Living on the ground: The “Culture Woman” and the “Missus”

Abstract

Synopsis In “Living on the Ground” I investigate the cultural interactions between White and Indigenous people in a remote Indigenous settlement in Australia's Great Sandy Desert. Drawing on my own experience as a White Irish-Australian woman living in an Indigenous domain, I distinguish between the “Culture Woman” and the “Missus” as the difference between two worlds. The “Culture Woman” was formed in the gynocentric Indigenous environment of a women's Tjilimi (camp), where I lived with 13 women elders as they apprenticed me in their ways, their rituals and every-day customs. This contrasted starkly with the “Missus” — a conduit constructed by the elders to facilitate their access to resources tightly controlled by a hegemonic White society. The “Missus” is the nexus between Indigenous peoples' cultural needs and the demands of an inflexible White bureaucracy. These paradigms are created in a context of acute cultural clash where two societies are divided by even seemingly innocuous issues such as dirt and “mess”. This article is a call to White and Other-than-Indigenous researchers, consultants and community service providers to find ways of working which respect and advance Indigenous cultural self-determination. NB: This article strongly draws from Zohl de Ishtar's PhD thesis and her upcoming book Holding Yawulyu: White Culture and Black Women's Law, Spinifex Press, 2005.