Race Matters: Indigenous Australians and Our Society

Race Matters

Race Matters Indigenous Australians and ‘Our’ Society

Gillian Cowlishaw and Barry Morris (Editors)

Aboriginal Studies Press 1997

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1997 BY

Aboriginal Studies Press for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, GPO Box 553, Canberra ACT 2601 The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. © GILLIAN COWLISHAW AND BARRY MORRIS (EDS) 1997

Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher. NATIONAL LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Race matters: indigenous Australians and ‘our’ society Bibliography ISBN 0 85575 294 7 1. Aborigines, Australian – Treatment. 2. Australia – Race relations. I. Cowlishaw, Gillian K. (Gillian Keir), 1934–. II. Morris, Barry. 305.89915

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Contents Notes on Contributors

vii

Introduction Cultural racism Barry Morris and Gillian Cowlishaw

1

I Race and Cultural Representations 1. ‘Nothing has changed’: the making and unmaking of Koori culture Tony Birch

11

2. The journey out to the Centre Julie Marcus

29

3. Rousseau’s Knot: the entanglement of liberal democracy and racism Roberta James

53

4. Rum, seduction and death: ‘Aboriginality’ and alcohol Marcia Langton

77

II Cultural Borderlands 5. The ‘Breelong Blacks’ Marilyn Wood

97

6. Australia Felix rules OK! Deborah Bird Rose

121

7. Mrs Eyers is no ogre Merridy Malin

139

III Racism and Egalitarianism 8. Racism, egalitarianism and Aborigines Barry Morris

161

9. Where is racism? Gillian Cowlishaw

177

10. The ethics of the allocation of health resources Ian Anderson

191

11. Mabo: towards respecting equality and difference Noel Pearson

209

IV Aborigines in the National Imagination 12. Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism: primordiality and the cultural politics of otherness Andrew Lattas

223

Afterword ‘Tell them you’re Indian’ Mudrooroo

259

Notes

269

References

284

Notes on Contributors Ian Anderson is a medical doctor, and Director of the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service. Tony Birch is a post-graduate student in history at the University of Melbourne, and a writer and poet. Gillian Cowlishaw teaches anthropology at the University of Sydney. Roberta James is a post-graduate student in anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra. Marcia Langton holds the Ranger Chair in Aboriginal Studies at the Northern Territory University, Darwin. Andrew Lattas is a research fellow based at Macquarie University, Sydney. Merridy Malin teaches in the Faculty of Education at the Northern Territory University, Darwin. Julie Marcus is Professor of Social Anthropology at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales. Barry Morris teaches anthropology at the University of Newcastle. Mudrooroo is a well-known novelist and poet. Noel Pearson, formerly the Executive Director of the Cape York Land Council, is now a lawyer in Melbourne. Deborah Bird Rose is a senior fellow at the North Australia Research Unit, Darwin. Marilyn Wood is a post-graduate student in anthropology at the Australian National University, Canberra.

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Introduction

Cultural Racism Barry Morris and Gillian Cowlishaw

‘Tell them you’re Indian.’ Or Maori, or Islander. Anything but Aboriginal. Many Aboriginal families commonly practised such deceptions, until the 1960s at least, in order to deny the state access to their children, sometimes to avoid a repetition of the parents’ experience of removal.1 Alternative strategies, such as defying the state’s power, could have other savage consequences. Here is one element in the construction of race in Australia, one enabled by laws which varied between states and were amended over time so that the impacts they have made are local and specific. What is clear is that many Aboriginal people have grown up with the knowledge that their own parentage and heritage are stigmatised, marked with fear and shame by the wider society, and exposing them to the unpredictable consequences of local authorities’ random exercise of power. Here is a window on a world where the notion of race was mobilised not so much against the colour of the skin as against the origin of that colour. 1

2 Race Matters

Another example: ‘Ricky’s not your brother, he’s your cousin!’ The small child is confused, and has to reject the teacher’s ruling on the meaning of the kinship term because Ricky is her brother in Arnhem Land, and she should not sit next to him.2 Such a tiny, commonplace incident, yet it represents a shocking intrusion into the moral domain of family relations, authorised by the power of educational institutions, institutions that cannot be avoided if the tools for participation in the wider society are to be gained. This overruling of the primary social relations of the Aboriginal community is not merely an act of ignorance, but an act of power by the ubiquitous schoolteacher (see Malin). Neither the child nor her parents can be heard, yet the teacher is not deaf. Is this also racism, or should it be named with the milder, more innocent label of ‘ethnocentrism’? These examples show the difficulty of maintaining the careful separation of the racial from the cultural forms of social differentiation, and the shallowness of locating racism in individual psyches, a shallowness that is even more apparent when the way a system of kinship was erased by the colonising powers in an earlier era is examined (see Wood). The articles in this collection show the way that these forms of hierarchical categorisation are intertwined and inseparable in practice and demonstrate the conjunction of race, culture and identity. Like any work on race or indigenous rights, this collection is a political project. But it is an enquiry rather than a lesson; the articles raise questions rather than answer them and the contributors do not all share the same perspective. Further, the studies show that the strategies deployed for the management and regulation of Aboriginal communities are not uniform. The micro forms of power which operate in specific locations give rise to their own forms of race and marginality. You are invited to read the articles as distinct accounts, not as illustrating a general framework of inequality and poverty, discrimination and prejudice, and not as reaffirming ‘old truths’ or universalising ‘old solutions’. Rather, we hope to contribute to productive connections between the varied approaches to studies of culture being made today in anthropology and cultural studies, and to break down the division between Aboriginal Studies and Australian Studies. The collection also reflects the recent resurgence of an analytic interest in ‘race’, with its emphasis on race

Introduction

relations (for example, Wetherall and Potter 1992; Cross and Keith 1993; Goldberg 1993). As with these studies, our interest is in the way race serves power relations, rather than in the concept of race per se. Race is not a self-evident and natural category, but a historically grounded social construction, dynamic and shifting. Discourse and imagery construct a generic Other, an Other who is often perceived as hostile. Varied social understandings of racial identities coexist and compete within the same social space; these discursive processes are complex and unstable. In the fields of criminal justice and welfare (Cowlishaw, Anderson), the national politics of Mabo (Pearson), the domains of tourism and art galleries (Rose, Marcus), in government bureaucracies (Birch), in media representations (James), as well as within the world of scholarship (Langton), there are different, sometimes overlapping relationships between racialised identities and processes of racial marginalisation. The other purpose of this collection is to identify the paradox of liberal racism in Australia. Discrimination on the basis of race is abhorred as immoral, and Aboriginal people live in an unprecedented time of formal equality. But there are dramatic disparities in the conditions of life between Aboriginal people and others on every statistical indicator of social wellbeing (see Dodson 1995). Thus, despite the prevailing rhetoric of anti-racism, evidence of the destructive social outcomes of racialised inequalities and of racialised marginality is compelling. Racist expression is seen as ‘merely offensive but never harmful’ (Goldberg 1993, 38), but the harm is there for all to see. Race matters. Yet, within popular liberal discourse, race is treated as a conceptually flawed category and dismissed as if it no longer mattered. Prejudice and discrimination are seen as aberrations that unnecessarily distort the functioning of economic and political processes which, if not always quite fair and just, are normal and inevitable. Racial consciousness, and identification by race, are named as problems rather than as the racialised effects of social and economic inequality. The abandonment of race as a social category is considered a victory for reason, a testament to the progress of the scientific truth that race is a lie. Government policies which have the rational aim of reversing conditions of systematic inequality among social groups who have suffered oppressive histories are defended as

3

4 Race Matters

temporary necessities because of an unfortunate past. They are dubbed ‘reverse racism’ by less liberal conservatives (see Blainey 1995, and Lattas 1993 for critique of such approaches).3 Such understandings of race and discrimination are not ahistorical products of academic neutrality and objectivity. They are parts of a liberal ideology which deals in notions of individual agency, and assumes a linear progress towards a utopian future in which race will not matter. The historian John Hirst’s views on race illustrate the ambivalence of such a liberal position. He abhors the horrors of colonialism and the racial subordination it wrought, but, at the same time, considers colonisation inevitable (Hirst 1993). Here, race matters as racial subordination, but even that can be excused in terms of the ‘higher good’ which it demonstrably brings through the spread of civilisation and progress. Because racial consciousness is identified as the problem, anti-racism can co-exist with the passive acceptance of the institutions that produce racialised inequality and injustice. It is this passivity in the face of compelling evidence of the conditions that generate racialised outcomes, that we name as liberal racism. Thus, ‘racial tension’ is put down to rural rednecks, racial insults stem from poor attitudes among footballers, police discrimination is due to a few ‘rotten apples’ in the force, while cases of overt discrimination disappear after loud flurries of disapproval into a tangle of bureaucratic and legal processes. These are intended to identify the racist act and the racist individual. Meanwhile, the local tragedies in schools (Malin), cruelty in communities (Cowlishaw), racial hatred (Langton), bureaucratic indifference (Anderson) and public contempt (Birch, Morris) are left unnamed and unacknowledged. Because race is dismissed as an erroneous concept, scholars do not study the specific histories of white colonial racial thought and no nieces have described their uncle’s participation in Australia’s attempt at genocide.4 Racial consciousness and expression amongst Aborigines and non-Aborigines alike are considered the source of tension and conflict; white racism and the assertion of black identity are rendered as equivalent problems and condemned within liberalism. Thus, while race may matter little as a biological fact, it does matter as a major organising principle, as a source of

Introduction

imaginative energy and as a secret focus of social identity (Rose, Marcus, Lattas). Race matters because racism remains, seldom expressed in its regressive forms of biological determinism, but appearing in new forms, for example, of cultural determinism (see Lepervanche 1980; Barker 1981).5 The attempt to remove the spectre of race by replacing it with more flexible cultural processes can be seen in Australia’s multiculturalism. But to speak of culture is not to cease to speak of race, and multiculturalism does not escape the logic of essentialism. Cultural identity has a contradictory quality, with biological heritage remaining a fundamental but not a sufficient condition. Cultural identity refers to what you are born into, yet it is also implied that cultural characteristics can be affirmed or rejected at will. However, the enabling condition of a cultural identity must be established through genealogical connections. This genealogical condition is omitted from notions of culture which are currently in wide circulation, where culture refers to a chosen way of life, or ‘lifestyle’, as expressed in aesthetic forms and in voluntary social practices. The anthropological notion of culture as a whole way of life, with more or less unconscious and habituated patterns of behaviour, is left out. ‘Culture’ thus loses its organic grounding in embedded practices and meanings and loses its urgency as a domain of a deeply felt common identity. Individual agency is foregrounded at the expense of shared memory and inherited social relations. Racial identity, on the other hand, is commonly assigned a grounding in essential being, and it is this fixed and ahistorical essence which is construed as problematic within liberalism. In this logic, if individuals can choose which culture and which social identity to adopt, then all will be well. And which one would you choose? Why, surely the least problematic, the most accepted, the one which carries the greatest social capital and the fewest burdens. If any other cultural identity is adopted, then it must be involuntary, a problem of racial inheritance. But why is it assumed that a fixed heritage is a problem? Is it because it entails loyalty to a domain of awkward and disturbing social images and relationships which challenge the social spaces which the majority of us inhabit so comfortably? A sense of anger or bemusement when unpopular and problematic social

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6 Race Matters

identities command loyalty is apparent among liberal intellectuals, as well as among those we call ‘rednecks’ in order to distance ourselves from them (James). Culture, then, can mean a given essence or a chosen surface, an inner or an outer condition. Sometimes one meaning is called upon, sometimes another. The emphasis on aesthetic and voluntary manifestations can give way to the identification of cultures as fixed and unchanging entities. Here a culture shares the fixity of a race, and cultural identity can be equated with racial identity. This is ‘traditionalism’ or Said’s ‘orientalism’ (1978), where the essential cultural qualities and characteristics are seen as unchanging and the bearers of that culture are believed to share an essence which has nothing to do with the participation of individuals, kin groups and communities in the flux of history. Those experiences which have generated bitter or sweet memories, which have constructed hatreds and stereotypes and built intersubjective domains and habits are, in this traditionalist view, not themselves the stuff of culture. The slippage between culture as outwardness and culture as inwardness allows a discursive sleight of hand. Those claiming an ethnic identity are complimented on their otherness only when they can also choose to divest themselves of it at will. The proclaimed respect for indigenous rights and cultural otherness evaporates in the face of awkward and difficult demands. The separation of cultural identity from the histories of social groups is exemplified in the demands made by state policy in relation to multiculturalism, and in the legal procedures which legitimate Aboriginal land claims and native title claims. The current appeal to ‘culture’ in defining Aboriginality turns out to be not so different from the explicitly racial definitions of an earlier era. It is participation in fixed pre-colonial forms of Aboriginal sociality, ‘native custom’, which will most readily authenticate land claims. Some space is allowed for dilution of culture as it is for the dilution of race, but the anchor is in a culture which exists in some sense as a thing in and of itself. The difference between ‘race’ and ‘culture’ here is that culture can exist both inside and outside the person — it can be separated from the person as race could not. On the other hand, ‘Aboriginal culture’ is itself seen as fixed and ahistorical, not something moulded out of shared historical experiences such as

Introduction

those described here by Langton, Pearson and Wood. The irony is that it is precisely the separation of culture from historical processes which is held to provide ‘proof’ of cultural identity; such identity is nonetheless grounded in notions of cultural continuity through time. What is continuous is a stable cultural essence. But a historical culture, we suggest, is a highly improbable condition (see Hall 1989). It is the erasure of historical processes from Aboriginal identity which precludes many Aboriginal groups from the successful prosecution of land claims, or indeed the successful prosecution of their interests in general (see Birch 1995). Only an essentialised group identity is considered authentic. Accusations of inauthenticity are made aloud only in the less sensitive realms of conservative politics, but public discourse unashamedly constitutes racial minorities as a social problem. These sufferers of an outdated discrimination which is firmly located in the past cannot legitimately affirm their racial bodies in the present. The tradition of differentiating between race and culture, and between racism and ethnocentrism, is one that relies on separating the concepts from the circumstances which generate them and which continue to give them efficacy in society. The formation and reproduction of groups in a hierarchical society has always relied on some notion of given characteristics which define members of a group, and thus has also relied on the circumstance that primary social relations are the focus of personal and emotionally laden identities which command loyalty, rather than on some superficial, external cultural markers which can be discarded at will. Thus, the articles in this collection document the fact that race as a social construct is enmeshed with what anthropologists call ‘culture’, rather than simply referring to some racial marker such as parentage or skin colour which defines social identity. This is particularly shown in the work of Birch, Anderson, Langton, Pearson and Mudrooroo because these authors are socially positioned on the ‘other’ side of the racial frontier. While the racialising processes, as well as the savagery of overt racism, may be understood differently from there, their various positions illustrate that there is no homogeneous Aboriginal experience or agreed analytic position on these questions. Mudrooroo’s account of and response to the conferring,

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8 Race Matters

adoption and recent questioning of his Aboriginal identity is a vivid illustration of the effects of a racialised social environment. The problem of ‘cultural identity’ for indigenous groups emerges out of a context of colonial domination. Dispossession creates ruptures and discontinuities which themselves construct unique forms of social experience and cultural responses which cannot be traced or recognised purely within legal processes. Langton, Birch, Morris and others in this volume show that the exploration of cultural histories can uncover and help dispel the mystifications with which conventional history has laden us. The mystifications of contemporary racial processes, explored by other writers here, demonstrate the need for attention to the issue of indigenous rights as distinct from those of racial discrimination and cultural bias. In Australia the struggle against racial discrimination is entwined with the struggle for indigenous rights, while, in the USA, Black American struggles against racism take place separately from Native American demands for indigenous rights and sovereignty. This collection of articles explores the double burden of racial discrimination and the denial of indigenous rights that Australian Aboriginal peoples have had to carry.

I Race and Cultural Representations

These articles illustrate the intense emotional weight that sustains the construction of the black–white binary world of non-Aboriginal Australia, where attempts are made to erase ambiguity. The interaction of race, culture and identity reveals the play of binary codes which seek to maintain various forms of categorical closure or reaffirm forms of superior–inferior relations between Aborigines and non-Aborigines through processes of cultural appropriation. Birch’s analysis reveals much of the politics of erasure that confronted Aboriginal people with the resurgence of Aboriginal identity in the western region of Victoria. His account of the either/or, all-ornothing politics reveals the horror engendered in and by those who objected to the renaming of ‘their’ places with often chilling, and sometimes ludicrous, anger and fear. At the same time, he provides evidence of the levels of ambiguity and cultural dissonance that confront Aboriginal people in the maintenance of this Manichean world, and the little things chipping away at Aboriginal people every day. James’ work operates on a similar theme. Her personal experience of an ambiguous racial identity provides sharp insights into forms of categorical closure and the way ambiguity generates tension. For example, in the cartoons produced during the bicentennial year, James shows that anyone positioned in a mediatry position is given

a dubious status as hypocritical, lacking clear allegiance or motive, failing to establish categorical closure. They are representations which reaffirm the absence of movement beyond black-white dichotomies. Marcus reveals the other side of this form of categorical closure, where the ‘traditional Aborigine’, ‘the spiritual other’, undergoes a process of appropriation and incorporation into what Marcus calls ‘settler myths’. Aboriginal ‘bushlore’ and Aboriginal spirituality are evoked to save the white man, a redemptive practice which has the effect of silencing and infantalising those whose imagined world is being appropriated. Again, ambivalence and difference are either erased or usurped as expressions of settler nationalism and identity or as part of ‘universal’ (Western) cosmologies. Langton reveals another aspect of the either/or equation showing that, when liberal academics reject the major icon of Aboriginality, ‘the drunken Abo’, they also eschew interests in the cultural dynamics that surround the place of alcohol in race relations. Liberal sensibility as political correctness becomes an example of intellectual bad faith.

chapter

1

‘Nothing has changed’: The making and unmaking of Koori culture Tony Birch

I You get somebody coming in, a foreigner at that, trying to tell us to rename our mountains. (Bob Stone, Stawell town councillor, quoted in Melbourne Sun, 27 March 1989)

In March 1989 the Victorian Minister for Tourism, Steve Crabb, announced that the Grampians mountain range in western Victoria would ‘revert to their Aboriginal name, Guriward’ (which, after further research, was altered to ‘Gariwerd’). Although this initiative came from the Victorian Tourism Commission, and the local Koori community had not yet been consulted, the minister felt that he could already announce the names that would be ‘restored’: 11

12 Race Matters I expect that the Grampians will be known as Guriward, the Black Range as Burrunj, the Glenelg River as Bugara, Halls Gap as Budja Budja, Victoria Gap as Jananginjawi and so on.

The local white community did not share these great expectations. An ‘ex-Labor voter’ wrote to Crabb, accusing him of engaging in ‘gutter-level’ politics, and warned of an electoral backlash: ‘Remember, Mr Crabb, the tax payer pays your salaries not the lazy, dirty, counter-productive black sector of Australia’ (KTU 1). The Mayor of Stawell, Peter Odd, claimed that behind the idea was a ‘radical group’ who had forced the proposal on the government: It seems to me more like a little group that can get what it wants like all the minority groups. The government just bows down to them and the government is ruled by the loudest noise all the time. (Stawell Times-News, 31 March 1989)

Yet no ‘noise’ on the issue had come from the local Koori community. The five Koori communities in the Western District are represented by Brambuk Incorporated, which at the time was constructing the Brambuk Living Cultural Centre in the Grampians National Park. A spokesperson, Geoff Clark, criticised the government’s continuing refusal to consult local Koories on policies affecting their history and culture. Although he supported the ‘refreshing and positive gesture’ of the name restoration, Clark compared Crabb’s approach with that of a fellow Scot: ‘He and Major Mitchell are guilty of ignoring the Aborigines’ past and present association and ownership of the Grampians area ... over thousands of years’ (Clark 1989). Clark said that Brambuk ‘would rename important features in the Grampians area with traditional Aboriginal names’, regardless of any government initiatives. In December 1990, without Crabb’s knowledge, signs carrying Koori names were erected at certain features to coincide with the opening of the Brambuk Living Cultural Centre. Crabb objected; the community, he said, ‘would be entitled to criticise any cost involved in erecting the signs bearing Aboriginal names before an official decision was made’. But Clark insisted that, as ‘rightful custodians’ of the region, Koories ‘had the authority to erect the signs’. Clark asked: ‘Will Mr Crabb, with his paternalistic attitude, expect those

‘Nothing has changed’

Aborigines among us with dark faces to be selling trinkets/beads and performing corroborees for his tourist industry?’ (Melbourne Herald-Sun, 11 December 1990; Warrnambool Standard, 12 December 1990). Brambuk was not opposed to involvement with tourism, but this had to be achieved ‘without exploiting, and without becoming like the exploited’ (Clark 1990). The name change had been proposed in February 1985 by archaeologist Ben Gunn, who prepared a document for the tourism commission on ‘Recommended Changes to Aboriginal Site Names in the Grampians’ (KTU 2). The region contains 80 per cent of Victoria’s identified Koori rock-art sites, and Gunn suggested that these be given more appropriate names in line with the ‘planned promotion of certain sites as public attractions’. He noted that the existing ‘eurocentric descriptive names’ (such as ‘Cave of Ghosts’) could produce ‘inappropriate expectations in visitors ... disappointment or, worse, ridicule’. Gunn proposed that Koori names be given to the sites in consultation with the local Aboriginal communities. In 1988 an Aboriginal tourism survey alerted the tourism commission to the possibility of exploiting the region’s Koori culture and history: ‘Guided tours of Koori sites have the potential to be very successful. The opportunity is there to bring together the product and the potential customers’ (Victorian Tourism Commission 1990a, 18). Immediately before Crabb’s public announcement in March 1989, Ben Gunn conducted further research into alternative names for the rock-art sites and for natural features of the region. He did not feel that it was necessary to consult with the local Koori community, as he regarded his research as ‘an academic exercise, at this stage’ (Gunn 1989). The minister’s announcement two weeks later, however, was not an ‘academic exercise’, but a highly publicised media event. Crabb demonstrated a typical European disregard for the indigenous people of the area. To display ‘art’ was good for business, and to tag the sites with indigenous names confirmed their legitimacy as artefacts of an ‘ancient’ culture. But it was not seen as necessary to consult the Koories of the Western District about the marketing of the heritage that they had managed to retain through 150 years of oppression.

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Soon after Crabb’s announcement, the tourism commission appointed Ian Clark, a geographer from Monash University, to prepare a submission to the Victorian Place Names Committee. In his consultations with the groups that form Brambuk, he found that the Koori community regarded the absence of prior consultation as indicating ‘a lack of respect and recognition of traditional ownership of the National Park’ (KTU 1). As a result, a representative of Brambuk, Lionel Harradine, was appointed to prepare the submission with Clark. The submission made four sets of recommendations: that 21 incorrectly spelt Aboriginal place names currently in use be corrected, and that a further 10 Aboriginal names be retained; that the use of 44 known Aboriginal names of features more recently given European names be restored; that the traditional names of 11 places that do not carry European names be adopted; that the more appropriate names conferred on nine Rock Art Sites ... be formally adopted. (Victorian Tourism Commission 1990b, 5)

The name restoration met opposition from a variety of groups. The Stawell Shire Council wrote to all local governments in Victoria, and gained wide support from both rural and urban shires. The Victorian Place Names Committee received petitions of protest with 60,000 signatures (Wimmera Mail-Times, 16 October 1991). The Council of Clans regarded the proposal as a threat to ‘Scottish heritage and pioneers’, and the Wimmera branch of the National Council of Women claimed that ‘Aboriginals’ did not ‘know anything about the significance’ of the rock art (KTU 1). The Balmoral Golf Club was concerned with the effect that the name restoration would have on its greens: ‘Our Club is close to the Glenelg River & uses the water for irrigating the course’ (KTU 1). A Horsham shire councillor, Don Johns, expressed similar concerns about Horsham’s water supply (Wimmera Mail-Times, 20 June 1990). Bruce Ruxton stated the RSL position in his inimitable style:

‘Nothing has changed’

In no way would we want the name of the Grampians changed to any other name whether it be an aboriginal name or what ... There is a real feeling of ill-wind prevailing over this proposal (sic). (KTU 1, 2 November and 28 July 1989)

In a submission supporting the restoration, the Friends of the Grampians claimed that the League of Rights had manipulated opposition to the proposal, resulting in widespread ‘racist hysteria’ (KTU 2). The aesthetic and tourist value of the rock-art sites was also questioned. Many of the sites require protection behind cyclone-wire fencing, as they have been repeatedly desecrated by vandals.1 Pat Reid of Bellellen Rise Host Farm, Stawell, claimed that visitors to her farm had ‘little or no interest in our aboriginal pre-history’, and whatever there was ‘dissipates completely upon inspecting Bunjil’s cave (the most significant aboriginal art site in Victoria)’ (Portland Observer, 9 July 1990). ER of Mt Waverley wrote directly to Steve Crabb, informing him that in 20 years of visiting the Grampians she had seen ‘not one aboriginal person’ and only ‘a few miserable rock paintings’ (KTU 2, 10 October 1990). CS of Stawell wrote to ‘point out some facts associated with Aboriginal myths of Dreamtime’. He denied a Koori presence in the region (‘no Aboriginals ever entered the Grampians due to evil spirits’) and claimed that the rock art was painted by ‘a French artist who had a great appreciation of Aboriginal art of central Australia’ (KTU 1, 10 May 1989). Crabb apparently wants to promote the region as ‘Victoria’s Kakadu’,2 but he will have difficulty achieving this if people expect a replication of Kakadu ‘art’, ignorant of the regionally specific indigenous culture and history of the Gariwerd area. An officer of the Victorian Archaeological Survey informed visitors to one of the shelters in 1989 that, in the past, ‘people were disappointed in the art itself. They were expecting something like Northern Territory art’ (see note 1). People not only expected to view the ‘ancient’, but also to see its readily identifiable signifiers, the art of ‘real’ Aborigines. For visitors to appreciate the art, they must come to respect and appreciate indigenous culture, both past and present, here in

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Victoria. An exploitative tourist industry will not achieve this. Denis Rose, a Koori cultural officer from Brambuk, feels that this will occur when the ‘significance of the sites as places of occupation’ is interpreted and understood (see note 1). Brambuk Centre has attempted to do this by erecting signs that explain the spiritual significance of the art, and the Koori history of the area. The signs also inform visitors that: ‘If you wish to obtain more information about this site, its art or Aboriginal culture in general, please call at Brambuk in Budja Budja (Halls Gap)’ (Stawell Times-News, 18 December 1991).3 Some opponents of the name restoration also ridiculed Koori languages. Old racist slurs resurfaced: ‘Aboriginal names all ... sound the same, and in most cases, the spelling looks the same’ (Wimmera Mail-Times, 22 June 1990). The Western District Farmer (June 1990) claimed that the proposal pandered to ‘pony-tailed basket weavers and banjo players’, and the chosen names were ‘totally unpronounceable to modern day black and white alike’. Les Carlyon, in the Business Review Weekly (1 June 1990), complained that he could not ‘pronounce let alone spell’ the chosen names, and was concerned that the proposal was being considered when Victoria was ‘paralysed by billions of dollars of debt’. The Grampians District Tourist Association strongly opposed the restoration proposal. It identified ‘Aboriginal cultural tourism’ as a ‘niche market’ and therefore supported the upgrading of the rock-art sites (KTU 2). Initially, the association claimed that it wished to promote ‘aboriginal culture’ in the Grampians, and ‘supported appropriate names for Rock Art sites and any unnamed features’. Yet it rejected an overwhelming majority of the proposed names. This included the proposed names for rock-art sites and previously unnamed features, which would not be acceptable unless they were altered (that is, anglicised) to something ‘easily recognised and pronounced’.4 This cultural appropriation illustrates the attitude of many tourist operators, who regard Koori culture as a product that can be altered and re-presented in an acceptable form, as a commodity, but which has little or no intrinsic value. The tourist association objected to the removal of names such as Mt Lubra and The Piccaninny. It felt that, although such terms were ‘possibly racist’, they were ‘not truly offensive as they are in common usage throughout Australia’. Bob

‘Nothing has changed’

Stone agreed: ‘Piccaninny is a tribute to little Aboriginals’, he said (Melbourne Sunday Herald, 3 June 1990). Some names were also rejected on aesthetic grounds. Ararat City Councillor Peter Wright stated that names that translated as ‘pig face’, ‘base of spine’ and ‘phlegm’ were ‘not terribly good for a tourist area’ (Ararat Advertiser, 31 May 1990). Others related to excrement (such as Gunigalg), and ‘would be more suitable for a sewerage treatment works’. This European aesthetic ignores the relationship between naming and traditional Koori lifestyle. To reject such names is to reject their cultural significance, and to promote corrupt versions of Koori culture is not only appropriation but deception. Brambuk is disappointed that the Victorian Place Names Committee rejected some of the names on these grounds, denying the Koori community the opportunity to present and interpret the relationship to land identified in names that narrate spatial organisation (see note 2).5 If white Australia is to move beyond a superficial appropriation of the indigenous culture of this country, those in positions of influence — be they government departments, statutory bodies or tourist promoters — have to stop representing indigenous cultures in this way. If they are motivated by imperial possession, changes will not occur, as the motivation behind possession is the subjugation and control of the ‘other’.

II Piper carries a pair of handcuffs slung round him as one (black-fellow) must be taken prisoner for the sake of obtaining native names of the places. (Stapylton 1863, 95)

In his spatial history of Australia, The Road to Botany Bay, Paul Carter (1987, 2) has written of ‘how little value our culture attaches to names’. This is because ‘we’, feeling imperially secure, and ignorant of the presence of another culture and history, see ‘not a historical space’ that may be contested and may contain multiple histories, but a ‘historical fact ... as if it was always there’ (1987, xiv). The cultures of indigenous people are relegated to ‘prehistory’ and the ‘ancient’, allowing only for metahistorical myths, located outside the

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boundaries of ‘historical facts’, which support imperial domination. As Chris Healy (1990, 512) put it, ‘true knowledge of the past was knowledge of white Australia and reserved for white Australians’. To name spaces is to ‘name histories’ and also to create them. The process is accepted as natural, representing a ‘given’, that this country belongs to and is a white Australia. But this sense of security evaporates when the hidden history of colonial domination and indigenous subordination is challenged by an attempt to alter the names of spaces. Attaching names to landscapes legitimises the ownership of the culturally dominant group that ‘owns’ the names. Indigenous names themselves do not constitute a threat to white Australia. Houses, streets, suburbs and whole cities have indigenous names. This is an exercise in cultural appropriation, which represents imperial possession and the quaintness of the ‘native’. For the colonisers to attach a ‘native’ name to a place does not represent or recognise an indigenous history, and therefore possible indigenous ownership. It is when names are restored to recognise earlier histories and cultures that the threat to ownership occurs. Imperial history cannot recognise the existence of indigenous histories. A history of dominance is seen as the history of a ‘nation’. An attempt to recognise the history of indigenous people creates insecurity, paranoia, even hysteria. It ‘wipes out over one hundred and fifty years of (British) history’ and ‘takes away that heritage’ (RS of Stawell, 7 April 1989, in KTU 1). Existing names are ‘recommended for consignment to the scrapheap of history’ (Hamilton Spectator, 22 December 1990). The features themselves can actually vanish: ‘Ayers Rock is no longer’; ‘GRAMPIANS, ARE THEY GONE?’; ‘Familiar places or landmarks ... would disappear from the map’.6 Many people of the Western District of Victoria cannot accept a Koori presence in the area, either in the past or present. If they do recognise an indigenous presence, it is one that is long dead. They cannot accept a reality that makes a mockery of the racial theories and racist practices promoted for 150 years. In protest against the name restoration, BC, ‘a former Halls Gap resident’, dedicated a poem to Sir Thomas Mitchell:

‘Nothing has changed’

He battled through the heathery scrub and scaled the frowning wall To stand at last triumphant, on the topmost peak of all He named the range the Grampians. Why should we change it then? That traveller made our history, he and his stalwart men.

Of Mitchell’s feats, and his place in history, she was certain. This was not so of Koori people: What the Coorie people called the hills we cannot ever know For they have gone like yesterday, with little left to show. (KTU 1, 31 January 1990)

Many opponents of the name restoration eulogised the nineteenth-century ‘pioneers’ who had ‘developed the land using nothing but their bare hands and crude farm implements’ (PN Griffin, in Stawell Mail-Times, undated cutting). Peter Wrigglesworth of Blackburn posed a question regarding the indigenous peoples’ relationship to the land: ‘Did they strive to explore, to overcome danger, to improve their lot?’ His answer: ‘I don’t know. There’s no record. Who cares?’ (Melbourne Sun, 19 April 1989). Even when their presence was recognised, the present Koori community in the district was often regarded as a ‘cultureless remnant’. JR of Murtoa rejected the suggestion that the Koories had ‘some sort of culture’, adding ‘Its too late for all this nonsense’ (KTU 1, 10 April 1989). MW of Phillip Island asked: How many Western District Aborigines are there anyway? And what have they contributed to the progress of the area over the last fifty years or so? I’d guess, not many and not much. (KTU 1, 18 December 1990)

Philip Lienert of Horsham, in a letter to the Wimmera Mail-Times (22 June 1990), argued for the need to put a contact history of ‘murder, theft, rape, cruelty and ignorance’ into its proper perspective: ‘At what time in the world’s history has one group of people not done that to another group?’ He claimed that the indigenous people of Australia were fortunate that they had been colonised by a civilised

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race: ‘If Great Britain had not colonised Australia then someone else would have and what would have been the fate of the Aborigines then?’ Lienert is not the first to ask such a rhetorical question. Academic John Mulvaney has also asked ‘a theoretical question but one which must be faced ... one wonders what French treatment would have been if France had been the occupying power’ (Attwood 1989). The Hamilton Spectator (13 May 1990) urged Crabb to ‘leave history as it stands’. By this the newspaper meant a dominant history that not only ignored the Koori history of the region, but was also selectively amnesiac concerning the ‘pioneer’ history of the area. It was not a history of a civilised race, but one of ignorance, racism, greed, brutality and dispossession. Those who want to ‘leave history as it stands’ need to examine their own history with honesty.

III Australia is owned and run by white people not black. We took it and have fought several wars to keep it and our freedom. (Clive Johnson, Wimmera Mail-Times, 8 June 1990)

Popular Australian history has often been written about ‘winners’, who fought battles with the land before conquering it. Control of the Australian landscape is vital to the settler psyche. The victors’ histories falsely parade as the history of Australia. These histories are those of absence: of terra nullius. In order to uphold the lie of an ‘empty land’, Europeans have either denied the indigenous people’s presence, or have completely devalued our cultures. These hegemonic histories take possession of others’ histories and silence them, or manipulate and ‘deform’ them (Abu-Lughod 1989, 118). This misrepresentation is now being challenged as indigenous people confront the imperialist fictions that support political domination and racism. This upsets and displaces what Chris Healy (1990, 512) has termed ‘the seamless normality [of] a triumphal national history’. Many Australian histories authenticate themselves by drawing on ‘the available myths and discourses of national char acter and identity’ (Turner 1986). These histories often speak of Australia’s ‘pioneer spirit’, where the ‘settlers’ toiled in a harsh and

‘Nothing has changed’

empty land. They celebrate a hybridised Australian male: fiercely independent, but imbued with just enough British heritage to remain above the ‘natives’, who hover around the fringe of such histories or are disposed of in the ‘prehistory’ of the text. Within academia, it is true, the debate has moved on. But outside the walls of the universities, where indigenous people are fighting for land rights, cultural identity and the right to present and interpret our own histories, we are constantly forced to contend with an imperialist history that is really nothing more than ‘a crude apologia for the status quo of the day’ (Frances and Scates 1989, 72). It is a history motivated by cultural and political domination. It disguises its own violence and oppression by presenting sanitised ‘nationalist themes, grown cosy and thoroughly naturalized by repetition, [that] disguise or celebrate the actual history of imperial and colonial domination’ (Popular Memory Group 1982, 213). These histories may not be presented in the pages of a conventional text (although they often are). They parade themselves in the media and on film. They are evoked in political discussion of ‘Aboriginal issues’. It is not surprising that many of these debates centre on the relationship to land. In Perth, the Swan River Fringe Dwellers — Nyoongar people — have waged a struggle against developers and successive governments over the Old Brewery site on the Swan River (Age, 27 May 1991). They are attempting to protect a sacred Dreaming track formed by Waugal, a serpent that created many of the landscape features in the area, including the river. The authenticity of their claim and their culture has been challenged by those who wish to build a recreation and cultural centre on the land. Although both the developers and the government had difficulty accepting the Nyoongar belief in a ‘giant snake’, it did not stop them from trying to appropriate this creation story for their own purposes. The original design for the redevelopment incorporated a 100-metre-long ‘polychrome brick Waugal path’. The Nyoongars’ right to protect their sacred land has been rejected by governments that attempt to deny their cultural identity. Steve Mickler (1991) has called this ‘a colonialist disdain for the fallen ‘‘noble savage’’, the urban ‘‘halfcaste’’’.7 The simplest way to deny groups such as the Swan River Fringe Dwellers a right to their land is to deny their existence as

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indigenous people. If such a denial of identity fails, some opponents revert to the terra nullius myth. A Victorian journalist opposed the Uluru name restoration, claiming that the area had been unoccupied by ‘tribes of the desert ... for centuries’, with the exception of ‘nomadic hunters’ who visited the area ‘in prolonged wet seasons’ (‘ROCK ROBBERY’, Don Petersen, Melbourne Sun, 15 October 1991). At Echuca in Victoria, the local Yorta Yorta people had remains of their ancestors returned to them by the Museum of Victoria in 1990. The remains had been excavated at Kow Swamp between 1969 and 1972 by archaeologist Alan Thorne. Professor John Mulvaney, a supporter of Thorne, repeatedly claimed that the attempts to have the remains returned to the Koori community for reburial were ‘the actions of a handful of radicals’,8 despite the fact that the campaign was supported by the nine Aboriginal land councils of the Murray River Region, as well as Colin Walker, senior Aboriginal sites officer in the area and representative of the Yorta Yorta people (Age, 3 August 1990).9 Mulvaney and Thorne recognised the scientific value of studying the remains, but denied the historical and cultural relationship that present Koori people have with their ancestors. The remains were no longer a part of Koori history: they had become ‘ancient bones [that] belong to the world — not us’. Thorne dismissed any ancestral link between Koories living today and the bodies that he removed from their burial place, on the grounds that there were differences in anatomical features, while Mulvaney was concerned that ‘we could face refusal to excavate any more Aboriginal sites’ (Australian, 28 July 1990, 6 August 1990). Europeans continue to ‘make’ and ‘unmake’ indigenous people. When we attempt to claim rights to land, or to the bodies of our ancestors, we are separated from an ‘ancient past’. Mickler (1991, 74) believes that, as the appreciation (and possession) of Aboriginal art has increased, so too has ‘the intensity of the denigration of practised or ‘‘lived’’ Aboriginal culture’. This form of racism relates to what Renato Rosaldo has termed ‘imperialist nostalgia’, which makes racial domination appear ‘innocent and pure’. Having altered or destroyed the culture of the ‘other’, the colonisers then appropriate it for their own gain, or even mourn its passing, while at the same time concealing their ‘own complicity with often brutal domination’ (Rosaldo 1989).

‘Nothing has changed’

Historically, Europeans expected to witness the eradication of the indigenous people of this country, and Australian governments have attempted to erase the identity of indigenous people by physical or cultural genocide, the latter often parading under the title of ‘assimilation’. Despite their failure, ‘imperialist nostalgia’ is everywhere. The passing of an ancient culture is both mourned and celebrated. The collection of art, for example, can serve as evidence of the superiority of the imperialist culture, while allowing its owners the gratification of appreciating the ‘beauty’ in objects from a past time. James Clifford (1988, 222) has noted the Western preference for collectables that are from an ‘ancient (preferably vanished) civilisation’. This is so for art andbodies. For mourning to occur ‘innocently and purely’, without opposition, the possessed and commodified culture must be certified dead.

IV As much as guns and warships, maps have been the weapons of imperialism. (Hartley 1988, 282)

We should fully recognise what nineteenth-century explorers and ‘pioneers’ accomplished in the Western District. In 1836 Major Thomas Mitchell passed through the land of the Jardwadjali clans in and around the mountain range that he named the Grampians. During this search for exploitable land, Mitchell claimed that he was exploring a terra nullius — a no man’s land — despite his having contact with local indigenous people, some of whom his party murdered. Mitchell (1965, 174) wrote: It was evident that the reign of solitude in these beautiful vales was near a close; a reflection which, in my mind, often sweetened the toils ... of travelling through such houseless regions.

He described these houseless regions as an ‘Eden’ awaiting ‘the immediate reception of civilized man’ (Mitchell 1965, 171). His second-in-command, Granville William Chetwynd Stapylton, had a fine understanding of the value of their speculative exercise. The area was an ‘El Dorado’ which would be ‘at present worth

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sixty millions to the Exchequer of England’, and hopefully result in ‘a good fat grant’ for the ‘discoverers’ (Stapylton 1863, 65). Mitchell was a surveyor, taking control of the land by charting it on a map. By naming features, he placed a symbolic British flag on each of them. The land was charted, ordered and labelled, becoming a colonial possession. Mitchell eulogised his own feats: ‘Of this Eden I was the first European to explore its mountains and streams’. His cartography and favourable reports to the British government resulted in an immediate grab for land. He anticipated that his expedition would lead to the exploitation of ‘those natural advantages [of the land], certain to become at no distant date, of vast importance to new people’ (Mitchell 1965, 171). Such is the power of cartography. Mitchell was able to map a ‘socially empty space’ (see Hartley 1988). Although the land had been occupied for thousands of years, by making a map Mitchell took possession of it for Britain. Elizabeth Ferrier (1990, 41) has written that ‘mapping determines the way landscape has been conceived’; it is described as an ‘unfolded map’. This is a powerful metaphor. The land that was possessed could literally be held in the hands of the invading colonisers. When Mitchell mapped his ‘Australia Felix’, a land without a recognised people or history was given a history — a British history. His maps conceal the presence and histories of the indigenous people. Opponents of the Gariwerd name restoration regarded it as an insult to Mitchell’s ‘memory and tenacity’.10 And although the Koori Tourism Unit’s submission highlighted the fact that Mitchell had conferred only ten of the forty-four European names at issue, it also said that ‘Mitchell should be credited with advocating the retention of Aboriginal place-names’, and had often done so: ‘I have always gladly adopted aboriginal names’. Crabb, quoting the same passage from Mitchell’s diary, said ‘the explorer went to great lengths to use Koori words when he named landscape features’ (Warrnambool Standard, 1 December 1990). Although the indigenous groups of the Gariwerd area followed Mitchell’s party as it moved across the mountain range, they made little contact with him. Mitchell sometimes left the main party and ‘explored’ ahead with a smaller group, leaving Stapylton in charge. When visited by those from whom Mitchell wished to gain

‘Nothing has changed’

both knowledge and names, Stapylton (1863, 87) recorded: ‘I wish to detain them if possible until the Surveyor General returns, for by them we may obtain a great deal of knowledge of the intervening country’. Piper, a ‘black’ from New South Wales who accompanied the party, carried the handcuffs that would capture the indigenous names. But Stapylton did not exactly put out the welcome mat: Blackfellows shot at and wounded today by one of the men in the bush. The native shipped his spear and was accordingly very properly fired at. Now to war with these gentry I suppose. They are encamped around us tonight. Tomorrow we will give them a benefit if they don’t keep off. (1863, 95)

Stapylton entered comments in his diary in reference to the indigenous peoples: ‘Their hollo resembles precisely the cry of some wild beast, which in fact it is’ (1863, 100). On one occasion he disturbed a family who appear to have been hunting. He took great pleasure in the fear that he apparently instilled in them: ‘These devils will always run if you give them the time’ (1863, 105). This is the man after whom Mitchell named Mt Stapylton. It was this feature that the Victorian Place Names Committee refused to restore to Gunigalg, apparently on aesthetic grounds. In May 1836, north of what is now the Murray River, Mitchell’s party had clashed with indigenous groups. On 27 May Mitchell decided to take action ‘in a war which not my party, but these savages had virtually commenced’. He set up an ‘ambuscade’ in order to surprise ‘the vast body of blacks’ that had been tracking the party. Realising that Mitchell’s men were waiting for them, the group ran toward ‘their citadel, the river’. Without waiting for an order from Mitchell, his men ran after the ‘blacks’, shooting them as they attempted to escape across the river. Mitchell later reported that seven had been shot. He accepted fully the decision of his men to chase and kill, ‘for the result was the permanent deliverance of the party from imminent danger’. Mitchell commemorated the killings by conferring a name upon the site: I gave to the little hill which witnessed this overthrow of our enemies, and was to us the harbinger of peace and tranquillity, the name of Mt. Dispersion. (1965, 104)

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The massacre created enough ‘ripples’ to delay Mitchell’s knighthood (Poynter 1987, 79). To ensure that Mitchell’s place in history is remembered, there are some fifty memorial cairns dotted along a commemorative track bearing his name. This celebration of a ‘great explorer’ buries the dead and their histories. As Chilla Bulbeck (1991, 170) has shown, ‘most monuments avoid the sore spot of race relations’ (see also Frances and Scates 1989). Mitchell’s exploration of the Western District had been pre-empted by the land-hungry Henty brothers, who occupied land at Portland Bay in 1834 (Christie 1979, 24). The way to gain free title to land was to exploit it vigorously. A claim was established by ‘occupying it with sheep grazed in flocks from 500 to 1,000 head, each flock in the care of a shepherd’ (Peel 1974). This had a devastating effect on the indigenous population. When the Chief Protector of Aborigines, GA Robinson, arrived in Portland in May 1841, he discovered that only ‘2 of the tribe who once inhabited the country of the Convincing Ground are still alive’ (Robinson 1980, 15). Robinson’s tour of the Western District uncovered large-scale murder by the European squatters, as well as Koori resistance. At Portland, the Police Magistrate, Mr Blair, stated that the ‘natives’ of a ‘tribe’ that had killed a squatter and his shepherd ‘should be exterminated’. He would ‘shoot the whole tribe’ if the murderer was not ‘delivered up’. Two days later, one of the Henty brothers informed Robinson that ‘the settlers were dropping them’. Blair, who was present, replied that he hoped so, adding that ‘he had no power to restrain the settlers from shooting the women and children’ (Robinson 1980, 132). At the Fitzroy River near Portland, a Mr Pilleau informed Robinson that ‘the settlers encouraged their men to shoot the natives’, and ‘that for every white man killed 20 blacks were shot’ (1980, 27). Robinson recorded that the settlers spoke of dropping the natives as if they were speaking of dropping cows. Indeed, the doctrine is being promulgated that they are not human, or hardly so and thereby inculcating the principle that killing them is no murder. (1980, 27)

He received information of the murder of two Koori women and a boy, who had been lured to their death with the promise of food. Other women were abducted, raped and beaten. On 26 June 1840, he

‘Nothing has changed’

was informed that ‘an old woman’ named ‘Nar.rer.burnin’ had been murdered at John Henty’s outstation. She had been ‘shot, kicked, and stabbed with a bayonet several times ... and then buried in the ground’ (1980, 74). At the Tulloh property near the Grampians, Robinson ‘saw the corpse of a native on 4 sticks’, apparently used as bait to lure and kill emus. He despaired at ‘the heartless manner in which Charles Winter and his ruffians [reacted to] the barbarous murder of this man’. Tulloh told Robinson that he and eight other men had previously gone to the Grampians ‘in quest of blacks’. They found a child, laid it near the fire ‘and roasted it or, to use his qualified expression, burnt it’. They also found a ‘fine little boy’, who bit one of the men who had abducted him. ‘The ruffian then kicked the child to death’ (1980, 77). A week later, following yet another attack on a native camp near Mt Sturgeon, Robinson could only state the obvious: ‘[This] would not be allowed in civilized society’ (1980, 87). In denying a Koori history, the people of the Western District have also conveniently denied their own history. This is a form of radical conservatism: the history is not unknown, but is repressed by building monuments to murderers. When this kind of facadism is threatened with exposure, the response is hostility and hysteria. On 15 October 1991, Crabb announced the Victorian Place Names Committee’s decision on the name restoration. Forty-nine place name restorations were accepted, fifteen were rejected and four required further investigation (Wimmera Mail-Times, 16 October 1991). Most of the accepted names were given dual Koori/English names. The Koori Tourism Unit had publicly accepted this position during negotiations at least a year earlier: ‘We have no objection so long as the Koori name goes first’ (Courier, Ballarat, 20 October 1990). But this did not happen. The National Park will be officially known as The Grampians (Gariwerd). The Koori name is therefore linguistically subordinated, ‘handcuffed’ in parentheses. The local member for Lowan, Bill McGrath, promised that the names would be ‘thrown out ... as soon as the Opposition was returned to Government’ (Ararat Advertiser, 17 October 1991). Bob Stone, now Stawell’s mayor, said that ‘you won’t have anyone around here using the names’. He believed that the signs would most likely be torn down, adding ‘I

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wouldn’t do it myself, as much as I’d like to’ (Vox Populi, SBS Television, 28 October 1991).11 Geoff Clark of Brambuk, on the other hand, felt that on its own the name restoration was ‘a poor attempt at some form of social justice’, and would only amount to something of substance when ‘the concept of land ownership [and] recognition of our cultural heritage within this particular area is recognised’ (Vox Populi, SBS Television, 28 October 1991). The name restoration may be a beginning or an end. The tourist dollar chases the ‘niche market’. The marketers may one day target a Western District town as a ‘Sovereign Hill’ — perhaps Stawell, which has a gold-mining history. Its citizens may become artefacts performing behind colonial facades, stuck in a local version of ‘American Dreams’ (Carey 1988). But if the market moves away from ‘Dreamtime legends’, the money may well follow. Koori culture is not a commodity. It must be interpreted in an educative fashion by those who live it — Koori people. To assist in this process, the Koori names of landscapes in the region should be fully restored, not presented in a tokenistic fashion, or as a ‘dead tongue’.12 The first publication to promote the newly named Grampians (Gariwerd) National Park informs us that: ‘There’s a place in Victoria where time seems to have stood still. A place of Dreamtime legends.’ The booklet tells of the Koories, who ‘roamed’ the area, the coming of Mitchell, then the squatters, ‘the farmers, the foresters, and the miners’ (Victorian Tourism Commission 1991, 3). It asks tourists to visit Brambuk Living Cultural Centre, or possibly the ‘Grand Canyon ... Fallen Giant ... Whale’s Mouth ... Jaws of Death’. Visitors to the park can experience ‘the same panoramic views Major Mitchell marvelled at in 1836. Nothing has changed.’

chapter

2

The journey out to the Centre: the cultural appropriation of Ayers Rock Julie Marcus It is well-known that the term ‘Australian’ referred originally to the indigenous peoples of Australia, not to the settlers of 1788. The transformation in the meaning of the word was linked to a growing need to develop an identity for settlers who could never go ‘home’ to Europe (White 1981, 15), and the change seems to have been complete by about the end of the eighteenth century.1 The transformation of meaning has had important results for Aboriginal Australians: they have lost the identification of themselves with their country while, through it, settler Australians have legitimated their own claim to Aboriginal land. The processes by which meanings are transformed within a political hierarchy, I refer to as ‘cultural appropriation’. It is a process which is continuous and one now gathering considerable momentum in Australia. Cultural appropriation can be seen in a great many areas, for example in the rash of new folk songs celebrating authentic Australian outback values. John Williamson’s song written in 1986, 29

30 Race Matters

‘Raining on the Rock’, is an interesting example, for not only is the appropriation very clear, but it refers specifically to Ayers Rock which, I shall argue, is becoming the sacred centre of a rapidly developing settler cosmology. Pastel red to burgundy and spinifex to gold We’ve just come out of the mulga Where the plains forever rol And Albert Namatjira has painted all the scenes And a shower has changed the lustre of his lands And it’s raining on the Rock in a beautiful country And I’m proud to travel this big land like an Aborigine And it’s raining on the Rock. What an almighty sight to see And I’m wishing on a postcard that you were here with me Everlasting daisies and beautiful desert rose Where does their beauty come from, heaven knows I could ask the wedge-tail but he’s away too high I wonder if he understands it’s wonderful to fly? And it’s raining on the Rock in a beautiful country ... It cannot be described with a picture The mesmerising colours of the Olgas Or the grandeur of the Rock Uluru has power! And it’s raining on the Rock in a beautiful country And I’m proud to travel this big land like an Aborigine And it’s raining on the Rock. What an almighty sight to see And I’m wishing on a postcard that you were here with me.

