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jouljet's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
tense
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Colonisation, Racism, Violence, Alcohol, Blood, and Animal cruelty
tasmanian_bibliophile's review against another edition
4.0
‘Grog War is one of the few books published in Australia about a great Indigenous campaign. It is the story of how the Indigenous people of Tennant Creek worked together on a war against alcohol.’
After reading ‘Telling Tennant’s Story’ by Dean Ashenden and learning a bit about Tennant Creek, I (finally) picked up this book. This is an updated and revised edition of a book first published in 1997 and is an inspiring account of how the Indigenous people of Tennant Creek campaigned to reduce alcohol abuse. The campaign was initiated by the Julalikari Council Aboriginal Corporation in rallying the Tennant Creek community to fight the problem of alcohol abuse as a community problem, not (just) ‘an Aboriginal problem’.
‘This book explores the challenges that confronted the Indigenous people of this remote Northern Territory township in their quest to explore ideas, develop strategies, and enforce change in a complex, mostly negative and dominating political, social and economic environment; a legacy stemming from the fact that the rights of Indigenous people are the unsettled business in Australia.’
Their battle to get an alcohol-free day in Tennant Creek was difficult. Liquor licensees and hotel owners, quick to rail against alcohol-fuelled violence, were reluctant to see their profits reduced, while others considered that their fundamental human rights were under attack.
It makes for uncomfortable reading: the notion that the profit motive is somehow more important than addressing alcohol related problems. This was not a campaign to make Tennant Creek alcohol free: it was a campaign to make some rules around the purchase of alcohol and to have an alcohol-free day. The community leadership shown within the Julalikari Council Aboriginal Corporation was inspirational, as was their persistence in the face of opposition. Most of the Tennant Creek Council proposed measures which simply would have pushed the problem into majority Indigenous areas, without looking at the broader community. A classic approach of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
I finished this book full of admiration for the Indigenous community leaders who persisted, and full of disgust at those who believed they could define the problem of alcohol abuse as ‘their’ problem, not ‘our’ problem.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
After reading ‘Telling Tennant’s Story’ by Dean Ashenden and learning a bit about Tennant Creek, I (finally) picked up this book. This is an updated and revised edition of a book first published in 1997 and is an inspiring account of how the Indigenous people of Tennant Creek campaigned to reduce alcohol abuse. The campaign was initiated by the Julalikari Council Aboriginal Corporation in rallying the Tennant Creek community to fight the problem of alcohol abuse as a community problem, not (just) ‘an Aboriginal problem’.
‘This book explores the challenges that confronted the Indigenous people of this remote Northern Territory township in their quest to explore ideas, develop strategies, and enforce change in a complex, mostly negative and dominating political, social and economic environment; a legacy stemming from the fact that the rights of Indigenous people are the unsettled business in Australia.’
Their battle to get an alcohol-free day in Tennant Creek was difficult. Liquor licensees and hotel owners, quick to rail against alcohol-fuelled violence, were reluctant to see their profits reduced, while others considered that their fundamental human rights were under attack.
It makes for uncomfortable reading: the notion that the profit motive is somehow more important than addressing alcohol related problems. This was not a campaign to make Tennant Creek alcohol free: it was a campaign to make some rules around the purchase of alcohol and to have an alcohol-free day. The community leadership shown within the Julalikari Council Aboriginal Corporation was inspirational, as was their persistence in the face of opposition. Most of the Tennant Creek Council proposed measures which simply would have pushed the problem into majority Indigenous areas, without looking at the broader community. A classic approach of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.
I finished this book full of admiration for the Indigenous community leaders who persisted, and full of disgust at those who believed they could define the problem of alcohol abuse as ‘their’ problem, not ‘our’ problem.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
ehothersall's review against another edition
3.0
The subject matter of this book is fascinating, and the underlying themes of racism and inequalities are subjects I feel very passionate about. I have never read anything by Alexis Wright before and found the style quite disjointed and hard to follow. The sections based in the hearings were particularly challenging as they were a fairly verbatim report that often made more sense read aloud. I learned a lot but I didnt really enjoy the book.
archytas's review against another edition
5.0
This is an engrossing account of the battle to get an alcohol free day in Tennant Creek. If this makes it sound either dry or trivial, the book is anything but. It's authored by Alexis Wright, so it is beautifully written, and more importantly, raises a world's worth of thoughts through one microcosm campaign. There are elements of the technique that underpins the magnificent [b:Tracker|36653249|Tracker|Alexis Wright|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1511535124s/36653249.jpg|58183669] on display here as Wright uses primary sources, often contradictory ones, to introduce elements of the story.
So this is a story of a struggle by an Aboriginal leadership with a clear strategy against a morass of mostly strategy-less bureaucracy and local business. But there is a multitude of other stories here too. Beneath the surface of the maze of processes and rules is a battle between commercial imperatives - the desire to make money out of selling grog - and community imperatives - the lives destroyed by grog. The mere fact that this is viewed as a 'balance' issue is a little terrifying, and goes a long way to explaining the whole country's problems with alcohol, as just a tiny sliver of the power of the alcohol lobby is visible here, and a much bigger whack of its inhumanity.
