Ashgate

This is the last of David McKnight’s quartet of books on the Lardil people of Mornington Island, with whom he has worked from his first field trip in 1966 until his most recent in 2001. (For reviews in these pages of two of them, From Hunting to Drinking and Going the Whiteman’s Way, see the October 2004 and the February 2005 issues, respectively.) The title is characteristically challenging. A struggle for power in what we are always being assured was a tranquilly ordered society? Most of us have seen the pretty diagrams representing ‘traditional Aboriginal marriage practice’. How could violence and sorcery intrude on those elegant, iron-clad arrangements? Where all is prescribed, how can there be a struggle for power? And power over what?

When we think of Charles Dickens, we think of London – not the imagined medieval London of William Morris, ‘small, and white, and clean’, but the contemporary London Morris described as among the ‘six counties overhung with smoke’. For Christopher Koch, in Crossing the Gap (1987), the London of his imagination was full of ‘rooms where great fires blazed in open fireplaces’. He saw it this way because ‘Mr Pickwick had warmed his coat-tails before such fires’. We know, of course, that there are plenty of other English localities in Dickens’s novels, such as the memorable marshes in Great Expectations (1860–61). We even remember that parts of his novels are set in other countries altogether, such as the American scenes of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) and the Marseilles setting at the beginning of Little Dorrit (1855–57). Yet if we think of the quintessential Dickens setting, it is to London that we turn.

David McKnight made the first of many field trips to Mornington Island in 1966, when the old people could still remember how it was before the white men came. The Lardil largely escaped the violence that accompanied white intrusion, and had kept possession of their land, although in time they were made to share it with survivors from the region. A mission, established in 1914, had preserved them from further predation, but at a cost: hunter-gatherers were rounded up and made to live cheek-by-jowl in a ‘supercamp’ close by the mission, and their children were taken to be raised and educated by the missionaries, with only casual contact with their parents.

Reflecting on the sixty-year history of the United Nations, it seems obvious that this is an organisation created through the slow and tortured process of natural evolution rather than the product of careful, intelligent design.

Years ago, back when the UN had barely escaped its adolescence, the Nobel laureate and eminent diplomat Ralph Bunche observed that ‘the United Nations is a young organisation in the process of developing in response to challenges of all kinds’. He referred to institutional enlargement that typically continued as the global agenda grew. Agencies soon developed to coordinate the work of other agencies. Consequently, the modern UN became a haphazard creature, made up of a bewildering mix of political organs. Each part is intended to serve a different purpose, whether maintaining international security, advancing respect for fundamental human rights, or promoting economic development. And each component comes labelled with an almost impossible array of scientific-sounding designations (EcoSoc, for instance, UNEP, UNESCO, UNICEF and plenty more to make up page after page of abbreviation lists).