In Williamson’s song, the claim to be ‘like an Aborigine’ is particularly effective, I think, when it comes after the final verse and the reference to Ayers Rock. The statement that ‘Uluru has power’ is not only an expression of the widely held view that Aboriginal Australians draw power from ‘the Rock’, but a statement that such power really exists and is knowable to settler Australians like the singer.2 The singer then claims to be travelling around the countryside ‘like an Aborigine’, a claim that utilises the imagery of Aboriginal Australian ‘travelling’ and its links with the Aboriginal Dreaming tracks.3

The journey out to the Centre

The writer’s intention could well be to validate, legitimate or celebrate the power of Aboriginal law and ways. Yet there is no doubt that the claim that settler Australians can be ‘like Aborigines’ is a very clear attempt to appropriate an identity which has now become a source of power. The same theme is presented strongly in the popular film, Crocodile Dundee. The hero, Dundee, is shown as having access to the hidden part of Aboriginal life, and to the power that those hidden secrets convey. While it is never clear whether Dundee is of Aboriginal stock, it is perfectly plain that he grew up in mystically close contact with Aborigines and the land (Hamilton 1986). Within the imagery and narrative sequence of the film, there is a very clear expression of the idea that settlers who grow up on the land ‘like Aborigines’ can also sometimes have access to the power that such closeness to the land brings. Within a context of struggle over landownership, such claims are far from benign and they reproduce those made publicly in the community and in the print and television media. In Alice Springs, for example, settlers who have a basic knowledge of local Dreaming ancestors are quick to point out that they too have ‘birth rights’ in the Yiperinya Caterpillar Dreaming sites of the town. The irony is that Aboriginal Australians in the town who wish to conciliate are led to acknowledge such claims, even if only at a very superficial level. It is at this point that the relations of power governing the nature of knowledge become very clear. TGH Strehlow used ‘his’ conception totem to bolster his right to hold sacred objects that were shown only during secret ceremonies (Morton 1987), despite the fact that he was not an initiated adult.4 And, in the case of Ayers Rock, the slogan used to oppose its handover to the ‘traditional’ owners was ‘The Rock Belongs to Everyone’. The present force of the current of appropriation arises both from the partly successful moves to legitimate Aboriginal claims to land during the 1970s, and from the conscientious fabrication of a national identity taking place in the 1980s in response to the incorporation of Australia into the periphery of a world economic system. As national boundaries become economically insignificant, as national governments become less and less able to influence national economic forces, there seems to be a reaffirmation of the cultural reality, value and autonomy of the nation-state.

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The Australian bicentennial events provoked a plethora of nationalistic activities glorifying the achievements of the last 200 years. These events took place within an economy deteriorating into stagnation, a society in which unemployment and falling wages are becoming very common and in which the values of the nineteenth century petite bourgeoisie are increasingly stressed. Initiative and enterprise are the key words and the emphasis is on exploiting all and every available resource. In the nineteenth century, economic exploitation was largely of the natural world. Europeans mined and cleared and replanted the globe at a fantastic rate. Foreign cultures were collected up, ordered and named as part of the first wave of classifying the expanding colonial world. In the ‘post-industrial’ world, culture itself is considered as simply another resource, and is being mined and exploited accordingly. But collecting and naming are no longer sufficient. Other knowledges are being transformed rather than classified, perhaps in order to support an illusion of the reality of nationality. It is the conjunction of the exploitation and sale of cultural assets, with a desperate search for a national identity, that produces the pace and intensity of the current wave of cultural appropriation. It is distinctively Australian that an indigenous settler culture of ‘Australianness’ focuses constantly on the desert, on the centre of the land, and within such an ideology it is clear that the Aboriginal Australian must occupy an ambiguous position. This is a point I shall return to shortly. With the unification of economies and the obsolescence of national boundaries within the world capitalist system, and with the changing structures of the world economy, comes the increasing prominence of tourism. The commodity ‘Australia’ is now to be defined in terms of its distinctiveness or difference from the rest of the world, an increasing problem as Western capitalism tends toward an international homogeneity of culture which is especially evident in urban Australia. Aboriginal Australians become a critical aspect of difference but they do so in a particular way. They become part of difference expressed through the natural world, and are perceived once again as natural curios along with the platypus and ‘Ayers Rock’. This aspect of Aboriginality is enshrined in Australian understandings through the presentation of Aboriginal life and culture in museums where Aboriginals jostle for attention beside

The journey out to the Centre

whale skeletons, large gold nuggets and kangaroos. It is not only that Aboriginal Australians are consistently rendered as ‘natural’, timeless and unchanging, but there is also a claim to present this land as ‘ours together’, just as ‘we’ all ‘own’ Ayers Rock. Just such a claim is expressed vividly on the cover of a glossy tourist brochure advertising Kakadu National Park.5 It shows two young men sitting under a rock shelter, looking amicably out over the park. One young man is a settler Australian, the other an Aboriginal Australian. However, it is the settler youth who is the taller, who sits higher in the picture and who holds the spears. The Aboriginal youth sits cross-legged, presumably in a ‘traditional’ manner, and holds the didjeridu. It is an image in which the power is clearly in the hands of the settler Australian, with only the trappings of traditional culture in the hands of the Aboriginal Australian. It places that settler in command of an Aboriginal environment with control of Aboriginal weaponry. Given the struggle over ownership and use of the Kakadu region between miners, conservationists, pastoralists and Aboriginal people, the structure and symbolism of the image is far from neutral. As I noted above in connection with the slogan, ‘The Rock Belongs to Everyone’, the most recent movement towards appropriation is characterised by just such egalitarian claims. It is now common to hear settlers explain that ‘we are all Australians’ and to continue by saying, ‘We all have equal rights in these places, not just Aborigines. We want our children to be able to see and understand their heritage.’ This then is the new racism, a racism which is expressed and practised through doctrines of egalitarianism. Its soft but critical edge is seen in the forms of cultural incorporation and appropriated meanings used to control and express once again settler and Aboriginal perceptions of Aboriginal society and culture. In other words, it is through particular forms of cultural appropriation, those embodying notions of equality, that knowledge of both Aboriginal culture and the relations of that culture to settler society, is represented not only to settlers, but to Aboriginal Australians themselves. But it is also important to note that within the longstanding notions of ‘the Bush’ and ‘the Outback’, the most authentic manifestation of bush values and actions is located at ‘the Centre’.

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It is in the outback that one finds the real Australian, the bearer of authentically Australian values and skills. Central to the authenticity of the inhabitant of the outback, the ‘bushman’, the drover, the pastoralist, is the ideology of egalitarianism and it follows that, if the most authentic bush values are found at the centre of the outback, then the most egalitarian of fraternal values and behaviours will be found there too. This is a universalising form of masculine equality, and it is this which is sought by those leaving the cities for the Centre. The Australian Centre is characterised by its harshness, its redness, its space and its emptiness.6 At the centre of the Centre of ‘the outback’ lies Ayers Rock. Ayers Rock has developed both an international and a national significance as a pilgrimage site. As a relatively new nation (created in 1901) suffering an abrupt rupture in their history, settler Australians have lacked a sacred centre for their symbolically constructed social and cultural world. There has been no single, central place at which the universal values that characterised aspects of nationalistic ideologies and rites could be located and made manifest. While settler Australians built a plethora of shrines to death and masculinity inside the towns (war memorials, RSL clubs), attempts to create a distinctive national identity have lacked the legitimation of a primordial origin myth that celebrates what Victor Turner7 calls the antistructural, universalising, unifying values of society.8 While the Anzac myth works well for the structural domain of the social and is the basis of a flourishing structural cult, its central shrine, the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, is also set firmly within the city, just as were the great shrines of the Greek city-states. But it is at shrines that are located outside the towns, outside social and spatial structure, outside the interests of kin, political and economic groups, that the over-arching values which are said to characterise society as a whole become visible. The Muslim world has Mecca as a primordial place of origin; the European landscape is dotted with great pilgrimage shrines set up outside the spatial and temporal constraints of social structure (Lourdes, Our Lady of Fatima and, in an earlier era, St James of Compostela and the other way-stations leading to Rome and Jerusalem), and the Indian religions all have important anti-structural shrines.

The journey out to the Centre

But no prophet led Australians into their promised land; they were banished. There was no place at which the law that would bring order out of chaos was proclaimed authoritatively by the gods, there was no cosmic revelation, and there is no place set apart to which one can journey in search of the source, no place at which the meaning of life can be revealed. There is, instead, the grim order of an all-too-mundane nature that characterises a military colony, an imposed and unwanted regime of terror coupled with an inner emptiness and the fear that perhaps Australians have, in reality, no nature, no culture at all (see Strathern 1980). It is perhaps the absence of a central site of generation that helps to account for the continuing uneasiness that characterises Australian identities and which requires Australians to expend so much energy on telling themselves who they really are. If it is true to say that ‘authority once achieved must have a secure and usable past’ (Plumb 1971), then we must analyse the ways in which the bicentennial celebrations of 1988 were used to rewrite the past of the new nation of 1901 in response to the changing nature of the state.

Ayers Rock and settler tourists Given the symbolic and structural significance of the Centre in Australian histories, literatures, folklore and advertising, and given the challenge to manhood offered by the rigours of that Centre, it is perhaps not so surprising that Ayers Rock, a spectacular monolith, should have come to assume an increasing importance to settler Australians. Ayers Rock can be said, with only a slight empirical quibble, to lie at the heart of the Centre and at the centre of the Australian landscape.9 The Rock itself is a magnificent sight at any hour of the day. When Finlayson (1936) first saw it on the horizon, he was nearly 100 miles and still three days away from it by camel; today, even the rapid and easy approach by car on a sealed road cannot destroy the impact of that first sight. Ayers Rock, then, has natural qualities which lend it value as a symbolic site, but it is important to recall that such spectacular qualities are by no means a prerequisite for the successful

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development of a sacred site. The black rock which is the focus of the mosque in Mecca is very small indeed, and there is nothing obvious about the natural qualifications of many Aboriginal sacred sites. The significance of a successful site or shrine comes not from its natural characteristics but from its continuing role in connecting the events and symbolism of the past to the present. The great pilgrimage shrines of the world, some of which lie in magnificent natural settings and some of which do not, are characterised by the access they provide to the gods, by a primordial event, and by the ways in which, through ritual, visitors are able to shed the constraints of the world, gain access to the gods, and reach a momentary union or loss of self beyond structure. Ayers Rock as yet lacks a stunning intrusive cosmic event, but the stealing of baby Azaria by the dingo and the subsequent sacrifice of Lindy Chamberlain to the male gods of Australian society (Schaffer 1988) may have the dramatic qualifications for a national supernatural intervention.10 But, to some extent, the Rock’s extraordinary size and shape so counteract popular images of nature that its existence could itself be understood as proof of a divine and incomprehensible intervention. This empirical ‘proof’ or sacred origin need not be closely linked into the symbolic structures of meaning that operate within the cults that are growing around the Rock. Again, I refer to Mecca, as it offers a clear example of the disconnection of the focus and legitimation of the site from the specific cult practices which operate at it. Over the millennia, a folklore has grown up around the properties of the sacred black stone, but this has not been substantially incorporated into Muslim doctrines or dogma, even if it may be of more significance to pilgrims than it is to theologians. Meccan pilgrimage rites focus on the Kaaba with the sacred stone located at one of its corners, yet the rites do not make much play on the stone at all. It provides a pivot for the circumambulation, and it legitimates the location. One should touch the stone or kiss it, but these acts are not incorporated into the actual rites of pilgrimage as set out in the various pilgrim handbooks. In the past, the Meccan stone supported a solar calendrical cult. Pilgrims circumambulated the stone in a clockwise direction, a direction which is usual at shrines — one

The journey out to the Centre

circulates with the right shoulder to the sacred centre. Muhammad changed the direction of flow by decree, and Mecca remains the only major shrine at which pilgrims turn the left side of the body to the centre and move against the sun. Muhammad is thought to have made this change in order to sever the new religion from its predecessor, yet his act provides us with an example of the way in which quite different cults and meanings can be built upon the same natural base. It is quite possible, then, for a cult not to have a close initial relationship to the focus of the place at which it settles. While not wanting to suggest that cults are only ethereal creatures in search of embodiment, it seems to me that Australian settler nationalism and ideologies of identity can indeed be thought of as a cult in need of a central and suitable location. Furthermore, the transformations of time and space that can be found within Australian settler nationalistic ideologies and symbolism are so related to origins and social structures that Ayers Rock, standing alone at the centre of the great Australian ‘emptiness’, is a peculiarly suitable candidate for attaching this myth to that place. If this argument could be sustained, it would indicate that Ayers Rock is on the way to becoming one of the great pilgrimage shrines of Australia and there is now sufficient empirical evidence to suggest that this is precisely what is happening. The rapid development of the Centre as a tourist destination, the paving of roads and the upgrading of accommodation and other facilities means that now, as never before, the ‘average settler Australian’ is able to make the journey out to the Centre, to throw off the constraints of social structure, live the authentic Australian outback life, and to recreate the egalitarian frontier myth. The number of tourists to the centre of the outback has increased dramatically during the last decade, and it would be unwise to ignore the crucial importance of Ayers Rock to current cultural representations concerning national identity and authenticity. A great many tourists, particularly those equipped with four-wheel drive vehicles and their accompanying paraphernalia, bear some of the pilgrim’s sociological characteristics. The modern-day stockmen and drovers, re-creating the conquest, the hardihood and the egalitarianism of the frontier

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through recreation, are also recreating and affirming the essential masculinity of that frontier and its way of life. As one would expect in an increasingly integrated world economy, Ayers Rock is of significance beyond the political boundaries of Australia. The last decade has seen a worldwide boom in the sales of distinctively Australian paraphernalia in Europe and America. The Akubra drover’s hat and the Driz-a-bone stockman’s oilskin coat sell well overseas (in America), as well as within Australia. Pilgrimage, tourism and trade have always gone hand in hand. In the ancient world, the peace of the annual market was guaranteed by the feast days of the local saint or god. Mecca was one such trading town and the black stone was the marker of the town’s sacred protector. Pilgrims covered the costs of their journey through trading as they travelled, and the result of the processes by which pilgrims stepped outside of the constraints of daily life can be seen in the jollity described by Chaucer. To be a pilgrim was by no means a purely pious experience. Contemporary pilgrims are just the same and, in a self-consciously secular world, the tourist on tour to the Centre, in search of enlightenment through visits to secular sources of knowledge,11 carries many of the attributes of the pilgrim. The settler Australian tourist to Ayers Rock plays out pilgrim and tourist roles in varying combinations and degrees. There are a variety of ways of making the journey out, just as there are a variety of ways of getting to Mecca (organised tour, independent travel, by plane or bus or on foot, with visits to way-stations or without); but the move to get out of the city and into the ‘outback’, to divest oneself of the trappings of civilisation, and to live a simpler, more independent and more authentic life, is, I think, very strong. It is a theme that is widely expressed in the pseudo-exploration literature and in magazines catering to the leisure market, particularly those aimed at the four-wheel drive, off-road market. Those who move out towards the Centre adopt new, more authentically Australian garments (rough clothes: the felt hat, the boots, the tough trousers or ripped shorts, often ex-army gear); a new language of mateship and equality with a distinctive vocabulary and accent; and new attitudes to those whom they encounter. People wave at passing traffic, passers-by may even stop and come over for a ‘chat’ or a ‘yarn’, particularly if there is a warning that can

The journey out to the Centre

be passed on: ‘Watch out for the patch of “bulldust” up ahead’ or, perhaps, ‘The road’s washed out, and everyone’s bogged up to the axles down there’. The language and the roles and norms can be heard both in the crowded, treeless camp sites which cater to the new mass tourism and among those who wish to camp alone, as all indulge in the authentic pleasure of yarning. The journey out to the Centre is characterised by an immediate friendliness, a dropping of the social barriers of class and status between men, a willingness to help those in trouble, and, also, by a desire to struggle against the rigours of a harsh land and to conquer. The desire for conquest is a matter I shall return to in discussing the gendered space of the Australian symbolic world. There are a number of parallels that indicate the way in which Ayers Rock might be considered as a developing pilgrimage shrine. These include the spatial structure of the site, the ritual and symbolism evident in tourist behaviour, settler concepts of the sacredness of the Rock, and the ways in which the Aboriginal presence at the Rock feeds into settler dreams of their authentically Australian identities.12 The ritual aspects are perhaps rudimentary as yet, but they are regular and recognisably those of pilgrimage sites even if, at present, those acts are more generally thought of as secular rather than religious. To begin with, Ayers Rock, like Mecca, is surrounded by a discrete area (administered by the Mutitjulu community in conjunction with the National Parks and Wildlife Service); visitors may not take any life nor cut any blade of grass within the sacred precinct, nor may any buildings, apart from those of the local Aboriginal Australian community, be erected near the Rock. Visitors may stay only at the tourist resort which lies 14 kilometres from the Rock itself, and they are not permitted to be in the area surrounding the Rock after nightfall. In many respects, the Aboriginal keepers of the Rock who live within this forbidden realm come to act as guarantors of its authenticity, an ancient priesthood which knows the secrets of the Rock and its power, with more in common with the Meccan Eunuchs than they have with the settler pilgrims. Then, the climbing of the Rock and the walk around its circumference are both characteristic of pilgrim behaviour at shrines elsewhere. In Knock (Ireland) and at Lhasa (Tibet), pilgrims climb

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the holy mountain, sometimes on their knees, and frequently expire on the way. At Ayers Rock, every early visitor from Gosse to Finlayson to the members of the scientific parties organised by the South Australian Museum, all struggled manfully to the top. Those who now come as tourists do so, too, the climb also taking its toll on the elderly and foolhardy. The number of deaths at the Rock is steadily rising. The way is now marked by a handrail and the number of climbers of all ages is vastly increased. Ayers Rock is known to settler Australians for its size and for its dramatic colouring. Each visitor goes to watch the Rock at sunset with the hope of seeing the vivid red of the daytime Rock change to the deep violet of its evening incarnation. The more enthusiastic go also at dawn, where they see the golden redness rise from the blackness of the desert night. The redness of the Rock is part of a potent colour symbolism in which settlers see the central landscape as characteristically red. Visitors look for the redness as an indicator that they are entering the Centre, and it would be interesting to plot the red sand zones onto the map and see where the tourist destinations lie in relation to them, where the ‘outback’ might begin. The redness is evident in literary texts, paintings and film and is closely linked with the Centre’s dryness and danger. The redness of the Rock and its pulsing transformations of colour give it a very special place in this imagery and those colour transformations act as a challenge to man’s control of nature. Here is nature, primaeval and pristine, and man is but as an ant upon its surface.13 The circumambulation of the Rock by settler Australians also has a long history. In the past, the track lay close to the base of the Rock, and visitors moved through a series of Aboriginal sacred caves and waterholes. With the closing of some of these sites and the establishment of a new track, which makes the walk even longer (about 7 miles or 11.5 km), the contact of the walkers with the Rock and its Aboriginal sites has been reduced. Evidence from other developing shrines, however, suggests that the new route around the Rock will eventually become more clearly linked into the Rock’s surface and mythology, and the tour guides with their explanations and commentary should assist this process. Ayers Rock has indeed been transformed from an Aboriginal sacred site to an ‘Australian’ one which belongs to all by birthright.

The journey out to the Centre

Information on the Rock and its significance comes to visitors mainly through settler Australians: through commercial tour guides and through the activities of resort and National Parks employees. The Mutitjulu community has some input through their liaison with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, but a great deal of the guiding is done by people who are quite independent of any Aboriginal control. This process ensures that the view of Aboriginal culture and nature that is obtained by tourists is essentially a settler view, one which uses Aboriginal Australians as exemplars of prehistoric society who have access to an ancient knowledge of the land. The reproduction of these images is important to Australian politics of race but it is a theme which is also taken up, elaborated and appropriated by those pilgrims who see Ayers Rock as part of a global system of sacred sites.

Ayers Rock and the New Age pilgrims In addition to the flow of foreign and local tourists, Ayers Rock is now regularly visited by an international membership of mystics. Australian sacred sites are listed in the New Age Pilgrim’s Guide to Planet Earth (Khalso 1981), a handbook which gives a brief synopsis of Aboriginal spirituality and a list of Aquarian communities and festivals all over the world. Other sites of significance to the New Age movement are the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, Stonehenge, the megalithic ‘astronomical’ site at Callanish in the Outer Hebrides, the Easter Island statues, and Mt Fuji. There is an international mystical circuit on which Aboriginal Australians and Ayers Rock have gained a secure place (see Grossinger 1986). The popularity of Ayers Rock among mystics seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, however, and the number of international pilgrims is low but growing. The foreign pilgrims at Ayers Rock are part of a worldwide mystical tradition which draws on a multitude of sources for inspiration. Mayan and Hopi Indian traditions have been prominent, as have the variety of forms of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, theosophy, Druidic beliefs and the Jewish mystical tradition. These religious ideologies feed into and mingle with Aquarian New Age and other alternative

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lifestyle philosophies. The number of people becoming aware of Ayers Rock through their participation in one or more factions of the Western mystical tradition is, I believe, increasing very rapidly. The emergence of Ayers Rock into this world consciousness is of great significance as the number of potential pilgrims is very high. At present, international pilgrims who fall into this category are known to have come from America, Britain, Germany and Japan. These foreign visitors to the Rock do not think of themselves simply as tourists; they are people who think of themselves as seeking contact with mystical forces through the journey out to sites of particular power. Yet, as noted above, tourism and pilgrimage have always gone hand in hand and the roles are interchangeable and interactive, distinguishable only partly through emphasis. The visitors to Ayers Rock who define themselves as pilgrims are, in my view, pilgrims in the full sense of the word. They have all the sociological qualifications, as the Turners (1978) would describe them, and they share the characteristics and aspirations of pilgrims to Mecca or to Our Lady of Walsingham in England. The understandings of these pilgrims, in common with those of their Australian counterparts, are expressed in purely cultural terms. The Aboriginal Dreamtime and the travels of the Dreaming ancestors are understood as creative and originating forces, and Aboriginal ritual is a method of reaching that primal world. In interpreting Aboriginal religion, the works of Mircea Eliade are often referred to, so that the universal features of the spiritual path come into focus (Khalso 1981, 252). Of the anthropological texts, Elkin’s Aboriginal Men of High Degree (1977) is important, as are some of Strehlow’s writings. Aquarian writings on Aboriginal religion have two important characteristics. First, in the understandings of these texts that are presented (Andrews 1987; Havecker 1987), there is no sense of any relation between a cosmology and a particular social structure, no sense of the politics of religious beliefs, but, rather, a feeling of the timelessness and essential universal truths that such beliefs offer. And, second, Aboriginal beliefs are homogenised so that it is possible to speak in generalities and to use a word or concept from here and another from there, without having to consider how widespread such ideas or practices were.

The journey out to the Centre

The New Age in Australia Some settler Australians are part of this international mystical movement. The significance of Aboriginal religion (Newton 1988) and Ayers Rock for Australian New Age believers is developing rapidly. Ayers Rock is prominent in Australian Aquarian philosophies: it is sometimes held to lie on a line of power which connects directly with St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall (Adelaide Fountain News 25, 28 April 1986, 6), and it is at the Rock that the initial spark that will infuse the world network with light will strike (Selleck 1987, 21). In Australia, it is common to find the same people influenced by a variety of philosophical traditions and committed to the same range of political causes. The range of small, alternative religious and lifestyle groups in Australia alone is very great. The groups tend to be small, unstable, but linked into a loose network. They must not be underestimated, as, taken together, they contain and influence very large numbers of people. Adelaide, a city of about one million people, contains at least five well-stocked esoteric bookshops which cater to this market. Among the Australian groups involved are the Rainbow Group,14 the Fountain Group, and a range of meditation and therapeutic groups.15 The Fountain Group, for example, in common with many others inside Australia and out, is particularly interested in the lines of the magnetic grid encompassing the world. Sites on the intersections of nodes of this grid are particularly powerful access points, and ritual concentrates on getting the magnetic structures or forces of the body into a more natural alignment with those of the earth. Crystal therapy and magnetic therapies aim at this. There are also techniques for locating and making magnetic forces and lines visible, and techniques of intervention which aim at making the black forces of evil recede until they are replaced by white.16 The Aquarian pilgrim to the outback and its centre is very active. One contributor to New Age News writes of her trip to the Northern Territory: We were on a metaphysical journey seeking ways, by the use of Australian Bush Flower Essences, to help heal negative human emotions ... While we were in the north, I realized that

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the physical world has been very largely mapped and is known; but now the real pioneer work is in the area of ‘inner’ space and in the growth of consciousness. (New Age News, 1987, 1(9), 7)

Although I have separated New Age pilgrims from those touristpilgrims whose interest in Ayers Rock originates in more mundane concerns, this passage indicates the ways in which alternative cosmologies are very closely linked to the rationalities and concerns of mainstream settler Australians. The language and the mode of the search vary, but the underlying concern with identity and authenticity, and the use of pioneering and outback metaphors, are common to all Australian pilgrims. The frontier is still there. In addition, the use of specifically Australian essences, rather than the more traditionally known herbal remedies and scents, combines the belief that the Australian landscape is the oldest with the belief that Australia was also the most isolated of the continents. It is when one goes out into ‘the bush’ that one can find the most ancient of essences preserved from interference and pollution by the physical and cultural isolation of the Australian continent from the rest of the planet. Timelessness and isolation are the key factors, factors which are potent in Australian race politics. What I want to address, though, is not the detailed content of the beliefs and rites of these groups, but the universalising claims they make and their implications for Aboriginal Australians. Let me begin with a paragraph from Selleck’s booklet of visions and predictions for the coming of the New Age in February 1988: For ten years I have had a vision of a gathering of people at Uluru. They are there to take part in an awakening of deep mystery from within the Earth. They hold hands in a circle. A didgeridoo plays. A Great Light emerges from beneath the Earth at Uluru. It grows larger and larger until it encircles the earth. All the people can then see. We are one. We are one. We are one. (Selleck 1987, 22)17

In one sense, these are the age-old sentiments of transcendent unity everywhere, but, in the Australian context, they carry quite specific, local meanings. Although there is a clear hope that the Aboriginal owners will join in, the ‘they’ who will all hold hands around the

The journey out to the Centre

Rock are largely settler mystics. The unity that is sought is a unity which transcends all local differences and encompasses all religious traditions. In such a unification, Aboriginal Australians would, of course, lose their identity, their singularity, their difference. A great light will emerge and Aboriginal religion will become united with everyone else’s, that is, with a settler mysticism that has already incorporated Aboriginal mysticism. Note, too, the use of the didjeridu, a musical instrument not found in Central Australia, but used to indicate the ancient secrets of Aboriginal Australian religion. A crystal is thought to lie beneath Ayers Rock, and the Rock is held to be melded into the same web of power that supports the other sites of significance within this cosmology.18 The significance of crystals in Australian Aboriginal ritual, as described by Elkin (1977), is a happy confirmation of the powers of crystals, for the most recent phase of crystal therapy arose from Hopi crystal imagery and the mining of Hopi crystals by the Utah Mining Company.19 A universal cosmology, which originated in America, largely on the west coast, is therefore being used to provide an explanation of the spiritual power of an Aboriginal sacred site. This explanation supersedes those offered by Aboriginal cosmology and is used to explain the sacredness of the site to Aboriginals themselves. In addition to replacing the origin and cause of the power of the place, mystical explanations also point to links with other equally powerful places. Such explanations have the effect of negating local knowledge and reducing Aboriginal religion to a variation of a universal, often shamanistic, religion which is being defined and explored by settlers and which originates in Western mysticism. Bits and pieces are taken from a variety of religions and traditions and are melded into something quite foreign. The Mutitjulu analogy with quarrying is very apt, particularly so given the move away from material exploitation and towards cultural exploitation.20 In addition to incorporating Aboriginal concepts into a new religion, the new mystics have their own rites, derived from nonAboriginal sources, which they carry out at the Rock. They use their crystals to get at the power of the crystal under the Rock; they use their magic to produce global and local harmony, and so forth. They attempt to put the power of the Rock at the service of their own

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universalising and egalitarian aims. Yet the response from Aboriginal Australians is often far from welcoming. Aquarian claims to be in telepathic or ‘direct’ communication with the Aboriginal law men of Ayers Rock are not verified by those who are learned in Aboriginal ritual who live at the Rock. Settler attempts to tap into the power of the Rock are seen by local Aboriginal people as simply more of what has gone before — now, settlers are mining Aboriginal culture rather than the body of the land itself. And there is opposition to mystics who want to meditate at or on the Rock and perform their own rites during the night, as the sites of greatest power to Aquarians are those already identified as being most powerful by Aboriginal Australians. These are precisely the sites that are forbidden to tourists and protected by settler law. The fear that Aboriginal secret sites will be violated yet again is very great, and well founded. At the time of the Harmonic Convergence of 16–17 August 1987, an event widely reported in the media,21 park rangers had to blockade the entrances to Uluru National Park and make special searches of Ayers Rock and the Olgas to ensure that all settlers left the park at dusk. The Harmonic Convergence was an event originating in American entrepreneurial mysticism, which was understood in varying ways by the groups and individuals concerned with it.22 In Australia, Ayers Rock was the site of greatest significance and there were attempts to organise a large gathering of pilgrims there to, among other things, encircle the Rock with a human chain. One pilgrim describes the time as ‘clearly marked as the long awaited quantum point in humanity’s re-evolution ... the long promised Millennium of Universal Order will be heralded in ... ’ (Bee 1987, 26), while another expects the transformation of the genetic blueprint of all living cells (Adelaide Fountain News 39, 9 October 1987, 8). Formal applications to hold a major gathering at the Rock were resisted by the local Aboriginal community, as were applications by pilgrims to camp together with their Aboriginal ‘brothers’. Park rangers managed to intercept some of the convergers and prevented intrusions into the Aboriginal community. Yet one Aquarian claims to have spent the night at the Rock, despite being specifically warned off by the rangers, and claims that others did likewise, in order to conduct dawn rites in the Rock’s large caves

The journey out to the Centre

(Zable 1987, 26). Zable’s claims may be spurious, yet others also say that they went in at dawn and the intent is there — the intent to put into practice the dictum that ‘the Rock belongs to everyone’, in this case, everyone who really understands. Aboriginal sacred sites are secret and to be protected from all but the settler mystics who also understand the eternal truths of Aboriginal religion. In other words, the universalising and egalitarian sentiments of mystical doctrine are used to deny the specificity of Aboriginal belief, to disregard entirely the wishes of Aboriginal custodians, and to insert settler Australians into the very heart of that secret Aboriginal knowledge on which their only recognised claim to land rests. In addition to settler attempts to incorporate the Rock into their own cosmologies, there are also the ambiguities posed by settler understandings of the nature of these particular Aboriginal sacred sites. These ambiguities arise partly from the ready analogies drawn by settler mystics between Aboriginal concepts and those of settler cosmologies. For example, the Rainbow Serpent is linked to other serpentine symbols like the Loch Ness monster; the notion of the spiritual links of individuals with the land is extended to give settlers their own ‘Dreamings’, and the Harmonic Convergence rites in Sydney took the form of building a ‘Rainbow Serpent’ of sand on Bronte Beach. The ‘Dolphin Dreaming’ of the eastern coast is an example of a settler ‘Dreaming’ that is very popular — the dolphin links into a set of beliefs about the mystical nature and speech of dolphins, their relations to the rainbow, and so on.23 There were several ‘Dolphin Dreamers’ at Ayers Rock for the Harmonic Convergence. In addition, some therapy or healing groups offer courses in aspects of Aboriginal Australian cosmology. Aboriginal social structures have been crucial for the Australian communalists right from the start, when the first communes and festivals tried to organise themselves as ‘tribes’, although they have a place in Australian settler beliefs that is generally unrecognised. In its present form, interest in Aboriginal Australian religion grew out of the attempt to peel away the corrupting structures of materialism and to resurrect earlier forms more suitable to the human psyche and body. In its theosophical form, it derived from the search for the pre-Atlantan islands of Lemuria. ‘A New Age group in Perth has published detailed accounts of Lemurian sites said to be found in

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Western Australia and throughout the other Australian states ...’ (Drury and Tillet 1980, 10–11), and early theosophists thought that the Aborigines were the descendants of the ancient Lemurians. Yet the understandings of Aboriginal religion that are propagated are, of course, related to purely settler concerns. One of the other ambiguities which arises from such an engulfed cosmology concerns the relation of Aboriginal sacred sites to gender hierarchies. Questions of gender are of importance not only to feminist mystics and New Age philosophies but to settler Australian tourist-pilgrims to the centre of the outback. These latter are recreating the unrelentingly male ethos of the Australian frontier, even if they do so in a very comfortable way. In the case of New Age philosophies, it is important to note that the coming era will be one in which the female essence will triumph. The division and hierarchical structures of today’s world will be replaced by a oneness that is essentially feminine, and the feminine side of men that is held to be essential to a peaceable world will be able to emerge. As a result, women and men will be able to live together in a new harmony. In the case of feminism, there are feminist women who are actively seeking to formulate theologies freed from the constraints of patriarchal thought. This difficult task has provoked an interest in comparative religions, and, in Australia, the rise of a feminist anthropology has provided new approaches to Aboriginal women’s rites. The re-evaluation of the anthropology of Aboriginal women has merged with the doctrines and interests of those seeking a distinctively female-oriented religious life. Some feminist mystics have been concerned to establish the existence of Aboriginal women’s sacred sites and to extract from Aboriginal religions some of their important messages for women. It is now rather widely held that Mt Olga and the surrounding hills are a women’s sacred site. The Olgas have come to represent the new, feminine world. The rounded intimacy of the Olgas is contrasted with the rigid, terrifying masculinity of Ayers Rock. The water-worn patches etched into one section of the Olgas are perceived as being vulvas — again, a symbolism developed by women who were seeking a contrast to the widely reported phallic symbolism that characterises many religions. Such an interpretation of the Olgas

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contrasts with that of Aboriginal Australians and, indeed, constitutes a transformation of local understandings. It seems to me that the rise of the Olgas as a female sacred site goes far beyond the Aquarian cosmologies within which it seems to have originated. It is connected to the same factors which are leading to the immense tourist activity at Ayers Rock. The significance of both places derives from their location within a settler cosmology in which Australianness and authenticity are worshipped in ‘the Outback’, in ‘the Bush’. In the context of the cult of frontier masculinity which characterises Australian society, a cult which has its structural, urban focus on the Anzac myth and memorial shrines, the gender separation evidenced at the ‘centre’ of the outback makes a lot of sense. The blood-red Rock, its severity and harshness, epitomise ‘the heart of the centre’. There is nothing soft or feminine about it. The Olgas, on the other hand, are held to be quite different and they are secondary. One goes to visit the Rock, and then sees the Olgas if time and energy permit. Their ovoid form, their multiple curves, their vulva-like crannies — these are the feminine element writ large. If it is indeed the case, that the Australian cult of frontier masculinity is at last developing an anti-structural sacred site at ‘the centre’, then we are faced with a site that carries radically independent sets of meanings for different social groups. A dramatic Aboriginal site is being converted into a site of significance to several opposed groups of settler Australians. The new values attached to it have nothing to do with Aboriginal religion, much of which is devalued into ‘art’ or entertainment. The new values building up around Ayers Rock have instead everything to do with the bonding of settler society through race and the hierarchical division of that society through gender. There are, then, at least four sets of cosmologies circulating around Ayers Rock and the Olgas. The first of these is Aboriginal and is, of course, partly secret. In this cosmology, however, Ayers Rock carries sites of significance to women and to men, while the Olgas is a powerful and predominantly male place, even though female ancestors travelled to it and left the insignia of their genitalia in passing. The second cosmology is the international mystical tradition with which the Australian movement shares much, especially its

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origins. In this cosmology, the Rock and the Olgas tend to be less overtly engendered, perhaps because of the universalistic sentiments and the explicit privileging of a notion of the eternal feminine enshrined in their beliefs. The crystals and power of the site on an international magnetic grid and network predominate in this group of beliefs. The third is the specifically Australian settler mysticism that contains many feminist aspects. It is this latter cosmology that defines the Olgas as a female sacred site. Ayers Rock is central to each of these, but it has also become immensely prominent in the cosmology of a much wider settler public through the massive increase in tourism. It is this that I see as referring to a mushrooming nationalism — to the gender structures of Australian society, to the struggle to develop some sense of identity and authenticity in a homogenising world — and as receiving a terrific boost from the nationalist emphases of the bicentennial activities. In the bicentennial process, through the activities of recreation, through the commissioning of new conservative histories, through reprinting and re-issuing the earlier colonial literatures, and through the redefinition of the authentic in terms of the landscape and outback in art and film, Aboriginal Australians are being pushed back to where they used to be, back into the primordial time and no-place of myth. I now want to return to my opening remarks in which I stated that the term ‘cultural appropriation‘ refers to the processes by which meanings are transformed within specific hierarchical structures of power. It is important to note that cultural appropriation refers not just to any meanings and not to meanings taken out of their political contexts. It is the place of meanings within a structure of power — in this case, within the structures of race — that renders them into sites of struggle. In the case of Ayers Rock, a site of significance to Aboriginal Australians has been incorporated into several distinct settler cosmologies in such a way that settler claims to land and settler versions of Aboriginal meanings are legitimated. In this case, settler nationalism marches hand in hand with its alternative, settler mysticism, so that, in the bicentennial nationalist fervour of 1988, there can still be no place and no comfort for Aboriginal people. The political processes which have forced settler Australians to recognise and re-value Aboriginal culture have led to successful

The journey out to the Centre

Aboriginal claims to land. These are the material bases which keep reconstituting the symbolic and cultural frontier at the centre of Australian race politics, the frontier which is critical to the rampant settler nationalism which glorifies that frontier, the conquest of the land and the particular form of masculinity that goes with it. Yet Aboriginal claims to the land are still contested, and the nature of Aboriginal society and culture is a matter of fierce popular debate. That struggle for the land and the struggle to enforce existing race and gender hierarchies will come, it seems to me, increasingly to focus on Ayers Rock. As more settlers make the journey out to the Rock as tourists and mystics, more live out the outback myth of outback egalitarian mateship. The rise of the Rock in settler cosmologies accompanies a conservative movement in Australian politics, one seen in many aspects of daily life, but one seen most clearly in the pace of the cultural appropriation of Ayers Rock.

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3

Rousseau’s Knot: the entanglement of liberal democracy and racism Roberta James

What a little culture can do ... This chapter originates in the ordinary anthropological assumption that social life is circumscribed by culture. Racism is an integral part of Australian culture,1 as can be demonstrated by an examination of the apparently uncontroversial understandings of Aboriginality2 found in Australian newspapers.3 Normative racism — that is, an ordinary and accepted level of racial prejudice — occurs precisely because racism is a cultural artefact. Historical process entangles it in the meanings, logics and practices surrounding other cultural artefacts. Racism is not only entangled with obviously related artefacts such as colonialism and hierarchy, but also apparently distant cultural products such as democracy and varieties of communication. The inevitable state of cultural entanglement provides racism with its intellectual validity and ensures that it is normative, reasonable and pervasive. I call this entanglement ‘Rousseau’s Knot’ and discuss its shape below. 53

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Rousseau’s Knot Discourse on ‘race’ is intimately woven into discourses on the nature of (human) society, civil rights and justice.4 A crucial binary confusion takes place and exists as an organising cultural logic, a rationale and tension of normative racism. This first section is an introduction to the historical entanglement of liberal democracy and racism, and its trajectory during the Australian bicentennial year in 1988. The persistence of memory and the rhetoric of images In 1753 the Academy of Dijon invited entries for an essay competition on the question: ‘What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by Natural Law?’ (Cranston 1984, 28). Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s entry for that competition, A Discourse on Inequality, arguably became one of the most influential works of the French Enlightenment. Rousseau begins his essay by positing that there are two types of inequality, only one of which is ‘natural’ or innate and previous to sociality and which is generated by differences in ‘age, health, strength of the body and qualities of the mind or soul’; the other, ‘moral or political inequality’, is the result of the development of civil society or civilisation and ‘derives from a sort of convention, and is established, or at least authorised, by the onsent of men’ (Rousseau 1984, 77). Rousseau argues that the inequalities which characterised contemporary French society were not authorised by natural law but rather marked the emergence of humankind from the ‘state of nature’ (which is truly governed by natural law) into the civil state (which is governed by the constraint of social relations and sociality). This transition is marked by a transformation in human relations with nature from a complacent satisfaction as an organic part of it to a proprietary dominance over it. Self-consciousness and a particular intellectual faculty are distinguishing features of ‘civil man’. ‘The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘‘This is mine’’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society’ (Rousseau 1984, 109). So, civil society originated in and is defined by hierarchical intellectual, social and economic divisions. The true founder of civil society, according to Rousseau, possessed whatever unique

Rousseau’s Knot

capacities were/are necessary to arbitrarily define dominion and possession. The leaders of civil society are those who also have the capacity to define dominion and possession. Rousseau’s depiction of the witless, unconscious, guileless and complacent ‘natural man’ of the forest has, of course, become the stereotype of ‘the noble savage’. His explanation of the difference between ‘civil’ and ‘natural’ man has become an archetypal description of socio-cultural evolution and European colonial race relations. In Part I of his essay, Rousseau (1984, 81–107) makes atemporal elisions between some ‘ideal’ precivil human and contemporary indigenous people that retain currency in the late twentieth century.5 The lengthy heritage of this elision in learned works and popular imagery has empowered it with the authority of history itself.6 ‘The noble savage’ has become part of a rhetoric of images, an iconic mnemonic, with which the world is understood. It has acquired a certain kind of truth as a racial stereotype, one which obscures the unreliability of the things on which that truth is based. A stereotype is merely a definitive category, a notional container for a set of arbitrarily determined and privileged characteristics that are used to fix a reality and identity for an object. A stereotype gains cultural currency and authenticity through repetition. It gains authority through its articulation by, or association with, significant or privileged people and institutions. It may also gain authority or legitimacy by its articulation in common or popular discourse. In both cases, ‘after constant and consistent presentation of a relation between terms, such a link accrues [the] status of a natural category’ (Edmunds and James 1992, 426). ‘The noble savage’, like civil/ised man, has become a natural category in liberal discourse. Rousseau’s noble savage began life as a discursive device in an exchange between one civil/white man and his peers about their own contemporary conditions of civil/white being. It is important to remember the non-indigenous heritage of ‘the noble savage’ as an articulation of non-indigenous discourses on non-indigeneity. The urge and intent is to fix an identity, not to explore or understand it. It is rhetorical. Through the force of politics and dominance, indigenous people have found communicating in public discourses without using the imagery of ‘the noble savage’ almost impossible.

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The cultural space they enter has already located and defined them. Institutions which inhabit the space of public discourse have been historically shaped by the work of Rousseau and many others. The stereotype of ‘the noble savage’, the temporal elisions which are represented by it, its binary distinction, and its placement of indigenous people in the evolution and structure of social life, constitute some of the formative logics and rationale of normative racism where there exists a ‘white’, (neo) European north/western (etc) cultural dominant.7 Australia is such a place. The appearance of ‘the noble savage’ in Rousseau’s discourse on civility shapes and anticipates other racialised discourses, including those current in contemporary Australian culture. Representation, persuasion and the bicentennial nation ‘As the national [identity]8 is valorised, the discourses of nationalism ... tend to become areas occupied by those interests seeking to centre themselves within the culture’ (Turner 1990, 117). Three different discourses on nationhood vied for dominance in public life during the Australian bicentennial year. Each attempted to persuade the wider Australian public of the legitimacy of its representations and its popular right to make them. The Australian state exists in relation to other states, ideological contingencies and imperatives. Its relationship with Aboriginal people is not the reason for its existence but rather one of the consequences of its particular history and relation to the world. In 1988 Australia attempted to demonstrate its political maturity and its right to membership in the global community of nations. Australia — a peripheral, predominantly non-indigenous ex-colony — finds no necessary affinity with the originating conditions which support the imperial, metropolitan European structures of race relations.9 The historical emergence of the notions ‘race’ and ‘nation’ as natural categories of world order at roughly the same point of European cultural transformation has entangled them so intimately that they have become discursively ‘synonymous’ (Miles 1993, 56, 57, 62). There were no ‘race relations’ inside the original metropolitan imperial centres, only relations with racially defined colonies and other nations or empires. Australia’s domestic and foreign policy

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history is peppered with the products of attempts to reproduce these conditions, such as genocidal and assimilationist policies towards Aboriginal people and the White Australia policy, designed to make the national palette monochrome. An inherited understanding of ‘the nation’ as a racially homogenous entity and the centrality of race (relations) to nationalist discourse in 1988 suggested difficulties for the ex-colony. The inherent tension contained in a genealogical urge towards Australian identification with the established (first-world) community of nations and possibly dubious credentials to do so historically, constrained bicentennial rhetoric. The official theme for the Bicentenary, on which the Labor federal government’s nationalist discourse was based, was ‘Celebration of a Nation’. It was reiterated time and time again at the various state-sponsored events. In the absence of homogeneity, reconciliation — in the form of a treaty which recognised Aboriginal sovereignty — was represented as the gesture which might mark ‘authentic’ Australian nationhood. Awareness of this possibly pretentious enterprise imbued the Celebration of a Nation with a certain nervousness. The need for the state to prove its sovereign right to the claim of nationhood and the implications of this for representations of race relations are discussed by Lattas in this volume. The federal Opposition at the time introduced the theme ‘Australia — One Nation’ and it formed the centrepiece for Coalition discourses on nationhood. The theme embodied the assertion that ‘a nation cannot make a treaty with itself’ (Daily Telegraph, 8 January 1988) and reflects the Coalition’s opposition to a treaty with Aboriginal people as well as its position on multiculturalism. The Opposition’s discourse on this theme included an insistence that there were few real things which made the history of Aboriginal people under the Australian state worthy of especial or long-term distinction from that of any other group of people in Australia. The place of assimilation in the Coalition’s platform on race relations and multiculturalism is well known. If Aboriginal people and non-’white’ or non-anglophone migrating communities share the characteristics and benefits of ‘civil man’ with ‘white’ anglophone Australians, they no longer possess any substantial cultural difference. Or, at least, they should not. Since all Australians are the same (or should be), it is simply not logical to make treaties

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amongst the population: there are no cultural differences between real Australians. People are individual citizens and their relationships with other (collective) national/cultural identities are annulled by citizenship. The Coalition’s platform articulates a quite specific understanding of the close relationship between national, racial and cultural identity, a variation on original imperial logics, as well as an enormous faith in the rhetoric of liberal democracy and its guarantee of equality amongst all people as individuals. Aboriginal people themselves introduced a third theme for the year, ‘1988 — National Year of Mourning’,10 in distinct contrast and opposition to those on either side of the official bicameral fence. Aboriginal discourse on this theme suggested that the violence which characterised the original colonial moment, or transition to ‘civil’ being, was not easily ameliorated by current promises of future égalité. Nor had such violence necessarily ceased to be a feature of Aboriginal experiences of Australian race relations. The notions of unity inherent in the Labor government’s Celebration of a Nation and the Coalition’s Australia — One Nation, while in opposition to each other are, nevertheless, unified by their subordination of any resistant Aboriginal presence. This may or may not be anything more than a reflection of the custodial nature of representational democracy. The Aboriginal construction of 1988 as a National Year of Mourning counterpointed this unity by refuting the basis for celebration and the legitimacy of any substantive claim to genuine national unity except perhaps that of its own opposition. The Aboriginal National Year of Mourning denied the legitimacy of the other positions, themes and bicentennial discourses on nationhood. It refuted the institutionalised processes of Australian democratic representation by precisely practising the politics of ambiguity and utilising the democratic right to dissent. Ambiguity or lack of clear categorical closure in discourse is absolutely basic to the material articulation, practice and experience of race relations and strategies for political and social survival. The contest between the themes and discourses of Celebration of a Nation, Australia — One Nation and National Year of Mourning reflected recognisable axes of opposition. The existence and inevitability of discursive contest was accepted as appropriate in a

Rousseau’s Knot

heterogeneous democracy. But, when national/cultural identity is constructed and accepted as a ‘natural’ category, its contestation quite literally means a challenge to manifest reality. Discursive opposition which concerns the nature of (national) identity is marked by conflict as and when it marks difference. This conundrum predicts the likely space for Othernesses in ‘Australian culture’, especially those of ‘indigenous’ and ‘ethnic’ character. Yet the capacity to encompass disjunctures is a hallmark of democracy. The tension between democratic aim and method is clearly visible in the daily representations of ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ relations in the Australian media, and the polemical positions taken on the subjects by the dominant actors in Australian politics. It can remain a reasonably benign dialectic of the democratic nation-state or it can be intensified by interest groups into a guarantee of civil disaffection, unrest or violence, as people feel and respond to any of the variety of threats signifiable by difference.

Normative racism and iconography The competing bicentennial discourses anticipated and articulated political contest within Australian society. But cartoons which commented on them assumed a degree of common meaning and understanding in Australian culture. They assumed a commonsense. Normative racism is not an overtly moral issue. It is the product of relationships between things and meanings through which other cultural articulations are made and understood.11 This is most readily visible when representations are assumed to communicate certain messages. In this section, I illustrate the nature of normative racism through an analysis of cartoon representations of Aboriginality during Australia’s Bicentenary.12 Historically specific materials and imperatives of race relations and democratic discourses came together with the ordering logics of normative racism to form a specific cultural product. That product was the meaning of Aboriginality in Australian public culture in 1988. One cultural imperative or another ensured that that meaning was negative. One of the consequences of the binary logics of normative racism is the persistent dissuasion of non-Aboriginal Australians from direct association with Aboriginal people and race relations issues.

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Stereotypes of Aboriginality The first cartoon to be examined here neatly describes the two stereotypes of Aboriginality which dominate public discourse. Don Lindsay’s cartoon (Figure 1) depicts the organising logics of normative racism as Aboriginality is literally split into two distinct kinds. Active reflective Aboriginality is signalled by bandanna, landrights insignia, battle jacket and copy of the constitution. This predominantly urban image of Aboriginality is credited with agency, particularly political agency, and has acquired the euphemistic label of ‘contemporary’ Aboriginality. Inanimate reflected Aboriginality is signalled by near-nudity, as well as a spear and a boomerang which are positioned as equivalent to the constitution. This predominantly non-urban, sometimes rural, usually desert-dwelling Aboriginality is rarely credited with agency and has acquired the euphemistic label of ‘traditional’ Aboriginality. Disjunction between ‘contemporary’ and ‘traditional’ Aboriginality, marked by the intervention of history (the mirror of colonialism and civil society), may be mediated by appeal to the unified constraints of the human body. These figures are Aboriginal because the artefacts they carry are associated with Aboriginal people.13 Otherwise, the figures express common signifiers of generic blackness by use of classical racial typologies: heavy brow, large round noses, protruding voluptuous lips. Representationally speaking, there are no pale-skinned, light-browed, aquiline-nosed, rosebud-lipped Aboriginal people. Such people are not ‘real Aborigines’ and are often perceived with a mixture of confusion and contempt, as inauthentic provocateurs, liars and fools. Even though representations of Aboriginality and race relations rely heavily on the rhetorics of history, they are astonishingly ahistorical. Miscegenation, otherwise acknowledged in the body of the country’s legislative history, has no representational reality. This historiographic surgery on the unwieldy details of social life shapes the anatomy of Australian race relations and their representation. Binary representations of Aboriginality form the basis for current confusion and certain hostility concerning the vexed question of ‘authenticity’ among the wider non-Aboriginal public. The adjective ‘contemporary’ and its representational forms, like the

Rousseau’s Knot

Figure 1 Cartoon by Don Lindsay, West Australian, 4 January 1988

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phrase ‘post-colonial’, conflate apparent temporal or historical events and material conditions with ideologies. ‘Contemporary Aboriginality’, as represented by the constitution, is peculiar to Aboriginal ways of being after 1967, while ‘contemporary Aboriginality’ is merely any way in which an Aboriginal person articulates their identity at the moment. Ambiguities and complexities are constantly masked by the profound simplifications of social realities common to standard representational conventions. The question of ‘authentic’ Aboriginality persists. The significant question of ‘authentic’ nonAboriginality does not.14 The stereotypes of ‘contemporary’ and ‘traditional’ Aboriginality, though different and opposed, both operate against the interests of Aboriginal people. Aboriginal people will be, and are, blamed when the category falls apart, even though greater capacity to manipulate the representational processes rests elsewhere. Figure 1, containing the tensions and ambiguities that it does, illustrates the major tensions and ambiguities constraining the three competing discourses of the Bicentenary. It queries the basis on which Australia might celebrate and queries the identity of the people with whom the state might reconcile. The Coalition’s theme of Australia — One Nation is represented here as the irreversible march of history. Those unique things which make Aboriginal people different from the rest of the Australian population are remote reflections of a self-image, distant from the realities of what would be understood as the world of ‘modern Aborigines’. Alternatively, this cartoon can also be seen to articulate the major issue of the Aboriginal National Year of Mourning. The two stereotypes depicted can represent a unified Aboriginality, embodied firstly and lastly in an (armed) opposition to non-Aboriginal colonisations or interventions. This interpretation of the cartoon lends visual support to the notion of pan-Australian trans-temporal Aboriginal unity, of an Aboriginal nation, which has suffered sustained grief. While a continuity of resistance or opposition is suggested, the efficacy of historically later Aboriginal opposition to dominance is compromised as it directly reflects upon the colonial moment in which the boomerang and the spear failed to repel invasion.

