'Goinna Cooktown!': Transformation of Identity on a Bus

Race, in Queensland, has always beenDaily, on the street.Familiar, therefore hidden from consciousness.Pearson is changing that, with others.Because of Hope Vale we are forced to think, and be aware, and welcome change.There is no other way.I read again of Hope Vale l.We know of Hope Vale from another time. We nearly went there, to Hope Vale, on a trip by bus to Cooktown years ago. The attraction then was of 'authentic Aboriginal tours' - but Hope Vale was all a bit too Indigenous for us at the time. We didn't go.Now it is the other Hope Vale that takes my interest. Not as a figment of our tourist imagination. This Hope Vale, new to us, has been constructed by the work of women and men who look dominant and non-Indigenous society in the eye and say what must be said. Noel Pearson 2 is a man of Hope Vale.It was Noel Pearson who broke the ideological stalemate over Aboriginal policy and the remote communities... Pearson now acknowledged that over the past quarter-century or so the communities at Cape York had experienced what he would call 'a descent into hell.' (Manne 2008)We ventured out; we, the naive, non-indigenous travellers from the sheltered south; and took a bus to Cooktown to see a life we did not know. And on that bus we saw, in fact became fleetingly a part of, those familiar, everyday relationships across the cultural and racial divide that have become the heritage of every man and woman in this land. We saw no pathos there, on that swaying bus or down the streets of Cooktown. We saw only what everybody sees: the tips of people's hidden lives: the glance, the passing word, the so-familiar that we do not think of what is buried deep.And now I read of Pearson's Hope Vale and begin to understand. I start to see beneath the hidden lives of the good people on that bus and on the streets of Cooktown. I hear the tragedies of life told by those who know. And from those woeful tales I see a new politics of change emerge from strident voices that this time will not go away. The tipping point is reached.Hope Vale is an Aboriginal community located 44 kilometres north of Cooktown...it is on Deed of Grant in Trust (DOGIT) land. Hope Vale has an Estimated Resident Population of 856 (as of June 2006)...This community is subject to alcohol restrictions through Queensland's Alcohol Management Plan. The restricted area in Hope Vale is defined by the Deed of Grant in Trust area. (Queensland Government website 2008b)The tipping point was reached for the people of Australia, first with publicity about and Government response to the Little Children are Sacred report; then with The Intervention; then The Apology 3. And now we listen with respect like never before to Indigenous luminaries.Thus across our journeying to Cooktown another story now is being written: explicit, not hidden; emerging, not familiar; structural, not idiosyncratic. I follow Noel Pearson and his articulation of tragedy and hope for Cooktown, Hope Vale and the Cape. I follow it now, this Hope Vale experiment, but it is not where I began. I began as all must do: with the hidden but familiar personal politics of race... on a bus to Cooktown... years ago...'Goinna Cooktown!' A statement rather than a question. The bus arrived thirty five minutes late. No explanation. Our driver was a humourless character of impressive stature, topped with severely short hair and wire brush moustache. He flung the 22-seater-with-trailer onto the highway north and settled in to try and make up time.The only safety belt was stretched around his generous frame; so I slid across to a kerb-side seat to give myself a slender chance of survival, and cast an eye over the paying customers.We were overwhelmingly odd: three single white males to the front; two older Aboriginal men; 'Michael', a younger bloke of uncertain ancestry whom later we learned also was Aboriginal, from somewhere north; and us. …

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