Book Review
Holding Men: Kanyirninpa and the health of Aboriginal men
Brian F McCoy
ISBN: 978-0 85575-658-1; 2008; 296 pages; Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra;
Peter Willis
Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences, University of South Australia, Mawson Lakes SA
'Holding men' is essentially a book of listening and being present, particularly to Aboriginal men in the Western desert of Australia in a time of second level turmoil. In these times, Aboriginal people, instead of being harried and hunted by the whites or kartiya during the first level of colonisation, have, under the rubric of 'self determination', been largely ignored by them and given attention only when their actions impact negatively on the so-called 'mainstream' white regime.
In recent years, Mission settlements originally set up to protect Aboriginal people and convert to Christianity and western customs of sedentary life and work routines, have been largely handed over to the care and administration of their Aboriginal residents. These settlements have been a major arena of challenge for Aboriginal people to frame and manage their relatively autonomous life in terms of language, education, aspirations and customs in the new social context.
One of these erstwhile missions known as Balgo and now known as Wirrumanu, is located in the desert region of Western Australia near the Northern territory border north and west of Alice Springs. It forms a centre of the Kutjungka region of the western desert which is the site of much of McCoy's research. In 1967 I spent a year at this centre then Balgo mission, as a young Kartiya (white) priest in charge of the boys' dormitory under the authority of Fr. John Maguire. A few years later in 1973, Brian McCoy as a young student, took up the same role. He was known as a courteous, considerate and thoughtful young man who was keen to learn and to make sense of his world and his future work as a priest.
Twenty years later after lengthy periods of service to the people of this desert region, McCoy, now an ordained Catholic priest, set out to clarify and formalise the huge amount of cultural knowledge he had already gained in the interactions with Aboriginal people during the years of his previous ministry and their period of quasi self determination. McCoy wants to explain how the people make sense of the various life changes they experienced in the light of their own ways of seeing and naming their world. His report, Holding Men (Kanyirninpa), is an exploration of an Aboriginal key concept linked to Aboriginal wellbeing and contentment and how it is applied to explain contemporary circumstances of Aboriginal men. What makes this quite special is the way McCoy has managed to foreground Aboriginal thinking and perception and how the people use kanyirninpa as a key notion to explain the loss and possible regaining of wellbeing.
As parish priest of the Kutjungka region based at Wirrimanu (Balgo mission), he was a friend and minister to the Aboriginal people where his ministry was largely one of ceremonial and cultural exchange, of 'presence' and spiritual service which he seems to have pursued in dialogue rather then indoctrination. In many ways his ministry evokes the work of Fr. Ted Kennedy in Redfern in Sydney a substantial amount of whose work was concerned with listening and entering into the Aboriginal world and particularly supporting Aboriginal people in their times of bereavement and loss.
In a happy synchronicity, McCoy's attentive and supportive ministry manifested a kind of 'holding' (Kanyininpa) that he realised was central to the health and wellbeing of the Aboriginal people of whose lives and reflections he had long been a part. He notes that some sympathetic researchers have seen an explanation of Aboriginal distress and illness in trauma and post traumatic stress disorder. While aware of the appositeness of these western terms, in his closeness to the people he noticed the use of one of their own terms, Kanyirninpa, 'referred to in English as 'holding', 'touching', 'nurturing' 'growing up' and 'respect'. Its presence and absence was seen a key to the people's health and particularly the men when they got caught up in petrol sniffing, alcohol abuse, football playing and periods in gaol.
His revealing book evokes earlier work by Basil Sansom in his book, The Camp at Wallaby Cross on the Aboriginal experience of Fringe camps outside Darwin. Like Sansom, McCoy, uses an 'ethnography of speaking' in his inquiry, asking what words do the Aboriginal people use to name and classify the events and challenges of their world and how can readers learn from this.
With regard to healers and health, McCoy's study gives a careful account of white and Aboriginal (puntu) perspectives on health and the role of various healers: white medical people and their clinics and the Aboriginal 'maparn' or healers. He uses Aboriginal paintings and a range of academic 'readings' from cultural studies. He uses ideas from Deleuze and Probyn in his exploration of Aboriginal embodied personal and social identity, speaking of the 'inner and outer desert male body' where 'inside' and 'outside' are bridged through forms of folding or pleating (p. 90). As a reviewer I felt a kind of slowing and complicating in this excursion which seemed different from the rest of the text. It was evident that McCoy found some of these abstract ideas and theories helpful although even with his extraordinarily clear exposition, I wasn't sure how helpful these ideas about various 'bodies' are in his writing but this may be a matter of taste.
The tender and tentative style of McCoy is revealed in his careful exploration of petrol sniffing, and gaol. In discussing petrol sniffing, his writing features a comprehensive treatment of written studies from health researchers particularly the work of Anne Mosey and his own distillation of conversations with his Aboriginal friends. Petrol sniffing is revealed as a practice handed down from older to young people especially around Wirrimanu. Its exaggerated form combined with lawless acts is linked to lack of parental control and finally it is perceived by some particularly those without effective family links, to a kind of coming of age passage. McCoy notes that the people think that forms of Kanyirninpa ameliorate the practice of obsessive petrol sniffing and provide a space for Aboriginal young people to 'grow out' of it.
McCoy explores the same paradoxes he in petrol sniffing in Aboriginal men's experience of gaol particularly in the minimum security gaols in Broome and Roebourne. He notices the kanyirninpa can be realised in its presence and absence. For some inmates, gaol time gives them a time of respite away from grog, bad food and fights especially if there are older men in gaol with whom the younger men can find some form of holding. For others the separation puts strain on significant relationships especially with wives and children.
McCoy's life was embedded for many years in the people whose world he has revealed and is aware of the relationships underpinning the Puntu approval of his painstaking study. Comparing his work to some Aboriginal language texts where their words and expressions are collected by university linguists whose time is curtailed by their grant, McCoy's access has been prolonged and entwined with cultural matters particularly funeral rituals. His situation has given him the chance to see how the language is used in practice in conversations of which he is a participant but not necessarily the recipient of specific comments and how the people frame their current difficult world.
Readers need to be aware of how this book is as it were a presentation of the way Aboriginal people represent their experience of their current personal and social life as situated in a kind of 'wartime' of social disintegration. In representing his Aboriginal friends' ways of naming the world and its challenges, McCoy has managed to keep the same even tone that I recall in the way Aboriginal people told stories of hardship and endurance under the white regime. Readers may need to be reminded of the huge distress that can lie behind Aboriginal matter of fact comments. Brian McCoy's book is a helpful and painstaking interpretative work in which the world of his Puntu friends in the desert and their linguistic representation of it has been made respectfully accessible.
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