Rousseau’s Knot

The potential of Aboriginal resistance armed with the constitution and ‘civil’ means of opposition to achieve a genuine autonomy or self-determination is questioned. ‘Civilised’ Aboriginality faces ‘natural’/’pre-civilised’ Aboriginality in a way that is reminiscent of the Dijon question. The juxtaposition of these two images of Aboriginality effects a degree of political containment. As a reflection of ‘contemporary’ Aboriginality, ‘traditional’ Aboriginality is also embodied within it. Rousseau’s ‘natural’ inequalities are thus also part of the physiognomy of ‘civil’ man (contemporary Aboriginality), and so contemporary Aboriginality suffers both innate and civil disadvantages in the pursuit of socio-political and economic égalité. The logical outcome is the announcement of a National Year of Mourning. Lindsay’s cartoon illustrates an article by Sally Morgan on the designated bicentennial funding of Aboriginal projects during 1988 and the debate in Aboriginal communities about whether or not the funding should be used (West Australian, 4 January 1988). The debate was represented in the general Australian media at the time as a schism between ‘traditional’ Aboriginal groups, who opted to use the money, and ‘non-traditional’ urban, or southeastern, groups, who did not. Contemporary Aboriginality is here being defined by its deliberate opposition to contemporary non-Aboriginal Australian society. In contrast, ‘traditional’ Aboriginality is more acquiescent, opposed to ‘contemporary’ non-Aboriginal Australian society only in as much as its innate qualities make it substantially and identifiably distant and remote from it.15 As Lindsay’s cartoon appeared in conjunction with an article by a known Aboriginal person, the shown dichotomy shared in the authority of a representative indigenous view. Aboriginality is not entirely a matter of Aboriginal self-determination. It is contained and mediated by socio-political relationships and structures, most particularly with and of the state as an active presence in Australian life. This relationship is alive in the authentication of dualist representations of Aboriginality and plays some part in the repetition of certain icons (such as spears, landscapes and landrights flags) as signifiers of Aboriginality. The semiotics of these icons themselves are at work in the organising logics and iconography of normative racism.

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Personification and representation Politicians and agents of government are primary actors in the state of the nation. Their actions during the Bicentenary were a major focus of public representations of that moment. In Figures 2 and 3, icons of primordiality (landscape, loincloth, and so on) are used to comment on the issue of guilt, which was a persistent theme of bicentennial discourses. Cartoons dealing with the notion of guilt utilise icons of ‘traditional’ Aboriginality. Guilt is related to genuine injustice which is consigned to the politically distant, marginal geography of the Australian interior as well as the no-man’s-land of the past or the original colonial moment. Guilt and empathy belong in the realm of the primordial and the remote. Appropriate guilt stems from inappropriate or immoral action towards an Aboriginality which is distant, helpless and passive. Resentment is generated by implicit or direct demands on non-Aboriginal people for the same guilt-response from an Aboriginality that is apparently aggressive, active and non-desert-dwelling. Guilt is the righteous due of the noble savage as an exchange good for the intervention of history and civil society.16 These cartoons contain the tacit suggestion that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are not ‘Australian’. This commonplace suggestion can be found in a number of academic discourses on Australian national identity (see Turner 1990). Gibson’s (1992, 69) work on the semiotics of landscape in the construction of Australian national identity positions the arrival of ‘civil society’ or British colonisation as the beginning of Australianness, of which crisis in the ‘alien’ Australian landscape is apparently a feature. The exclusion of Aboriginal people from the category of ‘Australian’ may be in part due to Aboriginal prior-ity and the semiotics of ‘the noble savage’ since, essentially speaking, Australianness is about civil Australianness. The cartoons also introduced and positioned the figure of Gerry Hand who was then the federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs. Gerry Hand, and the icons of civil society and ‘modernity’ (the ministerial mode of transport and the Aboriginal landrights flag), are out of place in the ‘Aboriginal’ terrain of a pre-civil landscape, of an undesignated desert. The schism between the world of

Rousseau’s Knot

Figure 2 Cartoon by Alan Moir, Sydney Morning Herald, 5 January 1988

Figure 3 Cartoon by Bill Mitchell, Australian, 5 January 1988

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the politician and the world of Aboriginal people is shown as a geopolitical disjuncture marked by aridity, heat and likely discomfort. Gerry Hand suffered copiously at the pen of cartoonists at the time. His suffering is an excellent example of the politics of ambiguity. As a minister for Aboriginal affairs, he mediated relations between the state and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In this capacity, he was continually depicted playing dress-ups. His apparent fancy for cultural cross-dressing acknowledges the difficulties and dubious status of anyone in a mediatory position, as well as the apparent lack of clear allegiance or motive of anyone who displays either guilt or empathy. Hand’s official position lacks integrity in as much as it lacks clarity or categorical closure, however much it is also institutionally necessary. Hand’s lack of cultural or categorical closure operated in the same way as thebinary categorisation of Aboriginality. All things contain within them the potential of their opposite. Yet there is some tension over the appropriate intimacy of this relationship and its acknowledgment. Tension over ambiguity is manifested in a variety of ways but it is the product of the binary logics of Australian normative racism. As Gerry Hand’s purported sense of personal guilt was made preposterous, so is any sense of personal responsibility for, let alone direct participation in, race relations held by viewers invited to fit themselves into his represented position.17 The state mediates relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in Australia, and partly by being the metaphorical non-Aboriginal archetypal Australian citizen. Any action by Hand that displayed incompetence or ill-judgement could be metaphorically extended to other Australians who may have been categorised as having the same interests and attitudes towards Aboriginal people and race relations. Interest groups and the politics of association The general stereotype of an individual, and all that they are taken to represent, is added to the associated meanings of [an] issue. So that the constant association of people and issues comes to thematically define both ... (Edmunds and James 1992, 79)

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Representatives of government are not the only non-Aboriginal people with an interest in race relations. In Figures 4 and 5, nonAboriginal Australia is represented by non-government political interests who regard themselves as relevant to Aboriginal political affairs and as representative of the wider Australian public. In early 1988, the Australian Teachers Federation instructed its members not to participate in school bicentennial activities which did not ‘address the ‘‘Aboriginal perspective’’’ (Australian, 7 January 1988). This action partook of the infamous label ‘boycott’ (earlier extended to Gerry Hand’s preference for and tendency to follow his work calendar rather than a diary of bicentennial engagements) and was treated in the press with the same scepticism as Hand’s purported guilt. In Figure 4, the Teachers Federation was also linked to the discovery of legionella in the water supply of the Aboriginal community at Jigalong in Western Australia. Figure 5 referred to contemporary suggestions from members of the Returned Services League (RSL) that people claiming to be Aboriginal should be blood-tested to prove their Aboriginality so as to prevent inauthentic claimants (people without a suitable amount of Aboriginal blood) from abusing the welfare system. These cartoons comment on the intervention of putatively left- and right-wing actors in race relations. Note their gender and their dress; both are significantly out of place in the desert environments. Both are the agents for interaction. The left (Teachers Federation) is represented as tokenistic and patronising, and the right (RSL) as fascist and high-handed. The polar ends of the political spectrum are represented, at the least, as sorely misunderstanding the issues, if not as being utterly devoid of commonsense. In this landscape, Aboriginality is reactive whilst non-Aboriginality is represented as intrusively pro-active. Viewers are tacitly invited to reflect on how they relate their own political positions to these representations and to place them on a scale between weakkneed tokenism and hard-nosed fascism, while the entire political spectrum is imbued with possible stupidity. In 1988, the safest position on Aboriginal issues and race relations was not to have one at all. The interplay of various binary relationships constantly reiterates the complexity of issues surrounding the place of Aboriginal

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Figure 4 Cartoon by Bill Mitchell, Australian, 8 January 1988

Figure 5 Cartoon by Bill Mitchell, Australian, 12 September 1988

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people in Australia. Yet possibilities for the transformation of Aboriginal situations are constrained by understandings of Aboriginality and Aboriginal people afloat in public discourse. The absence of Aboriginalities outside the categories of ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’, as well as the satirical dismissal of personal responses and institutional political positions, contribute confusion, suspicion and hostility to this constraint. The situation is represented as dire. The distance for reconciliation to span (at least if it is initiated by non-Aboriginals) is great. Race relations are shown to be made of insurmountable obstacles. Non-Aboriginal people may well feel uncomfortable about the position of Aboriginal people in Australian society, but the representations of that position make confidence in any transformation impossible. Aboriginal agency In the preceding cartoons, primordiality shared its meanings with welfare dependency and state sponsorship. These things are characterised by a shared quality of passivity. Non-Aboriginal Australia is shown as active, but also as compromised in its actions. Reconciliation is ultimately represented as an awkward project if initiated by non-Aboriginal Australia. Cartoons representing Aboriginal agency suggest that reconciliation is not even on an Aboriginal agenda — an urban contemporary Aboriginal agenda — it is usurped by a bloody-minded and generalised opposition.18 Charles Perkins’ infamous position on immigration during the Bicentenary was commented on in a cartoon by Patrick Cook.19 It is one of the few cartoons appearing that year which indicates at all that Australia is populated by anyone not designatedly black or white. In the absence of designatedly white actors, all actors present display active dissent or assert difference. The way in which the cartoon represents the heterogeneity of non-Aboriginal Australia indicates that heterogeneity is a dangerous thing. Race relations are dangerous: Aboriginality represents the schism within and migration and multiculturalism represent the dilemma without. Figure 6 comments on Aboriginal reaction to the Coalition’s Australia — One Nation theme. In this cartoon, two protests compete at street level. Two competing political agendas meet in a generalised and apparently equal, informal opposition to an

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unspecified and unclear absent dominant. Aboriginality, or race relations, is always the agent of disruption within the non Aboriginal community. ‘Contemporary’ or ‘urban’ Aboriginality is represented as adding fuel to the fire of already heated issues. In the case of the Teachers Federation and the RSL, (traditional or remote) Aboriginality was merely a platform for established political agendas. In these last cartoons, Aboriginality is shown as provocateur, colonising the political terrain of other interest groups. Active Aboriginal self-representation is shown not only to operate at street level but to do so in a rather self-defeating manner. Cook’s cartoon showed Perkins as having over-simplified the immigration debate. His presence within debate complicated race relations discourse, embarrassed the government and compromised the integrity of the reconciliation project. As seen in earlier cartoons, rapprochement is directed towards passive and well-behaved (discreet) Aboriginality. Perkins is not passive; thus he makes rapprochement or reconciliation impossible. In Figure 6, having

Figure 6 Cartoon by Jeff (Geoff Hook), Sun News-Pictorial, 15 August 1988

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made an act of defiance, anonymous urban Aboriginality is shown to walk swiftly and wordlessly away, avoiding further communication or confrontation. Aboriginal guerrilla tactics are contrasted with those of Howard, who is depicted as peacefully exercising his democratic right to dissent/protest. Both cartoons suggest the contingent nature of contemporary Aboriginal resistance, that it can never quite be pro-active. It is never quite self-determinate. It is always contained. This contingency evokes the memory of failed or compromised resistances of the past and emphasises the central importance of non-Aboriginal Australians in the lives and psyches of Aboriginal Australians — at least, in the minds of those who choose to represent them. Active Aboriginal presence in public discourse is shown as negative. It is anti-social. Such representations of Aboriginality inauthenticate or de-legitimate Aboriginal resistance and disempower it by showing it to be contrary to certain notions of civil propriety. The cartoons recognise that the structures of well-behaved political opposition are not directly accessible to Aboriginal people. But representation of Aboriginality is such that doubts are set about Aboriginal capacities to behave well anyway.

Culture and Australian normative racism Entanglement I mentioned earlier that this chapter originates in the ordinary anthropological assumption that social life is circumscribed by culture. I suggested that all cultural artefacts are eventually entangled in the meanings, logics and existences of one another by historical process. Racism occurs all over the world. It occurs constantly but differently, as determined by different relations of culture, historical process and locality. All this is stating the obvious, and yet I think that it still bears saying again, as popular discourses on racism seem to be directed more at moral validity than useful inquiry. Shouting the injustice and immorality of racism does nothing to limit its existence or further understanding of it. Racism may be made up of unequal power relations, material relationships between people that involve suffering and benefit. It may be

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dangerous and ugly. But it is, sadly, not absurd. Anthropology can yield useful insights into the entanglement of racism with other cultural artefacts. The possibility of actually disentangling the cultural relations of normative racism, the possibility of an unracist world, is something for future discussion. Don Lindsay’s cartoon is an almost perfect rendering of ‘Rousseau’s Knot’: the organic tension between essentialism and ambiguity in binary logics, the relation between racism and democracy, the uses and abuses of ‘the noble savage’, and the stereotypes which define Aboriginality and the position of Aboriginal people in contemporary Australian culture and society. It neatly demonstrates the cultural entanglement of categories which characterises normative racism in Australia. The purposes which entanglement served in the various bicentennial discourses on nationhood, and the deliberate satires offered by the cartoons discussed above, go some way towards describing the Australian locality in which normative racism exists as well as illustrating its demeanour. Representation and democracy If the heritages or polysemy of various images or icons of Aboriginality are negated, then most of the cartoons presented here can be seen as effective critiques of Australian race relations. But if those multiplicities are examined, then the capacity of the satires to fully challenge or critique the status quo seems uncertain. Images of Aboriginality are actually constituted by the materials of normative racism. Stereotypes possess the rhetorical power to invoke past meanings and to create the shape of the present from them. In this way they constitute an urge towards the status quo. The inflexibility of stereotypes based on binary or categorical oppositions mediates their efficacy as devices for any kind of transformation. The iconic split of Aboriginality into predominantly opposed categories clouds Aboriginal initiatives or issues in a fog of debate about authenticity, and obscures from view (representation) the diversity of Aboriginal ways of being. The opposing stereotypes can be seen to repudiate each other and thus to throw doubt on the validity of the category

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altogether. Repudiation generates greater urges toward categorical closure. The RSL call for blood-testing is a case in point. The ascribed characteristics of each stereotype — whether those characteristics are passivity, welfare dependency, aggression or overt and particular relation with the state — are qualities which are negative-valued within the dominant culture. No other marginal group in Australia has such a public relationship with the state. This alone separates Aboriginal people from the rest of the population. The respective bicentennial discourses of the opposing parliamentary parties emphasised this relationship in 1988. Aboriginality was thus associated with longterm political oppositions and conflicts between those people involved with the management of the national interest. Aboriginality became a significator of institutionalised opposition fundamental to the bicameral system, the governing principle of the nation, and so was made structurally fundamental to Australian democracy. As in Rousseau’s original formulation, Aboriginality became a discursive device in a non-Aboriginal discourse between non-Aboriginal people about non-Aboriginal ways of being.20 Aboriginality was seen to bring out irrationalities in both the left and right, either guilt and paternalism or pomposity and myopia. The history of Aboriginal relations with the state was characterised as a potential catalyst for guilt — to which the left obligingly responded with guilt and the right belligerently responded with what amounted to a terse ‘Get over it’. Aboriginal self-representation or presence in public discourse through the National Year of Mourning encouraged the first response and dismissed the second. It invoked and challenged the concept of nationhood by rendering palpable the textured realities of democratic practices and the fraught peculiarities of binary opposition. Ambiguity, essentialism and resistance As Charles Perkins demonstrated, Aboriginal presence in public discourse during 1988 exploited discursive ambiguities even while ambiguity itself was shown to be the enemy of sensible race relations. The National Year of Mourning is an essentialising discourse. It marks out an emotional space which is categorically

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Aboriginal. By doing so, it specifies pain and loss as defining characteristics of Aboriginality. It implies psychological vulnerability. This implication affirms the authenticity of stereotypes of Aboriginality based on the notion of ‘the noble savage’, or Aboriginal ‘pre-civility’, by directing attention towards an overwhelming colonial heritage and acknowledging its capacity to constrain contemporary Aboriginal initiatives. It also alludes to the idea of an Aboriginal pathology suggested by Lindsay’s cartoon. There is an ironic ambiguity in the capacity of a theme which privileges passivity and insularity to focus a national mobilisation of Aboriginal networks in the organisation of a National Day of Mourning on 26 January as well as sustained media interest throughout the year.21 Irony, or apparent contradiction, is a commonplace of the representation process itself. This uncontroversial point merely underlines the significance of the politics of ambiguity in daily Australian life. Aboriginal resistance in all forms confronts all understandings of Aboriginality articulated and extant in the wider environment, at the very least, of Australian society. In the above cartoons, the then Minister for Aboriginal Affairs was shown in a way which authenticates a particular image of Aboriginality. This situation is predominantly due to the kinds of non-Aboriginal sense that the image makes. The complex and diverse history of ‘the noble savage’ is a part of the context for Aboriginal resistance or challenge to dominant discourses. Culture and justice for all ... Australian democracy is based on the notion of equality among individuals. The challenge to find equity for aggregates of individuals, designated groups of people, is barely addressed by philosophies and ideologies, such as those of liberal democracy, which posit the individual as the primary social unit. The concept of ‘race’ necessarily validates collective, aggregate, or corporate identity as a natural and absolutely fundamental category of social action and existence. Cultural logics maintaining social relations organised around the individual as the basic economic, political and social unit and identity can only encompass race relations in the most clumsy and

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unsatisfactory ways. In this context, the constraints and pains of normative racism also ironically include the impossibility of enculturations entangling individualism to apprehend the reality, authenticity and legitimacy of ‘organic’ collectivities or aggregate identity, especially when there is little space in the organisation of daily life for it.22 Tensions of normative racism arise here where people struggle to apprehend something which has no meaning or place in the organising principles of their culturally shaped existences, localities and/or realities. These cultural tensions are manifest in the above representations of democracy and Aboriginality. A sense of the entanglement of racism as a cultural artefact emerges, almost literally, from the background of public discourse when representations are examined as assumptions of communication. It then becomes evident that racism is reasonable, that normative racism is pervasive, because of the appearance of icons and logics of race in influential and foundational discourses such as those of democracy, and vice versa, and not because white folks are mean and evil.

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4

Rum, seduction and death: ‘Aboriginality’ and alcohol Marcia Langton

Of all the different constructs of ‘the Aborigine’, or ways of imagining the native in Australia, the most vocal is the ‘drunken Aborigine’. In cities and provincial towns, there are regular public debates about the ‘drunken Aborigines’. Having consolidated apartheid practices so that the most dark-skinned and traditional Aborigines are denied ready access to services except for emergency welfare services and public toilets, the city and shire councils, the local newspapers and the talkback radio programs regularly raise the alarm about standards of civilised living falling because there are Aboriginal people living in the streets, or in the Todd River in Alice Springs, or on the Esplanade in Cairns, or under the bridge in Mt Isa, or in the parks in Redfern. The Aboriginal organisations respond with the obvious solutions: they need land, houses, jobs, alcohol rehabilitation services, as well as fewer take-away alcohol outlets in the town. 77

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The local motivations for starting these debates about the dangers stemming from ‘drunken Aborigines’ are knee-jerk economic and political responses which might be characterised as jigaboo voodoo: shire council members engage in the rhetoric to increase their chances of being reelected (boong-bashing is a good campaign standby ... ). The local main-street merchants try to grab the attention of the state government to get an increase in police numbers in the town to prevent their shop windows from being repeatedly smashed by vandals, who are, as the police attest, in the majority youths and not those Aboriginal people who are in the firing line of the debate. The right wing or ultra-conservatives try to gain enough public support to run all the homeless Aborigines out of town. Not content with the appeal for more police, one of their recent savage strategies was to ask for police dogs to be used on Aborigines. Kevin Byrne, Mayor of Cairns, proposed this in January 1993, only two years after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody tabled its reports in the Commonwealth Parliament. In Alice Springs, in 1989, an alderman of the Alice Springs City Council proposed that dogs be used on Aborigines soon after the Royal Commission had set up an office in the town (see the Centralian Advocate, 1989–90, and the Cairns Post, December, January and February 1993). In the last five years, in the tourist-economy towns, such as Alice Springs and Cairns, the local councils have confined their racist media campaigns to the hot, wet season from November to February. One would guess that the motive for the timing of the antiAboriginal campaigns has something to do with the fact that the business communities involved in the tourism industry had been trying to put in place some measures for removing Aboriginal people from towns before the start of the tourist season from March to October. Rather like the early colonists recruiting Aboriginal labour, who imagined that there must have been thousands more Aborigines out in the bush ready to follow the few who came into the stations, the business communities in the towns know so very little about what has happened to Aboriginal people outside the towns, and what they do know is largely ugly colonial mythology. They imagine that they can ‘send these Aborigines back to where they came from’, ignoring the fact that they have been dispossessed

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of their land and that their colleagues in the local cattlemen’s association are trying to remove them from the rural regions, from the land, the reserves and the smaller towns. I propose here that there are some familiar motivations for those who prefer to imagine ‘the Aborigine’ as a drunken buffoon. For those who observe the conduct of affairs by rural shire councils and business communities, the purposes are clear cut. But how is it that one image, that of the ‘drunken Aborigine’, has held such a widespread ideological sway over such a long period of time? And why does it hold such sway when the real problems associated with misuse of alcohol in many Aboriginal communities are amenable to solution, when the rate of alcohol misuse in the Aboriginal community is actually less than in the general population, when the focus of these campaigns is handfuls of binge-drinkers in the provincial towns, whose plight deserves something better than vicious racist attacks? The image of the ‘drunken Aborigine’ is a colonial construction, predating the ready availability of alcohol to Aboriginal people. From the first settlement and throughout the frontier period, alcohol was used to engage Aboriginal people in discourse, to attract them into settlements, in barter for sexual favours from Aboriginal women, as payment for Aboriginal labour and to incite Aboriginal people to fight as street entertainment. Later, as the Aboriginal population was perceived to be a menace to further land dispossession, protectionist policies included a total ban on the sale of alcohol to Aboriginal people, as well as of opium in some regions, such as Queensland and the Northern Territory. Despite its illegality, and despite the appointment of protectors (often the police) throughout Australia, frontier practices involving alcohol as the agent of seduction continued largely unchecked. The assimilationist era from the later 1930s to the earlier 1970s involved another political use of alcohol. Exemption certificates entitled a few to have access to alcohol under certain strict conditions: that they not associate with their Aboriginal kinfolk, and that they dress, work and live according to the expectations of European society. Those exempted were allowed to drink so long as they did not do so with family or friends. Thus, the consequence of exempting people from repressive laws also, in effect, exempted them from

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being Aboriginal. Should they continue with normal sociality, criminalisation would follow.

Taming the native Firstly, a major historical source of this key racist construct was the colonial necessity of transforming the dangerous native into the pathetic mendicant ‘Abo’. This is a similar exercise to that described by Anderson in examining the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion — the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry. (1991, 164; emphasis added)

Having crossed the seas without falling off the edge of the earth, the European imperialists imagined the new lands, peoples, flora and fauna as the primitive precursors of their own divinely ordered state of civilisation. The divine order required the conquest of the wild, the slaying of the dragon. The European grammar of conquest includes, as a powerful syntactic device, extinction — or at least depletion — of unicorns, dragons, and other species which endanger the order of the settled, garrisoned human community of the European imagination. It was inevitable that the colonists would find naturism and animism somewhere in the imperial domain, because naturism and animism are a priori concepts in the Western cultural construction of Nature, like the fabled unicorns and dragons, memories of an age before monotheism, the Holy Church, feudal agriculture and the dynastic realm. The analysis and imaging of the primitive as natural was the final conquest. Try as they might, the full force of this mental and psychic conquest eludes the European intelligentsia because their pursuit of understanding of themselves as human is privileged in this enquiry. Take, for example, Torgovnick’s defining of the primitive: To study the primitive is thus to enter an exotic world which is also a familiar world. That world is structured by sets of images and ideas that have slipped from their original

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metaphoric status to control perceptions of primitives — images and ideas that I call tropes. Primitives are like children, the tropes say. Primitives are our untamed selves, our id forces — libidinous, irrational, violent, dangerous. Primitives are mystics, in tune with nature, part of its harmonies. Primitives are free. Primitives exist at the ‘lowest cultural levels’; we occupy the ‘highest’, in the metaphors of stratification and hierarchy commonly used by Malinowski and others like him. The ensemble of these tropes — however miscellaneous and contradictory — forms the basic grammar and vocabulary of what I call primitivist discourse, a discourse fundamental to the Western sense of self and Other ... The real secret of the primitive in this century has often been the same secret as always: the primitive can be — has been, will be (?) — whatever Euro-Americans want it to be. It tells us what we want it to tell us. (1990, 8–9; emphasis added)

The structuring of the Western self around the notion of the ‘primitive’ Other can also tell us a great deal about the Western cultural construction of ‘Nature’ as the model of beingness. Torgovnick’s reading of Lévi-Strauss after the critique by Derrida alerts us to the possibility that, somewhere along the way, the Western intelligentsia, having given up on defining the primitive, has also given up on the concept of ‘Nature’: There is no pure state of nature, Lévi-Strauss says; all men have language, and language implies culture. There are more or less rudimentary cultures, but always cultures. For LéviStrauss as for Derrida, the binary opposition of nature and culture is a dead letter; all cultures construct natures. He thus cannot find a ‘natural’ society, an authentic primitive. When he thinks he has found it, among the Nambikwara, he loses sight of the group for the individuals. When he thinks again that he has found it, among the Mundi, he is exhausted and cannot speak their language, so he cannot be sure he has found it at all. When he thinks again he has found it, among the Tupi-Kawahib, he needs to persuade the group (tribe is too large a word) to please stay with him for a week or two before joining civilization (they were on their way to a white settlement when he met them). The structure deliberately signals the failure of the actual quest, though validating the

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search via memory. The message is both clear and obscure. The primitive, like some grail, recedes before the observer. It may not exist and probably does not — but it is essential to act as though it does. (1990, 221–22)

Rousseau also stated that the primitive has probably never existed, but, he wrote, ‘it is nevertheless essential to form a correct notion [of it] in order rightly to judge our present state’ (as cited in Torgovnick 1990, 222). The concerns of Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss were to discover the principles of forms of social organisation to allow the construction of a new form. Yet, as Lévi-Strauss understood, every effort to understand destroys the object studied in favour of another object of a different nature; this second object requires from us a new effort which destroys it in favor of a third, and so on and so forth until we reach the one lasting presence, the point at which the distinction between meaning and the absence of meaning disappears; the same point from which we began ... The completed stages do not destroy the validity of those that went before; they confirm it. (as cited in Torgovnick 1990, 222)

Not only does this give us some clues as to why some good Australian suburbanites have plaster casts of Aborigines in their gardens, along with the gnomes and swans made from car tyres, but as well it gives some insight into the construction of the ‘drunken Abo‘ icon.

The presumption of innocence There was, and remains, the further necessity for the colonial mentality to create an ideology which allows its participants to presume innocence in the colonial process. ‘The drunken Aborigine’ functions as a convenient shorthand for the eugenecist theory applied to Aboriginal administration. Elkin (1932) wrote in terms of a series of steps in a ‘breeding’ process sufficiently simple for anyone who has bred cattle to understand. The eugenicists’ theory allowed Elkin to imagine an Australia in which no ‘full-bloods’ survived because they observed the ‘miscegenation’ on the last frontiers and projected its

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effects into the future. It is not a large step, although an entirely illogical one, from the assumptions about miscegenation, such as that made by Elkin, to the proposition that the race is being bred out. The iconoclastic image of Aboriginal men and women as ‘drunks’ serves a convenient purpose in the ideology of white Australia. Today it remains the background and popular explanation for the extraordinary arrest rates of Aboriginal people, for the continuing removal of Aboriginal children and the continuing exclusion of Aboriginal people from employment, education, health services, rental accommodation, and a range of other services. The virility of the myth of the ‘drunken Aborigine’ is in its appeal to racist and eugenicist theory, elements of which still remain in popular discourse. The once respectable theory that: ‘Aborigines ‘‘have a genetic trait’’ which makes them susceptible to alcohol abuse‘ remains in popular belief. There are other genetically based theories. For instance, the medical profession suggests that the effect of drinking alcohol on all men is different from its effect on all women, and they suggest that men and women should therefore consume alcohol at different rates. This does not deny the racist premise of the theory about Aboriginal susceptibility, a popular version of which states that ‘You can’t give grog to the full-bloods’. Well, according to the medical advice cited above, you cannot give grog to any woman either, regardless of colour. And, indeed, it would be fair to suppose that you should not give alcohol to the white male youth of Blacktown because we all know they are also at risk of creating trouble for others. The notion of the ’drunken Aborigine’ is a myth of origin. The virile white man needs a can or two after a long hard day. The black man, however, cannot hold his drink. It was this ‘discovery’ — the presumed fact of white superiority in relation to consumption of alcohol — which was and is the archetypal ‘proof’ of superiority in popular white Australian culture. The proposition, being racist, is not amenable to information which contradicts it. A likely response from the racist proponent would be: ‘What are ya? A bloody boong lover.’ Logical and obvious refutations of the popular theory or presumption are simply not currency in this racist economy of falsehoods and ideology.

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This is because we are dealing with the language of metaphor. The term usually used is ‘stereotype’. When we understand that these stereotypes are metaphors or signs whose deeper social, political and economic meanings are disguised by the revulsion and other negative associations which they intend to convey about Aboriginal people, we begin to understand the grammar of these signs or metaphors. In Cultural Studies, the Afro-American feminist theorist, bell hooks, writes: Stereotypes, however inaccurate, are one form of representation. Like fictions, they are created to serve as substitutions, standing in for what is real. They are there not to tell it like it is but to invite and encourage pretense. They are a fantasy, a projection onto the Other that makes them less threatening. Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken — are not allowed. (1992, 341)

This is not to deny that alcohol, particularly the colonial economy of alcohol, constitutes a grave social threat to Aboriginal people and to their societies. However, the colonial constructs around the notion of the ‘drunken Aborigine’, far from alerting one to these very real problems, glosses over the economic facts of the distribution of alcohol. The icon also deprives the set of problems involved in the misuse of alcohol by Aboriginal people of the contradictions, ambiguities and subtleties to do with the social use of alcohol in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal societies. The ‘drunken Abo’ does not require that the economic and political factors which lead to and perpetuate the misuse of alcohol be understood or that any the oretical approach which might include such questions as: ‘Who benefits from the distribution of alcohol to Aboriginal people? Who profits?’ be developed. Such questions are quite simply unnecessary in the discourse of racial superiority. With the power of mythology, this icon has also deceived Aboriginal people, and the politics of alcohol are now being fought out on this battlefield of phantoms. Some Aboriginal people will not tolerate any discourse or representation of the impact of alcohol on

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Aboriginal people. Any discussion or portrayal perpetuates the stereotype of the ‘drunken blackfella’, they argue. Other Aboriginal people counter that this fear of the white stereotype hinders us in finding solutions to the extreme availability of alcohol and to its power to destroy, based as it is in the way it has been incorporated into Aboriginal society, into the exchange system, and even into notions of Aboriginal identity. If one refuses a drink, people ask, ‘What kind of blackfella are you?’ Maybe we should be asking instead, ‘What kind of blackfellas have we been made into?’ The story of Bennelong was the first reconstruction of an Aboriginal person as a ‘drunken Abo’, and from there the stereotype was developed. Very little about the metaphor itself has changed, and the reasons and causes which can be identified in colonial history also show little variation. The young anthropologist now wanted to understand what was then being called the ‘functional system’ of social life, how institutions help maintain each other, and contribute to the whole process of human society. We were beginning to speak about ‘social structure’, the system of enduring relations between persons and groups. Where a society was breaking down (as with most of the aborigines) we thought it our task to salvage pieces of information and from them try to work out the traditional social forms. Such were my interests. They help to explain why an interest in ‘living actuality’ scarcely extended to the actual life-conditions of the aborigines and why in referring to those conditions I did so in anything but a fire-brand’s words. But it will hardly do as a sufficient explanation. What was missing was the idea that a major development of aboriginal economic, social and political life from its broken down state was a thinkable possibility. How slowly this idea came to us. (Stanner 1968, 14)

The anthropological gaze on Aboriginal identity, whether as a study of ethnic identity or as a political phenomenon, has been informed by a number of theories, and at two extremes are theories which could be said to be concerned with ‘function’ and ‘dysfunction’. It would be more useful, I suggest, to reconsider these theoretical positions, not by looking yet again at Aboriginal people and the

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ethnographic evidence to support this or that view of identity, but to look at the observer’s attitudes towards Aborigines and their designs and purposes. The ‘drunken Aborigine’ as an icon of European contempt for Aboriginal people is an excellent starting point for examining the identity attributed to Aborigines and the inter-subjectivity of the European and Aboriginal identity constructions. Amongst the officers of the British penal colony at Port Jackson in 1788 were men who keenly observed Aboriginal society. They did so for practical purposes — politico-military, economic and social. One way they chose to observe Aboriginal people was to kidnap them. This kidnapping policy was an attempt to pacify Aboriginal people by informing a few captives of British language and customs by having them forcibly live amongst them in the colony and at the same time to ascertain from them the food and economic resources of the region. The economic reasons became paramount when, in April 1790, it was learned that the ship, Sirius, which was returning with supplies for the destitute colony had been wrecked on Norfolk Island. Another ship, the Supply, was despatched, but the food shortage had become a famine and, as well, a serious security problem should the Aboriginal people learn of the state of affairs. They tried to keep the famine a secret from an Aboriginal captive, Baneelon (more famous by the name of ‘Bennelong’): Our friend Baneelon, during this season of scarcity, was as well taken care of as our desperate circumstances would allow. We knew not how to keep him, and yet were unwilling to part with him. Had he penetrated our state, perhaps he might have given his countrymen such a description of our diminished numbers, and diminished strength, as would have emboldened them to become more troublesome. Every expedient was used to keep him in ignorance; his allowance was regularly received by the governor’s servant, like that of any other person; but the ration of a week was insufficient to have kept him for a day; the deficiency was supplied by fish, whenever it could be procured, and a little Indian corn, which had been reserved, was ground and appropriated to his use. In spite of all these aids, want of food has been known to make him furious and often melancholy. (Tench 1974, 167)

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These officers were the first British ethnologists, whatever their purposes and whatever their prejudices. They were also the first of the British to attempt to assimilate Aboriginal people, albeit by means of kidnap, a tactic not so different from the removal of children which followed in the late nineteenth century and continued until the 1970s. They were also the first of the British to create an ‘urban’ Aboriginal population: Baneelon was the first archetypal ‘urban Aborigine’. It would be not too far-fetched to suggest that alcohol was, from the very beginning of British settlement, a crucially important strategy in dealing with Aboriginal people. It must be assumed of the British that, in their predicament of having Bennelong living in their midst, alcohol was deliberately chosen as an effective way of keeping the truth of their famine from him, of keeping him too drunk to notice. But more importantly, alcohol was, consciously or unconsciously, used by the British as a device for seducing the Aboriginal people to engage economically, politically and socially with the colony. The British versions of alcoholic beverage were first introduced to an Aboriginal person in January 1789. ‘Arabanoo’, who had been kidnapped on Governor Phillip’s orders, would not drink it: He dined at a side-table at the governor’s; and ate heartily of fish and ducks, which he first cooled. Bread and salt meat he smelled at, but would not taste: all our liquors he treated in the same manner, and could drink nothing but water. (Tench 1974, 140)

He subsequently died of smallpox on 18 May and was buried in Governor Phillip’s garden. An old man and a young boy, also kidnapped, had died before him. In December 1789, assisted by Nanbaree and Abaroo, two child captives who had survived the smallpox, Lieutenant Bradley of the Sirius commanded the kidnapping of another two men. One of these latest captives, ‘Baneelon’ or ‘Bennelong’, accepted the offer of alcoholic beverages and enjoyed them. His friend, ‘Colbee’, escaped a week later. Tench wrote of ‘Bennelong’:

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88 Race Matters But Baneelon, though haughty, knew how to temporize. He quickly threw off all reserve; and pretended, nay, at particular moments, perhaps felt satisfaction in his new state. Unlike poor Arabanoo, he became at once fond of our viands, and would drink the strongest liquors, not simply without reluctance, but with eager marks of delight and enjoyment. He was the only native we ever knew who immediately shewed a fondness for spirits: Colbee would not at first touch them. Nor was the effect of wine or brandy upon him more perceptible than an equal quantity would have produced upon one of us, although fermented liquor was new to him. (1974, 159–60)

On 3 May 1790, Bennelong, too, escaped and went back to his own people, apparently none the wiser as to the conditions of famine in the colony. In an encounter later, when Phillip approached a large group dining on a beached whale at what is now known as Manly, he enticed Bennelong to resume the old friendship by offering wine: Baneelon’s love of wine has been mentioned; and the governor, to try whether it still subsisted [his relationship with Bennelong], uncorked a bottle, and poured out a glass of it, which the other drank off with his former marks of relish and good humour, giving for a toast, as he had been taught, ‘the King‘. (Tench 1974, 179)

It was during this encounter that a man standing with Baneelon’s group, whose name is reported as Wil-ee-ma-rin, of a tribe residing at Broken Bay, threw a spear at Phillip, impaling him by the right shoulder. After some negotiations, it appears that Baneelon’s group was anxious to disassociate themselves from the attack and sought to placate Phillip and his officers. Officers returning stolen goods to Baneelon’s group, in the hope that they might retrieve the governor’s dagger (which Phillip had thrown down earlier in an attempt to defuse the situation), reported: Baneelon inquired, with solicitude, about the state of the governor’s wound; but he made no offer of restoring the dirk; and when he was asked for it, he pretended to know nothing of it, changing the conversation with great art, and asking for wine, which was given to him. At parting, we pressed him to

Rum, seduction and death appoint a day on which he should come to Sydney, assuring him that he would be well received, and kindly treated. Doubtful, however, of being permitted to return, he evaded our request, and declared that the governor must first come and see him, which we promised should be done. (Tench 1974, 186–87)

Tench recounts that, on 8 October, Bennelong and a group of Aborigines visited the settlement, as arranged. This was the first voluntary visit and ‘blankets and cloathing [sic] were given them, and each had a bellyfull of fish’, but it was Bennelong who ‘sat down to dinner with Governor Phillip, and drank his wine and coffee as usual’ (cited in Willey 1979, 117). Phillip’s strategy of kidnapping as a means of alleviating the cost of violent conflict with the Aborigines paid off for a while. Tench wrote: ‘From this time our intercourse with the natives, though partially interrupted was never broken off’ (cited in Willey 1979, 117–18). Hunter said: The next visit from these men brought the same favour from their wives and families, whose example was followed by many others; so that every gentleman’s house was now become a resting or sleeping place for some of them every night; whenever they were pressed for hunger, they had immediate recourse to our quarters, where they generally got their bellies filled. (cited in Willey 1979, 118)

And then, after the Supply arrived and conditions improved in the colony, the colonists built him a house at a location of his own choosing: the site of the Opera House today, Bennelong’s Point. In November 1790, Tench wrote: Baneelon, from being accustomed to our manners, and understanding a little English, was the person through whom we wished to prosecute inquiry: but he had lately become a man of so much dignity and consequence, that it was not always easy to obtain his company. Clothes had been given to him at various times; but he did not always condescend to wear them: one day he would appear in them; and the next day he was to be seen carrying them in a net, slung around his neck. Farther to please him, a brick house, of 12 feet square, was

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It was from these initial encounters, especially those in respect of the role of alcohol, that the historical view of Aborigines as indigent drunks developed. Alcohol usually had a devastating effect on those who drank it, and rendered them susceptible to racist caricature. But the significant factor ignored in studies of the representation of Aborigines is the role of the British men who deliberately provided the alcohol to trick and debilitate those Aborigines who had survived the smallpox and the destitution into which they were forced. Baneelon, for his part, on occasions sought from the colonists their alliance with him against his traditional enemies, the ‘Camaraigals’: One of the major aims of Bennelong’s own policy toward the whites was to engage them as allies in destroying the power of his enemies, the much-feared Camaraigals. A month after his approach to the sergeant he told Phillip the Camaraigals had murdered a kinsman and he urged the Governor to have the soldiers kill them. (Willey 1979, 121)

But Baneelon’s alliances shifted frequently. Perhaps this can be seen in retrospect as desperate calculations to save their world in what became month by month an increasingly hopeless situation. The killing in December 1790 by Pemelwi (Pemelwuy) of M’Entire, the governor’s gamekeeper, changed the relationship of the colonists with the Aborigines forever. Phillip demanded vengeance, at least ten Aboriginal dead at first, then six, after Tench’s suggestions. Ruthless violence took the place of enticements with gifts of alcohol, food and axes. Willey remarks on the subsequent view of Aborigines:

Rum, seduction and death Soon they were being regarded pictorially almost everywhere as objects of cruel fun, clad in European rags boozing and fighting, divested of the last traces of that nobility with which the eighteenth century had once clothed them. (1979, 132)

Bennelong went to Norfolk Island and London and returned just under three years later. He returned a changed man, with the manners of an Englishman, and was no longer accepted by his own people — his wife had left him for a younger man and Bennelong could find no other wife. He became increasingly intoxicated and violent, and the colonists declared his anger at his predicament, and his attacks on them, ingratitude. He returned to his own people and ways and died unmarried. His obituary in 1813 in the Sydney Gazette evokes the theme of an unredeemable savagery and primitivism: The principal officers of the Government had for many years endeavoured, by the kindest of usage, to wean him from his original habits and draw him into a relish for civilized life; but every effort was in vain exerted and for the last few years he has been but little noticed. His propensity to drunkenness was inordinate; and when in that state he was insolent, menacing and overbearing. In fact, he was a thorough savage, not to be warped from the form and character that nature gave him by all the efforts that mankind could use. (cited in Willey 1979, 144–45)

Bennelong was buried near a brewery at Kissing Point owned by James Squire, of whom it is reported that he was ‘interested in the Aborigines and a number of natives were buried on his property’ (Jervis, as cited in Willey 1979, 146). Willey describes the behaviour to which Aborigines resorted to obtain alcohol: ‘They would also hire themselves to the tavern proprietors to cleanout the brandy and rum casks. The first wash contained a flavour of spirits and this liquid, called “bull”, was given to the Aborigines as payment’ (1979, 212). Willey quotes LE Threlkeld, the missionary, who pointed out that their addiction to liquor was in no way out of character with the general mores of the settlement:

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Rum, as the strongest inducement that could be offered to the aborigines [to make them work (Willey)] used to be the temptation held out as the most likely to prevail. It must however be remembered that ... this was a Rum-colony ... Rum built our hospitals, Rum built our palaces, Rum erected churches, and Rum was the circulating medium, which even paid preachers to teach men ‘to live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present evil world’. It was indeed a Rum-national-education to reform criminals by Rum and stripes. The Aborigines became adept scholars ... Drunkenness seemed to be considered by (them) as a sort of accomplishment, as the following instance will illustrate: Some brine was being boiled one day out of doors, in a large iron pot, and as usual a number of natives were around, amongst whom was one from the mountains, a black that we had never before seen. Looking very earnestly into the pot, he said ... — ‘Massa, that Rum (?)’ — ‘Taste and see,’ was the reply and taking up a tin pannikin full of boiling hot brine, the aborigine ... tasted it, kept drinking it until he had drunk the whole! The blacks laughed at his simplicity, and enjoyed the ignorance of their friend from the mountains. Presently he began to say, smacking his lips: ’Rum merry good, me mer(r)y drunk,’ and cut all manner of capers, on being asked how he liked it, ‘Oh! merry good merry good, make me merry drunk, me drunk like a gemmem’ (gentleman), and danced about to the great amusement of his countrymen. It was a fact that he did not know what rum was, but had only heard of its wonderful effects upon those who drank it. (1979, 212)

This might be the first reported evidence of what experts now diagnose as ‘drunken deportment’. The dispossession had left the Aborigines of the five groups of the Sydney region ‘begging their bread, and begging for clothing and rum’, as the Reverend William Yate explained in his evidence to the House of Commons Select Committee in 1835 (Willey 1979, 213). Mahroot, the boatswain, told the NSW Legislative Council’s Select Committee on Aborigines in 1845 that he had never had any children. Few children had been born to the women of Botany Bay since

Rum, seduction and death

they had begun to drink alcohol and to trade their sexual favours with white men for it. Drinking alcohol ‘was the only thing that destroyed them’, he said.

Conclusion The significance of this tale of rum, seduction and death in geopolitical terms is the pattern of colonisation and the situating of Aboriginal men and women as mendicants and whores during the frontier days. Aboriginal people were ‘tamed’ by being attracted into ration depots with the lure of tea, tobacco, jam and flour, the depots and towns serving as administrative centres, labour centres and military bases. The narrative constructed by the white man out of these events presents the Aborigine as living a fantasy of wanting to become like the white man, but unable to do so. He is totally removed from the real world, ignorant of the way it works. The image of drunkenness is one of the ways in which white society projects inauthenticity onto the ‘half-civilised’ native. While white society needs its success stories about a few Aborigines, it also needs its stories of tragic failure. The drunken Aborigine provides this narrative, presenting a modern image of uncontained and undisciplined violence which cannot be made to accept and adopt the genteel constraints of civilisation. I contend that it is the invention of the ‘drunken Aborigine’, and other metaphors or social icons to do with how whites need to imagine Aborigines, that enables the sociological or anthropological notions about degeneration, or more recently deprivation and social pathology, to remain intact. Such notions are impressionistic and insubstantial, like the notion of ‘the masses’ which Baudrillard (1983) dissected and revealed as a convenient political and sociological convention. An iconic image can be created in words or pictures, or imagined onto a person or group. ‘God’ or ‘the masses’ are icons onto which all kinds of social dissatisfactions and fears are projected. Individuals might be drunk or depressed. Many individuals in a group might show these characteristics. But can a culture be described in this way? This is precisely how the metaphor which I have discussed here is constituted: an iconic image, as powerful as that of the Virgin Mary for Catholics, can hold sway for as long as it

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is able to say what people want it to say. Why have only a few anthropologists (for example, Brady 1988; Sackett 1988; Edmunds 1990; Stotz 1990) grappled with alcohol use and misuse and the social ramifications? Perhaps it is because some anthropologists and other social scientists might not want to consider the role of the Western imagination, and their own imaginings, in some of their notions about contemporary Aboriginal society as dysfunctional.

