All Under One CCTV

October 23, 2019

It is always an impressive climb out of Broome Airport on the Fokker 100 south bound to Perth, Western Australia. As the plane banks left through Roebuck Bay and Kunin disappears under the wingtip I am always drawn back in memory to what Ronald Roe, Yawuru descendant and Goolaraboo Elder has shared with me and spoken of in this part of Australia.

As an Aboriginal writer, Roe generously enrols me in conversation regarding the installation of CCTV tracking and monitoring devices in this small city of many contrasts. Roe speaks of a letter he has written to the Australian Privacy Commissioner on the matter at hand.

Extreme poverty and discrimination occur hand in hand alongside the depravities of the rich and infamous Kardiya (white folk) Roe relates with me, knitting his brows and blowing cigarette smoke out through shimmering convection of heat in this Kimberley build up to the wet season.

The political dimensions of how things work in this place Ronald  also describes as involving a corporate consortia locking down Law through the vestige of the Crown in what’s known as Native Title. Roe states native title as it currently is convened being nothing more than a blunt instrument which separates clans and countrymen, Ronalds objects both to Native Title and to an omniscient CCTV that points into and maps his community of the unwilling, who, as Roe emphasises ‘...forgo all rights in a series of calculated and capitulated string of human wrongs.’

With the onset of body worn cameras (BWCs) on police, parking inspectors, Shire rangers and medical staff all claiming it is for ‘public safety’, Ronald questions how this pervasive technology whether it be on poles, in shops, on human bodies solves anything of the social determinants of crime being that of poverty and trauma. Roe also adds that despite countless successive government reports and billions of dollars invested in national suicide prevention that nothing is more important than a comprehensive review of a failing and self serving Native Title Act. Surveillance only adds to the looming dystopia Roe relates and with it comes through its own functional symbology a chilling effect not unlike other parts of Australia ‘under wraps’.

Recounting a ‘stop-and-search’ incident by armed and uniformed police days before, under this CCTV camera mounted outside his home, Roe illustrates how the rights of Aboriginal people are constantly, daily wronged, in this case by two police officers. Roe posed the question seeking how such incidents occur no matter what forms of surveillance are implemented and whether these will ever incriminate those officers of their wrongdoings. With a break in the description and obvious distress this caused Ronald I inquire whether  these devices which have been installed without community consultation will solve anything they purport to be there for.

The skepticism of Roe answered my inquiry sharply, with Ronald quick to point out that in this city of immense natural beauty there is equal measures of an ugliness of human deprivation of liberty, perpetuated through the undercurrent of ‘self serving mafia’ and ‘corruption’.

When the instruments of the prior colonisers give way to the electronic eyes of the machine driven artificial intelligences of the corporations that now control the mining interests of the Kimberley region Ronald reports, the constitutions of power prior that was manifest in religion now collapses under the new regime of digitised Confucianism. To describe these surveillance posts which purportedly imbue sincerity and polite subjugation as anything other, obviously belittles the words of this Goolarabooloo Elder who has lived through all manner of collapse in cultural conviviality.

Sardonic associations arise through Roes observations on ‘evangelists spouting redemption’ or ‘forces wielding whips of conformity giving way to the cudgels of pastoralists who slaughtered millions in the failed bid to reap from oxen’ which Roe equates now to ‘black hatted monsters segregating, dividing and conquering (or disappearing) those who speak against the ‘new legends’ and ‘reigning emperor’.

Returning in conversation to how some members of communities have given up hope of speaking for Country, I got a sense that Ronald will never cede nor accept those dictates from the current ruling hegemony. To bow down in politeness seems as far removed from where those sentiments I gather occur in a war waged in this part of Australia. 

Our conversation on the Anne Street porch of Roe’s humble home swings to songlines and connection to Country from across clans, communities and nations. This connection to Country which is of centrality to all conversations I’ve had with Roe concur also in my connections with other Aboriginal Elders and Traditional Custodians over the years.

Our conversation deepens as the day eases into mottled shadows against the Goolarabooloo community sign on Roes vehicle trailer.

Country owns its inhabitants and no human is seperate, rather part of Country, Roe reinforces. Likewise ‘liyan’ which is a term that occurs right across the Kimberley region Roe describes as his ‘moral compass’ occurring also in each of all humans, not a commodified product rebadged as reconciliation. With animation through hardened hands that have seen many years of tough work, Roe punches out prose unlike others in his generation who have succumbed to the apathy or dejected subservience to those who would have them extinguished as was their ‘native’ entitlements.

In essence Ronald reiterates, no anthropologist can describe anyone other than themselves as the ‘tool of oppressor’. Nor will an archeological report ever make meaning in a landscape older than the Anthropocene itself. 

In sheer indignation and disgust at the way his Grandfather, Paddy Roe OAM (Lulu) has been defiled under the constitutions of these corporations that redescribed bloodlines, Roe shows me a letter he is composing which refutes the claims of those who now set upon themselves to control their own countrymen. In a few short minutes I better understand where it is that drives this Aboriginal Writer, Elder and what brings Roe to be considered by others as a leader amongst his nation. With a reminder of his bloodlines and Ancestors, Roe dismisses the term ‘bosses’ as a bastardised vernacular where traditional and continued contemporaneous ‘proper’ use of ‘Maja’ would be respectful.

With reference to documents which Roe claims illegally set about division in his community, we end our conversation and depart on a handshake.

Two things are certain as I reflect on Roes words as I near touchdown in Perth, one of the worlds most geographically isolated cities in the world. The rampant and misguided mandate of a surveillance society ‘for your own safety’ does not bode well in those regions such as the Kimberley which was once dubbed ‘the cultural melting pot of the North’, all now under the one CCTV.

Nor will those leaders like Roe it is certain ever accept that ‘sincerity’ defines and promises these communities anything more than what has already been denied under successive regimes. What is very real in the takeaway is that Country will always be alive where connections are spoken and in listening proper Law remains.

With a wave, all else Roe relegates to future writing and more timeless meetings with me on Country.