Wes Carter got home after a month away on holidays, and saw the park across from his house burned to a cinder. He's retired, old enough to let others worry about such things, but he views the blackened acreage philosophically. It's more than an act of wanton vandalism, he claims. "It's acting-out behaviour, with no apparent discipline, but these young men are really cocreating rites of passage with their peers. It's like skid marks all across the road and tyres screeching late at night. It's dare and double dare. These are signs, visible signs - and you can travel all over this State -these are the signs of young men's discontent. There are still no appropriate rites of passage for younger men, so they are creating their own."

Wes has been involved with The MensWork Project Inc for many years. The former automotive engineer also works with individuals, with groups, and with separated men. It's shown him the general damage that's been done by ignoring the transition into adulthood.

"It's too easy to say 'absent fathers'," Wes says, "and to call on the education system to cater for their specific growth. It's the community's role to do something collectively. What's existing is certainly not healthy.

"I have the sense we as a community rely on the government to do something for us - we're not sufficiently community minded. And so the young don't have much mentoring. They mainly rely on their peers: adolescents socialising with other adolescents. They challenge each other."

"If the groundwork's not done, adolescence is too late."

Nyoongar elder Fred Collard also sees how the disintegration of old ways and the splitting up of families has been destructive for his people. "Uncles haven't been able to keep the younger boys in line. They don't take the younger men out to the bush to make them good men, to build them up." He'd very much like to see this change.

Can we take the best of this ancient wisdom and give it a character appropriate to our culture? In any case, do we understand the processes well enough to ensure we are not merely parodying or dishonouring or expropriating older ways?

John Allan has pondered this question. John has lived an active life, from antique dealer to Buddhist teacher. And throughout, he's been building bridges between Western and Indigenous, from his own locality in northern New South Wales to Eastern Arnhem Land and the Kimberley. He's worked as a psychotherapist, providing court reports to magistrates for young male offenders. He's worked with violent men. So John's certainly a doer, but he's a first class thinker as well. The man with a serious countenance and veritable twinkle in his eye turns ideas over, combining an eclectic knowledge of old and new, East and West, looking for a direction forward.

"Models for initiation are there to avoid the problems that come with the big surge of testosterone. What goes right for young men is when they have enough direction, have some decent role models, and inner focus," John says. "The traditional view was to have this focus, to link you with the community, to show you your extra responsibility to the community."

He sees our preoccupation with materialism as a cancer in our midst.

"Whatever Western consumerism touches fragments this sense of responsibility to wider culture. It's the promise of eternal adolescence. Consumerism pushes apart the fabric so that everyone is self reliant, which really means maximising consumers. Meaninglessness and purposelessness is filled with things. There's a massive epidemic of existential malaise, leading into depression. Consumerism breaks connection with the fabric of the community.

"What used to happen was a communal thing. You got initiated into something larger. You had a cohesive vision of what that larger thing was. So you had a model of what it was to be a man, linked with a worldview."

"Our society has its own worldview 'Every man for himself'. It brings freedom as well as a danger."

Putting this all together, John believes the modern initiation needs to contain at least three elements:

"It's the beginning of something - that's what initiation means. It doesn't mean you do this ceremony and you're a man. You've just started the process of taking on responsibilities for the wider community."

As a second point, he says, the practice is embedded in a network of relationships. "You can't privatise initiation like every other damn thing. It needs fathers and uncles and significant men in the boy's life.

And finally, we need to "provide opportunities for responsible thinking, rather than teaching through shame and blame".

Like Wes and Fred, John Allan turns to the issue of mentoring of younger boys by older men.

"Traditionally to help you on that path to find a sense of meaning and reality, you had mentors. The original mentor was Athena, the Greek goddess of the centre of the city. If you don't have mentoring, the young men will burn down the city or graffiti it.

"There are some things I'd like to convey to my own son, but because he's my son I can't. That's why in Japan a potter's son is apprenticed to an uncle. A boy needs a larger range of adult men in his life with whom he can have a close relationship, with avenues for impact. In our culture it's through friendship that there's informal teaching."

A rite of passage complements this male mentoring. As a friend, David Nourish, puts it, "ritual embeds people in their culture, which is what we don't do."

As for a rite of passage itself, both Wes and John refer to the work of Pathways to Manhood. This organisation is based in northern New South Wales, but it's been working as best it can nationally, running workshops for fathers and sons since 1994, from Margaret River to Byron Bay and Tasmania. Dr Arne Rubinstein has given up his medical practice to now work fulltime for Pathways to Manhood. It doesn't get government funding at present, but they're looking for philanthropic, government and corporate support.

Arne returns to the litany of problems besetting young men - it's the theme that commentators come back to again and again. Arne recites "the poor performance of boys in schools, tragically high suicide rates, plus the increasing use of drugs and alcohol. "Without appropriate rites of passage, the modern curse of addictions is directly linked to the sense of isolation and hopelessness felt by so many of our young men." He says up to now most solutions "have been based more on dealing with the problems rather than focusing on the root cause of the issues."

Like so many men growing up, Arne himself received little education about how to be a father or to be a man. He became interested in what switches boys into men, and started to look at the difference between what he calls "boy psychology" and "healthy man psychology".

"The event has to be profound. We don't pretend to recreate an Aboriginal or North American Indian initiation. We don't call it an initiation but a rite of passage, an opportunity for father-son bonding that gives the boy hope.

"Pathways facilitates growth by taking the boys and their fathers to a bush camp and creating a sense of community. Fathers and other men publicly acknowledge the boys, and we allow boys to hear the stories of older men. Modelling respect is a primary learning tool. We challenge the boy to determine his own future, to be a positive, responsible member of his community and to live his life to its fullest potential. We set up an ongoing supportive environment." Graduates of the program return to help later generations of boys through the process.

One lad aged 15 gave the following testimonial: "Pathways to Manhood is the biggest challenge I have ever undertaken; it was also the most rewarding." The most intense response comes from the older men. Arne recounts one 50 year old attending a workshop left saying, "I have watched women given birth to children, now I know it is men that give birth to men."

But the work starts well before adolescence. Arne's best advice to fellow fathers? "Spend time."

There are signs of wider change. Speaking for Juvenile Justice in Western Australia, Sergeant Peter Pope outlines developments in the Young Offenders Act which avoid the courts. A Juvenile Justice Team can include someone of value to the young offender, including a mentor and others from the community. The round table approach has had successes which points the way to a more community oriented approach - 86 per cent of offenders in the Fremantle district going before a Juvenile Justice Team don't go back.

Graffiti around our public spaces, high suicide rates, poor performance at schools, depression, increased use of alcohol and other drugs, burned out national parks and anti-social revving at the lights - are some young men just being pathologically difficult, or are they trying to tell us something? It could be these wanton, senseless acts represent the ceremonies of disarray, that they are collectively our only community rite of passage for young men looking for what it takes to be a man. It's time we acknowledged their crying need.

Boy Psychology
Wants to be noticed, acknowledged and first
Leadership means power
Thinks he is the centre of the universe
Wants to be mothered
Believes he is immortal

Healthy Man Psychology
Part of the team/community
Leadership means guidance
Knows he is part of the greater universe
Seeks relationship of growth with a woman
Knows he is mortal