In the face of that, the smarts and persistence of Julalikari, elders and community leaders managing dry camps, and fostering children, staffing the night bus is notable. Community leadership here is strong and capable, just very hampered by having government pose largely as an adversary rather than ally. The constant shifting in public policy that is a marker of our Westminister system is deadly here, preventing Aboriginal leaderships from real, long-term progress on a strategy as the rules keep changing.
The aspects that haunted me most, however, was the gulf of understanding between the majority of the Tennant Creek Council and Julalikari Council. While the local council gave lipservice to the grog problem, their approach indicates it is a 'Black' problem they are trying to solve. The measures put forward are all intended, not to mitigate the social tsunami of alcohol, but to remove visible and loud Aboriginal people from the main street. Most measures would enable the ongoing sale of grog - and hence profit - to this group, while pushing the problem back into majority Aboriginal-areas. There is little sense in which the alcohol-affected Aboriginal locals are part of the community the Council serves. Julalikari is trying to bring a community together, when the whites (in the Council leadership at least), don't even seem themselves as part of the same community. The depth of racism this reveals is unsettling, and even slightly shocking.
This extends to the white Australian response to the proposal for a grog free day a week. Now, I, an Anglo-Australian, have been a pretty heavy drinker in my time. Enough to recognise that when people start thinking that it is an impossible limitation to not have ready access to full-strength alcohol once a week, it is likely that they have a problem. Yet, despite numerous letters to the editor decrying the impossibility of giving up a liquid lunch once a week, the issues of white alcohol abuse never seem to surface in the discussion.
Putting all that together, it is almost agonising, with hindsight, to think of a missed world, in which the whole of Tennant Creek comes together to deal with alcohol abuse in a united. Acknowledging that colonialism means this plays out differently - and more destructively -for Indigenous Australians, but also recognising the commonalities of alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, and the right of a community to defend itself from those making money out of misery.
In the end, this is a good news story, and a pointer to the future, but, like moselle, there is a definite sourness in the aftertaste.
2019 Reading Challenge read #37. A book with a two-word title.
So this is a story of a struggle by an Aboriginal leadership with a clear strategy against a morass of mostly strategy-less bureaucracy and local business. But there is a multitude of other stories here too. Beneath the surface of the maze of processes and rules is a battle between commercial imperatives - the desire to make money out of selling grog - and community imperatives - the lives destroyed by grog. The mere fact that this is viewed as a 'balance' issue is a little terrifying, and goes a long way to explaining the whole country's problems with alcohol, as just a tiny sliver of the power of the alcohol lobby is visible here, and a much bigger whack of its inhumanity.
In the face of that, the smarts and persistence of Julalikari, elders and community leaders managing dry camps, and fostering children, staffing the night bus is notable. Community leadership here is strong and capable, just very hampered by having government pose largely as an adversary rather than ally. The constant shifting in public policy that is a marker of our Westminister system is deadly here, preventing Aboriginal leaderships from real, long-term progress on a strategy as the rules keep changing.
The aspects that haunted me most, however, was the gulf of understanding between the majority of the Tennant Creek Council and Julalikari Council. While the local council gave lipservice to the grog problem, their approach indicates it is a 'Black' problem they are trying to solve. The measures put forward are all intended, not to mitigate the social tsunami of alcohol, but to remove visible and loud Aboriginal people from the main street. Most measures would enable the ongoing sale of grog - and hence profit - to this group, while pushing the problem back into majority Aboriginal-areas. There is little sense in which the alcohol-affected Aboriginal locals are part of the community the Council serves. Julalikari is trying to bring a community together, when the whites (in the Council leadership at least), don't even seem themselves as part of the same community. The depth of racism this reveals is unsettling, and even slightly shocking.
This extends to the white Australian response to the proposal for a grog free day a week. Now, I, an Anglo-Australian, have been a pretty heavy drinker in my time. Enough to recognise that when people start thinking that it is an impossible limitation to not have ready access to full-strength alcohol once a week, it is likely that they have a problem. Yet, despite numerous letters to the editor decrying the impossibility of giving up a liquid lunch once a week, the issues of white alcohol abuse never seem to surface in the discussion.
Putting all that together, it is almost agonising, with hindsight, to think of a missed world, in which the whole of Tennant Creek comes together to deal with alcohol abuse in a united. Acknowledging that colonialism means this plays out differently - and more destructively -for Indigenous Australians, but also recognising the commonalities of alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, and the right of a community to defend itself from those making money out of misery.
In the end, this is a good news story, and a pointer to the future, but, like moselle, there is a definite sourness in the aftertaste.
2019 Reading Challenge read #37. A book with a two-word title.
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