See How We Roll

 

In the perilous movement of people through time and space, both places and kin are made and remade. A primary driver of movement is the opportunistic pursuit of resources: a meal, an adventurous ride, the numbing release of alcohol or ganja, the conviviality of assembled kin … All of these forms of Warlpiri movement, no matter their diversity, never seem to be in search of a destination per se. The near pristine abandoned houses at one of the outstations on Nungarrayi’s ancestral estate attest to this; the houses stand as a kind of melancholy memorial to the collapsed outstation movement more generally and the bewildering history of the disconnect between government imaginaries and Aboriginal ways of living. Warlpiri rarely look to settle in the conventional Western sense; they do not arrive at a destination. They keep moving, always on the lookout for what is coming next.

 

The extract above is from page 84 of Melinda Hinkson’s recent book, See How We Roll, which focusses on the challenges inherent in the life of a Warlpiri woman living in exile from her ancestral country in Adelaide. The subtitle is Enduring Exile Between Desert and Urban Australia.

 

See How We Roll is an ethnography exploring myriad issues which explicate and illuminate Warlpiri ways of living in modern Australia. It is narrated reflexively through the prism of a friendship between anthropologist Hinkson and her ‘informant’ Nungarrayi (a subsection term that serves to anonymise the individual concerned). Hinkson has written a comparatively dense book, interleaving an individual narrative embedded within a complex world of local Aboriginal politics, conflicts and social relations, anthropological theory, contextualised within a staccato account of two decades of policy history related to remote Australia.

 

My sense is that See How We Roll was written for a largely academic and anthropological readership, and I expect it will be well received. It is very well written, builds on the pre-existing literature, and moves smoothly between participant observation and theoretical exegesis. Despite its theoretical density, the narrative alone is worth reading as it brings to life the lives of not just Nungarrayi, but her extended family. While Hinkson doesn’t say so, my sense is that the experiences narrated in See How We Roll are widely replicated across remote Australia and the surrounding urban cities and towns.

 

Hinkson’s nuanced narrative describes, in largely non-judgemental terms, the extraordinarily precarious lives of Warlpiri people, the daily challenges of sustaining welfare payments, keeping power on, engaging government services, their drinking culture, the moving in and out of prison, hospitals, and the early deaths of far too many. She also describes the social relations at the heart of Warlpiri society, the importance of kin, the attachments to place and to country, and (as in the quote above) their addiction to perpetual movement and engagement, all from the perspective of a grandmother who has decided to leave her Central Australian community and live in Adelaide; a grandmother who has a propensity to live on the edge.

 

It strikes me that this is, more than any other I have come across recently, an important book for policymakers engaged in shaping policy in the Indigenous domain. It shatters preconceptions regarding the distinction between remote and urban contexts, and makes clear the parallels between disadvantaged Indigenous people and other disadvantaged citizens. Most importantly, it should make policymakers question their assumptions and preconceptions regarding Indigenous life choices, and the potential for policy instruments and measures of various kinds to articulate or engage with the altogether different world views and approaches to living of many Indigenous people.

 

I do have one critical comment regarding See How We Roll. While Hinkson’s narrative describes the experience of Indigenous lives neutrally and largely objectively, she resorts to a more value laden approach to her description of various policy measures. It is not that I fundamentally disagree with her policy critiques (which are often included as brief asides more than extended arguments), but it somehow doesn’t sit well within an otherwise neutrally descriptive narrative. In the scheme of things however, my criticism is a mere quibble.

 

See How We Roll is more than an anthropological treatise. It is a window into issues of enduring salience and importance to policymakers. It doesn’t offer solutions, it doesn’t argue for particular policies, but it certainly allows those of us whose knowledge and experience of Aboriginal social, economic, and political realities is thin to gain a better appreciation of what is at stake when policies directed at reshaping Indigenous lives are promulgated unilaterally and from ‘on high’.

 

Ultimately, Hinkson challenges policymakers, and the nation generally, to look harder at the underlying constraints on Indigenous lives, and our own responses to Indigenous life choices, and to truly ‘see’ how ‘we’ roll.

 

 

 

See How We Roll was published by Duke University Press in 2021.