Violence Against Women and Children, Nowra explores the escalating epidemic.

Bad Dreaming - an essay version of which will be published on Wednesday in The Australian Literary Review - argues that the problem is a product of dispossession, government neglect, judicial leniency and "a pathological extension" of traditional customs.

Nowra, best known for his plays Cosi and Radiance, draws on the work of early white settlers, explorers and anthropologists to conclude that traditional Aboriginal society was violent and misogynous.

He writes: "A male gerontocracy made sure that it could practise polygamy, take promised girls as child brides and made gang rape a custom. Aboriginal culture was also strongly punitive and aggressive."

He stresses that traditional violence was tightly regulated, whereas today, dispossession and alcohol abuse mean indigenous "violence has become violence for its own sake".

Nevertheless, Nowra says traditional indigenous culture has been idealised since the 1960s, "when it became hip to know about Aboriginal culture" and Left liberals re-embraced the "noble savage" ideal.

Nowra concludes indigenous communities "need to accept that certain aspects of their traditional culture and customs - such as promised marriages, polygamy, violence towards women and male aggression - are best forgotten. There has to be an acknowledgement by the men that women have human rights ... If men refuse to do anything, then they are responsible for the slow death of the many wonderful aspects of their culture, traditions and customs, and their communities will continue to be on a nightmarish treadmill to cultural oblivion."

Why is this 57-year-old, white, male playwright from neon-lit Kings Cross tackling this issue? The tipping point came in 2005 when he spent three days in Alice Springs hospital with pancreatitis, surrounded by bashed indigenous women and girls.

"Some of their faces looked as though an incompetent butcher had conducted plastic surgery with a hammer and saw," he writes in the ALR.

He also feels it is important that a white man should speak up about the indigenous violence epidemic, "writing about the issue 'man to man', and saying that it's actually our problem".

He adds: "I was brought up with it." The playwright's stepfather bashed his mother.

He says concern over the stolen generations must not prevent abused indigenous children being removed from "toxic" situations. Education for indigenous children - in boarding schools, if necessary - is the key to progress. "The most pressing need is that these (abused) children be rescued."