II Cultural Borderlands

In a hierarchically categorised social domain, whether the rhetoric of differentiation is predominantly race, religion, culture or class, many individuals, families and whole communities can occupy positions on the cultural borderlands, which sometimes appear as a no-man’sland, unnamed and unrecognised, and sometimes as a conflictridden cultural frontier. These uncomfortable spaces are policed in terms of the binarisms which were discussed above. Marilyn Wood describes how painful conditions were for Jimmy Governor on the cultural frontier between black and white domains in New South Wales at the turn of the century. She develops a compelling account of the very specific ways in which this young man could and could not enter into social relations with Europeans, and illuminates the cruel social and psycho dynamics of the conditions experienced by so many New South Wales Aborigines. Debbie Rose’s powerful example of today’s racial frontier concerns the way tourists who join Max’s Tour are drawn into the violence of racism and sexism. The account is at once horrifying and ludicrous. Merridy Malin describes another borderland, one within the familiar classroom, and one which is also blindly destructive of a cultural domain it fails to recognise.

chapter

5

The ‘Breelong Blacks’ Marilyn Wood

According to the official inquest, held on the day of his death, the prisoner had been executed by hanging ‘according to law’. It was on 18 January 1901 that Jimmy Governor was executed in Darlinghurst gaol. In November of the year before, he had been convicted for his part in the Breelong massacre, an event which had shocked the northwestern district of New South Wales with its ferocity. He and his accomplice, Jacky Underwood, armed with tomahawks and a nulla-nulla, had bashed and hacked to death three children from the Mawbey family aged between 11 and 16 years of age, as well as the lodger, Miss Katz. Mrs Mawbey died from her injuries within days of the attack whilst her niece, Elsie Clarke, who was also badly injured, managed to survive. Jacky Underwood had been sentenced to death at Dubbo court in October of the same year and died, just like Jimmy, by hanging at Dubbo, four days before Jimmy died in Sydney (Anon, nd;1 Mudford 1988, 214, 216). Death certificates made public records out of the facts of Jimmy Governor’s and Jacky 97

98 Race Matters Underwood’s executions,2 as they did the information that Jimmy had accepted the salvation offered by a Christian God during his imprisonment and so was laid to rest at the Church of England cemetery at Rookwood in the presence of an Anglican clergyman. Jacky was buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Dubbo with no Christian ceremonial, the simplicity of his faith in Christ probably demonstrated by his last words, which were that he would ‘be in heaven for dinner’ (Anon, nd). The massacre had taken place on a July winter’s night and in a further two attacks between then and Jimmy’s capture two other women, one of them pregnant, her child and two elderly men were also brutally murdered. A third woman was badly injured. Jacky had played no part in those later killings. Partially lame as the result of a fall from a horse, he was abandoned within days by Jimmy and his brother, Joe, who were both fit and expert bushmen. Jacky was captured four days after the Mawbey murders when he sought food at a Dunedoo homestead. Joe, who had been working at the Mawbey property with Jacky and his brother and had joined them in flight on the night of the massacre, was implicated in these later killings. The rest of the camp which fled on that night comprised Jimmy’s white wife, Ethel, their infant son, Sidney, and two other Aborigines, Jacky Porter and a young lad named Peter. These others gave themselves up once they were clear of Breelong and, after their early arrest, Ethel Governor, Jacky Porter and the boy were allowed to go free.3 Unlike Jimmy and Jacky Underwood, however, Joe Governor was never captured but shot dead by a grazier thirty miles outside Singleton in late October, 1900 (Mudford 1988, 215–16; Cameron and Job 1993, 89–97). By that time both Joe and Jimmy Governor had been declared outlaws, the effect of this being that the proclamation invoked under the Felon’s Apprehension Act ‘authorised anyone to kill them without being answerable for the consequences, and without the necessity of calling on the offenders to surrender’ (Sheppard 1981, 78). Before this proclamation was put into effect, however, the legal nicety of whether they could, in view of their Aboriginal status, be outlawed needed to be debated. It was decided that, whilst they were not citizens, they were British subjects. It was believed that to be a British subject was to be

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

entitled to a fair trial and right of defence if they were accused of breaking the law. That right, almost the only legal right they [as Aborigines] possessed, would be taken away from them if they were proclaimed as outlaws. (Sheppard 1981, 78–79)

No death certificate records the biographical details of Joe’s life but public ‘proof’ of his life and death is evidenced instead by a photograph of his body laid out in the Singleton mortuary, and a monument over his grave which was placed outside of the Church of England cemetery at Whittengham, three kilometres from Singleton. The macabre photograph of Joe’s corpse hangs, like a trophy, in the saloon bar of Singleton’s Caledonian hotel (Mudford 1988, 216; Cameron and Job 1993, 96). However, the purpose of this chapter is not to sensationalise the actions of the ‘Breelong Blacks’, as they came to be known, nor to examine the form of psychopathology which may lead an individual to become a mass murderer. Instead I intend to use the case of Jimmy Governor to illustrate certain processes characteristic of late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonialism which, in an Australian context, had the potential to destabilise the personal and public identities of the colonial subject. I will draw on the work of Ashis Nandy (1983) which examines the responses made by Indian colonial subjects to the stresses of cultural domination and which point to the variety and the complexity of the interplay between personality responses to longstanding situations of oppression and the values of the dominant culture. Nandy explores the ways in which these responses are always in some way predicated upon the subject’s reading of the characteristics both endorsed and repressed within the dominant culture itself. Thus, the actions of Jimmy Governor could be interpreted, first, as an attempt to identify with the dominant white culture by repressing certain aspects of his Aboriginality, and then as an attempt to repress his identification with white society by acting out the role of the quintessential ‘black savage’. However, at both stages in his relationship with white society, his actions appear as reactions to the hegemony of the dominant culture which entrapped him within its logic, the underlying racism of colonial ideology refusing to recognise his attempts at voluntary assimilation as anything more

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100 Race Matters than a mimicry of white values4 — a judgment vindicated in popular opinion by its partial nature and his subsequent abandonment of civilised behaviour in the savagery of his murderous rampage and his escape into the bush. Therefore, in a broad sense, the extremity of Jimmy Governor’s reactions to the social constraints within which he was positioned on a local level act out to their logical conclusion the destructive potential that racial stereotyping contains for a society which pays lip service to liberal beliefs of formal equality when it in fact employs race as the basis for discriminatory practices against a minority group. The work of Fanon (1965) will be used to argue that, in the face of asymmetrical relations of power upon which the categories of coloniser and colonised are premised, Jimmy Governor’s actions should be read not so much as an isolated and meaningless outbreak of violence, but as an intelligible reaction to perceived racial and cultural discrimination and the continuous experience of oppression within a colonial context as lived through his personal circumstances. This chapter explores, therefore, the particular historical situation of New South Wales Aborigines which, at the time of the massacres, can be seen as constituted by systems of interconnecting power relations based on race, gender and class differentiations. At the time of Federation, the combined effect of these asymmetrical relations was to constitute Aborigines as subordinate, in terms of legal and social status, to the ‘white’5 population of New South Wales. By drawing on the work of Foucault (1978), I will explore the situation of Jimmy Governor in terms of his positioning at the interface of sovereign and bio-power relations, concepts employed by Foucault to denote the shift from a sovereign rule secured through the actual and symbolic deployment of the sword of war and law to the government of the populace and individuals through techniques designed to target and regulate the living resources of the population, in particular their productive and reproductive potential (Foucault 1978, 135–45). Foucault’s later analyses of the nature of state power provide a framework which allows us to see Jimmy Governor as a colonial subject constituted at the very interface of macro forms of a sovereign appropriation of territory and the imposition of a hegemonic British legal system, and micro forms of

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

governmental administration and bureaucratisation (Foucault 1982; 1991).6 According to Turner (1986), the process of civil registration can be regarded as an exemplary procedure by which governmental processes were instrumental in the construction of public identities, providing the biographical detail which was accorded state and social recognition as the legitimate basis for self identification and subsequent positioning within the contemporary gender, racial and socioeconomic ordering of society. However, despite the formal equality which underpinned registration procedures, the interplay between the saliency of race on a local level and the increasingly active intervention of the state in the ‘management’ of Aboriginal lives meant that the introduction of this bureaucratic process led to differential forms of individuation within the putatively white and Aboriginal populations. Turning to the work of Morris (1989), who has investigated the historical construction of relations between Aboriginal peoples and white settlers in the Macleay Valley district of New South Wales, I argue that a process of cultural encapsulation had occurred in the northwestern district of New South Wales which resulted in the encompassment of traditional Aboriginal culture and customary law. Like Morris I also argue that this did not simply lead to the collapse of Aboriginal culture in the face of white settlement, but that operating within the context of this encompassment was the process of involution whereby small communities managed to sustain a tenacious identification with their Aboriginal heritage. This had the latent potential to develop into a reconstituted identification with Aboriginality as a social and political force through a series of oppositional acts and interpretations to white hegemonic norms (Morris 1989, 54–73, 200–29). This perspective on the local race relations between whites and Aboriginal peoples at the time of the Breelong massacres runs counter to the interpretation of events put forward by Reynolds (1979; 1982). Despite his acknowledgement that both Jimmy and Ethel suffered from racist taunts as a result of their exceptional marriage, Reynolds argues that the actions of Jimmy Governor were caused by class-based frustration rather than anger over any racial oppression he may have suffered (1979, 20). By taking this position,

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Reynolds has failed to adequately address the saliency of racial and cultural issues immanent to colonial Aboriginal experiences of both systemic and localised discrimination. Furthermore, he has diminished the issue of gender which the work of Huggins and Blake (1992) has shown to be essential to an understanding of the personalised nature of the pressures under which Jimmy Governor finally rebelled in his resort to violence. Following Huggins and Blake (1992) and drawing on Nandy (1983), I argue that the encompassment of black women by white men was outwardly condemned, yet it was nevertheless constituted as the norm within colonial gender and race relations in so far as it mirrored the wider imperial encompassment of Aboriginality by European capitalist society. Two aspects of Jimmy Governor’s actions constituted a challenge to the colonial order. First, the marriage of Jimmy Governor to a white woman marked an inversion of colonial race and gender relations which Nandy’s work has shown to be strongly dependent on the identification of the dominant race with a hyper-masculinity and the consequential feminisation of the subordinate colonised subject so that the encompassment of women by men was seen as analogous to the encompassment of the colonised by the coloniser (Nandy 1983, 37–38). Given the polarisation of gender characteristics and the dominant position accorded the man over his wife in Victorian society, the taking of a white wife by a black man represented a subversion of the colonial social order premised upon white male superiority. This situation was exacerbated by the challenge Governor’s attempted movement into the capitalist economy on equal terms with white men presented to contemporary stereotyping of Aboriginals as drunken, lazy simpletons incapable of managing their own financial affairs or working at a standard comparable to white men. The reported reaction of Ethel’s family to her marriage and the subsequent taunts she endured from the Mawbey household therefore reflected public opinion as to the outrageous nature of the Governors’ marriage.7 Likewise, the attempts to cheat Jimmy of his earnings were not isolated episodes but symptomatic of a belief that Aboriginal workers could be legitimately exploited as cheap labour, an attitude which became entrenched in New South Wales industrial law. Paradoxically, therefore, whilst Jimmy Governor’s ‘reversion’ to savagery threatened the safety of white communities, it nevertheless

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

afforded the white population of New South Wales the opportunity, both in discourse and by tactics of geographical separation, to reinforce the positioning of Aboriginal peoples outside the boundaries of white society. This movement exemplified the construction of a state bifurcated along racial and cultural divisions. Whilst the horror of the massacres continues to shock the reader by the brutality with which members of the Mawbey household were destroyed, the work of Fanon (1965) enables one to move beyond the unique features of the crime to see within it a pattern that Fanon found to be common in the French Algerian colony in which he worked as a psychiatrist during the Algerian war of liberation (c 1954–58). In his neo-Marxist and psycho-analytic account of the exploitative nature of the colonial system of political and economic domination in French Algeria, Fanon describes the process by which feelings of anger, bitterness and violence were suppressed by generation after generation of indigenous peoples who were forced to witness the violation, brutalisation and degradation of their family members and friends. Eventually, however, as the legitimation for this massive and systemic injustice began to falter and the overt means with which to suppress the indigenous population became more problematic to employ, violent forms of retaliation which mirrored the violence that initially constituted the asymmetrical relations between coloniser and colonised began to be manifested as a wave of desire felt by individuals who wished to physically erase the existence of the dominator from the landscape of their homeland. Fanon’s description of such a moment is illuminating for the way in which it places the motivations of someone like Jimmy Governor within a context of colonial brutality and exploitation: The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for the destruction of native social forms and broken up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters. To wreck the colonial world is henceforward a mental picture of action which is very clear, very easy to understand and which may be assumed by each one of the

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individuals which constitute the colonized people. The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less than the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country. (Fanon 1965, 31)

By storming the Mawbey household armed with tomahawks and a nulla-nulla, Jimmy Governor and Jacky Underwood enacted the frenzy of individuals who had witnessed the white depredations on their native culture and its devaluation, yet at the same time who were denied entrance into the world inhabited by whites. Jimmy’s unsuccessful challenge of the Mawbey men over the unfairness of their financial dealings and the Mawbey women over the personal nature of their racial slurs appears to have convinced him that any apparent opportunities opened up to Aboriginal peoples through the colonial process were illusory, that an unbreachable enmity existed between the white social order embodied in the racist morality of the Mawbey women and Miss Katz and the Aboriginal world which was forever being consigned to the margins of white society. Therefore, resolution of this tension could arguably be relieved only through the destruction of the white moral guardians. Given that just such a murderous rage did erupt under the catalystic circumstance of the Governors’ relationship with the Mawbeys and was replayed with others who had offended Jimmy, the work of Fanon provides one possible explanation of how it was that what Jimmy Governor seems to have remembered best about his crimes were his grievances rather than the details of the actual murders. Hence, at his trial he recalled the events of the Breelong massacre in the following terms: I went up to the house. I said: ‘Did you tell my missus that any white woman who married a ... blackfellow ought to be shot? Did you ask my wife about our private business? Did you ask her what sort of nature did I have ... black or white?’ With that Mrs Mawbey and Miss Katz turned around and laughed at me with a sneering laugh, and before I got these words out of my mouth ... I struck Mrs Mawbey on the mouth with the nullah-nullah. Miss Katz said, ‘Pooh, you black rubbish, you want shooting for marrying a white woman’. With that I hit her with my hand on the jaw, and I knocked her down. Then I got out of temper and got hammering them, and lost control

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

of myself. I do not remember anything after that. (Sydney Morning Herald, 24 November 1900, quoted in Reynolds 1979, 19)

However, it should be recognised that there is an important difference between the circumstances of the ‘Breelong Blacks’ and that of the psychologically disturbed patients treated by Fanon in Algeria. Whilst both groups of indigenous peoples lived within a colonial state characterised by its bifurcated nature, from a Marxist perspective the form of colonialism established in New South Wales was better described as a system of internal colonisation, whereby the settlement of large numbers of European peoples enabled them to form a majority group within the population, thereby encapsulating the indigenous population (Wolpe 1975; Hartwig 1978). The extreme divisions found in French Algeria between the world inhabited by the white colonisers and that endured by the colonised native population were not so completely implemented between whites and Aboriginal peoples within New South Wales. The work of Reynolds (1987), Morris (1989) and others has demonstrated that what occurred instead was the hegemonic imposition of British sovereignty over the entire land and population, delegitimating a culture and cosmology as well as everyday practice, thereby encompassing indigenous rights to land and the practice of customary law. This form of colonialism entailed its own characteristic forms of oppression but they were different, more contradictory and less allencompassing than those described in Fanon’s analysis of a divided colonial world. Within New South Wales, British hegemonic sovereignty purported to offer some degree of formal equality to Aboriginal peoples within its framework. However, what in effect occurred was the positioning of Aboriginal peoples at the very interface of the imposition of this formally defined and institutionally structured British sovereign power with the localised governmental employment of pastoral and bio-power strategies designed to regulate and control the population.8 This combination of tactics operated to disadvantage and oppress Aboriginal peoples because, although the formal aims of such government policies and actions may have been to promote assimilation or to ‘protect’ a ‘dying’ race, their subtext

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was the erasure of Aboriginality either through assimilation into the white community or through banishment and death. The intentions of the various government initiatives to ‘erase’ the problem of Aboriginality were frustrated, however, by the saliency of colour and culture in the identification of Aboriginality as a special racial category both by whites and by Aboriginal people themselves. Hence, in Weberian terms, Aborigines, whether ‘half-caste’ like Jimmy Governor, or ‘full-blood’ like Jacky Underwood, were denied entry to the white capitalist world on equal terms with white men through the operation of status differentiations based on their outward appearance and cultural practices (Weber 1977). By examining the prejudicial treatment of Aboriginal people by the state in New South Wales, it is possible to gain a clearer insight into those processes by which any minority group may find themselves constituted in a position of subordination. The case of New South Wales Aborigines, and Australian Aborigines generally, is noteworthy because it provides an exception to the general movement by particularist groups in the nineteenth century towards full citizenship rights. The three elements of citizenship examined by Turner were those of civil, political and social rights.9 He defines civil rights as ‘the basis of individual freedom and include freedom of speech, the right to own property and the right of justice’ and says that these rights are associated primarily with the courts of justice (1986, 8). Crawford, Hennessey and Fisher (1987, 196–97) demonstrate how the 1837 British House of Commons Select Committee on Aboriginals endorsed the policy which held that, upon British settlement, Aboriginal customary law was extinguished in all parts of Australia, creating British subjects out of all Aboriginal peoples and bringing them within the jurisdiction of the British legal system whether they were familiar with its structure or not. It is well documented, however, that the formal equality supposedly extended under the law — the point debated in the case of whether the Governors could be outlawed — did not occur in practice. McCorquodale shows how the initial problems Aboriginal people experienced through unfamiliarity with the language, customs and content of the legal system resulted in the legal precedent of case law increasingly diminishing their standing before the courts on account of their religious and customary beliefs as well as the assumption

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

that their testimony was not to be trusted (1987, 32–33). Moreover, McCorquodale documents how the erosion of Aboriginal civil rights was further accomplished by the statutory limitations on their legal standing that were introduced through the mechanism of legal guardianship, treated in detail by Morris (1989), through which they lost their status as juridic persons.10 These findings by Morris and by McCorquodale are consistent with Sawer’s analysis of British subject rights, which explicitly demonstrates that to be a British subject was no protection for groups such as Aborigines whose common law rights could be easily overridden by legislative enactments designed to impose restrictions upon their civil rights and liberties (1975, 130–31). The right to vote is the second of Marshall’s (1965) three elements of citizenship examined by Turner (1986). The work of Oldfield demonstrates that the formal right to vote extended to Aboriginal men in New South Wales from 1858 and Aboriginal women in 1902 was an empty right due to the informal sanctions which operated at a local level to constrain Aboriginal participation in parliamentary elections (1992, 63–66). Hence, taking the first two elements of citizenship together, it can be seen that either through formal or informal means Aboriginal people were subordinated to the sovereign law of the British and Australian states in ways that eventually crystallised into structural inequality. Their practical access to the first two elements of citizenship was therefore diminished in a trend which was the opposite to virtually all other groups in Australia, such as white women, who successfully challenged the particularist ascriptions which had constituted them as a category outside the body politic.11 The work of Morris, which details the evolution of state paternalism under the auspices of the Aborigines Protection Board, has shown how the third element of citizenship — that of access to social rights — was extended to Aboriginal people in ways which intensified, rather than ameliorated, the social and structural inequalities that they faced. According to Morris, this was particularly so when the legislating of the Aborigines Protection Act 1909 (1915 amendment) marked a shift from legalistic custodianship to bureaucratic custodianship (1989, 106). Morris interprets these various interventions as the extension of the disciplinary and

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pedagogic strategies of bio-power to the Aboriginal population (1989, 126, 129). They were implemented, however, within a framework of state paternalism which attributed a putative dependency status on the ‘full-blood’ Aborigine. The ‘half-caste’ or others who were excluded from the limited benefits of this state paternalism were expected to perform independently within the capitalist system (1989, 31–53). It can be seen, though, that the purportedly equal legal basis for negotiation between free agents within the capitalist labour market was never in place. The salience of their Aboriginal identity situated these peoples as targets for discriminatory employment practices against which they had little chance of obtaining legal or political protection. McCorquodale reviews the cases in which instances of the exploitation of Aboriginal workers were brought before the courts. He found that the courts always refused to establish precedents for the equitable payment of Aborigines on the basis of their imputed inferiority. Therefore, even in New South Wales, where discriminatory trade legislation such as that passed in the Northern Territory was not in place, the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration nevertheless held, in a 1932 case, that ‘award conditions were not applicable to Aboriginal station hands, an exclusion maintained in 1938 and in 1944’ (McCorquodale 1987, 41).12 These legal, bureaucratic and social circumstances reveal that New South Wales Aboriginal peoples at the turn of this century were positioned at the very interface of sovereign and bio-power relations which were coordinated through the state institutions of court and legislature and then reproduced and constituted at a local level through administrative practices of surveillance, discriminatory treatment and perjorative labelling. This placed them throughout the federation era in an increasingly untenable situation. The subordinated and discriminatory position within which Aboriginal people were positioned in colonial and federation society was at odds with the formal equality that they were extended through procedures for civil registration. As for the white population, this procedure was introduced to provide the means by which legally validated proof of subject and citizen status could be established as well as validating the occurrence of primary vital events (births, deaths and marriages) within the state’s jurisdiction. As Turner

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

(1986) shows, the process by which a publicly recognised and legally validated biography is created for a subject through the civil registration process constitutes a mechanism by which the subject is positioned in relationship to the state, the community and kinship networks. As with the issue of the vote, there was nothing in the Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages Act to exclude Aborigines from the scope of its jurisdiction.13 However, the case of the Governors and Jacky Underwood illustrates the extent to which the unstated assumption in the second half of the nineteenth century appears to have been that the Act applied to Aboriginal peoples only to the extent that they were assimilated into the white community, for example by marriage or blood relationship to whites, by use of anglicised names or by affiliation with the Christian religion. There was no provision made for the recognition of tribal marriages or traditional kinship naming systems, these not being recognised by law, so that Hall claims that ‘by 1856 most Aborigines of New South Wales had adopted the European systems of forenames and surnames’ (1985, 33). That these Anglicised identities were for many Aboriginal people constituted in a fragile and provisional nature can be evidenced simply by referring to the Governors and Jacky Underwood. None of the three men had been registered at birth, despite the fact that Jacky Underwood was born around 1862, Jimmy Governor in 1875 and Joe within a few years of Jimmy’s birth. The adoption of the name ‘Jacky Underwood’ was at best an artifice used to facilitate Jacky’s positioning in relation to the whites that he came into contact with. Cameron and Job claim that he was born Jacky Cusky and only adopted the name ‘Underwood’ when he formed an association with a drover of that name with whom he worked for several years. He also went by the name of Charlie Brown (Cameron and Job 1993, 99). Likewise Jimmy Governor took the name of his putative father, a ‘half-caste’ bullock driver who went by the name of Tommy Governor, but who was also known as Sam Governor (1993, 97). Jimmy’s death certificate reveals, however, that Governor may have been ‘Grosvenor’. Furthermore, he may have been the ‘William Christian Governor’ born at Belgrave on the Macleay River in 1852.14

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Therefore, while acknowledging that by 1856 most Aborigines had adopted the European system of nomenclature, we should not ignore the fact that their traditional laws of marriage and naming had been consciously delegitimated by statute which defined marriage in terms which excluded Aboriginal practice15 and common law rulings which held customary marriages to be invalid.16 Further, merely adopting a European name, such as Jacky Underwood did, or being given one at birth, as Joe Governor was, would not necessarily bring an individual sufficiently into the white community to be registered alongside them. Hence, ‘full-bloods’ like Jacky Underwood or marginal Aborigines like Joe Governor, who had some connection with the white community but defined themselves primarily in terms of their relationships with other Aborigines, stood outside the white communal practices by which a state-legitimated and socially validated identity was constructed, even if they were not outside the formal jurisdiction of the Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages Act. If they had never taken part in the spectacular acts of violence, they would have lived and died like thousands of others with no mark by the state that they, as its subjects, had ever existed, save only if they had applied for rations on the government reserves that developed from the 1880s onwards (Morris 1989, 91). This massive negation of ‘full-blood’ or unenculturated Aboriginal existence by the state can be read as a sovereign act of exclusion; in Foucault’s words, power exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prélèvement), a subtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate ... a right of seizure ... it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it. (1978, 136)

Once the territory had been seized in the name of the Crown, it was hoped by the state that these people would simply ‘die out’ and their bureaucratic erasure was one step in this process. The effects of this policy were to destroy an identification with Aboriginality by refusing to accommodate difference within those bureaucratic processes through which an Aboriginal subjectivity could have been formulated and reproduced. This is not meant to imply that Aboriginal society and the kinship systems on which they were based could have been bureaucratically preserved as they were in

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

pre-contact history. Morris has demonstrated that customary marriage practices could not continue in the same way that they had traditionally operated. Within the new bureaucratic processes of subjectification there was no room for any response to the hegemonic imposition of European kinship and nomenclature systems other than that of conformity (1989, 54–73).17 Morris claims that colonial control was not simply achieved by conquest through violence but also through legal, bureaucratic and demographic procedures. Colonisation did not simply limit indigenous rights, as it had elsewhere, but denied their existence. Similarly, the legal processes did not curtail or restrict ownership of traditionally-held lands, but denied ownership completely. (1989, 54)

Thus the bureaucratic processes of civil registration and census collections succeeded in metaphorically casting the Aborigine outside the body polity,18 erasing their existence from the bureaucratic landscape as surely as the medieval madman was expelled from the city state to wander in a liminal state outside the township’s limits (Foucault 1965, 8–9). Once the sovereign act of exile from the body politic was performed, however, those Aborigines targetted by the state were not able to enjoy the primeval freedom supposedly the birthright of the ‘noble savage’. They increasingly came to be incarcerated in a system which exhibited, first, the characteristics of Foucault’s leper colony and, later, those of the disciplinary institution (Morris 1989, 106–7). Unlike the Algerian state of Fanon’s analysis, the bifurcation of state relations between the black and white populations in New South Wales was not a simple unitary mechanism premised primarily on economic hyper-exploitation and experienced through systematic methods of segregation. Rather, it developed out of processes which operated simultaneously on several different levels and in a multiplicity of sites to divide the population geographically, politically and socially at the same time as they provided overlapping spaces and ambivalent readings of racial identity and appropriate positioning. The inconsistencies and tensions inherent within a society polarised by policies, theories and practices of segregation versus assimilation were manifested in the experiences of the Governor brothers and their companion, Jacky

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Underwood, with tragic consequences at the time. As a result of these tensions and inconsistencies, which may have been formally dismantled but whose pervasive influence is still felt, there is a continuing legacy of interracial violence within Australian society. At the local level, the combined effect of civil registration procedures with the processes of British sovereign law was the delegitimation of Aboriginal customary law, naming and kinship systems through British refusal to accommodate the means by which Aboriginal culture could be reproduced. This can be seen to have significantly extended British hegemony throughout the very fabric of individual and communal Aboriginal existence. I would argue that this, as much as the forced dispossession and relocation of peoples away from their traditional land, significantly contributed to the devaluation and consequent subordination of Aboriginal peoples by the state, fuelling the statistical myth of the ‘dying race’ in the late nineteenth century. For people like Jimmy Governor, however, who wanted to take advantage of the perceived benefits that white society had to offer, such bureaucratic processes appeared to provide a means for constructing an identity which would facilitate, as far as possible, assimilation into the white community. Hence, whilst his own birth had never been registered, his marriage to Ethel Page at Gulgong in 1898 and the subsequent registration of their son’s birth the following year can be read as an attempt on one level to stabilise his identity. It could also be read as an attempt to clothe it with the European conventions of respectability and Western patriarchal family relationships which would formally disguise his Aboriginality. As if to forestall the possibility that ‘Aboriginal’ could be inscribed on the marriage register, the amount of biographical detail recorded on the marriage certificate is exceptional in an era when details were not taken down regarding the bride’s and groom’s parents or even the bride’s and groom’s ages and places of birth unless unusual circumstances existed.19 The Governors’ marriage certificate describes the groom as ‘James Governor’, a bachelor born at Talbragar, New South Wales. His occupation is given as labourer and his age as 23 years. Thomas Governor, a labourer, is named as his father, and Annie Fitzgerald as his mother. These parental relations where Jimmy’s putatively white father is married to his putatively black mother are constituted to

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

mirror the ideological construction of imperialism which was premised upon the conflation of relations between the genders and the races so that male is to female as white is to black.20 Nandy interprets this gendered representation of race relations as the polarised construction of colonial relations of power in terms of the hypermasculinisation of the coloniser and the feminisation of the colonised peoples. This was based on a desire to ascribe to the dominant power the characteristics of virility, militarism and a work ethic dependent upon control both of self and others. The ascription of the supposedly feminine characteristics of gullibility, laziness and passivity to women and the subordinated races was essential for the legitimation and continued success of capitalism and the imperial system with which it was increasingly linked in economic and ideological terms (Nandy 1983, 32–39). Evidence of the gendered nature of colonial experiences of racial oppression may be found on Jimmy’s son’s birth certificate. His son is given the elaborately European name of ‘Sidney Golding Louis’ and James is described as a general labourer, 24 years of age and born at the Talbragar River in New South Wales. The only facet which is atypical of most birth registrations is that the mother, Ethel Governor, is recorded as the informant of the birth.21 It would probably not be reading too much into this to suggest that Ethel registered the baby in order that Jimmy could avoid the censorious attitudes of the courthouse staff. This is supported by the fact that interracial marriages were regarded as repugnant and scandalous events in colonial and federation society. Huggins and Blake in their examination of the gendered nature of race relations on the colonial frontier make the point that, had Ethel rather than Jimmy been Aboriginal, official consent would have had to be given to the marriage. The only reason why there was no provision for consent to be obtained in the case where a black man married a white woman was that the situation was considered to be so outrageous as to be inconceivable (1992, 49). It can be argued, then, that the untenable position that many Aboriginal people found themselves in resulted at least partly from the strain of being classified ‘white’ by the state at the same time as the saliency of their skin colour caused them to be classified as ‘blacks’ by their communities. Whilst this opened up spaces for

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people like Jimmy Governor to create a different life for himself and his family, apart from that on a reserve or in a blacks’ camp, it also had the potential to situate within his psyche all the tensions experienced within a bifurcated community. Nevertheless, despite the body of evidence which demonstrates the differential treatment Aboriginal peoples were afforded within New South Wales, and which during this period affected virtually every facet of their lives, many people have preferred to individualise Jimmy Governor’s crimes and thereby remove them from their political context. A contemporary example of this perspective is that of Henry Reynolds (1979; 1982), whose work exhibits a deep resistance to looking beyond terms of formal equality and a conflated concept of racial and cultural assimilation to accept that it was the humiliating taunts concerning Governor’s Aboriginality which triggered such ghastly violence. Reynolds, reacting to the fictionalisation of Governor’s life in Keneally’s book, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1973), deplores Keneally’s use of racial issues as an explanation for the crimes. He claims that clearly there was some racial component in the motivation of the aspiring bushrangers. Yet they were not looking back to the tribal past but like so many other rural working class youths to the exploits of Ned Kelly and other bushrangers. Their behaviour was perhaps less to be explained by aboriginality than by their social class. (Reynolds 1979, 20)22

The reason why Reynolds dismisses Keneally’s representation of Governor as one whose racial grievances were motivations for the murders can only be understood if one understands that, for him, Aboriginality appears to be legitimate only to the extent that it is traditional. He attempts to minimise Jimmy’s links with a ‘traditional’ Aboriginal culture, for example by claiming that in the condemned cell he said he was ‘half-Irish and half a black man’ and that accounted for his cleverness. He was well educated by the standards of the rural poor. He could read and write and apparently continued to read popular literature after leaving school. His work experience was typical of the rural working class — horse-breaking, fencing, trapping. The

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

employment was casual, hard and poorly paid. By all accounts he was sober and industrious. He said of himself that he was ‘never a loafer like some black-fellows’ and ‘always worked and paid’ for what he got. He was, according to his wife, ‘particularly touchy about his colour’. But he did not identify as an Aboriginal. Ethel reported that he ‘did not like to be called a black-fellow’. (Reynolds 1979, 18–19)

Nandy claims that sensitive analyses of colonial relations look beyond the stereotypical representations of polarised difference to discern the threat that synthesis, rather than antithesis, presents to the colonial social order. The products of such syntheses are disruptive because they have the potential to step outside the ideological framework legitimating such oppression and to challenge it by exposing the relativity of constructed differences and the shared dimensions of colonial experience. Therefore, ‘the opposite of thesis is not the antithesis because they exclude each other. The true ‘‘enemy’’ of the thesis is seen to be the synthesis because it includes the thesis and ends the latter’s reason for being’ (Nandy 1983, 99). In the case of New South Wales Aboriginal people under colonial rule, this was the potential position which could be occupied by the synthesised ‘half-caste’ rather than the antithetical ‘full-blood’ Aborigine whose appearance and lifestyle was constantly contrasted with the dominant standards of ‘white’ society. The case of Jimmy Governor reveals, however, the determination of the dominant sectors of society to resist this challenge to bifurcated colonial relations. In Reynolds’ analysis of the case, there is no room for the role of synthesis, complexity or multiplicity of motivation or subject identification. Overlooking the interrelationship between capitalist class, race and gender referred to above, one is either a traditional Aboriginal or an ‘enculturated’ Aboriginal, who on that basis may no longer identify with Aboriginality. Reynolds thereby conflates adherence to traditional culture with racial identification. One may suffer either class oppression or race oppression but for him the two are distinct phenomena. Out of class-based frustration one may aspire to become a bushranger, which Jimmy is claimed to have done, but in Reynolds’ analysis that disqualifies one from simultaneously seeking revenge for racial injustices.

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For Reynolds an identification with Aboriginality is evidenced by initiation, a knowledge of traditional law, a desire to return to a traditional lifestyle and pride in one’s colour. I would argue that this determination to position Aborigines within the supposed limitations of their traditional milieu ignores evidence of white colonial fears that the Governors’ actions marked a resurgence of Aboriginal militancy more horrifying than the original phase of Aboriginal resistance because the ‘natives’ were now empowered with white technology and expertise which would challenge white hegemony.23 This interpretation positions Reynolds within the tradition of liberal historians identified by Nandy as either consciously or unconsciously endorsing a perception of ‘the historical role of colonialism as an instrument of progress’ despite its oppressive effects (Nandy 1983, 101). Despite the fact that Jimmy acknowledged the ‘blackman’ in his make-up, it is outside the scope of Reynolds’ framework to consider that this may have been a mixed source of both pride and shame. There is no evidence to suggest that he rejected his Aboriginal relatives and siblings. On the contrary, ample evidence exists to suggest that Jimmy, as embodied synthesis, did in fact move easily and continually across the boundaries of the two cultures. Reminiscences such as that published in the Coonabarabran Times by a local resident indicate the complexity of Jimmy Governor’s relationships with both black and white communities (Cameron and Job 1993, 87–89). It is likely that his anger at being called a ‘blackfellow’ had more to do with the perjorative nature of the remarks made about him, and the interpretation given Aboriginality by whites, than with an actual shame in his racial and cultural heritage. Reynolds produced evidence of this himself when he recounts how Governor considered his cleverness to be the result of his mixed Irish–Aboriginal heritage (1979, 18). In an attempt to strengthen his argument, and revealing a narrow view of Aboriginal culture as a set of fixed traditions defined by ceremonial practices, Reynolds cast doubts on the issue of whether Jimmy Governor had ever been initiated.24 Although he and his brothers ‘grew up in a number of Aboriginal settlements in Northern New South Wales’, these sites are disqualified from having a formative role to play in his cultural heritage because he had been

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

born in 1875 into a community that had already undergone considerable acculturation. It was half a century since pioneer settlement and he may have had no contact with anyone who remembered traditional life as it was before the arrival of the Europeans. (Reynolds 1979, 18)

This astounding claim was obviously made in ignorance of the particular circumstances of Aboriginal life in this district of northwestern New South Wales. Morris has since produced evidence from the north coast of New South Wales which demonstrates the continuation of some forms of ceremonial life, including that of initiation ceremonies, well into the twentieth century, so that it is obviously the case that ‘traditional Aboriginal culture’ did not simply collapse in the face of white settlement either as quickly or consistently as Reynolds’ account would suggest (Morris 1989, 66–73). In the area where the Governors lived, despite the greater depredations of white settlement on Aboriginal culture, local evidence shows that the last bora or initiation ceremony held by the Gamilaroi people was held as late as 1894 near Collarenabri and that senior ‘full-blooded’ Aborigines, accorded the status of elders, were still living a reasonably autonomous existence well into the 1880s (Sheppard 1981, iii, 184–85; Pickette and Campbell 1983, 121–22). Reynolds makes the further astounding admission that the Governors’ mother, Annie, ‘was a woman ‘‘with a grievance’’ who ‘‘encouraged her sons to do acts of violence, as she states that the Government took the poor blacks’ country, giving them nothing in return’’’. But, because this political activism did not translate into a desire to return to traditional land ownership but rather to seek compensation for what had irrevocably been lost, Reynolds dismisses Annie Governor’s influence as a sentimental justification for a life of crime. He claims that ‘past dispossession may have provided the same sort of background as the “ills of old Ireland” did for the Kellys’, as if they are equivalent circumstances. Hence the similar forms of erasure of the particularities of Jimmy Governor’s case in Reynolds’ analysis uncannily parallel that of the bureaucratic erasure of their identity that Aboriginal people have been forced to deal with (Reynolds 1979, 20).

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To accept Reynolds’ explanation of these dreadful events is to depoliticise them. It is to silence the astute perceptions of Annie Governor who, in the opportunity afforded her by her son’s notoriety, unerringly located and publicised through media attention the essential aspect of the state’s relations with Aboriginal peoples that rendered those relations both unethical and illegitimate. Her assertion that their land had been appropriated and that no compensation had been made was an important statement, made at least half a century before land rights would become a major demand in political campaigns mounted by Aboriginal peoples for the recognition of past injustices and for restitution or compensation for colonial and post-colonial abuses of power. By the imposition of abstract concepts of race and class, Reynolds’ account also serves to silence Jimmy Governor who, when asked at his trial for an explanation of his actions, plainly stated that it was anger at the racial slurs directed against him on account of his marriage to a white woman. Jimmy Governor was a literate and highly intelligent man, a sober and industrious worker, a Christian as well as a practitioner of Aboriginal spiritual beliefs, a ‘half-caste’ man with a white wife as well as a putatively black mother, and ‘full-blood’ and half-caste’ Aborigines for relatives and friends. With his intimate knowledge of the land and survival skills as well as his Western knowledges of reading, writing and paid labour, he attempted to straddle both white and Aboriginal worlds. Ultimately, however, this man was frustrated in his attempts to reconcile his Aboriginality with his Irish heritage, because of his skin colour and because of his continuing Aboriginal kinship relationships which soured his employment relationship with Jack Mawbey who objected to his property being turned into a ‘blacks camp’.25 Reynolds fails to recognise that the ‘class conflict’ Jimmy Governor experienced was strongly mediated by the saliency of his race. The work of McCorquodale (1987) has been cited earlier to demonstrate the significant differences between the work experience of Aboriginal workers and that of their unionised and collectivist white counterparts. Thus, parallels with the frustrations of the white working class may be useful for the insights that they offer into the general lot of the rural poor but are totally inadequate as the sole

The ‘Breelong Blacks’

basis of an analysis of Aboriginal working class experience. This compounding of Jimmy’s positioning at the interface of an interracial marriage with his place as an Aborigine attempting to succeed in a racist employment market is reflected also in the ambiguity of his position with the governmental state. As a ‘half-caste’ in a bifurcated state, the very body of Jimmy Governor was situated within the heart of the racial frontier between black and white Australians.26 In this chapter I have sought to explore the complexities of power relations with the late colonial governmental state by focusing on the asymmetrical relations of power constituted between the white population of New South Wales and the Aboriginal peoples encapsulated by the encroachments of British hegemony. The case of the Governor brothers and Jacky Underwood has demonstrated the plurality of possibilities for the construction of an Aboriginality, but one constrained by colonial attitudes towards the appropriate nature of race, gender and class relations on the New South Wales racial frontier. These men were positioned at the interface of the sovereign appropriation of land and the imposition of British law, intermeshed with bio-power relations designed to control and regulate the population through the management of their productive and reproductive resources. There cannot be a simple conceptual division between relationships constructed with the state, or through participation in the paid economy, or with significant others within the social and familial community. This is an illustration of the Foucauldian concept of state power as an ensemble of institutions, laws and administrative procedures which operate in a multiplicity of interventionary sites and with a diversity of normalising and disciplinary tactics for the purpose of ensuring state security (Foucault 1991). The state plays a central coordinating role in the regulation of these power relations despite the decentralisation of interventionary sites within the governmental state (Foucault 1982). This strategy has positioned Aboriginal subjects in a subordinate position constituted through hierarchical relations at the interface of this complex ensemble of power interstices. Nevertheless, the case of Jimmy Governor, in particular, demonstrates that the state alone cannot maintain complete control over the population either through strategies of coercion and juridical sanction, or through its regulating practices.

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Operating concurrently with these formal techniques of normalisation and discipline are informal practices creating both sanctions against transgression or opportunities for subversions of the state order. Nor are the subjects of these formal and informal sovereign and disciplinary interventions passive actors. The actions of Jimmy Governor, particularly, both in his creative attempts to constitute a valid ‘white’ identity and in his attempts to recreate himself as a bushranger, demonstrate the usefulness of the Foucauldian analysis (1982, 220–21) whereby the existence of power relationships is contingent upon the possibility of strategies for resistance. However, the fact that Jimmy Governor’s attempts to assimilate into white society occurred at the same time as he was physically and socially marked by his Aboriginality point to the care which must be taken in applying Foucault’s work to the colonial situation. It is obvious that the extremity of the civil, political and social inequalities that Aborigines have suffered cannot be explained purely in terms of their regulation and disciplining by a governmental state. Prior to those measures and contemporaneously with them, a blatant form of sovereign power operated to deny Aboriginal peoples recognition of their land rights, through disregard and ignorance of traditional concepts of land ownership, and overriding their laws and ultimately facilitating the disappearance of their Aboriginality, their very erasure from the landscape of Australian consciousness. I would argue that by exploring the processes by which public identities are constructed at the very interface of multiple oppressions, and by analysing the role of the state as a central coordinator of discriminatory practices within a liberal democratic society, the nature of power and the construction of subjectivity through the processes of objectification and subjectification can be understood. An examination of colonial and post-colonial situations can thus move beyond the limited interpretations of race relations premised on simplistic notions of ‘contact’ and ‘collapse’ or on dichotomous representations of ‘traditional’ versus ‘enculturated’ Aboriginality.

chapter

6

Australia Felix rules OK! Deborah Bird Rose

In 1986 an American journalist named Tony Horowitz hitchhiked around Australia; like many travellers, he was particularly drawn to the outback. Subsequently he wrote about his travels in a book called One for the Road and there he draws an analogy between the Eskimo elaboration of words for snow and the Australian elaboration of words for the outback: woop woop, back of Bourke, beyond the black stump; to which I would add: never-never, no-man’s-land, and god’s own (Horowitz 1987, 22). The provocative aspect of these terms is not that there are so many of them, but rather that they refuse to specify time–space coordinates. We do not know where or when the outback is or was; the terminology points us away from the now and the here, and then dumps us. The outback is part of a colonising conceptual domain that resonates with the frontier. It thus signals time, space and history in their most contentious as well as most formative and vital moments. The frontier is, by general understanding, a place where two types of space come together. Definitions of the types themselves are 121

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contested, but in populist lingo the frontier is a place where wilderness meets domestication, where the savage meets civilisation, where native meets conqueror. In conventional thought, the frontier moves, it passes, and what is left behind is no longer a frontier. The wilderness or the savage gives way to a domesticated and civilised way of life. For Australians there is an implicit notion that the frontier has not fully passed; known as the outback, it is imagined to be just over the horizon. The outback has a central position in the cultural identity of many Australians. Indeed, the social and cultural coordinates are likely to be far more explicit than the time–space coordinates. I am suggesting that the lack of specificity in time and space enables Australians to hold the outback so vividly in their hearts and minds, and to sustain its significance as a formative and transformative site. In this chapter I analyse a tour organised explicitly towards themes of outback history and Australian identity. Max’s Tour, operating out of Timber Creek in the Northern Territory, was the winner of a 1993 Northern Territory Brolga Award for excellence in tourism, and is a remarkable event no matter how one analyses it. Timber Creek is an extremely small town located on the Victoria Highway which is now bitumen and in the process of becoming two-lane. It is the major connecting road between the top end of the Territory and Western Australia, and Timber Creek is halfway between Katherine in the Territory and Kununurra in Western Australia. It is a regional centre — there are two pubs, two shops, a caravan park, a police station, a medical centre, a small government suburb, and, most visibly of all, Max’s Tour. The town is physically and socially dispersed. To quote Max, ‘there are thirty whites and fifty blacks, just enough to give the place a bit of colour’. Max runs two tours daily: a four-hour morning tour, and an hour and a half evening tour which is a condensed version of the morning trip. He accommodates thirty persons per tour, and the longer trip cost twenty-five dollars per person in 1991 when I took the tour. Max’s brochure describes the event in these terms: Max will take you on a voyage through nature, history and wildlife, back to the days when Timber Creek was a remote

Australia Felix rules OK!

outpost and the river the lifeline of the biggest cattle stations in the world. Here you will find the real Territory.

Max plays with liminal time and space to make of his tour a ritual event which constitutes an initiation of the tourist into an Australian identity that is raced, sexed and authenticated. I use the term ‘authenticity’ in this context to denote the possibility of merging two statuses, that of settler and that of autochthon or native, in a way that enables the settler to belong to the country he has invaded. A crucial feature of this merging is that it is linear: the settler is the successor to the aborigine, and there is no possibility of concurrence. The Max’s Tour initiation depends on the unspoken proposition that settlers, as conquerors, are strangers in their ‘own’ country. Max will show his daily groups of tourists that settler and autochthon need not be in conflict, and he enables his groups to participate in a ritual transformation that links them to the resolution of the contradictions inherent in making peace without having declared war, and in being a stranger in the only country one can call one’s own. The basic scenario is already familiar through Hollywood westerns, Western novels, and television, and is summarised most succinctly in the phrase (and title) ‘the Last of the Mohicans’ (Fiedler 1968). In brief: settler (male) encounters aborigine (male) in a moment of recognition as the aborigine dies and the settler flourishes. In that moment the aborigine (male) passes the mantle of belonging to the land (autochthony) to the settler (male). A new relationship is established as the settler inherits the world of the aborigine. The elementary unit of the colonising frontier is two men: one white, one black; one belonging to the future, one to the past. The relationship between them is one of conferral, perhaps best expressed as the relationship between initiate and master. The relationship is linear: the ancient autochthon passes away and the settler takes his place as the new (and superior) indigene. In Max’s imaginative construction of liminalities, he generates a ritual space in which this moment of conferral is re-enacted and the tourists are given an opportunity to link their own lives with the lives of the settlers on whom was conferred the authenticity of the aborigine.

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Tourist ventures are embedded in a paradoxical dilemma: everybody knows that the outback, by definition, is remote and difficult to get to. A tourist venture is designed to make money, and so it relies on people. If tens or hundreds of thousands of people can get there annually, then it cannot be that remote. And if its drawing power is tourism, then can it really be the outback? On the other hand, if it is not the outback, then there is no point in going. So tour ventures must say that the outback is both: both then and now, both here and just over the horizon; here both for those who live here and, however briefly, for those who are just passing through. It is precisely this paradox that underpins Max’s construction of liminal time–space. In the four hours of the morning tour, Max constructs the time–space coordinates which outback terminology nullifies. He promises a trip through time and space; what he delivers is even more complex than the promise. He is not promoting the concept of the changeless so much as he is promoting the possibilities of continuities with the past: he emphasises change in order to dramatise that which has not changed. As the structure of the elementary unit of the frontier indicates, change must be shown to exist to account for the conqueror, and it must be incorporated within a master narrative of continuities in order to indigenise him. The establishment of continuities enables Max to develop the most significant portion of the tour. He constructs social and cultural coordinates which effectively say: this is the real Australia, and the settlers in these parts are the real Australians. Real Australians are defined as outback mates and Max asserts in numerous ways that he is one of them. On his tour Max offers brief honorary membership in the community of mates. He verifies the authenticity of bush mates, he defines the limits of the community, and he asserts the quality of the values appropriate both within and beyond this community. The tour is spectacularly popular and, in contrast to many tourist-oriented events, remarkably memorable. I say this from my own experience and from informal interviews conducted at Timber Creek and elsewhere. The key is that the tour is terrifically entertaining. Max makes jokes and keeps people laughing; he personalises the relationships between himself and his tourists; he tells bits of gossip that facilitate a sense of insidership. His antics with crocodiles and other wildlife are unusual, and the people who bring video cameras

Australia Felix rules OK!

keep them running for long periods of time. My informal surveying indicates that many people remember Max’s tour as one of the highlights of their trip around Australia, primarily because it was such good fun. Of the many moments of the four-hour tour, the most memorable seems to be the time around the billy when Max requires each tourist to have a go at playing the didjeridu. Max is a showman; his spiel is very well thought out, and very highly structured; it owes many debts to Ernestine Hill.1 Within his memorised routine there are spaces for spontaneity and, while it is clear that he is reciting a lot of his information, he undercuts the boundary between performer and audience through a variety of dialogic strategies, including the continuing jokes which draw people into the tour as participants rather than simply audience. There is an implication in much of what he says (overtly stated in a couple of contexts) that he is offering the tourists a set of understandings which give them a privileged position among the Australian populace. These tourists, he implies, are special people, deserving of special information which he, as a remarkable bushman and ‘a legend in his time’, is in a position to share with them. The description of Max occurs in a song about himself, from a tape of songs about tourist sites throughout Australia, which he plays on the homeward journey. As a final feature of the tour it verifies a representation of himself which he begins well before the tour gets under way, and is crucial to his subsequent moves in which, I suggest, he makes of himself the initiator of the tourists. Max promises a voyage through history back to the days when Timber Creek was remote and the Vic River was a lifeline, and tourist jokes provide an important medium for nullifying the temporal gap between past and present. Recall that this gap has to be there because if you are here as a tourist then this cannot be the frontier you’ve read about in books and ballads. The gap has to be there to account for your presence; a good entrepreneur like Max will close that gap. We stop at a bottle tree, and we all pile out and walk around to the far side of the tree where there is a plaque dedicated to the memory of John Lawler. Max describes him briefly as one of the dregs of society who washed up in the outback. He goes into a singsong eulogy, saying ‘Just a ringer and a drifter’. And then with a complete change of cadence and intonation: ‘Bet he didn’t expect to

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become a tourist attraction’. The gaze of the tourist is imaginatively reversed, and the tourists become the object of John Lawler’s gaze. Laughter greeted this quip, but along with laughter there was a bit of foot shuffling and sideways looks which I understood to be signs of self-consciousness. Most analysts seem certain that the tourist gaze is appropriative; it certainly seems often to be one-way (see Fiske, Hodge and Turner 1987). Max’s imaginative reversal of gaze and subjectivity has a powerful effect in two dimensions. It closes the gap between past and present, providing the dead man with a consciousness which interacts with the tourist. It reduces the inter-subjective distance produced by the appropriative gaze by briefly positioning the tourist as object. Spatial themes are constructed around the proposition that this place, the outback, is and was remote. I use the term ‘constructed’ quite deliberately. Max discusses the medical service, for example, saying that there are two bush nurses, one male and one female. They go on patrol to stations and Aboriginal communities. The doctor comes once a month for a general check-up. If there’s a real emergency they’ll fly you out, but it takes four hours for the plane to get here, so ‘you’ll either get better or die. There’re not too many hypochondriacs around Timber Creek.’ The construct is remoteness, the imagery is enjoyable, but the facts are dubious. Timber Creek is on a bitumen highway, and in a pinch it takes two hours to get to the nearest hospital. The more important theme is Max’s use of liminal space. The region is constructed as remote, and within this remote area he will play with space. His tour takes you from town to highway, and from highway to river. Along the river he pays due attention to crocodiles, which are the Top End emblems of wilderness and danger. The river becomes liminal space: it is the flowing link between past and present, between the tourist and the outback. You drift along through wilderness, danger and history, and you end up on an island, itself a liminal place. Max closes off this liminal space and makes himself completely central, by reminding you that you are on an island surrounded by man-eating crocodiles, and that there is only one boat — his. You walk to the centre of the little island, and sit in a circle while Max boils a billy and tells you stories. Here, in this

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inner circle of multiple liminalities, you participate in a ritual which is the heart of the tour. Max presents himself as a true bushman; Ernestine Hill (1970) has described this figure in considerable detail (see Morris 1988; Rose 1992). The plot is that he is a natural man in an unnatural country. He is a new type in the history of humanity: something new in the rank and file of mankind, civilized man with no need of civilization. He could live like the blacks in a black man’s country, and build a white man’s empire ... (Hill 1970, 422)

In Max’s updated version of this myth, nationalism replaces Empire, and Hill’s ‘civilized man’ becomes Max’s bushman. It is still the case, however, that he can live like a black in a black man’s country and build a white man’s nation. Positioning the white man in the Aboriginal domain has the dangerous potential of blurring the binary opposition created by colonisation. Max’s performance will repeatedly assert the boundary between black and white, while also asserting a continuity between the two. Characteristically for this frontier imagery, the white male is central and women are absent. This is another theme, to which I will return. The issue of living like a black in a black man’s country rests on the proposition that whites can effectively become like natives and belong to the place without going native and losing either identity or their superordinate position. Max explores this theme in a highly complex fashion. For Max, white belonging requires verification; the badge of authentic belonging is bestowed by the authentic native himself — the Aborigine. Native verification of white authenticity is expressed in this story about Nat Buchanan: He was a restless soul, old Nat Buchanan. He was always searching, further out and further out — to the other side of sundown. He came back to Wave Hill once after many many years. There was only the book keeper there. He introduced himself as Mr Buchanan. Well, it didn’t register with the book keeper. He thought it was another old city bloke wandering around in the bush. Because Nat rode a camel, with a big bright green umbrella over the top to keep the sun off. They

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didn’t call him ‘Bluey’ for nothing. His pack was on another one, and an old blackfellow for a mate. What a sight. And when he told the book keeper that he was going right down through the desert country to the South Australian border, the book keeper said, ‘You’re mad, you’ll perish. There’s no water down there. Men don’t come back from that country.’ ‘Ahh, we usually find it’, said Nat. Well, he tried to persuade him not to go but to no avail. And when he woke in the morning the old man had gone. So when the boss came back from the stock camp the book keeper told him about this old man who’d gone off into the desert. The boss said, ‘Ahh, blast it. We’ll have to go out and rescue him now. Better to find him alive than dead.’ So they set out. There they found him, way down in desert country, a hundred miles south ... Sitting under a beautiful big shady gum tree, water all around him, happy as Larry. Well, the boss was going to go crook on him for causing too much trouble, and one of the old Aboriginal stockmen, who’d been on the station for years, spotted him. And he said, ‘Whoa, I been tink dat old fella been properly pinish, dat old Paraway, old Bluey Buchanan. Him know all this country. Him belong this country.’ ‘Oh’, Bluey said, ‘I forgot to tell him I was Bluey Buchanan.’ You can imagine the reunion then. Shake hands all around, everybody giving a big smile. They reckon even the camels had a bit of a grin. But old Nat, he was still wandering around this country until he was a fair age. Finally, they persuaded him to settle down on a little farm just north of Tamworth in New South Wales. But settling down and leaving his beloved Territory must have broke the old man’s heart, for he didn’t last long. Oh, but I’ve got a feeling, and I would like to think that somewhere today old Bluey’s spirit is wandering along the Victoria. For it is men like Buchanan who shaped Australia and make you proud to be an Aussie. A great bushman. One of those men who are born with an innate sense of direction. Few men have it. You know, they reckon he could track the Holy Ghost through a thundercloud.

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There are several points to which I want to draw your attention: • Nat Buchanan is defined as a great bushman, the kind of man who makes you ‘proud to be an Aussie’. • The emblem of this definition is that, because of Nat’s sense of direction, he can live in this country. • While the fact of an ‘innate sense of direction’ would seem to indicate a biological factor over which one has no control, the more compelling theme that Max draws from this is that Nat Buchanan can traverse the outback and thrive; his thriving is an indication of his authentic belonging. • Verification of his authenticity is offered by an old Aboriginal man: ‘Old Bluey Buchanan, him know all this country. Him belong this country.’ Max is addressing the question of whether white Australians can authentically belong to the country they have conquered. His answer, of course, is yes. The outback is the site where belonging can appropriately happen and where it can properly be verified. The bushman who can live like a black in a black man’s country needs blacks for two purposes which, taken together, form the paradox of settler identity. First, the black man verifies the white man’s authenticity, thus establishing continuity. Second, the black man remains subordinate to the white man’s superiority, and thus does not threaten the boundary between them. I want to linger for a few minutes on the relationship between white men and Aboriginal skills. Knowledge of Aborigines and competence at skills which are generally defined as Aboriginal are crucial to the definition of the bushman. He can be thoroughly competent at both black and white skills without losing his white identity and status and is thus forever superior to the black, who can never be fully competent in both worlds. There is a zone of danger here which contains the possibility of the white man ‘going native’. Hill (1970) implies that, in the outback, there are evolutionary dead ends as well as opportunities, and that white men can descend as well as ascend the evolutionary ladder (cf McGuire 1990; Rose 1992). Black women can be understood as the devolutionary temptation and, within this

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logic, miscegenation signals the loss not only of supremacy but also of conquest, in so far as conquest is understood to be a lineal transition from native to conqueror. In line with Max’s presentation of himself as the superior bushman, he takes this time in the centre of the island to demonstrate his mastery of a number of Aboriginal skills. He makes smoke (not fire) by rubbing two sticks together. This display, in spite of (or perhaps because of) its boy scout qualities, indicates the competence of the bushman which is so central to the whole tour. Max displays his dual set of capabilities along several lines: he makes smoke but not fire because it would be irresponsible to make fires at this time of year (the unstated implication is that blacks use fire irresponsibly); he uses the right wood, as taught to him by Aborigines, and he gives it its English name (Sesbania pea) which is, of course, based upon its Linnean label. Throughout all of this, Max maintains his white man’s superiority. The most compelling example was offered in the liminal space of the island. Max told a story of how he got his didjeridu: Made by a very famous Aborigine, a fellow by the name of David Blanazi. Some of you’ve heard of David. He’s the fellow who taught Rolf Harris how to play the didjeridu. He’s from a little settlement halfway between Katherine and Mataranka called Barunga. But David, he’s been all over the world, he’s been to London, Paris, New York, Timber Creek. He’s not a Jawoyn, he’s a Buntang. Now they’re a similar skin or clan. He’d often come up to the corroborees, and when he did I’d get him to play as a guest artist because he’s an excellent player. He could do the call of the plover or the dingo or the kookaburra. It’d just reverberate down this hollow limb, barely missing a beat in the haunting sound of the didjeridu. Very clever. But he wasn’t too clever the night I got this didjeridu. He was as full as forty monkeys — drunk, dirty, swearing, spitting all over the customers. I went over to hunt him, and I said, ‘What do you think you’re doing, David?’ ‘Want this didjeridu, boss? I want to sell him and get more grog.’ I said, ‘Well, give us a look at it’. It was painted up something terrible. No one would have known ... but to me it was

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a good stick. And so I bought it off him and had it stripped down and repainted by a member of the Jawoyn tribe, a fellow by the name of Kurritjar ...

Here we see the white man’s superiority demonstrated through his many competences, and we see the black man’s inferiority: he is a world-renowned musician but he cannot handle alcohol. Listening to this with attention to discourses of Empire, we hear the familiar story of the gifted native who cannot handle civilisation and ends up destroyed by it. Max’s Tour is about Australia, and he is initiating his tourists into the outback (implicitly defined as the real Australia) and enabling them briefly to become bush mates (implicitly defined as the real Australians). Max himself is the initiator. He thus positions himself as a descendant of men like Bluey Buchanan, a true bushman, and as the possessor of those boundary-threatening and boundary-sustaining qualities of Aboriginal knowledge and white male superiority. He plays the didjeridu, sings a bit of song, dances very briefly, and accompanies himself with clapsticks. He also displays himself as an expert on Aboriginal culture; for example, he tells us that there are seven and a half thousand dialects in the Aboriginal language.2 The story of his didjeridu signals superiority, and in his playing, which is very good, he also signals danger. For example, a piece that involves making the instrument howl like a dingo is introduced as: ‘Azaria Chamberlain’s theme song, or The Dingo’s Lament. Hang on to your babies, ladies!’ Immediately after this display of skill and knowledge, danger and superiority, he passed the didjeridu around and each of us tourists had to take a turn blowing. He dipped it in water after each person, saying that he did not want anybody to get AIDS. For many people this was the highlight of their tour. Max walked around the group, handing the instrument to each person in turn. He made jokes with most people either before or after they played. Many of the jokes had to do with rude sounds — there were references to farts and laxatives, in particular. But they also had to do with one of the dangerous topics of the bush: miscegenation and the consequent blurring of boundaries between black and white.

