Jon Altman

Whether you love or hate lawyer–activist Noel Pearson’s ideas, you have to admire his chutzpah, his willingness to put his ideas out there for public discussion and debate, even if his own dogmatism sometimes limits his diplomatic engagements ...

Over the last few years, issues associated with underdevelopment in Aboriginal Australia have been widely canvassed in the mainstream press, led by the likes of Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, and Peter Sutton. This new edited volume adopts a somewhat different approach to Aboriginal development, focusing on Indigenous involvement in natural resource management around Australia.

Up from the Mission is a powerhouse of a book. One would expect no less from Noel Pearson. This collection of thirty-eight essays combines to provide multiple overarching narratives: Pearson’s personal trajectory from the mission on Cape York, where he grew up; his intellectual development; and his political efforts at regional and national levels to redevelop Cape York communities and to influence the nation. The writings date from 1987 to 2009, from his first essay as a radical graduate student to his latest pronouncements.

A remarkable feature of this book is that its thirty essays were commissioned, written, edited and printed for distribution within four months of the Howard government’s declaration on 21 June 2007 of an emergency in the Northern Territory. Seldom can there have been such a rapid and comprehensive set of responses to a major federal government policy initiative, bearing as it did all the signs of political opportunism in its timing. By contrast with the massive legislation embodying the reforms, most of the essays are thoughtfully cast and well written: a good advertisement for the way deadlines can concentrate the academic mind. The ironic twist is that the contributors’ principal target now is the Rudd government, whose own political opportunism in Opposition ensured bipartisan support for John Howard and Mal Brough during the legislation’s scandalously brief parliamentary consideration. Significantly, Minister Jenny Macklin’s actions so far suggest that she is in sympathy with the book’s main thrust.

Helen Hughes was a professional development economist who worked at the World Bank from 1968 to 1983 and then, as an academic, headed the National Centre for Development Studies at the Australian National University from 1983 to 1993. Since then, she has been a senior fellow at a conservative think-tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, where she initially focused on issues of development in the Pacific and, since 2004, in remote indigenous Australia.

This book’s launch was timed to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum. Hughes sets out to assess and address the ‘Aboriginal problem’ for 90,000 indigenous people who live in some 1200 ‘homeland’ settlements established in remote Australia from the 1970s, according to Hughes. Her book focuses on the ‘homelands’, because, in her view, their occupants’ deprivation is the greatest.