John Adams
For more than 30 years I’ve lived and worked in Central Australia. I worked in youth justice, Aboriginal organisations, remote communities, and environmental projects. I watched governments come and go. I saw new policies replace old policies, new slogans replace old slogans, and millions of dollars spent trying to improve Aboriginal lives.
The longer I am here, the less convinced I am that another program, inquiry, or expert is going to solve the problem. In fact, I think trying to solve the problem is the problem.
That doesn’t mean the problems aren’t real. They are. Kidney disease is real, so is overcrowded housing and the outcomes of poor education. Family violence is real as is youth offending; no one who lives in Central Australia could deny that.
But I think we misunderstand where these problems begin. We tend to see them as individual failures. We ask, why do Aboriginal people make poor choices? Why don’t they take more responsibility? Why don’t they simply work harder or live differently? Those are the wrong questions.
Take kidney disease. We like to blame diabetes and high blood pressure, but kidney failure is the accumulated effect of poverty. Cheap food is high in sugar because that’s what people can afford. Housing is overcrowded, skin infections become chronic, and babies are more likely to be born prematurely.
Every small disadvantage compounds the next until eventually people face chronic illness. None of those things exists in isolation, yet our response is usually to ask individuals to change, while leaving the conditions that created the problem largely untouched. We blame people for outcomes we helped produce.
That’s why I think we misunderstood Closing the Gap. (Editor’s note: A formal Partnership Agreement on Closing the Gap [the Partnership] was established in March 2019 between the Commonwealth Government, state and territory governments, the Coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peak Organisations [the Coalition of Peaks], and the Australian Local Government Association. For the first time, Australian governments shared decision making with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peak representatives to develop a new National Agreement on Closing the Gap [the National Agreement].)
One of the best things to come out of Closing the Gap is the data. The dashboard tells us exactly where the gaps are, but the data doesn’t explain why those gaps exist. There is no spread sheet that gives us the answers. Answers are found in people’s lives.
Over the years I learnt far more sitting outside a community store talking with old people than I ever learnt sitting in an office designing programs. The biggest lesson is people need purpose. Without purpose, why heal?
We spend enormous amounts of money helping people recover from illness, addiction and trauma. Those services matter.
But healing isn’t the end of the journey. Healing is only worthwhile if there’s something waiting on the other side.
Everyone needs to feel useful and needs to feel they belong. Everyone needs to know they contribute to something larger than themselves; without that, healing becomes another service instead of a pathway back into life. That’s why young people are misunderstood in the justice system.
People see stolen cars and criminal behaviour. I see young people who know exactly how unequal their world is. They see government workers driving new vehicles while their own families have none. They see money flowing through organisations built around Aboriginal disadvantage while their communities continue to struggle.
They know wealth exists. They simply don’t see themselves sharing in it. I’m not excusing crime. I’m saying we shouldn’t pretend it exists without context. These kids haven’t stopped caring and are hopefully still asking where they fit. Purpose matters.
The mistake we make is believing purpose can be delivered by government.
Governments can fund schools, hospitals, and housing. They should, while purpose grows somewhere else. It grows from family, community, responsibility, Country, and from knowing that your knowledge matters.
One of the greatest privileges of my life is learning from old Aboriginal men who never set out to teach me. One old fellow was cutting up a kangaroo with a knife that had no handle. I told him I’d bring him a proper skinning knife. He laughed. “Young fella,” he said, “if you give me that knife, one of my family will want it and I’ll have to give it away. Then I’ll have no knife. At least now I’ve got one.”
That wasn’t a lesson about knives. It was a lesson about enoughness.
Modern Australia has forgotten what is enough. We convince ourselves that more is always better: more money, more possessions, more growth. Yet many of the happiest people I know measure wealth very differently. They measure it in family and country, in being needed.
That’s why I get frustrated when people romanticise Aboriginal culture. Looking after country isn’t romantic, it’s practical.
Waterholes, fire, ceremony, and songlines aren’t museum pieces. They’re systems developed over thousands of years that allowed people to survive in one of the harshest environments on Earth. When people dismiss that knowledge as belonging to the past, they miss its relevance to the future.
Climate change should be teaching us that. If we’re serious about caring for country, then Aboriginal people already possess one of Australia’s greatest strengths. Caring for country is not simply environmental work, it is economic opportunity and cultural continuity – it is purpose.
Everything comes back to purpose.
These days I spend time in my forge making things from steel. People ask why blacksmithing seems to help people struggling with mental health.
I don’t think it’s the steel. I think it’s the fire. When you’re working at the forge, your attention is complete. You can’t think about yesterday or tomorrow. You’re completely present. Maybe that’s why it heals – not because you’re making something but because you’re becoming someone while you’re making it.
As I get older, I think less about achievement and more about contribution. My friend Kenny and I joke that we’ll become a couple of old blokes sitting under a tree. That’s fine with me. The point is the tree. You plant it knowing somebody else will sit in its shade. That’s purpose.
I’ve also become more honest about my own life. I benefited from the very systems I criticise. I live comfortably and own a good house. I made money working in a sector built around other people’s disadvantage. Ignoring that would be dishonest, but guilt isn’t the answer, responsibility is.
Responsibility means recognising that communities already possess the knowledge, strength and leadership they need. Our job isn’t to replace that. Our job is to make room for it.
For too long we approached Aboriginal Australia as though it was a problem waiting for someone else to solve. Perhaps that’s why we keep failing.
Real change doesn’t begin when another expert arrives. It begins when we stop believing we have all the answers. Sometimes the most important thing we can do is to simply be there, to listen, to walk alongside, and to share what we know while learning what we don’t know.
Purpose cannot be given to another human being, it can only be discovered. Our task is not to provide it, but to stop getting in its way.
John Adams is a social services specialist and the General Manager of the Northern Territory Justice programs of Jesuit Social Services where he spent decades advocating for community-led solutions, youth justice reform, and alternatives to incarceration in Alice Springs and across the region. He can be reached through his email: john.adams@jss.org.au.
Photo of the Northern Territory landscape is from Jesuit Social Services.
Related article by John Adams: Locking up more Territorians is not a plan, 21 April 2026