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Anyone who played the didjeridu well received a comment implying Aboriginality: ‘Hey, look at this! What colour was your mother, eh?’ Or: ‘Ah, no problem, here you go, splash of the old tar brush here somewhere.’ This segment has all the qualities of a boy scout initiation and, like the scouts, it draws on emblems of the native to produce a fraternity of whites. The colour jokes depend on the assumption that there is no slap of the tar brush. We were all being well and truly defined as white here, and it was in that context of whiteness that people laughed. In short, they were on their way to becoming whites who could master black skills without losing their whiteness; proof of their progress was that they could joke about the possibility of a less than pure whiteness. For me, this event conveyed a compelling sense of bonding. I felt that I was being drawn into complicity with a set of values which I oppose. Further, I think that every person who put their mouth to the didjeridu became an accomplice to a particular set of relations between black and white. The apparent purchase of the instrument from a man who was drunk and dead keen to sell it at any price is too low to be tolerated among white mates, but thoroughly appropriate, even clever, in the black–white context. I would suggest that this ‘theft’ may be seen as emblematic of the relations between white and black in many other domains of life, most notably the conquest of the continent. I felt that to blow the didjeridu was to give implicit assent to white supremacy, to dual standards, and to the proposition that there are contexts in which these stories and these jokes are appropriate. It was also implicit assent to the proposition that, like farts and other bodily functions, this conquest and those relationships are all natural. The naturalness of Max’s discursive strategies is reinforced also by the many resonances with conventional Territory discourse as encountered in pubs and anywhere else where white people, men especially, gather and socialise. Their near-obsessive conversations run to familiar themes of blacks and the bush: the gullibility of blacks and the smart moves of whites, the four-wheel drive tracks they have traversed and the difficulties they have overcome, the fish they have caught, and the blacks they have seen broken down in the same bush they claim to travel so successfully. Every tourist will have heard this

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talk. Max does not present new ways of thinking; he elevates and validates the conventional by positioning it within a symbolic and mythic structure of legitimacy. Max does not say much about women. His silence develops a significant theme. His very few comments are directed toward contemporary women: ‘Hold on to your babies, ladies’. More specifically he targets us, not surprisingly, for our bodies. After everyone has blown the didjeridu, Max makes this extraordinary statement: ‘Oh my god, I forgot to tell you girls. Holy bloody hell, too late now. You’ve never seen a gin3 playing a didjeridu, have you? And you know why? There is an ancient Aboriginal legend that within the didjeridu there are child spirits, and any woman that plays it has a piccaninny!’ Then, turning to a woman close to where he is positioned in the circle: ‘What are you laughing at? You had two goes!’

For me this statement, made after we had all participated, came as a series of direct hits. He indicates the phallic aspect of the instrument, an aspect which had been submerged through references to the gastrointestinal tract, although hinted at with the reference to AIDS. This phallic gesture, hinting at some unspeakable savage ritual, seemed to verify that we were mutually implicated in an experience so bizarre that it could only have extraordinary significance. Max made a hit in the direction of gender relations, marking an inequity which had been submerged in the relatively egalitarian circle. He hinted at white women’s superiority over black women through our assumed freedom from superstition and our greater control over our reproductive capacity. Prior to this statement, we had been accomplices in white supremacist relationships but our complicity was mediated by men because the relationship had been constructed only between men. Now, it seemed, we were given the status of white supremacists in our own right. Further, we were initiated into this status by Max himself. His pretence of having forgotten to tell us the crucial fact that Aboriginal women do not play the didjeridu was expressed as self-conscious ‘forgetting’, designed to indicate to us that we had been tricked. That the trick was a joke indicated, I think, that none of us need seriously expect to get

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pregnant. Our superiority to Aboriginal women was thus verified by Max himself. The identification of didjeridu and phallus, and the fact that we had all had our mouths on it, seemed further to separate men and women out. The jokes about pregnancy clearly indicated that the phallus would act on men and women differently. However we responded, it seems unlikely that we were identically affected by having come into intimate contact with the white man’s black phallus. It may be, too, that we women were being given a marginal position as honorary males. Like men, we could encounter the phallus and not become pregnant. But, if we were honorary males, we were definitely peripheral: in so far as this ritual speaks to the verification of an authentic belonging, then it seems to pinpoint and validate maleness as a key feature of belonging. Black is authentic, and black women do not play the didjeridu; ergo, authentic belonging is a male prerogative. The last anecdote that Max told while we were still on the island broke up the circle of mates and repositioned women well and truly on the outside. The context is a rather complicated story about some Borroloola characters. (Borroloola is at least 1000 kilometres east of Timber Creek, but in this outback ritual space such considerations become entirely pedantic.) Max reported what he said had been a recent interview between an old-timer named Wagga Darcy and a woman interviewer: She said, ‘Why don’t you go down and live on the Gold Coast where the climate’s not so hot, spend the rest of your days in comfort?’ ‘I’m not going down there and live with all them people. Anyway, who’d be looking after all me old mates up here?’ ‘Got a few friends, have you, Wagga? Who would they be?’ ‘Ah, I got plenty. I got me horse and me dog and me pig and me goat and me donkeys and me chooks.’ She said, ‘You never got married, Wagga, did you? Why didn’t you get married?’ ‘Ahh, not too late yet. Anyway, what would I want to get married for? Anytime I want one, I just run one down on the flat.’ And up to a couple of years ago he was still catching them!

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Max’s earlier phallic gesture differentiated between white and black women, constructing us as superordinate in our own right. This subsequent story does not specify whether the ‘ones’ Wagga Darcy runs down are white or black or, for that matter, even if they are human. The point is that it does not matter. Let us assume that he is not talking about animals. What he is saying is that white or black, differentiated though we may be among ourselves, women are essentially resources to be run down. Sexual violence, one concludes, is integral to mateship and authenticity, and white men can extend and withdraw their invitation to women to enter into the circle of mates. Women, then, do not become irrevocably transformed through initiation; they are granted, rather, a conditional status which signals the underlying possibility that women really are undifferentiated and that they do not fully belong with the mates. I felt pushed out of the circle of mates, but Jay Arthur (pers comm) suggested that this atrocious anecdote might also be understood to confirm our positioning as honorary white men. The gender logic would seem to be that there is no autonomous female position from which this joke could be funny; a woman is either excluded from the circle or included as a type of male.4 Entree into the circle of white mates, then, can be understood to be gendered and conditional. The conditions, for both men and women, include an assent to white supremacy and an assent to sexual violence. White women, I suggest, have the possibility available to them of being marginally included but not ultimately transformed. We are positioned ambiguously — potentially both outside and inside the circle. Max does not tell us what colour or what species Wagga Darcy runs down; for me, this ambiguity is coercive. It is because we do not know that we are exempt that we are faced with this injurious proposition, that our access to the protective circle requires our assent to the violence from which we require protection. The Wagga Darcy anecdote hinted at the possibility of women going feral. The spectre or fantasy of women running at large in the bush is not confined to Wagga Darcy or to Max. Constable Willshire, the first policeman in the Victoria River valley (and a man conspicuously absent in Max’s historical account of the region) wrote in

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1896 of the region as a place ‘where women of all ages and sizes are running at large’ (Willshire 1896, 14 and throughout). He and his trackers regularly ran them down. I am pondering the concept that the white phallus thinks pardon the personification) it can control this boundary, and that a significant challenge to the phallus is the feral quality of women, a quality which might also be understood, in light of the Wagga Darcy anecdote, as a possibility of female bonding. All women have the potential to run in the bush, it seems, and, if from their position in the bush they were to establish their own circle of mates, they would do so without regard to race and would thus challenge the rule of conquest. Their challenge would destabilise the injurious hierarchies into which we had been initiated: racial distinctions and the superordinate position; maleness as the essential condition of belonging to the country; the impossibility of concurrent indigenous and settler relationships to land. The possibility enabled through the logic I am pursuing here is that female–female relationships can challenge the cultural logic of white male supremacy in conquest. In this light, it is worth considering Fiedler’s view (1968) that the peculiar alliance of the last Mohican and his white successor includes the fear that white women will fulfil their potential to castrate males. Nothing in Max’s tour suggested to me that Freudian fears were implicated in this logic of conquest, although the relational logic he constructs between men and women certainly offers a motive for castration. Female bonding in the bush, it seemed to me, can be imagined as a prospect pregnant with possibilities, the least enticing of which would be a reversal of gender relations marked by domination through violence. I hasten to add that the possibility of female bonding outside of the circle of mates to the disruption of white male supremacy is only hinted at obliquely in Max’s tour, and then as a danger rather than as a desideratum. Let me now briefly retrace my steps away from the circle of mates, following Max and his tourists back to the boat, then to the bus, and finally to Timber Creek. Let us recall what we have and have not learned. According to Max’s implicit logic, Aboriginal men controlled the status of belonging to the continent and conferred this status on white (male) bushmen of high achievement. The status of

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indigenous (male) authenticity passed to white (male) bushmen as an act of respect; the presence of white bushmen was never, in Max’s spiel, connected to the demise of Aboriginal people. White men can position themselves within a circle of outback mates, and in this circle they can be initiated by one of the legendary bushmen (in this case, improbable as it seemed to me, Max). The white initiator can also position women as honorary mates (males), but women’s status will remain ambiguous. We tourists know that we do not leave the island transformed into authentic bushmen, but I think it is fair to say that through our participation we tacitly assented to conditions of authenticity: to conquest as an accomplished fact, to Aboriginal conferral of legitimacy, to the linear relationship of succession from black to white, to white supremacy and racial contempt, to sexual violence, and to maleness as the primary condition for genuine belonging to society and to the land. Max’s initiation enabled us to come back to Timber Creek transformed to some degree. The music he played to announce to all of us that he is a legendary bushman reinforced his right to have put us through the ritual of initiation. As we rode past John Lawler’s grave, Max called out to him. This time, one sensed, we were no longer gawking tourists but had entered the circle of mates.

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7

Mrs Eyers is no ogre: A micro-study in the exercise of power Merridy Malin Naomi, Jason and Terry were three physically attractive, energetic, bright and curious Aboriginal five-year-olds.1 Outside the classroom, in this Adelaide urban school, they were articulate and confident but inside the classroom, by the end of the year, they were in the lowest academic group for their age, considered troublesome by their teacher, and were largely ostracised by their non-Aboriginal peers. Naomi, Jason and Terry typify, I believe, the experiences of very many Aboriginal children in urban classrooms in Australia (Harris and Malin 1984; Christie 1985; Folds 1987; Hudspith, in press). While there are many different kinds of Aboriginal communities, schools across the country have considerable homogeneity. Thus, certain elements of the processes described in this chapter may be expressions of fundamental cultural discontinuities experienced by children from many cultural minorities. In addition, this ethnography shows the cultural basis of much dissatisfaction with 139

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schooling, often expressed by Aboriginal people (Poulson 1988; Ngarritjan-Kessaris 1994). The major findings of my research were that the skills and characteristics of the Aboriginal students which were positively valued, or simply considered normal, at home became irrelevant or disabling in school because of the contrasting cultural practices embedded in the way classrooms function. These cultural differences were apparent in the way the classroom was organised as well as in the values of the teacher and students and in their ways of communicating. These differences, together with the teacher’s unconscious low expectations of the Aboriginal students’ academic and social potential, created serious conflict between the students and teacher. This conflict gradually developed into a vicious cycle where the students became marginalised both socially and academically. The non-Aboriginal students tended to follow the teacher’s lead in attitudes expressed towards Naomi, Jason and Terry. The skills and ability of these three students were not only not rewarded, they were deemed deviant and, often in subtle ways, punished. The teacher only noticed and responded to what she saw to be their ‘problem behaviour’. She was unable to recognise or respond to their zest for learning, their resourcefulness and ingenuity, and their awareness of and concern for the needs of the other students. In so far as such experience mirrors that of Aboriginal children elsewhere, it sheds some light on the statistics showing their poor academic records and high drop-out rates. However, much of this could be avoided if teachers were to understand two major points. First, as my study shows, there are important and systematic cultural characteristics among Aboriginal children to be taken into account if professional educators are to succeed in their task. Second, the behaviour in question is neither intended as a challenge to the teacher’s authority, nor does it in fact pose a threat. On the contrary, as has been shown in some innovative classrooms, more responsive teaching techniques lead to remarkably successful Aboriginal students (Hudspith, in press). This chapter presents a quantitative analysis of long-term observations in a number of classrooms, and also describes and analyses details of the experiences of three students in a reception/year one classroom in order to interpret the statistical evidence and to

Mrs Eyers is no ogre

show its consequences. Equivalent experiences of other Aboriginal students were observed in another classroom which was closely studied, and in classrooms whose teachers I interviewed and observed.2 I will argue, firstly, that certain culturally based differences led the teacher to misinterpret the motivations and responses of the Aboriginal students. And, secondly, that this eventually resulted in a situation which seriously disadvantaged the Aboriginal students both academically and in terms of their status within the student hierarchy. The overwhelming power that the classroom teacher wields, in the context of the benign and valued institution of the infant school, can be seen here as an expression of certain authoritarian social processes which are seldom acknowledged. In this case, the racial stereotypes which circulate in society are given expression in a form which is destructive of the lives of small children.

Differences in home socialisation The two most prominent differences in cultural orientation in the Aboriginal and Anglo families studied were that the Aboriginal families valued, and worked to develop in their children, an autonomous or independent, self-sufficient bearing on life. In contrast, the Anglo families invested considerable time and energy in developing in their children particular correctness concerning dress, manners, bearing, health and hygiene, in keeping with a set of clearly stated expectations. In the Aboriginal families, the major restriction on a child’s individual autonomy was the adults’ expectation that children modify their independent drive with a nurturing and socially considerate orientation. In other words, it was hoped that the child would become self-reliant and self-regulating while also being always aware of others’ needs, and be able to help out when needed. In the Anglo families, the young children sought their parents’ attention a great deal. However, the Aboriginal children, for much of the time that their parents were present, oriented to adults no more than to peers. While the Anglo children were often asking questions and seeking assistance from their parents, the self-sufficiency of the Aboriginal children meant that they relied on their own observations to learn new things. If they needed assistance in doing something, they were more likely to seek it from their older brothers

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and sisters than from the adults. In addition, they were encouraged not to dwell on their own minor injuries or upsets and to resolve their own disputes. Several Aboriginal parents stated that such characteristics as these were necessary if their children were to survive in a world which was largely hostile to their Aboriginality. Hence, the Aboriginal children of this study were skilled observers and possessed a good deal of practical competence at a relatively early age, compared with their Anglo counterparts. As well, they were used either to helping those younger than themselves or to relying on the help of children older than themselves. Those people who were admired tended to be emotionally stoic, to be assertive in conflict with their peers, and to be able to laugh at themselves. The autonomous bearing of the Aboriginal children of this study meant that, given an unfamiliar situation, they would expect to be allowed the time and space to sit back and examine the whole situation from afar before having to plunge into it and try to be competent. If that time and space were not given, the child might experience shame or embarrassment. This is consistent with Coombs, Brandl and Snowdon’s (1983, 102) statement that the Aboriginal people of their focus felt that making a mistake while performing a deed in the public eye was a more serious failing than admitting ignorance and not attempting to do the deed in the first place. The importance of autonomy for both the Aboriginal children and adults of this study meant that direct, obvious control of children by adults towards their particular desired goals was considerably less than that exerted in the Anglo families. In fact, there were more than twice the number of directives, reprimands, rationalisations, monitoring questions, and punishments in the Anglo families (see Table 1). In sum, the important aspects of childrearing in the Aboriginal families of this study included encouraging autonomy by expecting that children would be self-reliant, able to make decisions for themselves regarding their basic needs, be naturally observant, practically competent, and prepared to seek help and attention from their peers as much as from adults. Parents would allow their children both time and space to tackle new tasks and situations cautiously so as to avoid making mistakes, and they would expect them to be both

Mrs Eyers is no ogre

Table 1: Frequencies of overt and direct social controlling acts by parent over child: cross-group comparisons*

Aboriginal

Anglo

Directives Reprimands Monitoring questions Rationalisations Teasing and scaring Punishments

236 124 90 89 22 4

359 350 270 335 0 9

Total

565

1323

*Counted across four families for six recorded hours of daily activity for each group (Malin 1989, 169). emotionally and physically resilient. To balance this individual independence, the parents encouraged their children to be affiliative — that is, to be affectionate and nurturant with those younger than themselves, to maintain an awareness of the whereabouts of everyone, to help those needing it and to trust that their peers will be similarly dependable.

Autonomy in the classroom The Anglo children were much more dependent upon and accustomed to parental guidance and obvious monitoring than the Aboriginal children and so in the classroom they expected, and in fact depended upon, constant teacher supervision and direction as they grappled with the new tasks of classroom life. They continually adjusted their actions in accordance with what they thought the teacher’s expectations were, from moment to moment. If they were being inattentive when they knew they should be attentive, they would watch the teacher’s line of vision in order not to be caught not attending. Many of the Aboriginal students appeared to be oblivious to this need to continually monitor the teacher and to adjust their behaviour according to her expectations, even when she appeared to be attending to something else. They tended to monitor their entire

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social, physical and academic environment and regulate themselves accordingly, apparently having the expectation that they needed to be self-sufficient and attentive to everyone in the room, not only to the teacher. Of the eight Aboriginal students in this particular classroom, Naomi, Jason and Terry were the most culturally and physically distinguishable as they alone had both parents who were Aboriginal. The other five Aboriginal students were from more obviously bicultural homes, each having an Aboriginal and an Anglo parent. These students demonstrated that they were aware of the need to monitor adult whereabouts and obey adult directives with relative swiftness. In many regards, they displayed the same tendencies towards self-regulation and self-reliance as, for example, Naomi did but they adjusted them to some extent to fit with the teacher’s expectations. Hence, they less often ‘infringed’ the classroom norms in the ways that Naomi did. Observations in, and interviews with teachers of, other classrooms at all the primary school year levels found similar tendencies among many Aboriginal students, although not all. An analysis of the long-term observations which were recorded on videotape showed that Aboriginal children were far more likely to perform acts which were autonomous, practical and helpful in the classroom than were Anglo children (see Table 2). Of all the acts that were called ‘voluntary demonstrations of autonomy and competence’, 79 per cent were performed by the Aboriginal Table 2: Voluntary demonstrations of autonomy and practical competence*

Aboriginal

Anglo

Proportion of student population

21%

79%

Tying up others’ shoelaces Miscellaneous offers of assistance Organising classroom materials Opening pyramid carton on own

5 15 10 3

3 0 5 1

Total Percentage

33 79

9 21

*Counted across 21 videotaped hours of classroom life (Malin 1989, 472).

Mrs Eyers is no ogre

children, who comprised only 21 per cent of the class. More closegrained description of what was going on here allows us to analyse the consequences of such differences. The following anecdote (Malin 1989) from one videotaped classroom encapsulates many of these principles: The Tracing Lesson Fifteen minutes into the lesson, when all of the students except Naomi ... and Tran, who is Vietnamese, have begun colouring in their traced balloons, Naomi is still in the process of tracing the outline. She has spent a great deal of time talking to Ronald and Gaye who are sitting opposite her, and also much time watching those around her. Her teacher, Mrs Eyers, sees her, sitting rolling three coloured pencils back and forth on her desk top while watching the children around her. Mrs Eyers reprimands her, telling her to hurry as they have plasticine work and a story still to do before recess. Naomi colours for several seconds, then begins to survey the class again, watching Bruce who has finished and is on the carpet playing with plasticine. She then watches Mrs Eyers come over and write Gaye’s name for her on the back of her sheet.

Although Mrs Eyers has told her to hurry, Naomi does not see the necessity to immediately obey even when the teacher is standing less than a metre from her. Naomi receives another reprimand four minutes later, after she has leaned over to show Gaye where she has made a ‘mistake’. She obeys the directive to work by colouring for a few more seconds, but then she fixes her gaze on Gaye who has walked over to the teacher on the other side of the room to seek final evaluation of her finished work. When Gaye indicates to Mrs Eyers that she doesn’t know what to do with her finished worksheet, Naomi calls out across the room for her to ‘Put it on the chair!’

So, although Naomi appears ‘to be in a dream’ (a common quote of Mrs Eyers’), she is in fact monitoring very closely her friend’s activity. Even the ‘top’ student of this class did not know that finished

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worksheets go on the chair, so Naomi’s knowledge of such a routine is not common knowledge at this stage. Naomi does no colouring now for four minutes until she is reprimanded yet again, this time for being out of her chair watching in fascination the automatic focusing mechanism on the video camera. She obeys Mrs Eyers for a second with a brief colour-in and then resumes her surveying of the room and the students. Two minutes later when Mrs Eyers walks over towards Naomi’s desk, Naomi resumes her colouring but stops after about thirty seconds, being distracted by the teacher’s telling Bruce to play with his plasticine ‘nicely’. At this stage, Jane, Ronald and Tran have also not finished. Mrs Eyers walks over to Ronald who is at Naomi’s group of tables and urges him to hurry. She then sits down in Gaye’s chair, directly opposite Naomi, and supervises Ronald closely. Naomi sits motionless and gazes at the children on the carpet and only resumes colouring when Bruce is punished for ‘being silly’ by having to sit on his own at the art table.

So, all this while, Naomi has not felt impelled to hurry on with completing her work even when under the watchful eye of the teacher, and even after receiving several directives from her. Instead, a greater requirement for her is to survey what is going on, to sit back and watch the whole situation, this first lesson for such a large tracing worksheet. This characteristic of not wanting to plunge into a relatively unfamiliar situation reflects both the autonomy Naomi would be granted at home and the importance for her of not risking being shamed for doing her assignment incorrectly in front of her peers. It is also evident that Naomi’s strategy is most effective from the point of view of learning classroom routines. She knows more than even the ‘top’ student in this regard. It is not useful, though, from the point of view of pleasing the teacher. It is possibly contributing to the teacher’s belief, which she expressed some weeks later, that this child does not accept her authority. What is also apparent in this situation is how the Anglo children have plunged into the activities, making blunders, colouring over the lines, scribbling, leaving blank spaces, not colouring all the balloons, not tracing all the strings, not knowing where to

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put their pencils and worksheet when they’d finished and so on, implicitly trusting the teacher to guide them as to the correct procedures when they made a mistake. This is not the case for Naomi, who seemed more to orient to her peers for guidance than to the adult, in this case the teacher. To return to the lesson: Now Ronald has finished, Mrs Eyers stands and looks directly at Naomi and says to her in an exasperated tone, ‘C’mon, Naomi! (pause) You’re so slow! (pause) And I’ve got to do something with the plasticine!’ Naomi glances up at her and then looks down towards her lap unsmiling, her hands motionless. Mrs Eyers continues, ‘Hurry up!’ Her tone of voice now sounds impatient and she is looking down at Naomi very intensely. Naomi sits frozen with her chin against her chest, fiddling with her pencil in her lap. It is not until Mrs Eyers moves back to the carpet and begins talking to the rest of the class that Naomi resumes her colouring, which she does with some urgency. Almost a minute later Mrs Eyers directs another reprimand to Naomi and also Tran who is sitting at his desk refusing to colour. She says to them both emphatically, ‘Come on, you two. Hurry up!’ Naomi sits back in her chair and stares into space. Tran starts to pack away his coloured pencils into their box. Naomi colours some more, watches Bruce some more and then, leaving two balloons uncoloured, begins to pack away her coloured pencils one by one, into their box. Shortly after this, Tran is exonerated of his obligation to finish his colouring and Mrs Eyers fetches him a plasticine mat and he begins to make a snake on the carpet.

Thus, we see Naomi still taking her time, not immediately obeying the command to hurry. Mrs Eyers describes this behaviour of Naomi’s as being ‘typically Aboriginal’, of ‘going walkabout in the head’. She explains to me that Tran is just plain immature, possibly being only four years old. She is therefore more tolerant of his refusal to finish than of Naomi’s slowness at complying with her directives. Naomi’s behaviour is consistent with that of a child accustomed to self-regulation, having been encouraged to act independently and to make her own decisions as to when and whether she

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obeys another’s commands. She finishes off the lesson in the following way: As Naomi is putting her pencils carefully into their box, Mrs Eyers calls over to her, ‘Come on, Naomi!’ Forty seconds later Naomi walks over to her drawer and puts her pencils away. She then shows her sheet to Mrs Eyers. Mrs Eyers says that she must colour in all the balloons, ‘Quickly!’ she says. After some colouring, some watching of the children, two more reprimands and seven minutes, Naomi finishes and takes it to Mrs Eyers for evaluation. Clearly Mrs Eyers is pleased with its quality, ‘Beautiful colouring-in but why did you take so long?’

Naomi made the same procedural mistake that many of the children had done, in seeking evaluation before her work was completed; but, in other regards, she did not make the same blunders such as colouring over the edges of her tracing, leaving white spaces or not knowing where to put her completed sheet. She avoided these mistakes probably as a result of her intensive surveying of what everybody else was doing. Naomi’s biggest ‘mistake’ was a result of her lack of awareness of the tendency socialised into Anglo children of deferring without delay to the authority of an adult. Such a deferral on Naomi’s part would mean abandoning a considerable degree of her autonomy. It would seem that Naomi, through her astute observation skills, has picked up the observable, explicit expectations and routines of classroom life while the subtle ones which go against her early socialisation, and which constitute her mistakes, have not been picked up by her at this early stage of school life. She continues to operate under the assumption from home, that she has the right to thoroughly size up this new and unfamiliar situation before being expected to plunge in and risk failure. These characteristics of Aboriginal student autonomy in this classroom corresponded closely with those evident at home. The children expected to regulate themselves with regard to doing things in their own time, not always obeying directives the first time round and sometimes delaying compliance indefinitely if the issue were not considered important. They often did not respond to teacher reprimand with obvious contrition, particularly over what they considered were minor issues. They

Mrs Eyers is no ogre

demonstrated that they needed time to size up new situations before acting upon them, which included the answering of questions in front of the class. The self-reliance of the Aboriginal students in this class was evident in the practical ability that they demonstrated and which was greatly appreciated and capitalised upon by other members of the class. They were dependable helpers for those unable to tie their shoes, for opening cardboard drink containers, opening the handbag in the home corner and numerous other forms of assistance. Selfreliance was also at the heart of their verbal and physical assertiveness. They expressed needs and desires as declaratives and directives, for example saying, ‘Pass me that bag’, instead of ‘Please, would you pass me that bag’, which was the teacher’s preferred mode. With regard to tangible classroom resources such as having a turn with the class puppet, they might edge their way into its possession, simultaneously edging all competitors out of the way. Apart from the acute observation skills demonstrated by Naomi above, they also generally had the ability and tendency to orient themselves successfully within a wider geographic area than the other students. These five-year-olds were often admonished for playing in the senior school yard instead of staying within the restricted area of junior primary. In a variety of ways, they demonstrated ingenuity, astuteness and initiative, but usually in time and space outside of Mrs Eyers’ awareness.

Affiliation in the classroom Naomi and her ‘countrymen’ also differed from the Anglo students in the degree to which they paid attention to their peers. This reflected the systematic difference that was quantified from the video recordings of classroom interaction. Table 3 shows that, of all the nurturant and collaborative acts observed in the classroom, 62 per cent were performed by Aboriginal children although they made up only 21 per cent of the class. To explore this systematic difference, I will examine what this means for relationships in the classroom. In their initial weeks at school, the Aboriginal children took fellow students into consideration as much as they did both their teacher and the academic task at hand. There were many expressions

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Table 3: Nurturant and collaborative acts between students*

Aboriginal Proportion of student population Affirmation from one student to another: physical expression verbal expression Explanations offered by a student on behalf of another student Explanations from student to student Total Percentage

Anglo

21%

79%

30+ 6

22 4

19 29

10 16

84 62

52 38

*Counted across 21 videotaped hours of classroom life (Malin 1989, 510).

of this affiliative orientation. For example, compared with the Anglo students in the class, the Aboriginal students were more likely to know the whereabouts and activities of students not present. They expressed knowledge of other students’ wellbeing, academic activity, personal appearance, friends, relatives and interests more often than other students did. They were more likely to assist other students, both Aboriginal and Anglo, who were in difficulty, whether academically or practically. They were more likely to act as interpreters for students who had misunderstood, or who had been misunderstood by, the teacher. On Anglo student Adrian’s first day at school, when Mrs Eyers reached his name on the roll and said, ‘Good morning, Adrian’, he just sat staring at her. Naomi, who was sitting next to him, leaned over so her face was close to his and she directed him, smiling, ‘Say it. “Good morning, Mrs Eyers”.’ Adrian, remaining mute, sat looking at Mrs Eyers.

The Aboriginal students were also more likely to send positive messages to other students during the course of the day, either through silent smiles, stroking of the hair or face, or leaning on a neighbour in an unobtrusive way. They tended to express spontaneous joy at

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another student’s achievement, such as when Naomi exclaimed with amazement, ‘He beated us!’ when Anglo student Bruce finished his academic assignment before her and the others at her table. This was after she had echoed Anglo student Gaye’s declaration, ‘I’m beating you!’ earlier in the lesson. For many of the Aboriginal students in the class, despite declaring that they were entering into competition with their neighbours over finishing a task, they tended not to follow through with the resolve; and they displayed no envy at another’s successes. In fact, often they would express pleasure. The only exception to this was one incident towards the end of the year when Naomi’s despair at the implacably negative response from the teacher drove her to declaring to her Anglo friend, who had just received elaborate praise from the teacher, that she hated her. The world of the Aboriginal children and students of this study was a very social one. At home, they were encouraged to play with other children rather than with things. This contrasts with the materialism of the middle-class Anglo world where children are encouraged to amuse themselves on their own, or, when with peers, with toys, books, television, drawing and construction activities, and the like. It was therefore not surprising to find that the Aboriginal students often indicated that they perceived themselves as collaborating with others and of achieving collectively, even when the class task had not been organised in that way. This was evident linguistically in subtle ways: Tuyen, a five-year-old Vietnamese boy from the classroom next door, came into the room during the morning session with a message for Mrs Eyers. The class was seated on the carpet, with Tran directly in front of Mrs Eyers, and Naomi, next to Jane also in the front row, to the side of Mrs Eyers. As Tuyen was standing beside Mrs Eyers waiting for her response, he noticed the paper flowers pinned to the back wall, and the following conversation ensued: Tuyen: Who done them? (pointing to the back wall) Mrs Eyers: My children. Aren’t they clever! Tran: I done two! Naomi: Me and Jane done it! (Naomi was stroking Jane’s hair while saying this.)

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In fact, Jane, who was also Aboriginal, and Naomi had made a flower each, independently of each other. On another occasion, the children were individually making Chinese lanterns: The class was seated in a circle with Cindy, an Aboriginal student, seated between Naomi and Rebecca who was Anglo. Cindy and Rebecca had both finished the next step and Rebecca called out to Mrs Harry, who was moving around the circle monitoring their work, ‘I done it, Mrs Harry!’ Cindy then called out immediately after this, ‘Me and Rebecca done it!’

Communication difficulties Certain culturally based differences in language use also increased the teacher’s misunderstanding of many of the Aboriginal students. For example, differences in the forms of questions and answers led either to the teacher’s often not recognising correct answers which the Aboriginal students gave to academic questions or to her asking them in a social context which embarrassed the students. Specifically, on several occasions when the teacher asked a question, then compulsorily selected an Aboriginal student (including some of the confidently bi-cultural students) to answer, the student either did not answer and the teacher answered for them, or else the student’s answer came several seconds later, after the teacher had addressed the question to somebody else. In this way, many correct answers from the Aboriginal students were never recognised. I believe that, apart from dialect differences which meant that some answers were not comprehended, there were two other tendencies involved here. Firstly, for many Aboriginal people in Adelaide, there is a longer pause between questions and answers than in Anglo-Australian talk (see also Harris 1980/1984 and Eades 1982). In addition, for many urban Aboriginal students, being spotlighted to answer a question when they have not volunteered to answer can cause considerable shame or embarrassment. Making a mistake or being seen to be vulnerable in public is potentially far more demoralising than it is for the majority of middle-class Anglo-Australians. Mrs Eyers, as most teachers, often used public questions to informally evaluate what a student knew and her missing many

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correct answers led to her underestimating the Aboriginal students’ knowledge. Another difference in communication style was in the Aboriginal students’ non-verbal response to reprimand. They would respond to the teacher with expressionless faces, head erect, looking directly at her or glancing periodically between her and to the side of her. This reaction differed from how the Anglo children characteristically responded, with their blushing, their often-slight deferential, self-conscious smiles or, in serious situations, their downwardlooking, often-pouting expression. Mrs Eyers said of Naomi and Terry in particular that they were not vulnerable to reprimand: ‘When I get angry with Naomi it doesn’t affect her emotionally’, and ‘she (isn’t) sorry for being naughty’. The emotional stoicism valued at home was considered illegitimate defiance in the classroom. In sum, then, many of the actions resulting from the Aboriginal students’ autonomous orientation and their social awareness and skill contributed to the smooth running of classroom life. Some of the Anglo students were aware of the valuable resource in the Aboriginal students’ inclinations to help, and their practical competence and sense of responsibility. Unfortunately, however, the only acts which the teacher seemed to notice were the Aboriginal students’ frequent slowness or occasional failure to respond to teacher directives, their apparent emotional stoicism in response to reprimand, and their tendency to orient less to the teacher than the non-Aboriginal students. These latter acts she interpreted as their lack of respect for her authority, their not needing her and their poorness as students. This set into motion the micro-political situation described below.

Micro-political processes in the classroom In one of the classrooms studied, a lack of rapport developed between the three most culturally distinctive Aboriginal students — Naomi, Jason and Terry — and their teacher. Simultaneously, a state of ‘co-membership’ (Erickson and Shultz 1982) or special rapport developed between the teacher and particular other students. This co-membership involved the granting of special favours — some very subtle and others quite blatant — by the teacher to these few

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students. The nature of these favours included the teacher joking with them and entering into personal conversations with them about her out-of-school experiences. For these favoured students she clothed reprimands in humour; she let pass infringements which, in other students, would be censured; she chose them to go on errands more often; and she greeted their quality work with, ‘Good as always’. The students with whom the teacher felt comembership were those she found to be especially appealing because of a particular physical and personality characteristics, mannerisms and grooming. In addition, it appears that she expected them to ‘do well’ or, if they did not, she perceived there to be underlying special reasons which were out of their control, such as their coming from a ‘difficult home background’. For example, of her ‘favourite boy’ who was one ‘who did not get many cuddles at home’, and who was often ‘in trouble’ for vandalistic-type acts in the school, she said, ‘I just know I relate to Ronald and him to me’. The fact that Naomi, Jason and Terry did not share comembership with the teacher was evident in her private use to me and other teachers of such expressions as ‘sod’, ‘dead-shit’, ‘pain’, ‘aggravating’, ‘off this planet’, when referring to them. Over the entire year, she did not make one unambiguously positive statement about Naomi or Jason. I believe that this indicated not merely lack of rapport, but actively negative feelings verging on dislike. Once, she stated that Terry was attractive with his ‘coffee-coloured skin’; and she expressed regret that he did not seem to need her; so her relationship with him was more one of puzzlement and dismay than dislike. The negative relationship which developed between her and these three students had repercussions for their relationships with their non-Aboriginal peers as well as for their schooling success. These repercussions underlie the use of the term ‘micro-politics’ to represent such situations in classrooms. ‘Politics’, here, refers to the allocation of precious resources, by a person in authority with power and influence, among the members of a community who possess less influence and power (Kuper and Kuper 1985). The classroom is a micro-culture and the teacher, the authority. The precious resources which the teacher has to allocate among the students will become apparent as the discussion continues.

Mrs Eyers is no ogre

Among the social repercussions, more reprimands and punishments were directed towards these students than to the others, and on many occasions for actions which, when performed by others, were not censured. In addition, the punishments were often more severe than those given to other students. The teacher rarely acknowledged their jokes or their attempts to initiate conversation with her. On many occasions also, she would double-check the validity of their statements: One day Naomi read her news story to Mrs Eyers. It read, ‘I went to the Show with Sally’. Mrs Eyers looked at Sally (Anglo) who was sitting listening on the carpet, and she asked, ‘Did she, Sally?’ Sally nodded to Mrs Eyers, smiling.

As to the academic repercussions, it seemed that Naomi, Jason and Terry lacked legitimacy as students in the eyes of their teacher. Mrs Eyers seemed to not quite believe that they were capable of highquality academic work. Invariably, when they handed in such work and she acknowledged it, it was with surprise. ‘Oh, you wrote that all by yourself, Naomi?’, the rising intonation at the end of the sentence indicating that this was a question. Naomi was also told that she was a ‘good girl’ on this occasion. This was rare, being recorded six times across the year. When such praise was forthcoming, albeit with surprise, Naomi would be delighted and would sit smiling shyly, or on occasion would exclaim proudly as she returned to her table, ‘Mrs Eyers said mine was good. She said ‘‘Good girl’’ to me.’ As a further indication of her lack of rapport or identification with Naomi, Mrs Eyers stated to me, shortly after this latter incident, that it annoyed her when Naomi ‘bragged’ in this way. This irritation that she felt towards Naomi, Jason and Terry led her to ignore them much of the time. Naomi and Jason responded to her frequent censure by pleading with her for acceptance and by often asking her if she liked their work. This irritated Mrs Eyers further and she ignored them even more. Terry responded by totally withdrawing from interactions with her, giving her the same invisibility that she gave Naomi and Jason. This led her to believe that Terry was mentally disabled and she invited a psychologist to test his intelligence. She also felt hurt by his detached demeanour, stating, ‘It was a real blow to the ego him not wanting or needing to get close to me’.

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Mrs Eyers perceived all three of these Aboriginal students to be behaviour problems. As a means of controlling them, Mrs Eyers consistently reached these students last with their work books. By having them sit beside her while she handed out the books to the rest of the class, she was keeping them within her radius of control for a greater length of time. In addition, her most common form of punishment for them was ‘time-out’, when they were placed in ‘Coventry’ with their face to the wall, or at the back of the room, or by being sent outside. In these and other ways, these students had less time ‘on task’ in each lesson for a major part of the year than the other students in the class. Mrs Eyers forbade Naomi to take her reading book home for the final seven months of the year, as punishment for not bringing her first book back to school. Hence, the only practice Naomi received in reading aloud to someone was during the two or three occasions that she read to Mrs Eyers each week, for less than three minutes each time. (Of those reading lessons videotaped, the ratio of time that Naomi spent reading to the teacher, compared with the ‘top’ student, Sarah, was 1:6.) Another punishment of Naomi for not returning her reader was to be demoted to the flashcard reading group below the one to which she had originally been assigned. Mrs Eyers stated to me, I’m putting her back; she’s not coping enough so I said I’d demote her. She’s not practising enough. I want her to realise that it’s a demotion. She’s just ... I think they’re lazy. There’s no reason in the world why she can’t bring her reader back.

Naomi had just that day, before her demotion, been commended by Mrs Eyers for her success in identifying the flashcard words, so the above assertion contradicts that commendation. Naomi’s subsequent comments to her peers indicated that she was most distressed at the demotion, understanding fully its implications, its lowering of her status in the eyes of her peers. The pedagogic error of this move was evident in that, for several weeks, Naomi was deprived of precious instructional time as she could identify every word in her new group. These punishments imposed on Naomi indicate a failure on the teacher’s part to reflect on the best solutions for

Mrs Eyers is no ogre

advancing her learning. Jason and Terry received similar treatment but the other students did not. For five-year-olds, it appears that, if the teacher laughs at your jokes, if she confides in you and shares her jokes with you, you acquire status in the eyes of your peers. Partly in this way, a few privileged students came to acquire status within the student hierarchy of the class. Conversely, Naomi, Jason and Terry came to be ostracised by their peers, particularly their non-Aboriginal peers, who at times highlighted their differences in derogatory ways. On a number of occasions, immediately after one of these students had been punished or severely reprimanded, other students would make faces at them or move away from them or say that they would not play with them. On none of these occasions had the infringement that led to the censure by the teacher affected the students who performed the ostracism. The Aboriginal students responded to their peers’ ostracism with initial begging for acceptance, offerings of food or money, resorting to angry outbursts, and then finally social withdrawal from those doing the taunting. They sought refuge in the company of the other Aboriginal students, and with ‘emotionally disturbed’, Anglo student Bruce. Although receiving many reprimands and punishments, he was rarely invisible to the teacher in the way that Naomi, Jason and Terry were. In fact, he was undergoing a behaviour-modification program under the guidance of a visiting social worker, and Mrs Eyers would give him reward tokens for ‘good behaviour’. He also was the recipient of much physical affection from his teacher, which was not available to Naomi, Jason and Terry.

Conclusions It is apparent that culturally based differences initially led Mrs Eyers to mistakenly believe that Naomi, Jason and Terry were not accepting of her. Their different dialects and ways of using language meant that she missed many of their correct academic responses to her questions. Her initially low expectations of their academic abilities were therefore not challenged. Her irritation with their appeals for clemency caused her to ignore them when they were most in need of support, as well as clouding further her perception of their academic

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progress. Their appeals to her and, on rare occasions, their anger at their peers and at her increased her negative feelings towards them to the extent that she resorted to simplistic, racist stereotyping in her efforts to rationalise what was happening and retaliated with indiscriminately harsh censure. The students were thus caught in a vicious cycle which must have considerably obstructed their opportunity for learning. During that year, Jason and Terry left to attend other schools. Over the following three years, Naomi withdrew into passivity during lesson time and, when she no longer had other Aboriginal students in her class, she took refuge in a friendship with an Anglo girl who was herself ostracised by her peers. It can be seen, therefore, that the quality of life for the three most culturally different Aboriginal students in Mrs Eyers’ class was considerably less than for all the other students. They received far less of the precious resources of teaching. It was evident that Mrs Eyers had initially low expectations of these students; that she held negative stereotypes of their home backgrounds; and that she had no knowledge of the richness of their cultural background. But Mrs Eyers was no ogre. Rather, she was an experienced teacher who enjoyed teaching and was considered by education department officials to be a good teacher. Perhaps contemporary teacher training would make a younger teacher more sensitive to cultural differences, but the more general condition is that Mrs Eyers’ judgments and responses are simply an expression of her cultural priorities, both as a member of Anglo society and as a member of a common classroom culture. Whether the latter is changing in this post-modern world where difference is supposedly celebrated is too large a question to discuss here. More relevant is that this teacher unquestioningly accepted many of the stereotypical views of Aboriginality which abound in the larger society. Mrs Eyers’ attitudes and understandings are far from unique among teachers in Australian urban schools. The provision of more Aboriginal teachers in urban schools would not only help defuse racist stereotypes, but would provide interpreters and guardians for Aboriginal students like Naomi, Jason and Terry. In addition, better pre- and in-service education is needed for teachers, emphasising the issues raised by this research.3

III Racism and Egalitarianism The ideology of egalitarianism seems to saturate Australia’s self image, and these chapters closely consider the way racism can thrive on the assertion that we are all equal. Morris analyses the everyday commonsense discourses which circulate in New South Wales, and the way they reinforce stereotypes and justify discrimination. By differentiating between formal and populist egalitarianism, he is able to reveal the way the latter actively promotes racism. Cowlishaw illustrates how the denial of racism coexists with racialising processes, so that quite different moral judgments are made of, for instance, educational subsidies for graziers’ children and for Aboriginal children, and a nurse who was implicated in a black death in custody can be repositioned as a victim. Anderson looks at the subtle forms of differentiation which allow the supposedly objective and equitable process of resource allocation to disadvantage Aboriginal health services. Pearson documents Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s startling admission in 1989 that the land at Hopevale had always belonged to the Guugu-Yimidhirr — it was just that the government had been looking after it for them. He illustrates the shift from paternal relations to formal equality which excludes difference. While recognising the limits and injustices entrenched by the Mabo decision, Pearson is seeking a politics which goes beyond that encoded in the stereotypes of ‘Uncle Tom or Malcolm X’.

chapter

8

Racism, egalitarianism and Aborigines Barry Morris

I think there will always be prejudice while ever there is the big handouts given to Aborigines. I feel the white people are the people discriminated against, not the Aboriginal people ... We see cases where Aboriginal people are given handouts for their children to attend school, and in lots of cases the money never reaches the school, it doesn’t go to their education, it goes to the local hotel and this is why until something is done about this system of this handout — I’m sure a lot of Aboriginal people don’t want these handouts — but I feel there is this handout and this abundance of money that there’ll always be prejudice and this is a sad thing. (talkback radio, Kempsey, 1980; emphasis added)

This statement was made in a talkback radio discussion on the issue of welfare funding for Aboriginal people. The theme of ‘big handouts’ and ‘this abundance of money’ being directed towards 161

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Aborigines is quite a widespread opinion amongst whites in the town of Kempsey, as it is in many other rural New South Wales towns with significant Aboriginal populations (see Cowlishaw 1988). It sustains an exaggerated view of the degree of financial assistance that individual families receive from the government. The intention underlying this public statement is to distance the speaker from any assertions of racist attitudes.1 It is argued that white people are the people discriminated against; the view of the Aborigine as ‘victim’ is inverted. Government support for Aboriginal people in the form of the ‘big handout’ violates the principle of egalitarianism inasmuch as they are treated as a ‘special interest group’. Indeed, the speaker suggests that these nonegalitarian practices are the real source of the perpetuation of white prejudice. Such assertions are a critique of existing government policy. Yet these concerns remain inextricably linked to evaluations of Aborigines’ unworthiness to receive welfare benefits, a situation only exacerbated by their receipt of ‘big handouts’. While the speaker appeals to egalitarian principles, she shifts ground to an evaluation of Aboriginal people in general which mobilises as fact a particular set of inferiorising racial typifications. Aboriginal people are depicted as incapable of handling welfare money, misdirecting its use from the intended purposes. The monies are allegedly frittered away on the most ephemeral desires, such as drinking in the local hotel, rather than directed towards education, to the acquisition of knowledge and to social betterment. This depiction of Aborigines as a ‘problem’ has always held a central place in racist reasoning.2 The positioning of Aborigines as ‘problem’ in everyday utterances continues to be important in the reproduction of racial discourses. The contemporary form of racism is similar to those of the past, with a fixation on negative evaluations and with the assumption that Aboriginal people are historically invariable, incapable of change. Despite these a priori assumptions, Aborigines are still a continual source of speculation and evaluation. Such constant speculation and exaggerated concern reflect an awareness of the diverse and countervailing discourses about Aboriginal people and also commentary by them about their own social circumstances. The ‘Aboriginal problem’ has become an authenticating discourse, bound up in processes which depoliticise its racial nature.

Racism, egalitarianism and Aborigines

Antagonism towards Aborigines is not seen as racially inspired but rather as a consequence of the ‘natural facts’ of observation, neutral and innocent. The problematised nature of racial discourse shows that the conditions of existence that characterised racial thought and practice in an earlier period no longer prevail. Instead, bureaucratic discourse and practices have now gained a pre-eminent place. Aboriginal people are located among a broad range of welfare recipients who, within the logic of policy intervention, are defined as victims of the social conditions of their existence. Support and retraining are seen to provide the basis for the individual’s return to ‘normalcy’. The shift has problematised the commonsense of the interpretive and social practices that sustained earlier racial, essentially biological, discourses and racial segregation and that led to the current reformulation, but a reformulation that still seeks to construct Aboriginal people as historically invariant. The significance of this reformulation has implications over and above the local level because it parallels analytical attempts to move beyond traditional understandings of racism. The problem of using ‘race’ and ‘racism’ as explanatory concepts for understanding human behaviour is the tendency to reify them as pre-given categories of human experience. Critiques of racism generally focus on two areas: overt individual acts of racial prejudice which have immediate consequences on the lives of individuals; and institutional forms of racism, measured in terms of the dramatic statistical differences between the Aboriginal and white populations in areas of health, education and housing.3 The racial outcomes revealed in the latter are too often reduced to the operation of the persistence of the conceptual errors of the former. These analyses of racism increasingly reduce themselves to a comfortable pedagogical form of moral critique of ‘prejudice’ or ‘discrimination’, in which the social construction of racism is displaced as a central issue. Racism is subsumed within a more general phenomenon: prejudice, or as evidence of the perpetuation of a racial consciousness which depicts the problem as an irrational response to those of different colour, physical characteristics, custom or belief. It is seen to be essentially an irrational reaction based on fear, ignorance or misconception, which may be ameliorated by

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better communication and more accurate information. In this, racism is reduced to a more or less perennial aspect of human behaviour which does not require explanation. In other words, the use of racism in this way as an explanatory concept ultimately reifies it as an ahistorical phenomenon rather than as a historical and social construct. Even Marxist approaches, where race relations are treated as social relations (and not as human behaviour), are often more concerned to explain the forms of exploitation than to address racism as a social and historical construct. Racism is reduced to an opportunist borrowing to legitimate ‘super-exploitation’ in a capitalist society where class exploitation is endemic to the structure of economic relations. Racism is subordinated as an explanatory concept to a more general understanding of capitalist relations, rather than analysed as politically constructed. The issue of race is culturally and socially constructed, and structured, directly or indirectly, by relations of power. The relations may be given expression in forms of legislative repression or discrimination, but their legitimation is premised upon establishing a hierarchy of differences: differences considered incommensurable. Racism is a socially constructed way of life which is elaborated and expressed in the mundane world. The depiction of Aboriginal people in everyday speech provides an important source for an understanding of the historical and cultural construction of ‘race’ relations. Yet racial utterances are often reduced to ephemeral, idiosyncratic expressions as personal conviction or prejudice, but lacking efficacy or immediate consequence. The initial problem here is that such an approach provides only a limited understanding of language; language is perceived as a vehicle for communicating private meanings, expressing individuals’ unique experience. This simply ignores what Eagleton has called the ‘linguistic revolution’ of this century. That is, the recognition that meaning is not simply something ‘expressed’ or ‘reflected’ in language: it is actually produced by it. It is not as though we have meanings or experiences, which we then proceed to cloak with words, we can only have meaning in the first place because we have a language to have them in ... our experience as individuals is social to the roots;

Racism, egalitarianism and Aborigines

for there can be no such thing as a private language, and to imagine a language is to imagine a whole form of social life. (1986, 60)

Language is always a matter of historical and cultural convention and is an important social practice bound up in the ways we act in and on our social world. Speech is doing something other than conveying information inasmuch as it bestows meaning and categorises experience within the world. Everyday speech is an interpretive practice constituting ‘commonsense’ or customary understandings, which are inexorably linked to political, administrative and other social processes. The ‘real’, in effect, is constituted by representational and interpretive practices. The relativising and reduction of speech to private meanings expressing unique experiences authorises and legitimises much contemporary racist expression. It is an authoritarian relativism which offers itself as the only way of seeing the world. Countervailing discourses can be dismissed on the grounds that they lack validity in terms of alleged commonsense knowledge. The certainty of commonsense prevails, that is, the existence of an external world operating independently of our interpretation. It is assumed in such statements as ‘You only have to live here to know what they’re really like’ or ‘I’ve lived with them all my life’. The ‘commonsense’ that ‘reality’ is readily at hand legitimises the constant evaluations of and representations of Aborigines as a problem. ‘Commonsense’, as Eagleton points out, assumes that ‘our way of perceiving it (the world) is the natural, self-evident one ... (and) believes itself to be historically invariable’ (1986, 108). The point is that commonsense is ideological inasmuch as it seeks to claim innocence of the production of meaning, of participation in practices which produce meaning. Historically, racism has been so intertwined with specific social processes and interpretive practices that it ceases to be recognised as a socially constructed practice (Morris 1989). In the more contentious context of the present, racist discourse seeks to canonise its own interpretive practices as ‘commonsense’ knowledge. In this, racism expressed in terms of the Aboriginal ‘problem’ is drawn from conventional meanings and understandings prevailing within the mainstream patterns of social and political life and is applied to

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Aborigines as a group. Their alleged ‘transgressions’ of mainstream social patterns gives racism its power as an emotive force and pervasive influence on the lives of many people in country towns. What is specific to the commonsense reality of racism is the social construction of notions of ontological difference and hierarchy which reduce Aboriginal lives, the possibilities of their existence, to a singular reality, attributed to an alleged invariant Aboriginal character. The issue is not what makes racist thought and practice aberrant, but what makes it acceptable and legitimate. From this, we can begin to locate many of the assertions in the opening statement in a wider historical and cultural field. The meanings drawn from the talkback radio statement above only exist contextually. It has meaning and is understood, whether we agree with the sentiments or not, because it is part of a shared cultural and historical context. The social conditions for such a statement did not exist in the past (Morris 1989). Hence, the statement itself cannot be detached from its social surroundings and reduced to an autonomous object, as it can be seen to be part of a range of equivalent meanings expressed in other everyday understanding of Aborigines in a number of contexts, which reinforce its social meaning. The conditions for the existence of contemporary discussion of Aboriginal people as ’problem’ draws its raw materials from the local social and cultural milieu. The production and circulation of knowledges in the form of inferiorising representations in everyday discourse serves to maintain social and physical distance in a racially divided community. The representations encode in themselves the tension and strained relations that form part of the social fabric of the town. The issue of race has not dissolved, but has been reconstituted in new forms that have their specificity in the present. Historically, such knowledges are shaped and influenced by wider socio-political and economic changes. In summary, the removal of repressive and discriminatory legislation in New South Wales in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the end of the politics of segregation, played an important role. Aborigines now have equal social and legal rights and access to the major institutions and services available. Previously, Aboriginal people in Kempsey had been segregated in hospitals and picture theatres, and excluded from schools, cafes, shops, hotels and the local

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swimming pool. Also, in the past two decades, major changes in the local economy have removed Aborigines from their structural niche in the economy, as pastoral and agricultural labourers. The introduction of capital- and energy-intensive production techniques has rendered labour-intensive production obsolete (Morris 1983).4 Aboriginal people now form part of the pool of the chronically unemployed. Aboriginal dependency has changed from one imposed by political and legalistic controls to one caused by the coercions of a declining rural economy. The third feature of this change has been the extension of social rights to Aborigines, and the more general expansion of the scope and the range of welfare interventions in the postwar period. There was a shift from policies which saw segregation in one institution, that is, government reserves as a site of control and pedagogical reform, to a multiplicity of sites, such as educational, welfare and legal institutions, to facilitate Aboriginal assimilation. As part of this transition, equivalent social welfare benefits, such as maternity allowances, family allowances and unemployment and sickness benefits (1957) and pensions (1959), were granted to Aboriginal people in New South Wales. Access was further facilitated by the expansion of welfare services in general.5 The forms of welfare interventions are consistent with the ethos of economic egalitarianism as they seek to guarantee a minimum standard of living, by way of employment benefits, and/or to ameliorate the social conditions of inequality, through housing and health cover. Collectively, these social changes have brought about shifts in the ideological constructions of Aborigines within the local community. The forms of racism that are prevalent gain their significance through their opposition to welfare interventions in general, but more specifically to those for Aborigines. Aboriginal people are pejoratively defined by their real or assumed place within, or relationship to, welfare services. However, the representations go further than simply asserting a social fact inasmuch as they identify Aborigines as inherently inferior, a fact, in turn, allegedly verifiable by their dependency upon social welfare and their perceived utilisation of ‘taxpayers’ money’. Aboriginal dependency upon social welfare services is asserted to reveal an inherent essence of Aboriginality.

