Recently a journalist from the Sunday Age, Russell Skelton, visited Central Australia. What his reports offered the newspaper’s readers over several editions in May and June 2005 was a sketchy view of two small, isolated Indigenous communities that have been overwhelmed by the force of historical and contemporary circumstances—circumstances created by Australian governments and their mandatory policies enforced through rule of law. Skelton is well meaning and has good intentions. But what his cursory view did not make clear is that in every state and territory there are Indigenous communities stricken by poverty and associated injury of enormous magnitude, and that we cannot be held accountable when we are prevented by foreign, imposed systems of law from being in control of our lives.

Most Indigenous people working for their communities, such as Alison Anderson, are not sightseers or cultural tourists who fly in one day and leave the next. Aboriginal leaders, as all Indigenous people in this country, have been shaped by a history of more than two centuries of political domination, theft of land, and widespread suffering. In the face of this onslaught our leaders have struggled to continue their responsibility as the residents and caretakers of their traditional country. Yet the administration of Indigenous policies and programs is largely by white workers holding positions of domination over Aboriginal people.