Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, May 14, 2003
TRUTH CAN BE CONTRADICTORY
THE truth is skittish and must be approached carefully. The closer we come to it, the more likely it is to take flight or change shape, depending on who is telling the story. My dear friend Margaret Simons is a story teller and a truth seeker. An obsession with truth is a common misfortune among journalists. Her new book The Meeting of the Waters, out this week, strikes boldly at the heart of the Hindmarsh Island bridge affair, a bitter controversy about belief more than anything else. A brave woman, our Margaret. Belief _ how some people believe one thing and others don't _ is at the core of an affair that gave us the term ``secret women's business'', which became the basis of an ultimately futile attempt by a group of Ngarindjerri women to block the bridge's construction. A Royal Commission found the ``secret women's business'' was a fabrication, not just a myth but a deliberate lie. The finding was wrong, as Margaret proves, and was later discarded by Federal Court judge John von Doussa - by which time the Ngarindjerri were in disarray, resentful and even more marginalised. The Meeting of the Waters reveals more about the multi-layered ``secret women's business'' - yes, it exists - than the Ngarindjerri women probably ever wanted told publicly. Margaret worries about it but the context is important in explaining the full story. Beyond that, she exposes a litany of deceit, abuse of process and power, selective misrepresentation, double dealing and political chicanery. Her book also makes me wonder if anthropology is a branch of science or a belief system itself. Even the rational approach - seeing, thinking, learning, understanding - cannot change entrenched ideology. In the crossover between belief and truth, the opposite of one truth is not necessarily a lie but another person's truth. The Ngarindjerri women's different levels of knowledge led them to believe different things, not to lie. But more than one truth at a time was too much for the white system, which therefore found that someone must be lying. Sigh. Belief is not far removed from faith _ the act of suspecting something is a fiction but believing it anyway. Religions depend upon faith but unlike other religions, the Ngarindjerri were not given the benefit of the doubt for placing their faith in the Dreaming. Many Ngarindjerri women now will not cross the bridge, believing its existence interferes with female fertility. A colleague of mine _ the harshest of cynics when it came to ``secret women's business'' _ bought a block of land on Hindmarsh Island in anticipation of the bridge being built. He moved into a new house on the marina and, at the age of 47, was making smug plans to buy a boat, followed by early retirement at 50 and the easy life thereafter. On their first weekend in the new house, his wife fell pregnant with their first child, which put an end to his retirement plans. Powerful stuff, that secret women's business.