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The criticism of state assistance rejects the view of Aborigines as ‘victim’, a view which underpins welfare interventions. The logic of the formal egalitarianism of state interventions through specific health, welfare and education programs stresses environmental factors as the source of inequality. The financial and pedagogical interventions seek to ameliorate and remedy the social conditions of individuals and families. But, at the local community level, formal egalitarianism is rejected and replaced with a populist egalitarianism which stresses that ‘all men are created equal’ and make their own way according to their own abilities. Given this egalitarian emphasis, the seemingly paradoxical acceptance of racist practices requires further explanation. The work of Dumont (1972) provides us with an understanding of the paradoxical relationship between racism and the egalitarian ethos of the modern secular or humanist state (see also Kapferer 1988).6 He argues that the pervasive notions of egalitarianism underpin important cultural principles which underlie the constructions of social difference in the modern state. The notion of biological egalitarianism, which states that everybody is born equal, provides the fundamental basis of universal citizenship. In other words, the modern state recognises a basic and universal humanity which is accorded rights and dignity. Accordingly, neither group nor class status is given social currency within the secular state, but rather the individual is made the ‘measure of all things’. The principle of biological egalitarianism means that birth, occupation, wealth and religion are not to be regarded as impediments to citizenship. Nevertheless, the citizen is recognised as the bearer of rights and responsibilities and must be assessed as capable of behaving rationally and making rational choices (Turner 1986, 7). The construction of hierarchical racial differences in the modern secular state has asserted that inferiority is fixed by nature and is, hence, unchangeable by law. The historical emergence of modern racial knowledge and practice is not coincidental, as it provided the cultural logic for the exclusion of certain categories of people from citizenship rights (Gould 1987).7 Hence, the emergence of a secular racial thought regarded Aborigines as genetically flawed, and, therefore, as incapable of participating in the rights and responsibilities bestowed upon citizens within the popular sovereignty of the modern state.

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Ascribed membership to a racial group was equivalent to exclusion from the universal conditions governing membership of the ‘family of man’. The predominance of biological racism as a social discourse was closely linked to the denial of Aboriginal equality by the state. A similar logic of exclusion can be traced to those categorised as insane, and to children, who, like those belonging to racial groups, were regarded as incapable of carrying out the rights and responsibilities of citizens. Biological racism categorised Aborigines as existing ‘outside the family of man’, as biologically inferior. These evaluations crystallised around the relationship between assessments of personhood and citizenship rights. In the racial policies of exclusion and segregation, the evaluations of Aboriginal humanness have held a central place. For the major part of this century, the knowledges of biological differences provided the racial basis for a social hierarchy associated with legislative discrimination. Dumont’s (1972) argument reveals how the pervasiveness of biological egalitarianism as a cultural principle underpinned notions of universal citizenship and elevated biological difference to the status of ontological difference. The exploration of Aboriginal humanness formed the nexus of knowledge/power which asserted ontological difference as the basis for racial custodianship by the state. Yet Dumont’s approach tends to reify the modern state as an autonomous entity rather than exploring the constitutive role of the human sciences in the process of differentiation and evaluation of social groups. He also ignores egalitarian sentiments as expressions of the cultural habits of a class-related capitalist society. There has been a shift in the criteria for racial exclusion. The reformulation of Aboriginal humanness as not fulfilling the conditions of citizenship in the present is through constructions of difference based on ostensibly cultural, rather than racial, criteria. The constructions of their humanness are in terms of an inversion of the conventional economic/moral values of the dominant society. The existence of racism is denied in the present and identified with previous institutional forms of segregation and expressions of biological inferiority. Further, the removal of these ‘artificial barriers’ to Aboriginal ‘success’ is seen to reveal their ‘true nature’.

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The removal of all discriminatory and repressive legislation in the 1960s has meant that Aborigines formally have the same rights of access to public places as whites. The rescinding of discriminatory legislation has removed one of the important elements maintaining the hegemonic unity of Europeans in racially divided towns: the political confining of Aborigines to reserves away from areas of white social life.8 The relationship between public discourses about Aboriginal inferiority and their political exclusion in an earlier period can be seen in the blunt statement by a white witness from Kempsey, appearing before the Parliamentary Committee Inquiring into Aboriginal Welfare (1967, 384): as he put it, ‘You can smell them’. Although crudely put, it was simply the reiteration of a medical discourse associated with the exclusion of Aborigines from cafes, shops and schools on the grounds of disease and contagion (Morris 1989). The decline of these political and institutional forms of racism, under the increasing weight of a liberal critique, has rendered expressions of racism based on biological determinism problematical. The extent to which such assertions of Aboriginal inferiority are now discredited can be seen in the fact that they no longer form a legitimate part of the public or political domain. The expression of such sentiments has become more a matter of private conviction or personal belief. In this, the relativising of knowledge to the realm of private meanings drawn from experience remains a powerful source of legitimation. For example, as one woman pointed out to me, after a lifetime of observation and personal contact with Aborigines (her mother had Aboriginal women in regularly to do her washing), she believed that they were intellectually inferior to whites. The major qualification made was that ‘Aborigines are not stupid though, they’re cunning, you know, like monkeys’. On another occasion, I was told that ‘full-bloods’ were all right but it was those who had become mixed with whites (generally) that were the problem. This ‘problem’ of the ‘half-caste’ was due to the ‘union’ between lower-class whites and Aborigines; as he put it, ‘they get the bad’ from whites combined with their own Aboriginality. The expression of these ‘private beliefs’ is contentious precisely because the link formed between such interpretive practices and the social, political and administrative processes has changed over time.

Racism, egalitarianism and Aborigines

For the most part, such assertions in overt discourse do not predominate in the social construction of Aborigines as ‘symbolic failures’. The major assertions of Aboriginal inferiority today relate to notions of ‘individual deviance’ associated with the conventional morality of an autonomous self-regulating individual. This is often condensed into the cliched opinion that Aboriginal people are ‘drunken, lazy and live off taxpayers’ hard-earned money’. Such overt expressions reveal that racism has undergone a number of fundamental shifts in emphasis and changes in content. In the absence of political segregation to provide concrete referents of European moral and intellectual hegemony, the ‘knowledge’ of a transhistorical Aboriginal inferiority is constructed out of their ‘deviance’ within the private or personal domains. The metaphysical scaffolding on which previous racial discourse was erected, through standardised notions of biological inferiority, seems less evident. The raw materials that provide the content for the construction of Aborigines as symbolic failures are now drawn from their perceived ‘deviant’ behaviour and their alleged ‘misuse/abuse’ of personal property. Their ‘failure’ to work is seen to indicate that ‘they are lazy’ or that ‘they just don’t want to work’ or ‘that they just don’t stick at anything’, or as an indictment of the corrosive effects of social security payments: ‘they just won’t work since they got the welfare payment’. The construction of knowledge within these negative, pejorative characterisations seeks legitimacy for an a priori notion of Aboriginality which grounds its claim to authenticity in the empirical evidence, such as of Aboriginal unemployment. The criticisms of welfare recipients are, of course, applied to whites as well. Dependency is axiomatically linked with subordinate status; this is a central tenet of populist egalitarianism. I would argue that populist egalitarian sentiments are associated with the cultural habits of a class-related capitalist culture. It is the capacity to stratify society along the functional lines of the division of labour (that is, ‘institutionalised function performance’) which has given the forms of life and cultural patterns their class-relatedness (Heller 1988, 2–4). Dependency, in this sense, may well be extended to the status of the young (pre-functional) and the aged (post-functional, to use Heller’s terms), and understood in terms of capacities developed through

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natural maturity and decline. Subordinate status is synonymous with the absence of self-autonomy. In regard to the unemployed, dependency is linked to the view that one’s status is reflected in the remuneration that one receives from the utilisation of natural abilities and skills. The notion of self-autonomy operates as a principle of individual differentiation, mystifying the social and historical conditions of existence by reducing them to ‘natural’ individual attributes. Populist egalitarianism does not deny hierarchy, but constitutes it as natural. As everyone is born equal, social hierarchy is established through the use of natural skills and abilities. Criticism of the unemployed is part of a class-related discourse which links welfare assistance with notions of a loss of self-motivation and of self-respect for those on government ‘handouts’. Such assertions are part of a general stigma attached to recipients of welfare payments which associates such assistance with individual deviance. However, in the case of European ‘dole bludgers’, dependency is regarded as an individual aberration, atypical of Europeans in general. Such ‘deviant’ behaviour by Aborigines has been generally considered to have a uniformity and consistency which pervaded the whole Aboriginal community: the absence of self-motivation and self-respect is seen as innate. The absence of self-autonomy here operates as a principle defining group differentiation, which similarly mystifies the social and economic conditions of Aboriginal existence by reducing them to ‘natural’ attributes. Ontological difference, mobilised as a vehicle for racism, is not expressed in terms of genetic or phenotypical traits, but rather as deviance from the conventional moral values encoded in a productionist ethos. Difference is, nevertheless, ascribed as ontological and asserted as the basis for hierarchy. Such assertions, obviously, are not applied to Europeans. As an Aboriginal woman put it, ‘If a whitefella does something wrong, he’s wrong, (but) if a blackfella does something wrong, we’re all wrong’. As many Aboriginal people are aware, the chronic unemployment in their community has now been transformed into a general ahistorical characteristic of Aborigines. The evaluation and understanding of Aborigines is as a group in which selective elements are

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utilised to ascribe general characteristics which exist outside of time and place. Other empirical sources for European evaluation are provided by a continual focus on Aboriginal gambling and drinking. A public display of drunkenness usually provides a reference point for the perceived high incidence of drinking. More often, however, the primary criticism is that most of the money received from government ‘handouts’, as they are inevitably called, only goes to the local pub or TAB (state government betting agency). It was pointed out to me that, whereas ‘most whites would only have small bets, Aborigines place bets in $50 notes’. Similarly, it was suggested that if I really wanted to research Aborigines, I should sit on the library steps opposite the pub that they frequented and count how many went in. Then, I was assured, I would know what they are really like. What is explicit in these characterisations of Aborigines is that they are wasteful and indulgent and misusing taxpayers’ money. But, more than this, such depictions of ‘deviant’ personal behaviours underpin an ontological view of Aborigines as irrational beings who are incapable of budgeting their welfare money. They are, in effect, beings who cannot calculate. Such characterisations suggest that Aboriginal people exist primarily through sensations, that is, through the satisfaction of desires, and that that is all they are capable of doing. There is a unity here linking the assertions that Aboriginal people are incapable of work, are drunks and are spendthrift gamblers. Such representations are derived from an inversion of the conventional moral values embedded in the productionist ethos of a capitalist culture. It is through these cultural lenses that Aborigines are constructed as symbolic failures. Central to this are the cultural habits associated with the notion of work. It is through work that individuals become independent entities, capable of controlling their own existence. Furthermore, work is a regular, disciplined and purposeful activity which stands in direct contrast to the consequences of receiving ‘handouts’, considered to be money for doing nothing. Conventional attitudes about work are not simply instrumental values relating to the satisfaction of wants, but are associated with moral values of acting rationally and responsibly. This self-conscious rational individual, an individual with conscious

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purposes, one who consciously shapes his or her own existence, is juxtaposed against the irregular and undisciplined group behaviour of Aborigines whose unrestrained desire seeks to satisfy only the most ephemeral and immediate wants. In terms of consumption, personal deviance is associated with the failure to comply with cultural notions of deferred gratification. Inability to control desire is contrasted with a more restrained and calculative form of pleasure, such as the ‘small bet’, which implies the harnessing of desire to reason. Notions of dignity and self-esteem are seen here to be maintained through a continual opposition to the fragmenting tendencies of desire and impulse. A similar unity in the evaluation of Aborigines by Europeans is found in the characterisations of Aboriginal housing, characterisations which also build up a picture of Aborigines as irrational beings who misuse and abuse their property and possessions. Perhaps the most striking expression of this is encapsulated in an account of an Aboriginal family who, allegedly, had chopped a large hole in the floor of their house so that they could drop all their rubbish and food scraps through to the pigs which lived under the house. Chicken wire had been run around the foundations to enclose the pigs. The themes of abuse of personal possessions, and the unhygienic and polluting properties of pigs and rubbish, are self-evident. But what is also important is the satirisation of Aboriginal rationality as primitive or naive, which is posited in the inappropriate use and violation of private space. The critique embodied in this anecdote was founded on a clear-cut demarcation of inside/outside space, a norm which the Aborigines were regarded to have violated: they had, in primitive and irrational style, privatised elements of outside space. What is signified here is the belief that Aboriginal people are incapable of understanding the most rudimentary cultural codes associated with domestic life. The commitment to cultural difference here is a commitment to a hierarchical ranking between Aborigines and whites in the town. The Aborigine remains a racial entity, embodied as difference expressed through ‘culture’ and in ‘domestic/family life’. In a world that has changed, the Aborigine remains unchanged. The distinguishing feature of such representations is their claim to legitimacy through ‘empirical verification’. Such claims are

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made on the grounds of personal experience, observation, or the communicated personal experience of others. If the pejorative characterisations are inaccurate, it does not necessarily follow that they are illusory. The raw materials are drawn from the present and are structurally reinforced by the Aborigines’ present circumstances. Both the selection of elements and the interpretation are mystified by such ‘commonsense’ verifications. The connection between empirical evidence, inaccuracy and illusion can be made apparent in the degree of welfare assistance ascribed to Aborigines. Aboriginal people in Kempsey receive the same range of welfare payments and pensions as do members of the European community, except in the case of a secondary school allowance for Aboriginal children. Yet the level of ‘handouts’ was seen by local Europeans to be far in excess of those available to Europeans. It was pointed out to me with confidence, for example, that if Aboriginal people abused their homes or their cars, the government would pay for the repairs. This ‘evidence’ was obtained from those who serviced the cars and who inferred it from the fact that Aborigines paid by government cheque. No such government policy has ever existed and, in fact, they were cashing their social security benefits. Similarly, it was assumed that the government paid for financial instalments on houses, cars, television sets and so on. Consistent with this was the view expressed that ‘Aborigines received a cheque every second day for some form of allowance’ (talkback radio, Kempsey, 1980). Such exaggerated claims could be said to demonstrate the social distance between Aboriginal people and the rest of the community. I would argue, however, that this is not a matter of ignorance but that such ‘inaccuracies’ are ideological statements of Aboriginal inferiority. The structuring of this racial discourse is grounded in an opposition to those points of bureaucratic intervention associated with formal egalitarianism. The expressions of racism assert an inherent Aboriginal essence, an inherent inferiority as the source of social and economic inequality and, hence, their welfare dependency. They reject the view of Aboriginal people as victims of historical forces and social and economic conditions of existence as the source of inequality. Within the context of the negative perception of welfare, the assertions of such overwhelming welfare

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dependency continually act to provide a symbolic index of the degree of Aboriginal inferiority and confirm their incapacity to manage and control their own affairs. What has emerged is a form of racism in which ontological difference is constructed out of alleged personal deviant behaviours, misuse/abuse of property and the levels of welfare dependency. Aboriginal people continue to be constructed as historically invariable and their social circumstances reduced to the realm of the natural and inevitable. It follows from this that the political efficacy of government policies is denied as well as the accompanying objectifications of Aborigines as ‘victim’. Despite the invisibility of ‘race’ in public discourse, the Aborigine remains an eternal ‘problem’, insensitive to ethics, the negation of values. Such typifications sustain the hegemonic unity of whites in the community of a racially divided town. The abolition of judicial forms of racial discrimination from the domain of the political state has not abolished racism nor freed Aboriginal people from inequality.

chapter

9

Where is racism? Gillian Cowlishaw

A poster was produced by the Bourke Council in 1988 which announced that ‘Drinking alcohol on streets or footpaths is now against the law in Bourke’. A similar local government ordinance has been enacted in several other towns. Although applied universally, the edict is clearly directed against Aboriginal people because it is mainly they who drink on the streets. However, the poster is not racist, either in law or in local rhetoric, as it is directed towards the behaviour of individuals generally rather than a category of people identified by race. The notion that certain behaviours can be declared offensive and made illegal is fundamental to the practice of an undeclared racism. The use of local ordinances provides the basis for the criminalisation of Aboriginal activities and mechanisms for control. When the Human Rights Commission funded a study of racism in 1982, they directed the researcher to identify overt racist practices, such as the exclusion of Aboriginal people from pubs or discrimination in relation to jobs and housing. But the people of the 177

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targeted town did not display their discriminatory practices in these ways and denied that they were racially prejudiced. Later, in studying ‘racist violence’, the Human Rights Commission continued to rely on some explicit enunciation of a racist motivation for the violence. Racism is considered as specific, extreme and eradicable social practice, and its identification depends on the affirmation of racial categories by those practising racism. My argument is that both elements of this definition are misleading. Racism rather, in the contemporary context, is organically connected to processes which have a stated purpose of achieving social equity. Thus, practices which support racism are more commonly associated with the denial of racist beliefs than with the expression of racial hostility because essentialising racial categories are invoked and reproduced in various bureaucratic and institutional forums, even where the stated intention is to ameliorate racial inequality. We are all equal before the law. Schooling is free, secular and compulsory. Discrimination on the grounds of race is forbidden both in the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act (1975) and the NSW Anti-discrimination Act (1977).1 This explicitly egalitarian discourse would seem to outlaw the practice of racism. Imperfections in the practices of these ideals may be widely recognised, but their place in the complacent discourse about the nature of Australian society is not. These notions of equality, meaning sameness, operate to block any consideration of how difference can be accommodated in a liberal democratic society. That is, both establishment and popular egalitarian discourse silence the kind of dissent which is embedded in cultural differences. Variation remains aberrant, deviant or quaint. Unequal treatment is declared immoral and anti-discrimination legislation passed, leaving untouched the ubiquitous and mundane forms of injustice and inequity that resonate with cultural difference. For Aborigines, racial inequality is a normal part of Australian society.2 Racism can flourish as a hidden discourse because it is hidden behind the assertion of equality which assumes similarity. Our institutions assume a cultural homogeneity in the nation. The systematic cultural differences which are part of a structural segmentation of the society are not affirmed by liberal anti-racist discourse, in part probably because of a fear of legitimising

Where is racism?

inequality. The law, schooling and other institutions continue to impact on different groups differently, without any critical scrutiny of how this occurs. That is, there is no legal pluralism in the law, no educational pluralism in the schools and discrimination is quite legitimate if on the grounds of behaviour rather than race. Systematic cultural difference may be celebrated in literary or artistic contexts, and romanticised by the multicultural myth-makers, but in the search for the true essence of Australianness there is little room for the legitimation of group differences. Overt vilification of racial or cultural difference takes place in private sites separate from liberal discourse and can be considered a matter of personal opinion or aberrant attitudes. Yet such hatred of those who are not us is organically linked with the discourse about equality. First let me set the site of this analysis. Geographically it is located in rural Australia where Aborigines form a distinct and major part of the population, and where notions of distance and isolation frame the sense of identity of the citizens.3 Ideologically it is sited where the respectable surface of a population that claims to be a community excludes many of those who are not respectable, but welcomes the martyrs to distance, who service the community. Sociologically I am concerned with the way the steamy and emotional, the violent and angry contrast with and yet reinforce the sweet reason of bureaucratic rationality. ‘I never look at a person’s colour’; ‘There’s no racism in this town’; ‘The law is the same for everyone’. It is difficult for comfortable urban dwellers to imagine how hypocritical these phrases, often repeated in the construction of rural respectability, are to the Aboriginal population. It is difficult also for those working in the bureaucracy and government institutions to see that such statements continue to conceal and deny the intense awareness of colour, the contempt experienced by Aboriginal people and the disproportional number of Aborigines in custody.4 The racial division is deeply embedded in the history of many Australian country towns and in the understanding of the residents (Kamien 1978; Cowlishaw 1988; Myers 1988; Morris 1989). But, also, those rural areas which are considered undesirable are serviced by a circulating group of nomadic professionals, usually from urban backgrounds, pursuing their own career trajectories. Most of the

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medical staff, bank managers, school teachers, police and welfare personel arrive as outsiders and leave after a number of years. Despite their self-identification with a different socio-economic milieu, the ideological baggage which these people bring with them, though explicitly anti-racist in the main, is not necessarily in conflict with the major priorities of those who rule racially divided towns. The role of this powerful group is ignored in the simplistic explanation of racism as caused by ignorant, discriminatory and prejudiced individuals. To understand the reproduction of racism in the contemporary context, links must be recognised between liberal, anti-racist discourse and racist practice. One important link is the way in which processes that are grossly inequitable are normalised by means of their positioning within different logical frameworks.

Sister Sophia’s sacrifice? The link between local hostility to Aborigines, or rather to some Aborigines’ behaviour, and the urban liberals who deny racist sentiments, can be illustrated in the case of what Sydney Morning Herald journalist Ben Hills (1989) called ‘The Sacrifice of Sister Sophia’. Hills detailed the way in which the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, in trying to find the truth about the death of a young Aboriginal man in Wilcannia, focused on the decision of the 26-year-old nurse, after consulting with the matron and a doctor, to send Mark Quayle to the police station rather than treat him at the hospital. He was suffering from hallucinations brought about by alcohol withdrawal, the consequence of going ‘cold turkey’. He was left alone in a cell and found hanged the next morning. The journalist mentions that nine barristers were crowded into a little courtroom in Wilcannia to determine who was to blame for this death. Given the past lack of accountability or even interest in such matters, this is indeed remarkable. But the article interprets this confluence of legal experts as part of an exaggerated search for a culprit, an overzealous reaction by external bureaucratic agencies, outsiders ignorant of the local conditions of isolation and tension. Hills shows no interest in the past or in the context of these events.

Where is racism?

Rather, he arouses sympathy for Sophia, the young nurse in an isolated, difficult town, caught up in a legal enquiry intent on apportioning blame. The journalist implies that no-one was to blame for Mark Quayle’s death, not even those responsible for the nurse’s lack of training in dealing with the local problem of alcoholism. Readers are invited to ‘look forward to the day when Sophia finally gets a bit of justice’ (Hills 1989). What is remarkable about the article is that it does arouse sympathy for the young woman whose work suddenly came under intense scrutiny by people who knew nothing of the local social dynamics. It is obvious that nurses in country hospitals, as well as others whose jobs involve providing services, see Aborigines as constituting a problem for their normal practices. The hospital administration, the doctors and the wider society recognise but do not provide any solution to this problem. Ultimately Sophia was suspended by the Nurses Board for six months for unprofessional practice. The journalist and Sophia herself appear unaware that Aboriginal people are caught up in more lethal and entrenched forms of injustice than any nurse could experience, but such a formulation cannot be articulated. The question of race is erased; the Aboriginal ‘problem’ that obsesses the respectable residents is rendered invisible. The anger, hatred and denigration of Aborigines which dominates the rhetoric of towns such as Wilcannia cannot be spoken of. The despair and depression experienced by young men like Mark Quayle is not discussed. But if such righteous anger can be generated by the scapegoating of Sophia, why is it that there is not greater outrage at the daily and mundane forms of humiliation which are the constant fare of many Aboriginal people? Perhaps the responsibility for the misery and deaths in custody could be identified by asking how it is that Aborigines routinely experience shame and fear at the hands of many ordinary decent citizens who nonetheless claim complete innocence of any collaboration in the death of Mark Quayle. The ongoing racial inequality that is embedded in the life of these communities enters the dominant discourse only as creating specific problems for decent white citizens, for normal practices and for egalitarian institutions. With no source of explanation for the

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recalcitrance of Aborigines in relation to schools, hospitals and other such services, the transitory professionals can only blame the Aborigines. Perhaps an investigative journalist could have asked why this inquiry by the Royal Commission was not the most appropriate way to get at the truth about Mark Quayle’s death. Perhaps a more significant truth could be found were there to be legitimacy and respect accorded to Aborigines’ accounts of their troubles. For many Aboriginal people, the experience of Mark Quayle would be symptomatic of the systematic neglect and disrespect accorded them by the white community. ‘They don’t want us there’, explained one western New South Wales man about the hospital. The naming of Sister Sophia’s sacrifice is really symbolic of the fact that, in the white community, it is regarded as outrageous that a white person should be held responsible for the death of an Aboriginal person. As with many other journalists’ reports about ‘racial tension’, it proved too difficult for Hills to penetrate beyond the discourse of the white man’s burden.

Isolation and race Another source of implicit racism is in the evaluation of bureaucratic services and support from the public coffers which is provided for Aborigines and for whites. Equality of opportunity in education is an essential foundation of the liberal egalitarian strategy for achieving social justice. Some educational assistance for secondary schooling has been available to the severely financially disadvantaged for many years. In rural areas two kinds of educational assistance are provided by governments. One is to assist the wealthiest section of the community, the graziers,5 and the other to assist the poorest, the Aborigines. The rationale for these two subsidies is couched in somewhat different terms, and the local understanding of them is very different, as are the lobby groups involved. The Isolated Children’s Parents Association (ICPA) was formed in 1972 in Bourke in the same year that the Aboriginal Secondary Grant was instituted. Within a year the ICPA became an Australia-wide organisation under the aegis of the Livestock and Grain Producers

Where is racism?

Association (LGPA), and had gained substantial support for their children’s education in the form of Isolated Children’s Assistance (ICA). Their argument is simple. Children of isolated families should not suffer educationally because their parents are involved in rural industry. There is a sub-text which says that this industry and the people involved in it are the backbone of the country.6 Their importance is asserted rather than argued, and the years when the industry is not productive — years of drought, flood or low prices — strengthen rather than weaken the arguments for subsidies. The ICPA promulgates its views by way of regular press releases, a glossy magazine called Pedals, and direct lobbying of MPs by letter, phone, deputation and petition. They support their case with moral argument and facts and figures, thus indicating the advantages of the kind of private boarding-school education they are claiming is their children’s right. They coordinate their strategy at annual conferences which have been held in Perth, Alice Springs, Darwin and other centres since their inauguration. Unlike the ICPA, the Aboriginal Education Consultative Groups (AECGs) struggled in the 1970s to form themselves as local branches of the national and state Aboriginal education bodies, which were dedicated to reversing the longstanding severe educational disadvantages they had suffered. The introduction in 1972 of the Aboriginal Secondary Grant (ABSEC) was a great victory for people with few of the resources and lobbying skills displayed by the ICPA. Between 1972 and 1987 ABSEC was available to all Aboriginal secondary students without a means test (Watts 1982, 19). It soon became known in rural towns as The Grant and was the object of a series of denigrating and resentful phrasings, such as ‘They get paid to go to school, you know’. The rough calculation (Table 4) in one area in western New South Wales shows that 95 Aboriginal children in the town received about $85,500 in educational assistance, whereas 62 isolated children who were boarding away received about $90,000. The table includes the 25 Aboriginal students who were at boarding school, receiving support similar to the highest level of isolated children’s funding. The subsidies in 1983 were as follows:

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184 Race Matters Table 1: Aboriginal Secondary Grants (ABSEC) Book & clothing allowance* Fortnightly (during term) Junior secondary Senior secondary Annually Junior Senior

$330 $400

Living allowance

Student allowance

$17.00 $24.41

$3 $6

$374 $537

$66 $132

Total annual allowance: Junior $770 Senior $1069 * These students are not required to pay school fees, fees for excursions or for equipment. Note: There is no assistance provided for primary school children on the basis of their being Aboriginal. Source: Commonwealth Education Department

Table 2: Isolated Children’s Assistance (ICA) annual allowances Basic allowance

Maximum additional allowance

Primary

$866

$1066

Junior secondary

$866

$1266

Senior secondary

$866

$1537

Note: The basic allowance is not means-tested; the additional allowance is, and is awarded proportional to income.7 Source: Commonwealth Education Department

Table 3: Total number of recipients in New South Wales Isolated Children’s Assistance Aboriginal Secondary Grants

4355 6558

Sources: Isolated Children’s Parents Association and Aboriginal Education Consultative Group

Where is racism? Table 4: Estimate of education allowance paid in the Bourke district in 1983* Isolated children

Aboriginal children

Number

62

95 + 25 boarding away = 120

Total subsidies

$89,900

$104,490

Per child

$1450

$870.70

* No information was available giving the number of recipients in each category or the extent of their additional allowances. An average estimate of $584 was used on the basis of my understanding of western district pastoral finances. Sources: Commonwealth Education Department, Isolated Children’s Parents Association and Aboriginal Education Consultative Group

The fate of the grants over the years reflects the power of the beneficiaries as well as the wider ideological forms which normalise them. Since 1983 spending on Aboriginal education has been reduced while the subsidies for isolated children have increased. The amount of ABSEC has not increased, a means test is now applied and more stringent requirements have been imposed for boarding school assistance. These changes appear to be the result of lobbying by those for whom one form of assistance provides equity and the other is a waste of taxpayers’ money. The various differences between ABSEC and the ICA can be related to the search for racism. My argument does not concern the educational appropriateness or effectiveness of The Grant or of the ICA, but rather the way in which these two different forms of subsidy are authorised and re-interpreted through meanings associated with their recipients. Why is The Grant discussed with such contemptuous anger while the Isolated Children’s Assistance does not appear in the common daily discussions in a rural area where both provide substantial cash subsidies? Why is it that one is seen as pandering to a special interest group, and as a site of controversy where all have the right to pronounce an opinion, while the other is rarely discussed, when both are funded by similar welfare mechanisms? There are a number of rational explanations for the different spaces these two educational grants occupy in local discourse as well as in the realms of policy formation. The pastoral industry is the only really productive industry in the region (Cowlishaw 1988, 199–200)

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and, according to those involved, this level of production deserves support and gratitude in the form of government aid. Thus, subsidies and concessions to the pastoral industry have been regarded as a right rather than a problem. Indirect infrastructural subsidies, such as roads and railways, have always been provided by the state or federal governments, as have the police and courts that protect the property of those that have it from others that want it. The assistance to people who cannot sell their labour is also widespread but is legitimated in very different terms and advocated in very different forums. When this research was conducted in the mid-1980s, 37.5 per cent of the Bourke population who were over 15 years of age depended on the Department of Social Security for their income, either from unemployment or sickness benefits or from aged, invalid, widow or supporting parent’s pensions. Such assistance is advocated on the basis of need and often entails a discourse of victimology. To depend on ‘welfare’ involves the recipients in the understanding that they are inferior to those whose industry is encouraged through ‘subsidy’. The grant to subsidise the private school education of isolated children represents a radical departure from these conventions of economic egalitarianism associated with welfare subsidies which seek a limited redistribution of money by the state to guarantee a minimum standard of living. The fact that government assistance to graziers does not increase the cash flow in the towns, whereas virtually all of the money supporting Aboriginal education is spent there, might be expected to increase the acceptability of The Grant to the chamber of commerce and shire council members who dominate local orthodoxy. However, pecuniary interests are never called upon in this context, although they are a common part of local rhetoric about the unfairness of governments to rural areas. The issue of race, therefore, overrides that of commercial interest. It appears that a breach in the righteous and racist discourse is feared more than the potential loss of an important source of income. Resentment by other pupils, parents and teachers is caused by the unintended, apparent inequity created by ABSEC. For instance, white children sometimes have trouble getting money for excursions or equipment, while Aboriginal children sometimes do not want to go on the excursion or make use of the equipment which is provided

Where is racism?

free. Moreover, the fact that The Grant does not create obedient and grateful pupils but sometimes produces increased bitterness in the recipients arouses intense anger among the staff.8 The stigma attached to welfare dependence is markedly absent from government assistance to those who have the most authoritative voices in the rural community, and the difference in visibility of these two educational subsidies is part of this. Any scrutiny and surveillance of subsidies for pastoralists takes place in city-based government offices; ABSEC is administered from an office in country towns and often paid through the school. My own research illustrates this difference in that the school students who benefit from the ICA grants were not available for the kind of research that the above statements about ABSEC are based on. The members of the ICPA and their children stand in a very different relationship to the private schools they attend than do the locals to their school. A further factor is the eligibility criteria: in the one case, it is on the basis of distance and in the other, on the basis of race.9

Distance as deprivation It is usual for the professionals who service these towns to be rewarded in some way for taking jobs in what are regarded as isolated, outback communities. The ‘Aboriginal problem’ is just another factor supporting the notion that subsidised housing, faster promotion and choice of future jobs is a just reward for efforts in these areas. The T-shirt put out by the police in Walgett, saying ‘I survived Walgett’, sums up the notion of being isolated, with the additional connotation of being under attack. The assisting of isolated children reinforces the idea that the martyrs to distance deserve special consideration. A rather expensive attempt to provide boarding facilities in Bourke for isolated children provides an interesting example of how such special considerations can lead to what is surely a ‘waste of taxpayers’ money’. In response to LGPA lobbying, the Commonwealth Department of Education built a hostel in Bourke so that isolated children could board there and attend the local high school. It was argued that the cost to the department would be offset against considerable savings on the boarding subsidy and travel expenses.

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Country students could go home more often. These advantages seem to have been insufficient to ensure the hostel’s survival and it closed after a few years due to lack of demand. The parents claim that supervision at the hostel was inadequate for their children’s protection. Costs to parents were really not very different from expensive city schools, given the government subsidies. Less loudly proclaimed was the conviction that the local state school could not possibly provide as good an education as a private boarding school and, in terms of what many of these parents expect from the ‘hidden curriculum’, this is no doubt true.10 There was no outraged railing against graziers, their children or the government about this welfare measure. ‘Everyone has the right to an education.’ Such rhetoric is common to the ICPA and the AECG, but their political styles in achieving educational assistance are very different. The right is available on different terms for these two groups. Cash handouts to those who attend exclusive boarding schools subsidise the reproduction of a cultural elite. Thus, the search for racism shows us that the affirmation of equal rights can disguise the legitimation of privilege, and we see the double victimisation of those who have never had educational equity. The victims of these normal processes in our society are unable to articulate their sense of injustice in legitimate forums. The push for justice and equity for Sister Sophia and for isolated children reduce the injustice and inequity routinely experienced by Aboriginal people to a background issue. The Aborigines’ needs are identified as a welfare matter and cannot be addressed in the same terms as the ‘deprivation’ caused by isolation; in fact, Aborigines are part of the difficulties posed by isolation, a historical irony indeed. The transient professionals seem blinded by liberal discourse to the processes which reproduce not only structural inequalities but virulent anger at the victims. Even avowed anti-racists have no powerful words with which to mount an argument in favour of The Grant or ‘drinking on the street’. Their defences only serve to reinforce Aborigines’ status as historical victims, needing government assistance, and do not make any comparison with the ICA. Emphasis on equality of opportunity allows graziers to demand that the deprivation associated with isolation be righted

Where is racism?

with subsidies which often assist expensive private schooling. Nurses and other professionals in country areas want to be recognised as already sacrificial victims to rural problems, simply by working there. They must not be expected to right historical wrongs. These then are the sites where today the struggles of an undeclared racism are manifested and perpetuated by selective focus on justice and equity. The struggles over racial inequality are no longer about segregation and exclusion, as they were in the past, but are fought out in a number of public arenas and institutions. Bureaucratic and legal processes are a constant site of contention because they perform a significant role in the control and regulation of the Aboriginal population.

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10

The ethics of the allocation of health resources Ian Anderson

Firstly, the [A]borigines receive all health benefits available to the community in general, and in many cases, considerably more so, for as a group they do not hesitate to disturb Practitioners at any hour of the day or night, often for the most trivial things ... For past eleven years we have treated this segment of [the] community at our clinic entirely without monetary reward and with never a word of thanks or recognition ... I appeal to you, if you have any influence on the Aborigines Board do not saddle us with any more Aborigines, or we will reach the unhappy state where it will be a full time occupation attending to their wants, and private patients will have to seek attention elsewhere. (Letter to Aborigines Welfare Board, Victoria, 29 November 1965) They do have a distinctive body aroma to white people which is unfortunate as it can render a waiting room quite uncomfortable — although any unclean person is even less pleasant ...

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I do think of them as ‘pests’ by and large because the 5% of [A]boriginal patients would account for perhaps 50% of late night calls and week-end work ... (Letter to Aborigines Welfare Board, Victoria, 28 September 1966)

Often when we think about racism, or processes of discrimination, it is attitudes such as those expressed by the above medical practitioners that first come to mind. Historically, medical practitioners have held a range of views about Aboriginal people — from the frankly derogatory, to expressions of support and empathy. Although the doctor–patient relationship is a key site in the health system through which resource allocation occurs, my intention here is to explore the systemic qualities of discrimination and to demonstrate the complexity of issues one must consider in order to develop strategies to enhance the access of Aboriginal people to health resources. Racist and paternalistic attitudes such as those quoted above have been a key issue driving the Aboriginal health movement. Moral values and resource allocation cannot be isolated from the social interactions through which these are realised. In this sense, bigotry alone is not the only disadvantage Aboriginal people encounter. There are other characteristics of the clinical process that are potential barriers to equity of access to health resources. In exploring the nature of these issues, I would like to focus on the process of allocating therapies for end-stage kidney disease. However, this perspective is not limited to the doctor–patient interaction; it is important to consider these issues in a more global context, taking into account the overall quality of Aboriginal experience within the health system.

Ethics and Aboriginal people I am suspicious of arguments that simply assert the truth or otherwise of particular moral principles. My misgivings arise in part because many people, such as the authors of my introductory extracts, would argue that they are acting morally in denying Aboriginal people access to resources. ‘Moral’ behaviour has caused much Aboriginal suffering over the last 200 years. For many, the moral wisdom of colonisation, supported by the idea of terra nullius,

The ethics of the allocation of health resources

clearly demonstrates how moral values can be relativised through relations of power. In another context, some authors have argued that rewarded kidney donations from living non-related donors may be acceptable in some socio-cultural and economic milieus but not in others (Dossetor and Manickavel 1991). These instances illustrate how the ‘truth’ of moral principles may be relative to the global social and historical context in which they are formed. If we take the view that the values which underlie resource distribution are formed within particular socio-historical circumstances, it is important to analyse the social processes through which allocationary decisions are made. Rather than dissecting moral principles in a vacuum, my interest is in how people participate in making ethical decisions. However, in emphasising the processual character of ethics, I am not arguing for a retreat from judgment. Clearly, in the distribution of scarce resources, some judgment is required, otherwise we risk wasting resources. Within such processes, Aboriginal people should be in a position to articulate their sense of health rights and expect the health system to be responsive to this. A just system of resource allocation would facilitate the realisation of their rights, as defined by them, through a process that maximises individual and collective autonomy (see, for example, Charlesworth 1992). For this reason, it is important to clarify the nature of those barriers which may be embedded within allocationary processes. This should provide a basis for the development of strategies that ensure that Aboriginal values or needs are accounted for in the formulations of distributive principles, through a decision-making process that is in itself empowering to Aboriginal people.

Kidney disease and Aboriginal people Empirical data suggest that kidney disease is comparatively more common in Aboriginal people than in the non-Aboriginal community. In South Australia a survey of 3100 Aboriginal people used persistent elevation of blood urea and creatinine as diagnostic of renal disease. On this basis the rate of renal disease was estimated to be 4500 per million people, approximately ten times higher than in the non-Aboriginal population (Aboriginal Health

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Organisation nd, 71–72). Analysis of combined data from South Australia and the Northern Territory demonstrated that the prevalence of end-stage renal failure amongst Aboriginal people was seven times that of all Australians (Pugsley 1989, 94). Data assembled by the Australian and New Zealand Dialysis and Transplant Registry estimated, for the period 1987–89, that the rate at which Aboriginal people commenced treatment for enstage renal failure was three times higher than that for all Australians (AHTAC 1992, 5). Although treatment data reflect not only disease prevalence, but also patterns of health systems utilisation, it does demonstrate a greater demand for treatment programs by Aboriginal people. The management of end-stage renal disease is divided between two modality choices: dialysis (in all its forms) or kidney transplantation. In some cases, such as with concurrent terminal illness or extreme disability, active treatment may not be pursued. The following comment was made by the Australian and New Zealand Dialysis and Transplant Registry: It is quite reasonable to assume that the real incidence of severe renal failure in most ‘outback’ areas is higher than the reported figures. For a variety of reasons such as geography, lack of diagnosis, perception of the merit of such treatment amongst both Aboriginal and Caucasoid communities, some patients with renal failure will not be identified, or be offered, or accept treatment. The emotional and physical dislocation involved for those living in remote areas when having to move to a larger centre can easily be understood. Provision of treatment where they live will require more financial support, health care personnel, and commitment by the affected individual than often is available. (Disney 1992, 101)

Of the treatments, dialysis is the more widely available and provides an acceptable alternative to renal transplant. However, for suitable patients, transplantation has significant advantages over dialysis (AHTAC 1992, 8–9). Cadaveric kidneys (those taken from deceased donors) are a scarce resource, allocation of which occurs through clinical processes. Nevertheless, in Australia as a whole, there are slightly more

The ethics of the allocation of health resources

transplant patients than dialysis patients. For Aboriginal people (during the period 1981–91), the converse is true: a significant majority is dialysis-dependent (Disney 1992, 104). This different distribution between types of treatment may reflect factors such as the relative incidence of kidney failure and the relative survival of transplant patients. Even though Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal transplantation rates are similar (relative to the number of patients on dialysis), it would be necessary for Aboriginal people to have greater access to transplant services in order to achieve equity in the distribution of these health resources. This proposition presupposes, however, that renal transplantation actually does offer significant benefits to Aboriginal patients, an issue I will return to after considering some of the barriers to access to transplant services. In the clinical context, such barriers include the difficulties in procuring Aboriginal kidneys, as well as the inequities that arise in the distribution of cadaveric kidneys to patients with end-stage renal disease. For the purposes of this discussion I intend to confine my comments to the processes through which kidneys are allocated. Empirical investigation into issues relating to the treatment of Aboriginal people with end-stage renal disease is fairly preliminary. Consequently, many of the comments that follow should be read as tentative and hypothetical. Allocative criteria are used to determine which patients may be suitable for transplant, as well as matching kidneys, when they become available, to particular patients. These criteria can be divided into the following: medical, psychosocial and redistributive. The relative weighting of different criteria varies between programs, and, whilst some allocative criteria may be explicit, others may be implicitly submerged within the clinical process. Medical criteria such as age or general medical condition (such as the existence of other diseases, like diabetes) have been used to exclude some patients from transplant programs. The relative merits of these criteria have been contested, however. Some analysts have argued that there is no convincing reason for excluding patients over the age of 60 from transplant programs. This argument took into account both patient mortality and graft survival (Theil 1991). The existence of some medical conditions, such as diabetes and some

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forms of cardiac failure, has also been challenged as an appropriate basis for exclusion. (Dossetor 1991, 337; Theil 1991, 360). Given the significant level of chronic disease in the Aboriginal community, it is likely that coexistent illness may be one factor excluding them from transplant programs. It is therefore important that the validity of these medical criteria be investigated in order to ensure that a community already overburdened with illness is not unnecessarily denied access to treatment resources. One of the key biomedical criteria used in allocating kidneys is the closeness of the match between the donor kidney and the patient’s immune system, determined through a process called HLA (human leucocyte antigen) matching. In essence, the closeness of the match is graded. Kidneys are allocated on the basis of this match, as it has been observed that the probability of longterm survival of the graft is greater with a closer HLA match. The value of matching has been challenged, however (Theil 1991), which generated some controversy, with empirical data being mobilised in support of the operation of allocationary systems based on HLA matching (Opelz and Wujciak 1991). Others, whilst recognising the utility of the matching process, take the view that it is ‘but one of several relevant factors in graft allocation’ (Albrechtsen 1991, 409). What is significant is that HLA matching does discriminate against racial minority groups when most donor kidneys come from the racial majority (Lazda and Blaesing 1989). HLA antigens are proteins which coat blood cells. They are genetically inherited and distributed differently in different populations. Consequently, if most potential donor kidneys come from a population with a different distribution of HLA proteins, it is likely that there will be someone in the majority population who will be a better match. If the difference is extreme (such as a mismatch of 0 versus a mismatch of 6), there is a marked difference in the probability of graft survival. However, this difference in probability is graduated. Not even the most ardent advocates of HLA matching as a rational and scientific basis for kidney allocation insist on a perfect match. Further, they concede that ‘many other factors besides HLA matching exert an influence on graft outcome’ and that racial minorities may need ‘special rules’ (Opelz and Wujciak 1991, 403).

The ethics of the allocation of health resources

This raises two issues and, in raising them, I am not arguing that it is wrong to use scientific criteria in the distribution of resources; rather, I want to draw attention to the fact that apparently ‘objective’ or ‘scientific’ criteria may unfairly bias against certain groups of people, such as Aboriginal people. Firstly, such criteria alone are not a fair basis for the distribution of resources. Secondly, it is important to clarify the extent to which such criteria are valid determinants of resource distribution. This can only occur if we are prepared to examine the impact of the utilisation of particular criteria on the access of minorities to specialised resources. There is sufficient ambiguity in the current literature to suggest that, while biomedical criteria cannot be discounted in the allocation of kidneys, neither can they be elevated to the status of being the only ‘objective’ determinant of a fair allocation system. Various psychosocial factors may also influence the outcomes of clinical assessment. These include an assessment by the clinician of patient ‘motivation’ or ‘compliance’. The desire to select against non-compliers reflects a notion of medical efficacy, of not wanting to waste a kidney on someone who might spoil the opportunity. Clinicians would argue that this is important for renal transplant patients who must regularly take medication in order to prevent their kidney graft being rejected. Clinical staff may explicitly acknowledge that patient compliance is a significant issue in the consideration of suitability for transplant. Alternatively, it may be an assessment that implicitly shapes the quality of the disposition of staff to the ‘poorly’ compliant patient (see, for example, Plough 1986, 95–102). In another sense, compliance requires the patient to conform to medical advice and recognise medical authority. This cannot occur without the patient conceding a degree of autonomy. Some writers have even suggested that non-compliance in chronic illness may even be an attempt by the patient to exert control in such an asymmetrical relationship (Hayes-Bautista 1976). On the other hand, in her study of patients with cystic fibrosis, Bellisari argues that non-compliance may be adaptive and that medical advice is ... received in a specific psychosocial context, evaluated according to personal estimates of

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appropriateness and efficacy, and implemented in varying levels and degrees with a particular sociocultural setting. (1987, 244)

These examples suggest that, in order to understand how Aboriginal people respond to medical advice, we need to pay attention to the socio-cultural and economic circumstances which shape people’s behaviour. There are few ethnographic examples in the literature that explore Aboriginal notions of wellbeing. One comes from the Ngarinman mob of the northwest of the Northern Territory. For this mob, wellbeing or punya encompasses person and country, and is ‘variously translated as strong, healthy, happy, knowledgeable (‘‘smart’’), socially responsible (to ‘‘take a care’’), beautiful, clean and ‘‘safe’’ both in the sense of being within the Law and in the sense of being cared for’ (Mobbs 1991, 298). In this instance, wellbeing is a quality reflecting on the experience of a physical body, but it is also conceived to be integral to the quality of relations with other people and the cosmological universe which all the mob inhabit. These ideas are also reflected in a philosophical and political definition of health which is used within the Aboriginal movement: [Aboriginal health is] defined as the physical, social, emotional, cultural and spiritual wellbeing of the individual and of the wellbeing of the whole community. This is a whole of life view and it also includes the traditional concept of life–death–life and the relationship to the land.

Definitions such as this do not accurately reflect complex systems of meaning and practice. Further, it is a political definition, so that, while it certainly echoes Aboriginal cultural values, it is also in part derivative of the primary health care movement. Yet it is analogous to the connotations of words such as punya. Wellbeing is not only an individual experience, but also reflects the nature of the relationship of that individual with their community (or extended family). This is secured within Aboriginal concepts of time and place and the cultural position of Aboriginal bodies within such dimensions.

The ethics of the allocation of health resources

This understanding broadens how we interpret people’s behaviour in response to advice such as: ‘You should not compromise your dialysis regime’. Frequently, an Aboriginal person on dialysis may confront conflicts between responsibility to their own body and responsibilities to a family member. In discharging family responsibilities, such individuals may be acting in accord with Aboriginal notions of wellbeing. Further, patients’ response to medical management is also shaped by their socioeconomic context. This is important, given the significant level of poverty in the Aboriginal community. For example, it may not be possible for some people to relocate in order to be closer to a dialysis centre. Consequently, distance in combination with a lack of access to reliable transport may result in people ‘cutting time’ from dialysis. Yet the actions of Aboriginal patients, which may be shaped by economic circumstance or by cultural perceptions of wellbeing, place them at risk of being medically judged as non-compliers and so not suitable for transplant programs. An analysis of cultural factors in dialysis and renal transplantation among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in North Queensland demonstrated how socio-cultural issues impact on indigenous patients’ responses to medical intervention (Bennett et al 1995). The indigenous people who were interviewed expressed a range of understandings about their underlying disease and its treatment, ones that often differed significantly from those of the health professionals treating them. In addition, the authors documented the difficulties in sustaining effective working relationships between health care providers and indigenous patients, where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients were said to have difficulty in translating indigenous concepts of health and wellbeing into treatment regimens, while the hospital staff had difficulty adapting to differences between their own and Aboriginal or Islander cultural rules ... (Bennett et al 1995, 614)

Importantly, the authors also identified the degree of distress felt by many of the indigenous patients who had moved away from kin and country to have treatment.

