What is a community?

Such an easy question to answer ... or is it? I sometimes struggle with this idea of community, as it seems like many view the idea of an Aboriginal community in static or stereotypical ways.

For example, well it's a group of Aboriginal people all from the same area who speak the same language (isn't it?) Or it's [insert name] Community, you know, about [kilometres] from [town].

It's not. And it is.

Just as I might identify as 'Australian' when I'm in England, or 'country NSW born and bred' when I'm in Canberra, what is my own sense of community identity shifts according to who I'm with and where I am. So yes, sometimes people will say they are from Warburton, or sometimes from the Ngaanyatjarra Lands, or sometimes Central Desert, but it shifts according to context.

Blackstone Community - from office up to the store

The really interesting thing though, is how the community works when it's just a conversation about what's happening in one place. What does it mean when we're thinking just about one community, like Warburton or Blackstone?

One of the early things I learnt about work out here is that communities are really collections of families sitting around the one bore (so to speak). As traditional life shifted to contemporary settled life, places developed in ways that gave the impression of just one set of related mob, but really it is more complex.

Family comes first. Family is the abiding connector. So when outsiders say "the community should sit down and talk about this", what does that mean? Very little. The community is a collection of families. And like any collection of individuals, they will face all the usual struggles of meeting, sharing, agreeing and deciding what to do next that any of us face in small communities all across Australia (suburbs, communities of interests, little regional towns).

Somehow, people assume that because community members are tied together by language, culture, remoteness etc, there is somehow a magical additional layer of cohesiveness and collective decision-making. There are culturally informed ways of sitting down and trying to nut things out, but there are exactly the same challenges in doing that as there would be anywhere else.

Karrku Community (now abandoned) playground

Yet, when things go wrong in Aboriginal communities, in ways we don't ask of mainstream Australian communities, "the community" need to sort it out. Ta da.

It's not that simple. It can't be that simple.

Really, we are united by our similarity more than our diversity!