Reviewed by: The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus Andrew Nurse The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus. by Peter Sutton. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009. ISBN 9 789522 856361 (pbk.). $30.95 (CDN). Among the various failings to which academics are prone is one I call “know-it-all syndrome.” As academics, we spend years investigating specific issues or subjects, mastering research techniques, and reading comprehensively in the secondary literature. In our own fields of expertise we draw careful and contextualized conclusions … and then something happens. Having carefully and deliberately mastered one research field (or, even subfield), a certain percentage of us feel qualified to authoritatively comment on other matters entirely. Respected anthropologist Peter Sutton’s The Politics of Suffering is a case in point. Sutton is a senior and respected Australian anthropologist who is perhaps the leading academic authority on Wik culture. He has conducted land-claims research and made important contributions to linguistics and the study (and popularization) of Australian aboriginal art. His work has won him due respect. The problem with The Politics of Suffering is that its subject—Australian indigenous affairs policy—is not his field of expertise. The result is a disappointing and at times frustrating text. [End Page 540] In this book Sutton argues that late 1960s/1970s liberal reforms in Australian aboriginal policy were nothing short of disaster. These reforms aimed to sweep away colonial repression, recognize aboriginal land rights, provide for community autonomy, and recognize the legitimacy of a renewed traditional culture. Instead, aboriginal communities are beset by substance abuse, domestic violence, ill health, and child abuse. What is more, the power of a post-1960s “liberal consensus” produced a self-censorship that ignored problems believing, as liberals are supposedly wont to do, in the infallibility of their own perspective. According to Sutton, this perspective is deeply flawed. Liberals’ key problem is that they believe Australian aboriginal peoples’ problems are related to colonialism. He argues that their problems are not and instead faults alcohol and what he claims is an inherently violent and ego-focused traditional culture. Thus, where “liberals” believe that traditional culture freed of colonialism can create the basis of autonomy and reconciliation, Sutton believes it is a key cause of community breakdown. As for reconciliation, this can really be done only on an individual level and should likely be abandoned as state policy. The Politics of Suffering has been hailed by some as a path-breaking, honest text that marks a new way forward. It shouldn’t be. First, there is little particularly new in this book. The title and argument recycle a lecture and essay Sutton gave and published a decade ago. One assumes Sutton wrote this book to reach a wider audience because, in a scholarly sense, it adds little to what the author has already “put on the table.” Second, the text is amazingly unselfcritical, which is odd for a book that faults others—particularly “liberals”—for their own lack of self-criticism. Indeed, at different points in the text Sutton is at pains to disparage those with whom he disagrees. Liberals, he suggests numerous times, are motivated not by honesty but by political correctness, naiveté, romanticism, and self-interest. Sutton never seems to consider seriously the idea that there can be legitimate disagreements between scholars. Not only does this lacuna lend the text a mean-spirited feel, but is an oddly naïve heuristic for a senior scholar: one either agrees with the author (and hence one is right) or one is in error as a result of character flaws. This is a spurious logic made worse by the fact that it is sustained by a selective reading of the evidence. One example: Sutton frequently references the deeply disturbing report Little Children Are Scared as supporting evidence. This report was one of a series of investigations that drew national attention to the sexual abuse of aboriginal children and contributed to development and implementation of the controversial Northern Territory Emergency Response. It goes without saying that the sexual abuse of children is horrific and must be stopped. But in an effort to support...