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These issues make labels such as ‘poorly motivated’ or ‘noncomplier’ seem quite perjorative. Non-Aboriginal professionals may be judging Aboriginal behaviour from quite a limited understanding of Aboriginal reality. Claims that patients are poorly motivated may reflect an inadequate appreciation of their culture and the economic dimensions of their behaviour. More importantly, patients are denied the opportunity to develop strategies which would enhance the survival of a potential kidney graft. The label of ‘non-complier’ fixes the problem within the patient as an immutable defect of their personality. However, there is another dimension to this issue. In the distribution of health resources, account must be taken of the total impact of a particular form of treatment on a patient’s quality of life. It is not necessarily true that specialist and more costly resources improve quality of life over and beyond more readily accessible treatment options. In fact, Aboriginal people with transplants have a poorer survival rate than non-Aboriginal people (Pugsley 1989; Disney 1992), but this does not mean that they should be denied access to transplants. Rather, it is imperative that the decision to offer transplantation be well-informed. We need to ensure that Aboriginal people are not unfairly discriminated against, and that those chosen for a transplant program are provided with the appropriate resources or supports to effectively manage the long-term requirements of their immuno-suppressive treatment. Further, it needs to be clear that what is being offered represents an improvement in quality of life, an assumption that cannot be taken for granted (see Bennett et al 1995; Willis 1995). There is a need, therefore, to examine strategies which give clinicians greater competence in making these judgments. One strategy to overcome these problems is to educate professionals about Aboriginal culture, so that they may more appropriately take into account Aboriginal values in the clinical process. Logistically, this is often difficult and, at best, most clinicians currently receive only a few hours of teaching on Aboriginal issues in their professional careers and for many this is their first encounter with Aboriginal people. Whilst it is of some value, this culture-astemplate approach risks reducing culture to a simplistic set of ‘do’s and don’ts’. This may lead to ill-judged action by ignoring the

The ethics of the allocation of health resources

regional differences in Aboriginal cultures, as well as the individual experience of Aboriginal people. Individuals, who have their own ideas and experiences, are not mindless replicas of particular cultural models. Another mechanism for overcoming the possibly discriminatory impact of biomedical and psychosocial criteria is to positively discriminate in favour of Aboriginal people in regard to access to renal transplant services (Layton 1991). This is an example of a redistributive principle which may be built into the operation of transplant programs. Increasingly, as I alluded earlier, transplant programs across the world have taken such principles on board. Other examples include geographical criteria, which ensure that particular regions receive their share of kidneys, and time on the waiting list. However, whilst a positive discriminatory principle recognises the over-representation of Aboriginal people with renal disease, and their poorer access to services, Aboriginal people may be better served by allocative principles that are oriented towards achieving equity of access to particular health resources. However, this strategy alone does not sufficiently address the problems inherent in the clinical processes through which allocative decisions are made. It is equally important to develop models of clinical interaction that focus attention on the process of negotiation between patient and professional. Such a clinical strategy, although affirming cultural difference, would also require the clarification of problems in order to promote the development of strategies which are agreed to by both professional and patient. In this way, issues of compliance become a problem of the clinical encounter, not of the patient. In order for this to be achieved, there would need to be a shift away from the doctor–patient relationship as the only site of important decision-making. The expertise of the non-Aboriginal doctor in dealing with cross-cultural matters is clearly limited. As well as patients and their kin, other Aboriginal people with health experience have a significant role in this process. It is vital in the management of chronic illness that clinical processes are designed to incorporate the expertise of Aboriginal health workers, Aboriginal hospital liaison workers and Aboriginal health services. All such individuals and organisations have experience in delivering Aboriginal health services, yet they remain quite peripheral to the

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clinical decision-making processes which occur in specialist institutions. This may well be at the peril of Aboriginal patients’ wellbeing and indeed their long-term survival.

Macro-allocationary issues The clinical encounters that govern the management of endstage renal disease reflect only one aspect of an individual’s experience in the health system. Aboriginal people with chronic illness will inevitably interact with a number of sites within the health system as a part of the process of disease diagnosis and management. Their patterns of interaction differ from other groups in the Australian community. How Aboriginal people utilise health resources depends on the way in which disease and its appropriate interventions are symbolically constructed, peoples’ prior experience within the health system, their economic status, and the location of health care services relative to the Aboriginal community. Consider, for example, the type of health system utilisation that occurs in those small, rural Victorian towns which are at some distance from regional centres. In many of these towns, the Aboriginal community does not have the resources to employ its own doctor. Their access to local general practitioners is contingent on whether or not the GPs bulk-bill. Further, in some cases, the attitudes of the local doctors to Aboriginal clients are quite openly hostile. More subtly, practitioners often work in these regions without necessarily having cross-cultural skills. Most communities with a significant Aboriginal population employ Aboriginal health workers for the development of local primary health care services. However, these workers often spend up to two or three days a week driving patients to specialist appointments (such as dialysis) in provincial cities or other towns. These factors become even more exaggerated in the more geographically isolated communities. Some caution is necessary, therefore, in considering issues of access and equity to technologies for end-stage renal disease. The technologically sophisticated spectrum of medical management tends to create a symbolically powerful rhetoric and

The ethics of the allocation of health resources

a peculiar notion of equity is introduced that considers equal access to medical miracle a moral imperative; there is a narrow right to technologically mediated life. Inequality becomes an issue of public morality only at the precipice of death. (Plough 1986, 18)

The quality of Aboriginal primary health care is an important reference point in attempts to improve access to specialist services. Poor access to primary health services militates against referral for specialist services such as dialysis or transplantation (Caplan 1989). Jon Willis (1995), in his analysis of the benefits of hightechnology treatments (such as dialysis and kidney transplantation) for central Australian Aboriginal people, argues quite strongly that such treatments may be at the expense of the development of better systems of primary care and prevention. In addition, these ‘fatal technologies’ may actually diminish people’s quality of life by removing them from their country and kin during their final years. On the other hand, poor access to some specialist services also can place additional strain on already stretched primary care resources. I would argue that these problems are linked, and that the development of appropriate strategies to improve the quality of Aboriginal interactions with the health system must take a global perspective. In this respect, inequalities in health resource access may also be generated by the fact that Aboriginal people do interact differently with the health system. Different systems of resource allocation, which apply to distinct parts of the Australian health system, may impact differently on their access to health care. For example, what is the consequence of the fact that they interact more with the public health system (which is resource-capped) than with the potentially resource-unlimited private system? Access to a resource-capped health sector is dependent on policy governing the distribution of resources as well as the actual expenditure allocated to health. Of particular importance then is the extent to which public resources are allocated to the often resource-intensive delivery of services to disadvantaged populations. The increasing application of economic rationalist principles to the delivery of health services threatens to undermine the access of vulnerable populations to

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public health resources. In addition, the geographical distribution of Aboriginal people makes them vulnerable to inequities in the distribution of mainstream health resources, between, for example, the Australian states, or between rural and urban populations (Simpson 1992). Not only are they vulnerable in the face of decisions about funding for Aboriginal-specific programs, they may be more significantly disadvantaged by the parameters shaping the overall distribution of health resources.

Macro resource allocation processes Resource allocation processes, if they are to foster Aboriginal autonomy, must allow for substantial participation by Aboriginal communities, as well as enable Aboriginal people to address those allocationary barriers to equity of access to health resources. During the 1980s, significant changes occurred in the relationship between Aboriginal communities and one aspect of the Australian state, the bureaucracy. Consultative mechanisms were developed in order to facilitate the better participation of Aboriginal people in policy development and funding allocation processes. Those mechanisms that are health-specific include, in Victoria, the Victorian Tripartite Council of Koorie Health (which superseded the Victorian Aboriginal Health Resources Consultative Group). To an extent, these mechanisms enable greater participation by Aboriginal people in the development of health policy, but, despite the promise of greater collaboration made by the National Aboriginal Health Strategy, it has also been the case that governments have failed to fully implement effective consultative processes (NAHS 1995). Worse still, other consultative mechanisms, such as those built into the structure of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, have confused and complicated efforts by the health sector to seek policy direction from representative Aboriginal structures. The key problems which have emerged in the operation of these consultative processes are a consequence of the difficulty of articulating community and bureaucratic process. Firstly, the issues for consideration at these forums have tended more often to reflect bureaucratic (and government) policy priorities. Rather than

The ethics of the allocation of health resources

becoming actively involved to the extent of driving these policy agendas, community participation has on the whole been responsive. The Aboriginal representatives on these councils have been overwhelmed by a large number of largely government-driven policy initiatives in Aboriginal health (such as devising strategies for the implementation of the Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommendations, and the National Aboriginal Health Strategy). They are also required to respond to innumerable other general policy initiatives. It is not that community participants have not been keen to see these policies implemented, but that Aboriginal initiatives have tended to become submerged under bureaucratic priorities and processes (including bureaucratic time-lines, strategy and planning processes, and evaluation mechanisms). Rather than fostering active community policy development, the end result has often been a series of knee-jerk reactions to bureaucratic policy initiatives. For their part, Aboriginal community members of these consultative mechanisms have been criticised for privileging kinship-orientated organisational structures, as well as for being slow, even hesitant, about making policy decisions. Yet, for a culture that remains organised socially around kin relations and which emphasises the importance of some form of consensus in political process, these are key characteristics of the community process. Also, the knowledge/practice paradigms that dominate such discussions (both at the macro and micro level) tend to capture power differentials between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people rather than emancipating Aboriginal people. For example, in discussing issues of kidney disease, the definition of the problem is part of the problem. Aboriginal health has been measured, and Aboriginal needs assessed, within an explicitly biomedical understanding of disease. Little consideration has been given to the formulation of ‘need’ within an Aboriginal understanding of health and illness. In emphasising the difference between these understandings of health and illness, I do not wish to detract from the commonalities. For many reasons, Aboriginal people do choose to interact with biomedicine, and they do choose to interact with the Australian bureaucracy. This alone implies community interest in these processes. However, addressing issues of equity and access within an

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explicitly biomedical framework automatically links the resolution of these problems to a particular set of social relations that may actually be part of the problem. With regard to renal disease, who are the ultimate experts? The only form of expertise which those Aboriginal people who do not have health training can bring to such a discourse is ‘Aboriginality’. Consequently, problem resolution becomes focused on biomedical interventions that need to be appropriately altered to suit Aboriginal culture. Rather than targeting prevention programs as strategies to reduce the prevalence of renal disease, it may be more appropriate to frame preventative activities around notions of ‘good tucker’. This would, in part, deal with one of the underlying problems predisposing Aboriginal people to the development of kidney disease, as well as many other chronic illnesses. More importantly, it could be more readily engaged by community people — as a process more significant than a health prevention strategy. After all, what we consume is deeply symbolic of our cultural heritage. For many urban Aboriginal people, a return to a more traditional diet would not only be healthy, but also a part of an important process of maintaining cultural activities. Framing problems within an Aboriginal understanding of health may not necessarily require biomedical solutions, but rather may allow for the recognition and utilisation of their community knowledge and resources. At a policy level, the problem with how health issues are framed is made clear in the National Aboriginal Health Strategy Working Party Report (1989). Despite national consultation with Aboriginal communities, this document is significantly orientated towards biomedical and bureaucratic constructs of health and illness. Considerable discussion in this document focuses on the appropriate policy and funding relationship between the Commonwealth, state and Aboriginal community sectors. It also outlines strategic approaches to health improvements, based upon biomedically defined disease problems. What I am not questioning with regard to the National Aboriginal Health Strategy is the extent of consultation that occurred with the Aboriginal community. Rather, it is the degree to which this process has transformed the sense of problem into a form of discourse that cannot be implemented without an army of health

The ethics of the allocation of health resources

professionals who are required to translate this conception of need into programs. Finally, the issues considered within these health consultative mechanisms should not be divorced from the broader allocationary processes which impact on the distribution of resources. Aboriginal people clearly have an interest in the inequities in resource distribution between states, and between urban and rural centres. Yet the issues considered in consultative processes tend to be restricted to the creation and maintenance of Aboriginal-specific health programs, and programs to improve access to existing mainstream health resources. This points to the most problematic site in the relationship between Aboriginal people and the Australian state: government. The most appropriate way to challenge these broader forms of inequity is through parliamentary process. It is here that the Aboriginal voice is significantly absent. Aboriginal people lack the voting power or capital to be the type of lobby that potentially endangers governments. Consultative mechanisms have shifted the development of health policy in favour of the Aboriginal community, despite the problems inherent in these processes. Nevertheless, they do not deliver the community any real power. How effective they are, from an Aboriginal point of view, depends on the extent to which governments are prepared to listen and take action and on how well these policy processes make links between different sectors and levels of government. Currently, these processes are in a considerable state of flux. The administration of Aboriginal primary health care has been transferred from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission to the Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health. One of the reasons for this transfer was to promote better links between Aboriginal health services and the health system in general. Further, it was argued that the transfer of funding responsibility might strengthen the accountability of state governments in their provision of health services to Aboriginal people (see Anderson 1994). At the same time, the application of economic rationalist principles throughout the health care system, in addition to the retraction of expenditure on public health care, threatens to undermine Aboriginal access to public health resources. It is difficult to predict

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the long-term impact of these changes. Nevertheless, they only serve to further indicate the vulnerability of Aboriginal people to shifts in government health policy.

Conclusion However ‘need’ is formulated, it is clear that Aboriginal people are significantly disadvantaged in terms of their health status compared with non-Aboriginal Australians. As is suggested for renal disease, this need is not matched by equity of access to health resources. Barriers to access are embedded within the doctor–patient relationship. These problems may not be as explicit as the type of overt racist barriers referred to at the beginning of this chapter, but biomedical parameters or assessment of patient motivation may unnecessarily exclude Aboriginal people from particular modalities of treatment. Principles that orientate resource distribution to problems of equity can be usefully employed within clinical process. This is likely to be more beneficial, however, if implemented in association with the development of alternative models of clinical process that empower Aboriginal people in their negotiation with health professionals and which incorporate Aboriginal health expertise in decision-making processes. The processes by which resources are distributed must also take into account Aboriginal perceptions of need. This issue is important at all levels of resource allocation, including those consultative processes developed by the bureaucracy to improve Aboriginal participation in policy development. The other barriers embedded within existing consultative mechanisms need urgent critical examination in order that strategies can be developed that better foster community autonomy.

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11

Mabo: towards respecting equality and difference Noel Pearson

The Boyer lectures of eminent Australian anthropologist Professor William Stanner, entitled After the Dreaming, hold their own amongst this country’s finest writings on matters black and white. Today, more than ever, the series which Professor Stanner delivered for the ABC in 1968 makes compelling reading. His lectures articulate, illuminate and provide some guidance, with questions that will consume the people of this continent for as long as we need to consider them. Such questions as: the future of nationhood and the equivocal citizenship of those with whom a settlement of great grievance remains outstanding; indigenous rights and notions of new partnerships; constitutional and institutional renovation; the never-decreasing need for social reconstruction and renewal; and the great imperative for an equitable distribution of the hitherto not-socommon weal. Stanner wrote one year after the 1967 Referendum which, amongst other things, finally incorporated into the Commonwealth 209

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the indigenous people of the country. I propose to reflect here on some aspects of Stanner’s lectures, whilst tracing some of the developments of the past two decades, leading to the watershed decision of the High Court of Australia on 3 June 1992 on the question of native title to the Murray Islands, in the case brought by the late Eddie Mabo and others. I stood but a child of tender years when Professor Stanner spoke hopefully about our entry with a vengeance into this country’s history. To tell the story of that time and the changes which have happened and the changes which, like Stanner, we still await, it is appropriate first to tell of the man who commandeered Aboriginal policy in the state of Queensland for more than two decades. In 1989, on a bright Sunday morning, Joh Bjelke-Petersen stood at the front of the old church at Hopevale, surveying the long wide street, framed by mango trees and frangipannis and with barking dogs idly chasing horses. Earlier, the former state premier, whose once-authoritarian aspect had by now waned considerably, had regaled the congregation of black faces in the weatherboard church with stories. Stories of how they had transformed dense woodland into paddocks and rows of tin shacks with wide streets, named after German missionaries now long departed. How they had built this glorious church from the timber that had stood on the paddocks where cattle now grazed. He had returned to the mission to commemorate a community milestone: it was forty years since the Guugu-Yimidhirr people had returned, largely through his agency as a young Country Party backbencher, from seven years’ exile in central Queensland. The mission which was established in 1886 had been closed down and the people removed when the resident German missionary was interned in 1942. After the church service, a journalist asked the former premier about land tenure for the people of the community. With perhaps accidental candour, he replied that the land had always belonged to the Guugu-Yimidhirr. It was just that the government had been looking after it for them. And now they had handed the land back to the rightful owners. It was a startling admission — that the land had always belonged to them — from one who had made an international reputation from denying Aboriginal human rights in the state of Queensland and who had steadfastly opposed the notion

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that indigenous people had certain inherent, traditional rights to their homelands. His government could scarcely bring itself to mention the word ‘traditional’ without suffering acute political nausea. In the early years of government policy, Aborigines were considered to be different and, because of their alleged backwardness, could be treated unequally. Discriminatory treatment of the inmates of missions and reserves during those years — when it was said that ‘we lived under the Act’ — arose out of their perception of a constitutional lack of equality. Black people were innately unequal, therefore special laws to enable the state to govern aspects of their lives which were beyond the reach of law-makers for other citizens were justified. This assertion of innate difference and inequality was underpinned by a policy of assimilation for, by a process of training, of civilising and indeed of breeding out their backwardness, the blacks could lose their difference and become like everyone else. They could come out into mainstream society as people exempted from the Act and finally equal. The Churches would assist in this endeavour, and to that end no church body broke more sweat than the Hopevale Lutheran Mission Board under Bjelke-Petersen’s ten-year chairmanship. My parents watched their contemporaries pack up their young families, leave the mission and go south to live near Lutheran congregations: to milk cows, pick peanuts, cut cane and work on highways. Just like poor whites did. I don’t recall wishing that my family had also gone south. But I do recall the strange tolerance that my father and the older people showed those who administered the paternalistic regime which was our life in the mission: the missionaries and the managers. This was explicable by their overriding devotion to the Church, a fierce sense of the mission’s history and the community’s tribulations and survival through times of extreme hardship, loss and dislocation. Like those born before us and indeed those who would follow, the collective psyche of myself and my schoolmates was dominated by the Moses-like figure of George Heinrich Schwartz of Neuendettelsau, who had died six years before I was born. Old missionary Schwartz had first landed at Cape Bedford in 1887, by which time Guugu-Yimidhirr people had been reduced to a

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demoralised fringe-dwelling existence following the establishment of Cooktown. Many of their number were now exterminated, their bones lining the bloodstained tracks to the Palmer River goldfields. There was gratitude for Schwartz’s lifelong effort to provide a shelter from the colonial storm whose waves had almost completely swamped the Guugu-Yimidhirr, drowning many of the descendants of those who first met James Cook at the Endeavour River in 1770. Who of those who saw the sails disappear north after the crew of the Endeavour had effected repairs on the vessel would have thought that, four generations later, the captain’s descendants would return with such vengeance, with a fever for gold and for land, leaving demoralised strugglers, begging, sneaking and apologising for an existence in their own country? Given the Church’s role in the secular administration of the mission, and the fact that the government was now headed by a church friend, indeed a mission friend during the years of my early youth, the older people forgave and suffered government paternalism in much the same way that they had suffered the paternalism of old missionary Schwartz. But, as with the old missionaries who had gone, there was increasing disquiet among the younger people about the government and Church-sanctioned policy of inequality justified by difference. Why were people prohibited from buying motor vehicles? Why should they have to seek permission from the manager to leave the reserve? Why did the money that they earned have to be kept and managed by the mission? Why could not the community have title to their land in their own hands? The increasing awareness that Queensland legislation and policies concerning Aboriginal people breached fundamental human rights, and that our mission friend was a leading and vehement opponent of Aboriginal rights, brought on a significant identity crisis for the community. It was a crisis which led to a realisation that, whilst paternalism in a fraternal context might be a natural relationship of affection, when it concerned adults of different races it was undeniably racist and arose from a fundamental assumption of inferiority and superiority. The government, and indeed the Church, had assumed our innate inferiority and their own superiority. Like many paternal relationships put asunder, the bitterness of this realisation was painful. As with the memory of the old missionary, the pain was

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most acutely felt by those who had watched their parents and grandparents endure a system which treated them as state wards, as incapable and undeserving of equality and dignity. It was within the young hearts of those who contemplated this history that indignation burned, and it found resonance in the memories and secret, long-suppressed feelings of those who had endured it. There arose a movement for change and a demand for equality. The Brisbane Commonwealth Games in 1982 and Aboriginal protests focused international attention on Queensland’s record on human rights, and land rights in particular, and signalled a change in the direction of the National Party government’s policies on Aboriginal affairs. The infamous Aborigines Act was repealed, and new and less draconian legislation governing communities was introduced. Together with legislation granting a form of land title to Aboriginal reserves under an instrument called a Deed of Grant in Trust, this heralded a new era where the government strove to address the longstanding and widespread criticisms of its discriminatory laws. Rather than sanctioning difference and inequality, the new policy urged equality and sameness. Aboriginal people were no longer to be distinct from the rest of the Queensland community; they were equal and this meant that they could not be allowed to be different. Aborigines were to be considered merely dark-skinned Queenslanders. Communities which had endured terrible histories of repression and stranglehold government management, in which social problems were rife, and basic health, housing, educational and other services lacking, were by semantic fiat to have been transformed into wholesome country towns, with black yokels sitting on verandahs and contemplating cows and the sorghum harvests. Formal equality was now largely a fact. The government’s policies were therefore difficult to reproach. The response was always that it now treated Aborigines as equal, like any other Queenslanders. Of course, the respect in which Aborigines were most similar to their fellow Queenslanders was that they had no special claim or right to their traditional homelands. Non-Aboriginal Queenslanders had no such inherent rights, and it would be discriminatory to accord ‘special rights’ to compensation or landownership to Aborigines. All rights to land in the state were granted by the Crown and there was neither

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any legal nor moral claim on behalf of indigenous people to what they claimed were their lands. How can you have an equal society when one group sets itself apart with claims to separate rights? Therefore, whilst a substantial change occurred in policies in the 1980s — from inequality and difference to equality and sameness — both policies were discriminatory and were premised on a vehement denial of the notion of traditional rights to land. Thus, whilst Professor Stanner confronted the myth of waste and desert lands and said that if crown title were paraded by, every Aboriginal child would say, like the child in the fairy tale, ‘But the emperor is naked ...’, in Queensland the government continued to insist that the emperor was decently attired in its crown titles. It was on this insistence that the Bjelke-Petersen government moved at a night sitting of parliament to pass the Queensland Coast Islands Declaratory Act 1985. This Act purported to retrospectively extinguish any native title that might have existed in the Murray Islands. If valid, the legislation would bring to an end the court action brought by Eddie Mabo and others three years before, challenging the Crown’s power to grant title to people who claimed that they already held a pre-existing title to their homelands. Before dealing further with the question of pre-existing title and the outcome in what is the most important and controversial decision of the High Court of Australia, I would like to survey briefly the developments which unfolded at the national level following the 1967 Referendum and Stanner’s hopes for a final breaking of the Great Australian Silence and his hopes for Aboriginal landrights recognition. Prior to his Boyer lecture, Professor Stanner had been to Yirrkala on the Gove Peninsula, consulting the Aboriginal people in relation to bauxite mining leases granted to Nabalco. He spoke in his lecture about the people’s anxiety about the proposed development, and the strong feelings the people expressed about their homelands and what lay ahead with the mining development. The Yirrkala people launched an action in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory against the mining company, claiming that they held a communal native title, recognised by Australian common law, to their traditional lands. Professor Stanner gave expert evidence for the plaintiffs. In a 1971 decision now known as the Gove

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Land Rights Case, Justice Blackburn found that there was a traditional system pertaining to the claimed lands which he described as ‘a government of laws and not of men’. Nevertheless, his judgment denied that native title was part of Australian common law, and he confirmed the assumed doctrine of terra nullius: an empty land without owners. However, the negative finding in the Gove case, combined with increasing political agitation by Aboriginal people in the early 1970s, gave rise to a political imperative to address land rights. If Aboriginal people possessed no inherent rights to land at law, then a moral onus fell upon parliament to create rights to land. The Woodward Commission, established by the Whitlam Labor government, eventually led to the enactment of the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act 1976. This followed moves in South Australia to address land rights. Similar, though increasingly inadequate, legislative measures on land title were taken in New South Wales, Victoria and eventually Queensland. As each state dealt with the imperative to address the question of land rights within their jurisdiction, it is true to say that each subsequent measure was less inspired than the last. What has resulted is a patchwork of legislative regimes which have made provision for some areas of the country and no provision in respect of others. Moves in the mid-1980s at the federal level to introduce a national landrights model failed to fulfil the need for a national provision. The wellspring of goodwill which erupted after the Gove case had been reduced to a trickle by the time Michael Mansell made his assessment in 1989 that no more would we see landrights legislation in this country. The question, so far as the materialistic Australians of the 1980s were concerned, had been more or less addressed and, if not addressed, then at least attempted. In confirmation of Mansell’s assessment, in 1991 the Queensland Labor Party adjusted its landrights policy platform downwards to match its recently introduced legislation. The outcome determined the policy. It therefore appeared that there would be no more political or social impetus for any national movement on land rights. At this point, Mansell quite correctly asked whether our better prospects lay outside of the nation rather than within it. The constitutional mandate over Aboriginal affairs, which the 1967 Referendum gave

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the Commonwealth, has been infrequently exercised. Aboriginal affairs and matters concerning our entitlements have too often been left to the states to repeat the long history of neglect and denial which had given rise to the need for constitutional change in the first place. One of the few occasions when constitutional responsibility for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples was assumed was when the Whitlam Labor government enacted legislation outlawing Queensland’s discriminatory laws. And, of course, the most significant exercise of the race power came in the last days of that government, with the enactment of the Racial Discrimination Act in October 1975. That Act has proved to be pivotal in respect of the protection of native title as established in the Mabo cases. The High Court’s finding in the 1992 decision that, whilst under Australian common law the British Crown acquired sovereignty over the country, it did not thereby extinguish the beneficial title of the indigenous inhabitants which they held under their own laws and customs, has revolutionised the nation’s understanding of its land laws and indeed its history. There are historical truths which are difficult for some to accept, given that history is so important to contemporary political ideology. There are prescriptions which taste like too many bitter pills to many Australians who have alternately lamented, grieved and felt betrayed by the Court’s decision. There may now be some remnant rights which must be accounted for and will no longer suffer denial. This is being met by the complaint of politicians and interest groups that many in the desert areas of Western Australia and elsewhere in remote Australia, where there may be such remnant rights, have not been as comprehensively dispossessed and, better still, obliterated like so many have been in settled Australia. If only their ancestors had achieved in the Pilbara what they achieved in Van Diemen’s Land! There are black Australians, too, who will also feel betrayed by the Court’s decision on native title, who will feel short-changed by history and white law. But for many Australians, both black and white, the Mabo decision represents an opportunity for the achievement of a greater national resolution of the question of Aboriginal land rights and an improvement in relations between the new and old of this land, a first step in a new direction which

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might yield the changes necessary for indigenous people to be genuinely repossessed of their inheritance. Given the hope and doubt which Aboriginal people feel about the Court’s decision and the responses of various governments and the non-Aboriginal public to native title, how can we proceed with feet laden by such trepidation? Mabo is an attempt by the colonialist legal system to accommodate Aboriginal land rights. It is by no means the most perfect accommodation between rights under Aboriginal law and the white legal system. But, from all assessments, it is close to the best accommodation achievable within the Australian legal system. It stands creditably against similar accommodations in Canada, the United States and New Zealand. The significance of the decision is that it recognises Aboriginal law and custom as a source of law for the first time in 204 years of colonial settlement. For the great part, however, Aboriginal law remains unrecognised. Nevertheless, the breadth of the context of this recognition sets the stage for an interaction which has never before been possible. Colonial law has been a reality in Australia since 1788. Aboriginal law has always been a reality and we are unanimous in our resolve that it continue to be so. Colonial law is part of our indigenous reality here in Australia; it determines and controls our ability to exercise our law, enjoy our rights, maintain our identities. With the Mabo decision, the colonial system is saying: Yes, we do recognise Aboriginal law in certain circumstances relating to land, but our law also says that there has been extinguishment which is legal in many circumstances. As to the balance of Aboriginal law, well, the colonial law is saying: It has no reality, in so far as we are concerned and in so far as we are prepared to act. No matter the illegitimacy of the imposition of colonial law; no matter how revisionist and how artificial and pragmatic the High Court’s recognition of indigenous law in the Murray Island case might be said to be — it is nevertheless the prevailing reality. They are saying to us: This is the position, this is the reality, what can you do about it? If this is the situation — that Aboriginal law has restricted recognition and there is little prospect for an extension of recognition through agitation of the common law — what strategies do we pursue to make Aboriginal law have a reality, have consequence for our colonial condition? For the most part, the Aboriginal political

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system occupies a sphere which is quite distinct from the white political system. Indigenous political activity and philosophy are largely spinning in an orbit that does not have much relevance to, or impact upon, the dominant sphere in which many of the critical developments are taking place. We need a new political ideology for indigenous political strategy. Uncle Tom and Malcolm X represent the two extreme characterisations of racial/ethnic politics in the United States, where the pan-Afro-American struggle has provided an image of the way black politics ought to be understood. At one end of the spectrum is the sell-out; at the other, the radical activist. These characterisations are largely white constructs. The colonists have defined the way in which our struggle is to be understood: they, the media, the wider colonial society, define our struggles as moderate or radical, conservative or activist, to suit themselves, and we have internalised these characterisations and made them our own. Early black leaders in Australia seized upon the politics of liberating victims which defined the black struggle against segregation in America. The emergence of radical activism changed the way in which Australians were forced to take account of the victims, but it did not always change the stance and the position from which the victims spoke — as the powerless and oppressed minority. The language of victim politics positioned the rest of Australia as guilty perpetrators. It is an uncomfortable position and not one which will sustain a political cause. The Australian body politic will salve its conscience so far and then react in an indignant backlash, the ‘we can’t be blamed for what happened’ response. Such conscience-salving is to be particularly observed in the ready agreement of those most vehemently opposed forces who nevertheless concede the need to address the shameful health, sanitation, educational, employment and housing conditions of black Australians. Rather than land rights, this view urges conscience-salving through the pursuit of what Stanner called the ‘hobby horses’. But, as in 1968, with many of the statistics deteriorating rather than improving, Stanner’s questioning of this approach is still relevant: They are all in part right and therefore dangerous. If all these particular measures, with perhaps fifty or a hundred other, were carried out everywhere, simultaneously, and on a

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sufficient scale, possibly there would be a general advance ... But who shall mobilise and command this regiment of one-eyed hobby horses? And keep it in line or in column? (1968, 57)

For the indigenous quarter, the fact of our changing political circumstances calls for us to re-evaluate our political strategies. People are not moderates or conservatives on the one hand, and radicals and extremists on the other. Rather, it is actions and strategies which should be seen as moderate or radical. There is a world of difference between black radical cheek and black radical chic. The test of credibility of a strategy is not whether the approach is radical or conservative, but whether it is smart or dumb, and whether it enhances or jeopardises the rights and interests of one’s people. The politics of victims asserts that, unless the dominating state accepts us on our own terms, any complicity, any dealing constitutes an unacceptable relinquishment of our power. For a long time, the only political currency which Aboriginal people could use was their refusal to be involved. Now that the non-Aboriginal legal system has offered something in the way of rights, however narrow, to refuse to engage in the game and to fail to appreciate the rules and its limitations — even if our purpose be to disrupt the game — no longer seems smart. The challenge is to negotiate the expansion of those rights without losing ground and without surrendering the chance of future progress in a struggle which has seen incremental advances but whose resolution is still long in arriving.

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IV Aborigines in the National Imagination

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Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism: primordiality and the cultural politics of otherness Andrew Lattas Introduction Australia’s bicentennial celebrations were an exercise by the state in the production of nationalism — nationalism being one of the major currencies the state trades upon for its existence. The celebrations represented a massive investment of capital by the state in the symbolic production of a corporate cultural identity for its citizens. From the perspective of Bourdieu (1977), the celebrations can be seen as part of the production of symbolic capital, where the state sought to profit from its investment in the creation and circulation of a culture of nationalism. This investment in culture was also a process of investiture, that is, a process through which the state conferred ceremonial honours upon itself by mediating the relationship of the people back to their ‘history’, back to those primordial truths of origin that have created the fiction of a national identity and the 223

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mythic space of the nation. Through its investment in these celebrations, the state renews and establishes its authority as sovereign in the process of creating and celebrating the identity of those it governs. The state thus discovers its legitimacy and is further empowered; by mediating the identity of its citizens, the state authorises itself. The new Parliament House, which was built for the bicentennial celebrations, illustrates this dual process of investiture and investment, the process by which state power inaugurates itself through new investments in itself. The building represents political power undertaking the task of rebuilding and renewing itself. Through building this national monument, the state actively rebuilds its authority by rebuilding and renewing the concept of a symbolic centre which stands for the political identity of its citizens. According to one commentator, the new building is a structure which will ‘symbolically identify the “centre of the nation”’. The intention of the architects was said to be the grafting of meaning, myths and symbols into a geometric scheme expressing the significance of the Parliament and the spirit of the nation. (Johnson 1988, 121)

In creating a monument which objectifies the so-called ‘spirit of the nation’, the state creates a centre where its citizens can invest their identities. It draws these identities into a symbolic centre; it asks its citizens to invest their identities in a central symbolic monument which it inhabits. In doing so, the state seeks to place itself at the centre of the spiritual identity of its citizens. It seeks to inhabit, dwell and live inside the spirituality of its citizens through the process of inhabiting a monument which objectifies the ‘spirit of the nation’. The new Parliament House is celebrated as a brilliant achievement of Australian culture. It is seen to affirm and to embody the genius of Australian culture in all its triumphant glory and splendour. It should be noted that Aboriginal themes and motifs have been given a prominent role to play in constructing this spirit of the nation. A notable part of the new building is said to be its ‘sweeping “boomerang” walls’ and also the presence, in the middle of the main entrance, of ‘an Aboriginal design in a square surrounded by water, epitomising the Australian continent with its surrounding oceans’

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(Johnson 1988, 124). The use of an Aboriginal design to stand for the land mass of Australia is more a statement of the present ideological significance being accorded to Aboriginality rather than any statement of radical change concerning the present social, economic and political position of Aborigines. One of the central themes of this chapter will be the pivotal ideological role given currently to images of the indigenous in contemporary constructions of Australian nationalism. We should note that the new building was sunk into the earth. In part this was positioned as affirming a democratic ideology which locates the people as being over and above the state (see Kapferer 1988). Roger Johnson, in the magazine Landscape Australia, claimed that the reconciliation of the seeming impossible aims of Griffin, that Parliament should be seen to be subordinate to the people of Australia, was met by the brilliant idea of allowing the public access over Parliament House by way of grassed ramps. (1988, 124)

The sinking of the new building into the earth was also said to produce the experience of a continuity between ‘organising geometry’ and the ‘enfolding landscape’. The building’s design was meant to realise a harmonious union between nature and culture: It has not been the architects’ intention that the building be a monumental structure imposed on the landscape, but rather one in which there is an intrinsic architectural order and a natural association with the landscape. (Johnson 1988, 121)

The design of the new Parliament House prompted one critic, Jim Weirick, to claim that: ‘We are building a temple to the illusion that we live in harmony with the land’ (Neale 1988, 130). Weirick was reacting against the invitation to read the sinking of the new building into the earth as expressing a newly found unity by Western culture with an alien foreign earth. The building’s design was meant to assert the reconciliation of whites to their environment which was now to accommodate and house them. It was meant to symbolise that they had overcome their alienation from their environment. This

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alienation is often seen to be expressed in the initial attempts by Anglo-Celtic Australians to radically alter and reconstitute the Australian environment into that image of domesticated space provided by mother country Britain.

Landscape and alienation The theme that somehow white settler Australians are alienated from, and so need to be reconciled to, their environment is a popular topic in contemporary Australian newspapers, generating a great deal of intellectual debate and soul-searching. Of special interest to me are the political conditions governing the production and circulation of this debate, a debate which has many sites of articulation and which takes many discursive forms: art criticism, literary criticism, Christian theology, conservationism, and political commentary. In this chapter, I want to analyse the discursive strategies which are used to create and to perpetuate this sense of alienation. Moreover, I want to argue that this conceptual space of alienation mediates national selfhood. It produces nationalism by continuously calling on people to reflect on their collective sense of self. The separation and distancing of Australians from their environment creates a conceptual space for the nation’s identity. It posits and opens up a space of subjectivity which we are invited to occupy. The construction of Australians as inhabiting a space of alienation is not a denial of selfhood as it might appear to be (or as it is claimed to be), but is part of the production of a sense of being-inthe-world. It is part of the ontological constitution of the self, that is, a way of positioning the self in relationship to reality and back to itself. Documenting previous Australian attitudes to the land, the Weekend Australian published an article on the creation of national parks and bushwalking trails in New South Wales. It wrote of there being a prevailing hostility towards the Australian environment after the arrival of the first white. Poet Judith Wright referred to it as exile consciousness. In 1894, Marcus Clarke had called the Australian fauna ‘grotesque and weird’ and the characters sketched by Martin Boyd and Henry Handel Richardson were

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more intent on returning to their motherland. Nature was seen as an enemy, something to be conquered, subdued, or avoided. (4–5 June 1988)

The Weekend Australian went on to quote the Katoomba Daily: ‘Tree destruction became a kind of national complexus, it went altogether too far; it became spiteful’ (24 August 1934). Such statements are attempts to paint a picture of the Australian psyche; they seek to trace and map out its historical origins and secret fears. The attack upon the environment by early white Australians becomes a spiteful, destructive act which is rendered as closely bound up with the beginning of the nation and its original sense of self. This is seen to be not only an act of irrational violence but as such it also assumes the proportions of a primordial crime which reveals some kind of deep disturbing truth about the psychological make-up of all white Australians. It is seen to reveal some kind of underlying disorder in the national psyche. As such, it also assumes the proportions of a national myth, in that it becomes a narrative concerned with situating and placing the true identity of the nation. It is mythologised into a stain which defines the nation’s personality. The effect of such narratives is that Australians emerge as figures who have destroyed the very space they inhabit. Out of fear they attacked its otherness, as the Weekend Australian put it: The history of the White presence in Australia ... is constructed by men and women far from home in an almost interplanetary isolation where everything they saw was outrageously different and intimidating. (3–4 September 1988)

This construction of white Australians as alienated from their environment has become a pervasive discourse. It also appears to have become an officially sanctioned discourse. Whilst at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1989, Governor-General Bill Hayden referred to this sense of alienation from the land. He was opening the Great Australian Art exhibition which included a number of traditional Aboriginal paintings. The Governor-General commented that Australia had at least a 40,000-year-old history and not one of 200 years. He was quoted as saying:

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Indeed I sometimes think that unless we obtain an understanding of the landscape and the truths as Aboriginal people know them we will always be aliens in Australia. (Advertiser, 23 May 1989)

Such statements form part of a discourse which, in conceiving of white Australians as aliens, also conceives of them as removed from the ‘truths’ of the space they inhabit. As foreigners in an alien landscape, white Australians are seen to be removed from that realm of indigenous primordial truths the land can offer the nation. They emerge as figures who lack a spiritual sense of belonging to the land and of possessing the land. Reconciliation with the spirituality of Aboriginal people is posited as the means for healing that sense of being lost in space which is seen as being at the heart of the alienation belonging to settler society. Aboriginal art and its focus on the land assumes a redemptive function, for it is posited as embodying the realm of spirituality which white Australians lack. It is a realm of spirituality which exists outside of white Australia and which is seen to be all the more sacred for this reason. In certain versions of this discourse, the attack upon the environment by early white Australians is associated closely with their destruction of Aboriginal society. Through this association, the environment becomes something more than a physical landscape; it embodies a certain mode of being in the world that whites are repressing in themselves. The irreverent and material attitude of white Australians to the land is equated with their being removed from that original spiritual mode of being in the world which the land and Aboriginal culture can offer. The space that whites inhabit is the site of a symbolic loss, that is, it is positioned as characterised by an absence of the symbolic imagination. In an article on Australian art, the Weekend Australian stated: The settlers were pioneers in search of territory and wealth: their new environment was an enemy to be conquered. The relative harmony between (Aboriginal) man and the land that had existed for perhaps 80,000 years was shattered in a few decades. In the process, the great mediating symbols of Aboriginal culture sank back into the dreaming of the landscape. (3–4 September 1988)

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The otherness of the landscape is here closely bound up with the otherness of the consciousness of its primordial inhabitants. The above article was also concerned with bringing out how the alienation of whites from the landscape and Aborigines represented also their alienation from that world of the imagination associated with dreams and spirituality, for ‘the Dreamtime is also the nightly dreaming of sleep when the physical person becomes spirit again’. The materialism of whites shatters their ability to find this sleep in the landscape; that is, it shatters their ability to find spiritual peace and rest in that landscape of sentiments and symbols which the land embodies. The loss of this spirituality is the loss of that mediating mythology which would allow settler Australians to come to terms with their environment: These images flowed from the culture of the Aborigine, who sees earth and heaven as a single vast sign-system enriching and amplifying the whole cycle of life and who moves in a landscape saturated with significance. For the Aborigine, myth was a way of coming to terms with the environment. (Weekend Australian 3–4 September 1988)

In this discourse, spiritual reconciliation with the land is often equated with ecological adaptation to it.1 In opposition to whites, Aborigines are not only positioned as supremely spiritual beings (who inhabit the mythic space of Dreamtime), but also paradoxically as the beings who have most successfully adapted to the material requirements of their extreme environment. On the other hand, the inability and refusal of whites to adapt to their new environment is seen to be bound up with, and indeed it becomes a measure of, their ascribed spiritual alienation from it. Their alienation from the environment is seen to deny them a means of placing their identity; that is, it denies them a means of giving form to a spiritual sense of themselves, a means of situating, of locating, who they really are. The discovery by settler Australians of the ‘real’ imaginary space they inhabit is seen to guarantee them a real sense of self. Being at home with themselves comes from discovering and being at home both with the physical nature of the land and the indigenous meanings belonging to it.

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The home and garden section of an Adelaide daily newspaper, the Advertiser, illustrates further some of the forms this discourse can assume, a discourse backed up by academic authority, in this case conservation expert Professor George Seddon at the 1988 ANZAAS conference in Sydney. His reported view was that: the European heritage of the average suburban garden clashed with our Australian environment. After 200 years of turning soil, potting and planting, Australians still have not come to terms with their identity or environment — and the luxury of English-style gardens is something we can ill-afford to maintain in our arid country. (20 May 1988)

Australians were accused of not having adapted well to their environment: they had been slow to learn from it, so as to abandon their unsuitable English and European gardening traditions. This was said to be evidenced in them still preferring water- and nutrient-hungry English plants. Lawns were especially criticised as incompatible with a growing scarcity of water resulting from the increasing salinity of Murray River water and from declining rainfalls in Adelaide. Australians were criticised for having not yet adapted to the aridness of their environment, its brutal harshness and extremes, ‘the elemental fact that flood, drought and fire are not exceptional parts of our environment — they’re habitual’. The popularity in Victoria of azaleas and rhododendrons was singled out for special criticism, as being the result of gardening having become ‘one of the extreme consumer industries’. The implication here is that the artificial production of desires removes people from the secret order of nature within which they can locate their true selves. It was suggested that Australians could come to terms with their identity by planting indigenous plants which would produce a more efficient, self-sustaining ecosystem in their domestic gardens. The food provided by native plants would attract native birds which, in turn, would keep the insect population under control. A certain rationalised image of balanced nature thus comes to be wedded to nationalism and to a search for an authentic balanced self. Whilst I support the circulation of conservationist discourses, what I am interested in here is how the idea of Europeans not having

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adapted to the land often draws on the same discourse of a lack of spirituality and identity as that employed in nationalism. Indeed, the discourse of Professor George Seddon is very explicitly about national identity, about revealing the secret desires and truths of the Australian psyche: ‘I picked out the Australian typical suburban garden ... because it’s the one bit of land the average person can get their hands on and reshape to his heart’s desire’. The thrust of this is that Australians are alienated from their environment and as such are as alienated from themselves: This is a great country; I love Australia deeply but one has got to recognise its real nature ... after 200 years, we still don’t know who we are or where we are and that’s the basic problem. That runs right through the whole community, not just the average suburbanite.

The inability of suburban white Australians to place themselves in their ‘natural’ environment is seen to deny them an authentic ‘natural’ self. Removed from a knowledge of their ‘real’ situation, they are positioned as removed from self-knowledge. The reality and truth of the self is thus measured partly by its capacity to adapt, to enter into a balanced and efficient eco-energy system relationship with nature. This is what whites must relearn: the hidden rational economy of nature, its self-sustaining logic. This discourse of ecology often engages itself with the myths of nationalism; that is, it is an engagement with those myths about space through which settler society produces and gives form to its subjectivity. The discourse operates as myth, not so much because it is false but because it articulates an imaginary space full of primordial formative truths about identity and society. The thesis of this chapter is that the production of Australian nationalism is mediated through the production of an identity crisis. The continual questioning of who we really are is the essence of Australian nationalism. It produces the reflective space of distance and removal, which creates the alienation which we ascribe to ourselves as the secret truth constitutive of our identity. Other newspaper articles, like those by journalist Max Harris, have also been instrumental in producing this identity crisis. Max Harris’ characterisations of Australia refer to

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its urban pretentiousness, its desperate endeavours to achieve an identity that is simultaneously sophisticated after a Europocentric fashion and at the same time identifiably Australian in manners and mores ... We are not succeeding very well. Uniqueness we are not good at. (Weekend Australian, 4–5 June 1988)

Removed from the unique, Australians are positioned as trapped in an inflated and phoney (that is, pretentious) sense of self. They are positioned as removed from the cultural means of being selfpossessed. The national theme of self-alienation is one of being removed, and hence the need to be restored to a unity with nature and being made real in the process. It is a theme that haunts Australians. It is made to haunt them. It is something they haunt themselves with. It is a ghost that is perpetually circulated so as to haunt them with the prospect that they themselves are not real, that trapped in materialism and false superficialities they are removed from that which truly defines objective existence. Central to this sense of non-identity is the foreignness of the land; its imagery provides a landscape of ideas for exploring and constituting the depths of personhood. The Sun-Herald, on 12 June 1988, presented a review of Tim Winton’s novel, In the Winter Dark, which was described as bringing ‘together the elements of a hundred untold tragedies of life in the Australian bush’. The aesthetic power of the novel was said to reside in its depiction of the ‘grandeur of nature’. The author was said to penetrate ‘the surface of everyday life to reveal people on the knife-edge between survival and the abyss’. The abyss here is the internal space of subjectivity of the characters, the interior landscape within which they move. Thus, one of the novel’s characters says: but, God-almighty, when the continents begin to shift in you, you can’t tell tomorrow from yesterday, you run like that herd of pigs, over the cliff and into the water.

This inability of the characters to separate tomorrow from yesterday is the creation of a timeless space, a space which in this narrative emerges out of the movement of an interiorised landscape ‘when the continents begin to shift in you’. The reported theme of this

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movement is to take readers ‘into darker regions, deeper into the trauma of White Australians in an alien landscape’. Situated in an alien landscape, white settler Australians are made to internalise a sense of not being at home with themselves. They are invited to take this external sense of alienation (from the environment) into the innermost recesses of their subjectivity, so that they may not only question and experience the pain of not knowing who they are, but that they may also take this pain as their truth. The foreign environment they inhabit is used to problematise their sense of self. Moreover, this process of problematisation is the means by which Australians experience themselves as a self. It is a mechanism for constituting and giving form to subjectivity. The experience of the self as lacking in subjectivity, as lacking in spiritual form, is one of the most powerful images of the self our society has produced. It is a paradoxical image which, in rendering us conscious of the trauma and anxiety of our alienation from our selves, also renders us more conscious of our sense of self. Our ascribed lack of national identity is used continually to authorise discourses which are concerned with giving us a sense of national self. The posited space of alienation inside the self is the creation of an opening or a gap, within which a number of discourses concerned with the management and production of identity find their locus or field of operation. The problematisation of the identity of the nation is the creation and proliferation of mechanisms of control which take the form of discourses concerned with reconciling the nation with itself, with rendering it whole and unified with itself. The point I would make here is that all the Christian and psychoanalytic techniques which have been developed for the problematisation of individual identity have come to be projected onto the wider spatio-temporal domain of the nation.2 This is to say that Australian nationalism is realised through the expanded application of techniques of ‘caring for the self’, only now applied to the personhood of the nation (see Foucault 1979; 1986; 1988). My interest here is in the psychotherapy dramas we enact around the personhood of the nation, and through which we constitute its reification and fetishisation as personhood. Political discourse has become a means for realising the mythical personhood of the nation through discourses that question and fix the psychological traits, unity and

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character of the nation. The personhood of the nation is not a given but something that has to be produced. In Australia, this process of ascribing to the nation a personhood or psyche is mediated through a culturally produced sense that Australians are alienated or are lacking in a true self. Like Marx, I do not regard alienation as a pre-established existential given, but as socially produced within a field of power relations. The notion that Australians are alienated (or have not found) their true self is produced by a power structure which it in turn helps to maintain. That power structure is in part made up of discourses which fold the self back upon itself in a relationship of exteriority (that is, alienation) only so that they, the discourses, can be more effectively inserted into the crease and fold they posit inside the self. The production of alienation is here a set of dividing practices directed toward the problematisation of identities, that is, directed towards creating internal distances within the subjectivities of individuals and within whose interstices a nationalist discourse of unification can take root. In Australian nationalist discourses, alienation is often constructed as our being removed from a sense of having originated from the land. Here the self gains its identity through the struggle to overcome the distance separating it from the land. The land becomes a testing ground; it represents a challenge to prove the worth, character and mettle of those who wish to claim her (Schaffer 1988). This is the space of the pioneer, explorer and artist. Each of them is involved in giving birth to our sense of nationhood. Each represents a figure for colonising the land, for gaining over it some kind of spiritual possession. Each of these figures assumes a spiritual form through the suffering they experience as they move through the land in search of its hidden truth(s). Their suffering takes on the epic proportions of a pilgrimage that redeems and heals the nation. Indeed, this suffering at the hands of the land can have its creative unifying potential rendered as a process of giving birth to nationhood: For some of us Australians, our forefathers forsook the green fields and teeming cities of Europe and beyond, setting out like Abraham and Moses to find a promised land. They knew Exodus and Exile, condemnation and chains,

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desert wanderings and struggle, inequality and injustice, the crucible of tragedy and suffering, the childbirth of a new people. (Catholic Leader, 5 June 1988, 11; emphasis added)

The conservative political discourse of Australian culture often celebrates pioneers and explorers. Their suffering becomes white settler society’s right of ownership to the land, the means by which they are reconciled and enter into communion with it and its original inhabitants. For example, the headline of one Weekend Australian article (21–22 May 1988) proclaimed: ‘The BLACK AND WHITE BOND: The Death of a Bush Pioneer Highlights a Remarkable Story of Racial Kinship’. This was a story about those ‘great’ individuals who struggled against the violent elements of nature and in doing so discovered a kinship with Aboriginal people. It was a story about ‘brotherhood and friendship’, designed in the year of Australia’s Bicentenary to counterbalance the acknowledged facts that ‘we did butcher them and we did rob them [and] ... strychnine was put in the flour’. However, the article emphasised personal bonds and loyalty in the harsh bush overcoming racial divisions, and of those close to the land having a better knowledge of, and kinship with, Aborigines than ‘do-gooders in Canberra’. This was a story about ‘unity and mutual affection’ achieved through the land, about early pioneers who ‘learned to see the bush through the eyes of a black and grew to appreciate the Aboriginal culture, skills and spiritual sense of the land long before it became fashionable’. These pioneers were presented as colonising not simply a landscape but a landscape of ideas and sentiments; they were early explorers, charting a primordial religious and spiritual sense of the land. This spiritual sense of exploration is also a major theme in art which focuses on the Australian landscape. I want to give an example of this by looking at how we are invited to read the art of West German artist Nikolaus Lang. His art consists in part of panels containing different layers of coloured sand. Using cloth and glue, he transfers vertical cross-sections of the Australian landscape onto a canvas and in doing so he is seen to transfer different layers of geological time into a representational space. Through this process, Lang seeks to reveal the aesthetic and spiritual significance of the land. His ‘landscapes’ of multicoloured sands are often given titles

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that evoke those aspects of Aboriginal and Christian religion which deal with the beginning of creation. Lang’s art was said to have been inspired by his reading about the significance of ochre in Aboriginal culture. The Advertiser spoke of Lang as being ‘like so many explorers and pilgrims before him’ and described his project as having assumed ‘epic proportions’: At present he is working on his ‘crazy gear’ capes made from grass or emu feathers and shoes from gathered wool. Thus, cloaked and booted, appearing like a spirit at various sites, the journey-man artist continues his pilgrimage. (14 November 1987)

On 4–5 June 1988, the Weekend Australian also published an article on Nikolaus Lang, describing his work as emphasising ‘the clash between nature and civilisation’. His ‘fascination with the arid grandeur of the Flinders Ranges and its people, ancient and modern’ was described as ‘an obsession’, with Lang referring to it as ‘my Australian madness’. What inspired him to work in Australia were Aboriginal ritual journeys and the ‘timeless elements’ of Aboriginal outback existence. The timelessness which the land and Aborigines represent assumes its meaning as that primordial scene of unity against which contemporary white Australian alienation is measured.3 Timelessness seems to be a major feature of newspaper articles on Australian art. In many of them, the landscape becomes an aesthetic space within which the nation searches for its unconscious, timeless, subjective truths. This was the thrust of an article in the Weekend Australian (28–29 May 1988), which reported the release of a new set of lithographs by Australian artist Lloyd Rees. He was described as a champion for artists, and as an ambassador for Australia. His ‘great and rejuvenating powers as an artist and as a man’ made him the focus of unprecedented admiration. Apart from many official honours, he was described as having ‘a very real popular following ... His works are collected by the rich and powerful and he is well represented in all Australian public collections — and in many humble homes too.’ Then Prime Minister Bob Hawke was said to have opened an exhibition by him at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, where the ‘crush of celebrities and

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members of the general public’ had reportedly led to two or three people collapsing. Rees was described in the article as an ‘explorer’, as one of those great artists who can sum up and generalise his experience, who in doing so ‘risks all on paper and canvas’. ‘He continues to surprise and delight, wrestling with his angel and making of art the language of life.’ He struggles with the mysteries of life and his work gains its aesthetic fascination from its ascribed portrayals of the eternal truths of the subconscious. ‘After all, each work is literally a journey into subconscious memory; each is a space for the timeless’ (Weekend Australian, 28–29 May 1988). This subconscious timeless space, which the work of art is positioned as embodying, is the space where a nationalist discourse takes root. I believe that the nationalist potential and aesthetic power of Rees’ work is to be found partly in that collapsing of perspectives and viewpoints that is celebrated as the mark of his genius. This is how one of his lithographs of a landscape was described in the same article: ... featuring a gnarled tree silhouetted against a sky of the most intense cosmic light with a glimpse of the Derwent in the distance, was made entirely with his mind’s eye, from within. It shows a rare and immediate directness in the process between hand, mind and heart to which we have little resistance ... Perhaps the seated figure on the right, rather than the tree, is a personification of the artist, but we, the viewers of the work, stare out with him towards the consuming glare of eternity.

