Bureaucracy and Systemic Inequality Theme Analysis

The narrator’s desire to be kind and helpful is often thwarted by the bureaucratic structure of her job, placing her in a ladder of systemic inequality which limits every individual’s ability to support other people. While the work of the centre is intended to be altruistic, its mere existence is indicative of a system of economic inequality which leads to an inherited scarcity of and competition for resources. The mural’s very existence comes out of the bureaucracy of the centre (and, by extension, the local government), which creates a system based on competition, economic scarcity, and commodification of people and resources.

Throughout the story, the characters deal with financial limitations and struggles of varying degrees of difficulty. The cycles of systemic inequality divide every person into different economic classes. The artists, Mandy and Jake, have to apply to sell themselves as the best artists for the job (even though, it becomes clear, they may not be) in order to gain a paid job. Even with the grant funding, the narrator spends her own money on the centre’s projects, knowing that going through the process of getting the money can be a hassle and that it’s often “easier if [she] just pays for it.” Additionally, it’s clear that even the grant funding is not a hefty amount, as by the end of the project, the narrator is counting the remaining grant money in the account, and sees that there is only enough left to buy “snacks at the opening.”

Still, the narrator sees how even with her financial frustrations, she has class privilege that many others do not possess. When she is getting a parking ticket, she observes the inspector giving her the ticket and makes an assumption that he probably used to live at the centre himself, assuming based on her understanding of class division in Australia that it’s likely that someone in his job is a refugee or first generation immigrant. Similarly, she reflects on the “demands of getting by” that the entire community of two thousand who lives in the housing complex struggle with—while the narrator sees her own life as a bureaucratic struggle, she recognizes how her life is still in many ways easier—because of her whiteness, by her economic class—than the lives of those living in the complex.

The center’s bureaucracy—and the society-wide, systemic scarcity of resources—creates a situation in which the centre, which purportedly exists to serve its residents, in practice prioritizes its own funding and sustained existence above the actual needs of its residents. The grant used to fund the mural is itself shown to be a commodity. The narrator gets the grant approved by proposing the mural as a good investment, and when she imagines the event celebrating the mural, she pictures “community workers from other centres” coming to the opening to “marvel and envy, and apply for their own grants.” The narrator’s observation indicates the competitive nature of the centre’s very existence and the overall societal scarcity of financial resources. Ironically, the centre must work against other centres in order to succeed in its own goals.

But while the centre competes with other institutions to win funding and sustain its own existence, it ignores and overrides the material needs of its residents. While the mural is being painted in the gym, the kids who live in the centre are unable to do what they actually want to do—play basketball. And the mural itself makes use of grant funds that the residents of the centre would rather use for other purposes, like purchasing pool tables (as the narrator recalls). But the centre does not want to actualize residents’ desires as much as it wants to justify its own existence, which it does through commissioning the mural that, while ostensibly celebrating diversity, actually just celebrates the centre through a homogenized presentation of the centre’s residents that is designed to appease the white bureaucracy in which the centre is embedded.

In all, “White Spirit” portrays a modern Australian society in which systemic socioeconomic inequality—and the way that inequality is expressed through bureaucratic structures—makes it difficult for people to really support one another, or even to really understand each other. The centre, ostensibly, is supposed to exist for its residents. But the story shows how limited resources, the need to make the centre “look good” in order to keep those resources flowing, and the desire of the centre staff to personally be successful, actually creates a misalignment between the centre’s goals and the needs of the residents, such that the residents’ needs and desires are always ignored and pushed to the bottom.