The lithograph is presented as obeying not the laws of vision or of external perception, but as coming from an internal depth of vision which is somehow more cosmic, uniting as it does the components of the self — hand, mind and heart. Within Western culture, hand, mind and heart are metonymic, respectively, of practice, rationalism and emotion. The aesthetic power of a work of art is described as realising an ‘immediate directness’, between these components of the self; that is, it is directed at overcoming the partitioning and fragmentation of the self into the separate processes of ‘hand, mind and heart’. This unification of aspects of the self through the aesthetic is

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in keeping with the sense that Rees’ art is ‘a space for the timeless’. In the context of this same lithograph, this ‘space for the timeless’ works alongside the theme that the landscape is a space where subjectivities merge: ‘the seated figure on the right ... is a personification of the artist, but we, the viewers of the work, stare out with him towards the consuming glare of eternity’. Artist, audience and subject become one vision, their different vantage points fused into a common position. Indeed, the collapsing of their perspectives is itself sanctified and this is done through positioning the resulting common vision as being the vision of eternity. We are invited to read the painting as drawing the observer, the observed and the artist into the interior unity of its timeless space. The landscape here realises the dream of nationalism, the collapsing of different viewpoints, different vantage points within a common vision. The landscape is posited as the common space capable of aesthetically realising this common vision. In short, the nationalist appreciation of Rees’ work cannot be removed from that totalisation of visions which is the appreciated aesthetic movement of his work.

Primitivism and redemption Australian art represents one of a series of sites for grounding the ethnocentric psychodramas and universalisms of Australian society. The landscape is used to objectify the truths and spirituality for which Australian culture searches. The aestheticisation of the landscape is one means through which Australians are made to inhabit a spiritual space which they, in their ascribed spiritual poverty, cannot recognise as a spiritual space. Alongside this process of aestheticising and spiritualising the land, there is also a process of aestheticising and spiritualising the Aborigines who are seen to live in spiritual harmony with the land. In such discourses, the Aborigine becomes the ideal type of religious man. Moreover, Aborigines are made to function in a parallel way to which the land functions in nationalist discourses. This is to say that Aborigines provide an imaginary space for uniting subjectivities in the universalisms which often function as truth within Western culture. Aborigines are made to enact and objectify the primordial psychologised truths of the

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West, and come to represent a timeless unconscious subjectivity which whites have ‘lost’. Indeed, they become the unconscious of the West; they are made to embody its hidden archaic psyche which the West must rediscover if it is to gain self-knowledge and selfpossession. This hidden realm of primordial truths and the search for them takes many forms, ranging across discourses associated with Christianity, art criticism and popular forms of evolutionary theory. More often than not, these different discursive forms are blended to produce some quite fantastic contemporary visions and myths of what it means to be human. I want first to analyse the construction of Aboriginal identity within a contemporary Catholic Christian context. In the Catholic Leader newspaper, Aboriginal people are often positioned as the bearers of an archaic vision and a lost mythology through which whites can reclaim the power of their original vision of God. Through the materiality of their lifestyles, whites have lost their original sacred vision of the world. My argument is that this ascribed spiritual emptiness is what the spiritual discourses of whites produce as the necessary condition for their own existence (see Lattas 1989a). Indeed, according to the Catholic Leader, an international survey found that ‘Australians are among the most satisfied people in the world, but also among the most bored and lonely’... The ‘nothing inside us’ is the space where God’s fullness can dwell. (22 May 1988)

The positioning of settler Australians as being soul-less is often bound up with the accusation that their materialism has removed them from that realm of deep meanings which an authentic spiritual culture can offer.4 Often in such writings, the material poverty and the physical isolation of Aborigines from white culture is seen to render Aboriginal culture spiritually pure. Aborigines become the bearers of hidden sacred truths. They become the vehicle for those generalisations and universalisms which seem to define the divine essence of the human condition. In short, Aborigines become a sacred Other, the Holy Other. Positioned in this way, their religious system is colonised and made to speak the universal truths of Christian religion.5 An example of this ideological process appeared

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in the Catholic Leader on 5 June 1988, which quoted the views of Aborigine Doughie McCale at the National Council of Priests bicentennial convention in Perth: Now I’ll tell you about the Dreamtime and what I think about it and God. I reckon that long ago, the old people must have seen God, or he gave them a Dream. God gave Moses tablets of stone. He did not write anything on stone for the old people, but he gave them a special sacred Dreaming, which we call the Rainbow Serpent ... I reckon it is through this Dreaming that the Aboriginal people have a way of understanding God.

Aboriginal Dreaming here is more than a sacred gift, it is the gift of the sacred, the gift of spirituality. Its construction as a vision of a sacred order is seen to render it equivalent to the laws of God, to the tablets God gave Moses. In this discourse, the mythic Dreamtime space of Aborigines is appropriated and made to re-enact the narratives and mythic symbolism of white Christianity. The religious realm of the Other is used to reclaim and to universalise one’s own mythology. The Catholic Leader article went beyond trying to demonstrate the compatibility of Aboriginal law with Catholic law; it also sought to subsume and incorporate the historical experiences of Aboriginal people into the mythic narratives of Christianity. Indeed, their suffering was read as re-enacting the crucifixion of Christ. According to McCale: We are sad for Jesus on the Cross because we know what it is like. Some of the people at Turkey Creek remember seeing an Aboriginal man tied to a tree and flogged with a whip and had savage dogs put on him to tear his skin. It was the same for Jesus. Us Aboriginals are knocked in the same way as Jesus and they call us names and laugh at us ... when he hung on the Cross he did not want to take revenge ... he said, Father, forgive them. So we should be like that with all the white people.

Aborigines here take the symbolic place of Christ. Their suffering and forgiveness is used in a similar way to create that sense of debt

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and self-revulsion that will restore settler Australians to a lost sacred moral order. As historicised forms of Christ, Aborigines become the sacrifice which redeems humanity. Their blood becomes the means of establishing a consciousness of sin within settler Australians (Lattas 1989a).6 Aboriginal beliefs and practices are ascribed a Western sacred quality. Their sacredness comes less from Aboriginal culture itself and more from the significance of spirituality for a Western soul. A redemptive function is being assigned to Aborigines, with the process of knowing something about Aboriginal culture taking on the form of a pilgrimage. The focus of Aboriginal religion on the land and the importance of the land in Australian nationalist culture means that the land becomes an important symbolic space which mediates the imaginary relationship of white settler Australians to Aboriginal culture. Aborigines are often made to represent a primordial sense of the sacredness of space, with this being further read as the mythological ability to divine in nature the immanent hand of God. According to the Catholic Leader, the significance of an urban Aboriginal artist’s work was that it ‘deplores the loss of a culture based on nature’: I was born in a dry creek ... Right from the start I touched that land. As a little baby, I felt that land. My mother’s blood went into that land. My Dreaming was on that land. My Dreamtime stories came from that land. (5 June 1988)

Here, Aborigines’ sense of the land as origin is subsumed within and made to resonate with God’s creation of Adam and Eve out of earth. What is also being stated is that both religions share a sense of the earth as being the mother of humanity, though Aborigines are also seen to have a stronger sense of the land as mother than white settler Australians. Ventriloquising the voice of Aborigines, the Catholic Leader wrote: Others of our people, the forerunners, came here at the dawning of our race and roamed across the broad landscape, naming its outcrops and waters. The Spirit of God moved in our Dreaming to give law, ceremony and sacred sites. Over countless millennia we grew attuned to the land, sacrament of the hidden God, and learned to say Yes to the Mother who

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formed us, so that in time we might teach the latecomer to call her Mother, too. (5 June 1988)

The spiritual task assigned to Aborigines and their religion is to teach white settler Australians to view the land as a mother. Removed, through migration, from their immediate mother countries, whites must now learn to regard a new alien environment as their mother country. They must learn to acknowledge this new land as part of a common sacred origin. The maternal aspect of the land provides a mythological unifying space for that diversity of cultures which now colonise and suckle at her body. I would argue that the symbolic importance of Aborigines within nationalist discourse(s) is that they are expected to provide a common sacred space capable of overcoming the potential ethnic and linguistic divisions created by immigration. The primordial common Other offers a space of unity and identity to the nation as a whole. Through this incorporated common otherness, white institutions and ideologies discover their universality. Moreover, the incorporation of the otherness of Aborigines is also used to symbolise and celebrate a general national project of incorporating others into a multicultural society. Assuming the voice of Aborigines, the Catholic Leader also wrote: We whom the wealthy and powerful are pleased to place at the edges of society, as of the mind, God is making of us the core of his plan in forming a new people from the fragments of all the ancient peoples of the earth. (5 June 1988)

In this discourse we see a spiritualising of the primitive. The repudiated and colonised Other is rehabilitated and used to reclaim the identity of the nation. This is a process of reconstituting national origins by creating a new mythic space for the nation to inhabit. The dominant culture of whites now searches for its authenticity and identity in that primordial Other it has placed on its own margins (see Taussig 1987). Throughout the mass media, Aborigines are used to confer and to establish a unique identity for Australian culture and for the Australian nation. The Bicentenary was ideologically constructed as a time of reconciliation which was symbolically played out, in realms

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like art and architecture, as a process of incorporating the cultural otherness of Aborigines by rediscovering one’s own latent otherness. This internalisation of the primordial Other is closely bound up with, and seems to require, their romanticisation. The process of becoming-primitive and becoming-tribal comes to be subscribed to, and rendered as, the process of discovering one’s true Australianness. In an article on the coming of age of the Australian performing arts industry, the Weekend Australian published the views of Tony Morphett, former chairman of the Australian Writers Guild and five times an award winner. Morphett referred to ‘the luxury of distance’ which has informed white Australian writers’ work: They call it ‘the tyranny of distance’ but white Australia has been isolated for 200 years. This has been enormously beneficial ... We have been able to develop a 200-year-old white tribal culture alongside the 60,000-year-old black culture. (2–3 July 1988)

Modern Australian culture here discovers its original artistic voice and vision through participating in an ascribed mythic space of tribal isolation. Isolation is often seen as the historical or evolutionary reason for Aboriginal culture’s uniqueness. Through the category of the primitive, through appropriating that space of differentiation it represents, modern Australian culture escapes being simply a copy of other cultures. It discovers its authentic identity and its unique aesthetic truths in a primordial scene of solitude that belongs to that tribal Other it has conquered. According to Tony Morphett, the best of Australia’s television is very tribal. When we’re true to our own culture we’re terrific ... We go wrong when we try to imitate the English or Americans. Americans do American better. The rest of the world does not want to see a poor imitation. (Weekend Australian, 2–3 July 1988)

The tribal here is a ‘protected’ and buffered space of self-contained authenticity. Morphett’s policy of cultural isolation asks us to re-enact, at the level of culture, that physical isolation of the Australian continent which is often seen as the evolutionary cause of its unique legacy of flora, fauna and Aboriginal culture. This primitive world, removed from exchange, becomes a space of

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uncontaminated truths and as such it is seen as ideal for the construction of a national identity and vision, removed from the shadow of colonising cultures. These redeeming powers, whereby the primitive and the primordial are colonised to provide a unique personhood to the nation, gain their power through their ascribed marginality. In being positioned outside of the domesticating influence of civilisation, the primordial offers the nation an untamed vitality. We read primitivism into our subjectivity as a secret, distant animating truth which we have lost or are removed from. This separation or removal operates as the precondition for a discourse which seeks to reunite us with our ascribed lost evolutionary past. The redemptive function which is assigned to the primitive is a major aspect of Australian art and Australian art criticism. This redemptive mission can only operate through a patronising gesture which constructs the Other as full of a significance which we lack. This ideology positions itself as non-racist because it values the primitive whilst denouncing the spiritual poverty of Western society. However, the effect of this ideology is simply to imprison Aborigines within a binary opposition where they become the system of meaning that white society has lost. This construction of settler Australians as alienated from meaning is to be found not only in daily newspapers, but also in art journals like Art and Australia and Art & Text (Baume 1988; Lattas 1989a). Nicholas Baume, for example, in Art & Text, characterises Western society as painfully trapped in a shallow culture, arguing that its attraction to Aboriginal art is an attraction to a more powerful culture, more powerful in the sense of its having more layers of meaning and thus greater depth. This is what Baume has to say on the increasing international recognition of Aboriginal acrylic paintings, his views echoing those of others: In the words of Andrew Pekarik, director of the Asia Society Galleries, this ‘new’ art has ‘tremendously complex intellectual and spiritual content that is generally lacking in Western art’ (Australian, 8–9 August 1987). Moreover, it is a content based on a deeply spiritual relation to the land and the environment. That is precisely what seems to be missing from our ‘advanced civilisation’, an absence which is ever more painfully felt.

Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism

... Western society is attracted to another culture whose belief system is powerful enough to contain genuine secrets, whilst our secrets have become empty of all significance. (1989, 112)

This patronising sense of Aboriginal culture being more powerful perhaps reaches its most absurd conclusion in the reported views of the leading curator of the Great Australian Art exhibition: Aboriginal art ... is in the 1980s a very conspicuous reason for the white community’s new respect for Aboriginal culture generally. The Aboriginal people are reconquering the minds of their invaders, as the Greeks reconquered the ancient Romans. (Catholic Leader, 5 June 1988, 14)

The primitive here is a fiction that is caught up and constituted through the artistry of Western culture (Davila 1987). The primitive is made to symbolise an original valorised state of human consciousness (being equated with Greek culture). It becomes that realm of primordial cultural truths which Western society has lost and needs to recapture so as to regain its vitality.7 Though conquered, the primitive must not be denied but tapped and harnessed into a creative force. The civilising process is thus internalised and becomes the relationship of Western subjects to a repressed animating truth which they should never fully dominate. This symbolic construction of the primitive as our aesthetic truth often trades on ideas of human evolution. This is especially so in the paintings of Ainslie Roberts which had as their focus Aboriginal myths. Books containing his paintings were enormously popular, over a million copies being sold. More than any other artist, Ainslie Roberts helped to establish and to perpetuate a nationalist discourse which positioned Aboriginal culture as embodying the original primordial truths of humanity. Aborigines were seen to be closer to nature and to embody the more instinctual side of humanity which Western civilisation was accused of overly repressing. Aborigines here stood in opposition to the rational civilised side of humanity and more fully embodied its aesthetic, emotional and religious side:

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The mystical condition known to Aborigines collectively as the Dreamtime, and to an individual as his Dreaming, defy rational explanation to people reared in a Western-style civilisation. Nevertheless it is possible for such people to understand with their hearts even if they reject the evidence presented by their minds. Primitive instincts lie buried in even the most sophisticated adult, and in those blurred areas of the mind known as the unconscious there are powerful forces which most of us glimpse from time to time. The difference between ourselves and tribal Aborigines is that we have erected barriers of logic which prevent us from seeing clearly into our own Dreaming. (Roberts and Roberts 1981, 9)

Aboriginal culture is thus positioned not only as closer to the unconscious truths of humanity, but also as our unconscious. Accordingly, our imaginary relationship to Aboriginal culture is used to structure our relationships back to ourselves, through a process which involves our projecting our truths onto Aborigines so as to make them objectify and give back to us the imaginary otherness through which we figure our removal and alienation from ourselves and the truths of humanity. In short, the alienating structure of race relations comes to be internalised and used for figuring processes of self-alienation that involves Western culture searching for reconciliation with psychologised universals and psychologised forms of the divine. Narratives of pilgrimage have come to be psychologised and racialised in discourses which transform races into psychic properties. To the extent that Western culture searches for universals, it does so by placing them in the realm of the primitive. This construction of the primitive as our unconscious, as the bearer of our repressed truths, is to be found not only in Western art, but also amongst such intellectual traditions as Freudianism, structuralism, surrealism and sociobiology (see Clifford 1988).8 Invariably, Aborigines are placed on the borders of nature and culture. Indeed, their symbolic function within Western culture is to mediate the transition from nature to culture (see Beckett 1988, 205). The realm of universality we normally associate with nature comes to be transferred (via Aborigines) into the realm of culture. In the paintings of Ainslie Roberts, the realm of universality which

Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism

Aborigines represent is that of our common origin from an original Stone Age culture (see Beckett 1988, 194, 196). In Roberts’ paintings, religion is given the privilege of being this first Stone Age culture which begins the transition from nature. Religion is made to be that original symbolic state which produced us as human. The fascination with Aborigines is that they are seen to embody the creative formative power of this original sense of the sacred. They come to embody that first imaginative act which began human culture by making possible a sense of the sacred: Perhaps the most important thing is that mankind should believe in something: that out of the struggling mystery of his life he should use the mysterious powers of imagination to create some guideposts whereby his spiritual life can find direction. This is exactly what the Aborigines did in their Dreaming stories ... The fascination of Aboriginal mythology is that these ‘Stone Age’ men preserved a complex spiritual culture in which the Dreamtime myths, an integral part of this culture, may without any great stretch of the imagination be associated with the mystical life of peoples in other parts of the world. From this, one may play with the corollary that Aboriginal mythology derives not only from the Dreamtime of Aborigines, but from the Dreamtime of the human race as a whole. It is not difficult to believe that the Aborigines, isolated on a continent which some scientists believe was once connected to the rest of the world, maintained a spiritual culture at one time common to all of humanity but since diverted into many different channels. If this is so, then the Dreamtime stories may demonstrate a deeper brotherhood than we are yet willing to concede. It is a brotherhood stretching back to the very dawn of time, when all men were of one race and all sought the keys to mysteries which still remain concealed. (Roberts and Roberts 1981, 11–12)

It would be interesting to trace the contribution which sociologists and anthropologists, like Emile Durkheim (1915), have made to establishing this received wisdom which positions Aborigines as the bearers of our original sense of the sacred. However, in this chapter

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I am more interested in the popular discourses that have been built up around such received wisdoms, in how the category of the primitive functions within popular discourse where Aborigines become a primordialness which is both an otherness and yet an origin. Aborigines are made to encode our secret identity, namely a lost aspect of evolution which must be reclaimed if Western civilisation is to overcome the pain of being alienated from that creative plenitude and vitality offered by its origins. Fabian (1983) has pointed out that Western culture reproduces a certain politics of time in the way it represents the primitive as timeless whilst according to Western civilisation the privilege of moving through time. In popular discourses, Aborigines are often positioned as fossilised fragments of evolutionary time (see Marcus 1988a; 1988b; and this volume). When we are invited by artists, such as Ainslie Roberts, to read in Aborigines the primordial side of our own human existence, we are also being invited to introduce a certain principle of distanciation into our subjectivity. In recognising a distanced past aspect of ourselves, a cleavage is introduced into our being: we are separated from ourselves. This is one of the functions of the concept of primordiality in our culture — to ascribe to us an authenticity and truth from which we are removed. Both Foucault (1982) and Derrida (1987) have pointed out how the desire for truth and authenticity has kept us separated from ourselves. Rather than allowing us to get close to ourselves, the search for truth opens up inside us a space of mediation for other discourses which claim the right to recognise and control the circulation of what counts as truth. Their task is often to undertake the journey for truth and self-identity on our behalf, not so much to close the gap separating us from our primordial truths, for this would be to end the journey which authorises those discourses — to close the gap is also to close the reason for the existence of all these figures of mediation. The placing of the Other within oneself as one’s inner truth, as one’s primordial secret, creates the space within which a circulation of meanings can take place inside the self. It creates a space inside the self that makes a movement of meanings orchestrated by others and aimed at filling our being. This space inside the self created by the separation of our self from our primordial truth is posited to be an abyss of nothingness which threatens to consume the fullness of our

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being (see Lattas 1991; 1992). The primordial is posited as our protection from nothingness, but it is in effect the precondition for discourses of truth which feed and are empowered by removing us from that fullness of being which they ascribe to the primordial Other. We become the Other of the Other, the Other of that fictional otherness those discourses create.

Tribalism, savagery and modern culture I want now to analyse some of the other ways in which we are invited to read primordiality into ourselves. So far I have focused on the spiritualisation of Aborigines occurring in the Australian media. However, the category of the primitive can also take on other less romantic connotations, such as savagery, brutality and even animality. In escaping the logic of civilisation, the primordial offers the nation an untamed animal vitality that is both its distant source and its peril. In Australian newspapers, sport seems to be a major domain for discovering the brutal, primordial psychological truths of humanity, for unearthing our hidden savagery and repressed animality. Along these lines, John Bell reviewed a book on Australian football and culture called The Greatest Game (Fitzgerald and Spillman 1988): We admit now that we are not fallen angels ... we can dispense with any vague sensations of guilt before our ‘fall’ or the need to invent some ‘original sin’. Instead, we know that our father Adam was some killer ape — we have his bones to prove it. So we can take some pride in our comparatively short and violent struggle towards evolution. We’ve got a long way to go yet before we become anything like angels and we have exhibited a couple of nasty (and disturbingly recent) reversions to type. Just below our smooth mask grins the old killer ape and he regularly feels the need to pound on his chest. (Weekend Australian, 4–5 June 1988)

What we have here is a popularisation of Freudianism and evolutionism. These two ‘scientific’ theories are used to displace our Christian sense of original sin so that we might, instead, trace our genesis and our truths to a violent killer ape which continues

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to lurk inside us. This primordial animality is posited as our common ancestral heritage. It is what unites us, and its uneven socialisation is supposedly what differentiates us as (aggressive) individuals. Freudianism and evolutionism both claim to deal with the primordial aspects of humanity and it is in this reductive capacity that they are here discursively combined. Inevitably, as in all such reductionist discourses, it does not take long to move from our father, the killer ape, to our elder brother — the primitive tribal other. Thus in the above review, our sense of national identity and our need for social unity are seen to be part of our primordial need for group boundaries, for ‘local tribal loyalties’. Football, in particular, is said to reveal this universal, primitive side of humanity, to involve ‘mythology and tribal, clannish declarations of underlying support for various teams’. Football is presented as an escape valve for aggressive emotions which might otherwise be destructive and divisive. Indeed, it is said to have made national unity possible and to be a way of displaying those emotions which make life bearable. Quoting from The Greatest Game, Bell wrote: ‘Football broke down class barriers ... developed a sense of loyalty among people who were questioning whether loyalty meant anything after the senseless slaughter of the Great War and the mindlessness brought by industrialisation. Football gave hope, winning was possible.’ (Weekend Australian, 4–5 June 1988)

Football is used here to situate the unity of the nation as emerging out of capturing and domesticating that primordial animality which is the hidden repressed essence of humanity. For contemporary Australian newspapers, sociobiology provides scientific legitimation for the myths of human nature which are being peddled as our timeless truths. We are increasingly being assigned a primordial animality as our secret self. The construction of ourselves as full of repressed animal instincts occupies a prominent place in right-wing discourse, but it can also be found in the discourse of left-wing intellectuals like Phillip Adams:

Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism

Whether you believe in original sin or the seven deadly sins or the lurking nasties in Freud’s subconscious, you’ll recognise the propensity for evil within the individual human being and the societies we create. If you’re honest, you’ll recognise within yourself, in the nooks and crannies of your mind, lurking hatreds and murderous fantasies that you, that all of us, have learnt to suppress ... your head contains an archive of antique prejudice that, over the years, you’ve learned to control. Buried beneath the neo-cortex is what Arthur Koestler described as the reptilian mind, that evolutionary relic that gives us our savagery and aggression. And if we let that reptile off the leash, it’s still capable of being the driving force in our individual and collective affairs. That’s what religion and civilisation are all about — a sometimes losing battle to bring culture to us carnivores. (Weekend Australian, 20–21 August 1988)

Though Adams does not equate Aborigines with the reptilian mind that he posits as inside us, within popular discourse the primitive occupies the privileged place of being the missing link that connects humanity with a violent animality from which it is seen to have evolved. In terms of the Australian nation, this savage violent interiority, which is supposedly a lost relic of evolutionary time, often comes to be projected onto Aborigines (see Beckett 1988, 209–10). Indeed, these mythological images and metaphors of our savage evolutionary heritage are evoked every time that Aborigines are constructed as having a propensity to violence. According to the then Queensland Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mr Katt, the proposed listing of northern Queensland rainforests on the World Heritage list would deprive Aboriginal communities of land and result in ‘awesome’ black violence: ‘The white people are fighting it. Why wouldn’t the black people fight? ... They’ve only just started. The black people will react with twice the level of violence.’ As evidence of the likelihood of black violence, Mr Katt claimed that he had been confronted by ‘600 angry, vicious people’ when he had earlier threatened Yarrabah land and that ‘he had heard a number of people in northern Queensland (it was not clear whether they were black

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or white) speak of shooting the Federal Minister ... because of the listing’ (Australian, 15 June 1988). This primordial violence is also what Australians were made to fear as being reawakened by close links between Aborigines and Libyan terrorists.9 Discussing the poor safeguarding of Australia’s long northern coastline, Professor Geoffrey Blainey wrote in the Weekend Australian: ‘Colonel Gaddafi, if he succumbs to Mr Mansell’s arguments, would prefer direct and secret access to certain Aboriginal camps in Arnhem Land and the Gulf of Carpentaria’ (25–26 June 1988, 22). In the imaginative space of white culture, white fears about possible Aboriginal terrorism may be underpinned by a popular discourse of the violent nature of the environment which encloses them. In the same issue of the Weekend Australian, the Australian interior was referred to as a ‘savage interior’. In part, the primordial savage violence of the maternal landscape comes to be embodied symbolically in the children closest to her: the Aborigines. For political intellectuals of the Right, like Blainey, Aborigines do not provide a primordial scene of unity for the nation. Their primordiality is a space of fragmentation, which land rights will only consolidate.10 For Blainey, Australia is threatening to fall back into primitivism, with multiculturalism being accused of leading to Australia becoming a ‘cluster of tribes’.11 This dissolution of the nation into a ‘cluster of tribes’ would endanger national security and could lead to Australia being invaded.12 Inscribed in the primitivism of Blainey is the logic of a civilising process, the process of uniting people through the state and a common culture. This is the Hegelian logic of totalisation, where otherness and difference are to be resolved into a higher synthesis. It is the logic of aufhebung, of spiritually raising or uplifting through totalising cultural structures. The unity of the nation is posited as a ‘sameness’ constructed against some radical otherness which has to be subsumed to prevent that fragmentation with which it threatens the totality. Inscribed in the popularism of Blainey is the metaphysics of wholes, totalities and incorporation, all the Hegelian idealist philosophical concepts which objectify and universalise the dreams of nation-states.

Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism

Conclusion For some Australian intellectuals, like Blainey, the primitive is the very principle of fragmentation at work in our society. The ‘tribal’ culture of the primitive becomes a metaphor for all of our ethnic and social divisions. Within the logic of these racial metaphors, the primitive becomes an embodiment of all the evils of divisiveness which are seen to be afflicting Australian society and which can only be overcome through the mythic unity of a common Anglo-Celtic culture. A colonial imagery haunts Blainey’s work: the process of overcoming divisiveness is the process of overcoming and civilising the tribal aspects of ourselves. Within the logic of Blainey’s racial metaphors, social evils are collapsed into the trope of tribalism, that is, into the figure of a divisive tribal Other who threatens to fragment our unified sense of self (Kapferer 1988). For other intellectuals, the primordial and primitive otherness of Aborigines is seen as capable of providing a form of spiritual unity for the nation; it can provide the necessary mythology capable of overcoming that fragmentation of the nation which immigration and multiculturalism threaten to produce. Aborigines have, for some intellectuals, become equivalent with spirituality — they represent that primordial and original sense of the sacred which we have lost. Accordingly, a redemptive function is being assigned to them. Moreover, Aboriginal identity is being increasingly colonised by discourses which would like to be the vehicles for this redemptive process, which conceives of itself as rescuing us from a spiritual void into which we are seen to have fallen. These discourses take as their model, psychoanalysis, in that they position Aboriginal culture as that realm of meaning of which we have become unconscious. The race relations between Europeans and Aborigines come to be psychologised as they are constructed on the model of conscious analytical reflection, seeking to make explicit the instinctual, animal and religious residues of our evolutionary history. The blackness of the primitive Other thus becomes a metaphor for that shadowy realm of original meanings which we are said to now only dimly perceive. A great deal of intellectual work has gone into constructing the primitive into an unconscious realm of original meanings which we

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can reclaim and use to go beyond the empty superficialities of modern existence. The primitive here is a means of giving depth to ourselves, of imposing a subjectivity and an interiority upon us. It gives us a way to ward off the horrifying suspicion and accusation that we are composed simply of surface images which are not grounded in some sense of primordial interiority. The primitive becomes the means of sustaining a whole culture which requires us to have a soul or at least its secular equivalent, a secret interiority as our domain of truth. One of the major themes of this chapter is that Aboriginal identity is becoming the focus of discourses which gain their power and authority to speak by positioning us as living in a void which only they can fill. I have argued that this sense of being without meaning is itself a system of meaning. This interior world of nothingness is a system of meaning which authorises certain discourses and modes of representation that claim to be able to deliver the spirituality we lack. For me, it is a question of understanding the politics of this production of ourselves as in a state of lack. It is a question of treating this absence not as a given, but as produced within a field of power relations that have an interest in discovering and monopolising the authenticity which we are ascribed as lacking. My argument here overlaps with that of Deleuze and Guattari: Lack (manque) is created, planned, and organised in and through social production ... It is never primary; production is never organised on the basis of a pre-existing need or lack (manque). It is lack that infiltrates itself, creates empty spaces or vacuoles, and propagates itself in accordance with the organization of an already existing organization of production. The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organising wants and needs (manque) amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the greater fear of not having one’s needs satisfied ... (1982, 28)

Those discourses which claim to satisfy our need for an identity are often organised around the figures of the artist, the writer, the historian, the priest and the explorer — the bearers of nationalism in our

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culture. They are also merchants, often peddling nationalism surreptitiously under the cover of authenticity. Increasingly, authenticity has become a carefully packaged construction of Aboriginal identity and culture which they colonise and market as our truth (Davila 1987). Whether it is conceived of as a killer ape inside us or as some original sense of the sacred, the primordial becomes a means of sustaining a confessional dialogue with ourselves, of problematising our identities by ascribing to us a truth of which we are not consciously aware but for which we are required to search. This secret truth is delivered to us through a hermeneutic process, controlled by certain privileged groups of intellectuals who appropriate the construction of our identities in the process of asking us to confess the secrets they read into our existence. It is time for us to stop treating the artist, the writer, the historian, the priest and the explorer as outside of the power structures of our society. These figures are presented and present themselves as on the margins of society, speaking its truths and searching for the true boundaries and spaces which define us. It is time to recognise that these figures of marginality are authorising certain images of ourselves. They stand not so much on the borders of our society but at its centre, producing and policing from that centre the boundaries of who we are.

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Afterword

‘Tell them you’re Indian’ Mudrooroo

In these perilous times (1996), when race in Australia has suddenly become a respectable topic and there flows forth a plethora of words on and about Aborigines and Asians — the most visible, it seems, of the minorities in this land — it is perhaps pertinent to remember that, once, the two came together during those times when being descended from the indigenous peoples of Australia was seen as a liability; but it is difficult to believe that, in any of the country towns in which I spent the first years of my life, it was possible to claim such an identity. It did not matter which coloured ethnic group you ascribed to, for colour dominated the landscape, and Aborigines were rounded up to be shipped to missions or were allowed to remain on the outskirts of the towns. There was little choice in whether you were an Aborigine or not. In the small towns of Western Australia, you were classified as to degrees of indigenality and denied any right of appeal. ‘Tell them you’re Indian’ was a response denied people of colour in the rural areas. Indians, in some areas, were known from 259

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the Afghan camel drivers and Indian pedlars. They were known as a different Other, more civilised than Aborigines, mixed or otherwise, and there was not a choice of identity. Then, as most if not all coloured people existed on the outskirts of the white rural population, intervention by government agencies was clearly foreseen and even waited for. What the position was like for Aboriginal people in the cities, even then densely populated, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, is difficult to determine as the relevant research has not been done. Were there, for example, more ‘Indians’ than ‘Aborigines’ in these metropolitan areas? But times change and the Indians have become Aborigines: an amorphous mass, the members of which having all suffered an enduring persecution at the hands of all white people, that is until the 1960s when conditions began to be ameliorated. Is this true or not? Once, coming from an Aboriginal background, to be black was to be Aboriginal. I believed that all Aborigines were poor and oppressed. I would have found it hard to believe that there were Aboriginal property holders, Aboriginal artists overseas and Aborigines in jobs beyond the stockman stereotype in the Western Australia of the 1950s and early 1960s. It caused me to give a bitter laugh when I read these lines of the Black American writer, Chester Himes: He: Birmingham. She: Oh, you poor lamb. He: Ku-Klux-Klan. She: Oh, you poor black man. He: Lynch mob. She: Oh, you make me sob. He: Little Rock. She: Oh, what an awful shock. He: Jim Crow. She: Oh, you suffering Negro. He: Denied my rights. She: Oh, take my delights. He: Segregation. She: Oh, but segregation.

Afterword

He: They killed my pappy. She: Oh, let me be happy. He: They call me low. She: Oh, you beautiful Negro. (Campbell 1994, 281)

The point being stressed here is that Chester Himes, although lightskinned, engaged in a politics of the body as I did, which he and I might have avoided by stressing racial origins other than African or Aboriginal. He and I engaged in the existential being of the black man and did not try to escape it by claiming a fraudulent ancestry and thus incurring the guilt of an act of bad faith. It was Black American writers such as Richard Wright and Chester Himes who laid the foundations for the civil rights movement in America in the 1960s and, by extension, it may be claimed that they also initiated the civil rights movement in Australia through the Black Power movement by writing tough and angry books which appealed to black fellows in Australia. Be that as it may, for the young Aborigines of the 1950s and 1960s, there were no other strong black models to emulate and these were embraced with the same glee with which we had greeted other black heroes such as the boxer, Joe Louis. There were few Indians in the woodpile. Those who were able to claim Indian ancestry were those, the product of Europeans and Aborigines, who had begun to exist almost from the arrival of the first fleet in 1788 and lived in a city. It is no fault of their own. In fact, if there had not been a racial structure set in place in Australia quite early in European Australian settlement, those Aborigines in the settled areas would have merged into the settler population without friction. This was in contrast to the United States which had Indian wars and a civil war fought for the emancipation of the black slaves. Nothing on this scale ever happened in Australia. In fact, it was the opposite and there was a steady mixing of the new settlers with the older inhabitants, until such government fiats as the Aborigines Act of 1905 of Western Australia put in force a segregation between the races. Why this reversal occurred is difficult to gauge and any studies of this Act and others, of the reason for them coming into being, lack a sophisticated basis, either theoretical or historical, to explain the growth of such restrictive and racial legislation, although, from the work of Robert Young (1995), any explanations beyond simple reductionism

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must be found in the discourses of the British Empire and European thought. But, even with the best or worst intentions, such legislation did not prevent the steady growth of what the Native American writer, Gerald Vizenor, calls ‘crossbloods’ and he elaborates on this term further by stating that ‘mixed bloods loosen the seams in the shrouds of identities’ (1994, 227–46). Few crossbloods in Australia have examined the problem of identity within themselves and the often unproductive way such problems are negotiated. The latent absurdity of the sign displayed in the Aboriginal exhibition at the Victorian Museum — ‘a single drop of Koori blood makes you a Koori’ — is a case in point. The question of blood is what else but a clinging onto Victorian classifications of race, classifications which reached their fulfilment in the Nuremberg race laws (1935), set in place by the National Socialist government of Germany and which led to the genocidal practices of Auschwitz (Goldhagen 1996, 97–98). Race and racial theories have proved to be dangerous and too often rest on unsupported assumptions. If a single drop of Aboriginal blood rests within a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Aryan ‘beast’ without his knowing it, then it may be asked how this is manifested if he has not the slightest interest in Koories. Again, it may be said that this person’s ancestors have separated from the existential being of any Koories and the result has been an Australian without any visible signs of being a Koori. He is beyond the shrouds of identity and identifies simply as an Australian. The problem with theories of race and the practices of racism is that they involve a mass of contradictions, especially in the case of a crossblood. My identity as a crossblood was established in 1965. In the foreword to my first novel, Wildcat Falling, Mary Durack wrote: ‘He was nineteen years old and part Aboriginal, though his features would not have betrayed him and his skin colour was no darker than that of a southern European’ (Johnson 1965, v). It is interesting that she uses the word ‘betrayed’, as if my very existential being was somehow at odds with my own personal identity. In fact, from the mere genetic fact of being ‘part Aboriginal’, I was supposed to have an indigenous heritage into which I could enter. In a sense, I had been textualised by Mary Durack and given a race which did not affect my being in the slightest, but did affect my work when I went

Afterword

on to write my novel which was about a part-Aboriginal youth and which was edited into publishability by Mary Durack. A textualisation of identity went against the grain for me, especially when, in Melbourne, I became acquainted with existentialism in which man created his own values and man simply is. But this lofty position, I quickly realised, was traduced by racial theories which sought to define and confine the individual. Having been textualised by a white person, having been officially designated the native, in other words, I had to go along with that, though in a different climate I might have claimed my Irish ancestry and, by doing so, Irish culture into which I had been acculturated by the likes of Basher Doyle and his cronies in Clontarf Boys Town. This, for a person of literary ambition, would have been uplifting in the sense of belonging to a ‘race’ which had produced the famous modernist writer, James Joyce, and after him, Samuel Beckett. Not only this, but the Irish had had a history similar to other oppressed peoples and had never given in. But racism intruded in denying me this identity. It was denied to me by members of the dominant culture, such as Mary Durack. Still, all in all, the crossblood exists at the edges of identity and his identity is always open to doubt. He is the existentialist par excellence, resting his authenticity on doing rather than being. When, in 1996, it was declared that Mudrooroo was of Negro ancestry, thus negating thirty years of being an Aborigine, it necessitated some identity searching: what did this mean to me? I had discovered that identity is a fragile thing and can be taken away, just as it can be given. As I had not confronted such a crisis before, did it mean that through a genetic oversight I had lost my culture and had become unauthentic? Though with a little diligent research I might re-establish my racial credentials; but then for what? Australia was multicultural and the world was postmodern. A fixed identity really did not exist for writers such as myself who, every day, were creating identities in language. Identity itself, seeing it could be given and taken away, was as much pastiche as any other contemporary structure. In fact, having now been given an ‘American Negro’ ancestry, did it mean that I had to wear my cap backwards? Anyway, such problems were not so important in that much of contemporary culture is Black American, and I could continue on much as I had

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always. After all, I had no kingdom to defend. Most of the music I listened to was Black American, my favourite writer was Black American and I had had direct influences in my life from Black Americans. Then there was also my Australian identity (a pastiche, for sure), but there were all the attributes of national identity essentially within myself. I had been born in Australia, in the country too, and what is more even played with Aborigine kids before I was taken away to Clontarf to be acculturated into Irishness. Identity, for me, did seem like a shroud and part of the weave of that shroud was an early history similar to that of those Aborigines I knew: taken away from parents, ending up in gaol, being taken in hand by white philanthropists and sent to the Aboriginal Advancement League in Melbourne for my own good; then, in the 1970s, becoming part of the Aboriginal protest movement, and so on. I could not find an Indian anywhere in the woodpile, though, as I had lived in India, perhaps I had a better case for being considered an Indian than most. After all, I had a smattering of Bengali and Hindi and had lived within their cultures. Still, what has happened to me is to realise the absurdity of seeking a racial identity away from what I believe I am. Whatever my identity is, it rests on my history of over fifty years and that is that. Thus, a fixed identity (or lack of it) does not affect my identity as a human being and I can declare, along with Gerald Vizenor: ‘I imagine myself in good humour and wish to live a responsible life, and so I’m not going to fall off the edge as some imperfect person just because I’m an accident of history’ (1994, x). Of course, this might be seen as extreme in this day and age of ethnic membership, but then I have done my part in the Aboriginal struggle and, now that native title has been established in law, there is really nothing left to fight for, especially when I do not intend to pursue an Aboriginal identity merely for the sake of claiming a piece of land. In fact, I regard myself as having become a new person, belonging to a new group which came into genetic being with the arrival of the first Europeans and the coming to birth of their offspring. To acquiesce in what I regard as a racial construction of the Aboriginal, an invention to which those who have something to gain ascribe to and which leads to a schizophrenia of the spirit, is to deny

Afterword

the many strands of mainstream Australia and to elevate one of those strands at the expense of others equally important to the social fabric. Racism for any number of reasons, concealed and congealed, has been a bugbear of Australia, one which has inflicted harm on human beings merely because of the colour of their skins or the shape of their eyes. Why it continues to exist, it is difficult to say, and why those who are the target should engage in similar racisms of isolation and superiority is again a question which must sooner or later be addressed. It has become apparent that what is referred to as ‘mainstream’ Australia is a racist structure which must be combated. The problem with such a dominant structure is that it produces a mirror image which shapes a minority such as the Aboriginal into a similar racial structure. Mainstream Australia is seen as one monolithic culture and, through such government bodies as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), the various communities and individuals identifying as ‘Aboriginal’ are constructed in a similar monolithic fashion. The invented Aboriginal is then given a singular otherness on which is inscribed certain attributes of Aboriginality. What these are or were is open to debate, especially as the native title legislation has sharpened divisions and discords that threaten not only the singularity of the monolithic structure, but the cohesion of individual communities. With the Hindmarsh Bridge affair, any singularity of purpose was quickly shattered with accusations of ‘culture’ being invented rather than being passed down. It is a matter of debate whether ‘culture’ as a formal entity did survive in heavily settled areas and what is often put forward as Aboriginal culture of a particular area is but a pastiche collected from various books written by Europeans. Thus we are in the realm of the postmodern and a complicity of interests between liberal white Australians and certain ‘Aborigines’ to fashion a culture which is filled with contradictions. It is only from these contradictions that an indigenous culture can be constructed rather than any redress to the notion that a primordial indigenous culture is alive and well in Australia. This contradiction becomes absurd when we consider, next to it, the construction of the Aboriginal as victim, with community problems of such overwhelming concern that any spiritual content comes from a bottle. All in all, such constructions do not come from Aboriginal people but

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from those Europeans who want their pet Other to be constructed as The Aboriginal, which includes a spirituality and an affinity to the land and environment. Even this is open to debate; a case in point is the wholesale destruction of trees in southwestern Australia which fell to the axes of Aboriginal farm workers. These workers, now grown old, have been given a supposed custodianship of culture value which often is spurious. Any claim to their Aboriginality rests on a genetic connection rather than a continuation of tradition. My own concern with green issues rests on my growing up in the country and seeing the openness and the beauty of the ground, over which I roamed as a little tyke, being cleared, carved up and bought and sold in the market place. Country should belong to those who wish to belong to and look after her, not to those who seek to own land for future monetary gain. I have stressed in my latest book, Us Mob (1995), that any basic Aboriginal identity, owing to the many contradictions combining in such an identity, can only rest on a genetic connection to those who have come before us. This is because so much of traditional Aboriginal culture has been destroyed and, with it, any passing on of traditions. Often an avowal of the survival of traditional beliefs in those areas where they wiped out indigenous culture can be traced to the early works of Europeans, which I have found a problem in itself but which many indigenous people, because of a lack of any other resources, accept with only a denial of negative aspects such as cannibalism. Of course, this is not to deny the survival of some traditional cultural remnants, but to point out the inherent problems when there is a mix of such elements. For example, I have found that, on occasions when I have been told a story, the very same story is to be found in a collection put together by a European, with an identity being found not only in the content but in the structure of the story. Much of the defensiveness in debates or assertions about traditional indigenous cultural survivals may be seen to stem from what Kevin Gilbert has called ‘the rape of the soul’ (1984, 3). This rape of the soul occurred to those crossbloods who were denied a place in ‘mainstream’ Australian society and withdrew into a quasi-Aboriginality which often has been greeted with scorn by anthropologists with the advantage of knowledge gained from years in the field and from anthropological literature. I have heard this scorn personally and it

Afterword

was upsetting; but the defensive reaction also is seen when efforts are made to criticise such structures of ‘Aboriginality’ by persons from similar backgrounds but armed with some critical knowledge. Paul Gilroy, writing about the African diaspora, states: This shrinkage is another symptom of a new condition in which the old commitment to debate and discussion as a means to strengthen the culture is being replaced by a mood that reduces race politics to little more than a form of communal therapy and makes critical judgements on black culture impossible to articulate. In this climate, to be critical or analytical is often perceived as an act of betrayal. Where these accusations are made, the essential black identity which must be safeguarded at all costs turns out to be a surprisingly brittle construction. (1993, 3)

This brittleness is apparent in race politics in Australia where, too often, those who seek to open up the debate are bypassed, or their comments are dismissed out of hand. When a politician can give vent to feelings on ATSIC, for example, and the wastage of money therein, her comments are dismissed as merely racist, although such comments have been made by those who come under this government organisation and derive their funding from it. Those ‘Aborigines’ who agree that there is a degree of truth in what she says are considered to have betrayed their community. Construction of Aboriginal identity, an existential identity rather than a genetic one, is indeed a brittle construction, one whose existential contradictions need to be addressed and perhaps from a class perspective. If this is done, from it may come an informed debate about the effects of racism in Australia and its overweening importance in constructing not only mainstream Australian culture and society, but also such distorted mirror images found in minority groups which must stress a communality of identity, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, not only in regards to the degree of acculturation to mainstream values, but also to the genetic make-up of those who now pass as Aboriginal, though once — well, it has been admitted — once we were Indian or Maori, or what have you. As Gerald Vizenor writes: ‘The woodland tribes bear their agonistic totems from the wild premier union with the fur trade and written languages, and earlier,

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a brush with lethal pathogens; that first touch, the deceptions of missionaries, the phraseologies of treaties, and the levies of a dominant consumer culture induced postmodern emblems and discourses’ (1994, 226). The problem is: are those persons who claim some genetic connection to the indigenous people of Australia ready to accept their polyglot origins and release a culture on the world which reflects the many strands of Australian society and thus enters that postmodernist clash of cultures which is the world we live in?

Notes Introduction: Cultural racism 1. This was the case with Sally Morgan, whose mother was intent on avoiding a repetition of her own removal (Morgan 1987). It is not an isolated example. We have oral and documentary evidence of the adoption of Maori, Islander and Indian identities by individuals and sometimes whole families, in Queensland, Western Australia, New South Wales and the Northern Territory, either to avoid direct severance of family relations or more general state intrusions. 2. The example is taken from the Northern Territory where parallel cousins are in the same category as siblings and are the focus of avoidance relations. Morris (1989, 48) considered the equivalent situation in New South Wales. 3. Lattas (1993) argues that the approaches to the issues of Aboriginality and Aboriginal politics by various liberal academics represent more benign, more complex, but, nevertheless, deeply ingrained expressions of white superiority. 4. The reference is to the literary scandal in Australia in 1995 when a novel by a young woman purporting to describe her Polish uncle’s involvement in the Nazi death camps won a prize and was subsequently attacked as anti-Semitic. While there are now many accounts and analyses of involvement in Nazism, there is a remarkable silence concerning any personal involvement in Australia’s racist past. 5. The most notable expression of ‘the new racism’ (Barker 1981) in Australia came with the so-called ‘Great Immigration Debate’ when historian Geoffrey Blainey, in his book All for Australia (1984), took up the issues of multiculturalism and Asian immigration as threats to national unity, arguing that cultural compatability should be the basis for an immigration policy because cultural homogeneity is the basis for national unity. Blainey sees the nation as an extension of the individual. Despite his denial that race should be a principle of hierarchical social differentiation, Blainey includes and excludes individuals in terms of ‘natural’ national differences. Thus, Australia’s egalitarian ideology can encompass and even encourage modes of racial differentiation (see Kapferer 1988, 187).

1. ‘Nothing has changed’ This article first appeared in 1992 in Meanjin 51(2), 229–46. 1. Koori Oral History Program, Grampians Visit, 1 June 1989, Tape 46. 2. Interview with Ian Clark, 21 October 1991. 3. Pat Reid incorrectly blamed Crabb’s ‘sheer arrogance’ for the erection of the signs. 4. Grampians District Tourist Association, submission to the Victorian Place Names Committee, 26 September 1990. By anglicised, I mean corrupted, as was the case with some existing names, such as Cherrypool for Djarabul.

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270 Race Matters 5. Clark stated that the committee also rejected Bugara, not because of any distasteful translation, but because it sounds ‘too much like bugger’. 6. BG of Horsham, 28 March 1989, in KTU 2; Boort and Quambatook Standard-Times, 29 May 1990; Portland Observer, 4 July 1990. 7. The Western Australian government purchased the land in 1985. 8. See, for example, The Australian, 21 August 1990. 9. Media release, Murray River Region Aboriginal Land Council, 22 August 1990. At the time, Walker had recorded 160 protected sites, and ‘knew of many more’. 10. For example, DS of Bentleigh, 30 March 1989, in KTU 1. 11. This had occurred earlier in 1991 when a sign was erected at the newly named Yanga Nyawi National Park in the Mallee (Wimmera Mail-Times, 14 October 1991). It has since occurred in the newly named national park (Age, 14 December 1991). 12. Melbourne Herald, 31 May 1990: ‘DEAD GRAMPIANS’.

TONGUE SPARKS HOT WORDS IN THE

2. The journey out to the Centre This paper was originally published in A Rutherford (ed), Aboriginal Culture Today, Dangaroo Press, Sydney, 1988. 1. I use ‘settler’ and ‘Aboriginal’ as adjectives to describe categories of ‘Australians’ to avoid the use of categories of race, colour or culture. 2. A newspaper report on the handover of Ayers Rock to the Pitjantjatjara people was titled ‘Centre of Power’, for example, and begins with the statement that ‘Ayers Rock is saturated with symbolism’ (Davidson and Tweedie 1982). 3. Bruce Chatwin (1987) also plays on the notion of travelling across the land, setting it in an evolutionist perspective. 4. Linguist and anthropologist, born of mission parents at Hermannsburg Lutheran mission west of Alice Springs, Strehlow worked in conjunction with the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Museum. See McNally (1981) and Strehlow’s partial autobiography (1969). 5. ‘Australian Kakadu Tours 1986/87 Package Holidays’, Ansett and Australian Airlines. 6. There are dozens of titles of books that play on this symbolism: Ernestine Hill’s The Great Australian Loneliness, J Kirwan’s An Empty Land, Sydney Upton’s Australia’s Empty Spaces, HH Finlayson’s The Red Centre: Man and Beast in the Heart of Australia, CT Madigan’s Crossing the Dead Heart, Mrs A Gunn’s We of the Never Never, and so on. 7. Victor Turner developed his notions of structure and anti-structure in relation to African cults, and then applied them to European pilgrimages (Turner and Turner 1978).

Notes 8. The Anzac myth carries some of the meanings and functions of a national origin myth, but at present remains set in historical time. 9. The actual centre of the Australian landmass lies at Central Mount Stuart, north of Alice Springs. 10. I refer to the disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain from the camp site at Ayers Rock and the subsequent prosecution of Mrs Lindy Chamberlain for murder. The body of the baby was never found and Mrs Chamberlain was imprisoned in Darwin. Her husband was charged as an accessory to murder. Mrs Chamberlain claimed that a dingo stole her baby from the tent. Media reportage was scandalous, and police investigation incompetent. After a series of investigations, Mrs Chamberlain was eventually released from prison but she served over four years, a sentence that would never have been imposed had she been willing to plead post-natal depression. A film was made of the incident, with Merryl Streep in the leading role, and there is an extensive literature commenting on the case. 11. I use ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ as empirical native categories only. 12. This factor is played on increasingly by the advertising industry. An image of Ayers Rock is used to advertise everything from car batteries to women’s clothing. 13. I use ‘man’, not in a generic sense, but as a reproduction of the form of discourse used. The bush is a male domain and women have no place in it. In a separate paper, I argue for the maleness of Ayers Rock and the essential relation of the discourse of the bush to gender hierarchies. 14. Rainbow, unicorn and butterfly — seen as being the three fundamentally important symbols of the magic movement. Wika, referring to new life and potentiality, sexual power and soul or spirit. 15. EST (Erhardt Seminars Training), JEL (Joy, Energy, Life) and Insight, for example. Channel 10 in Sydney ran a New Era Program for some time. 16. In Adelaide these techniques have been applied to Glenelg, a site of drunkenness, and to Mt Barker Road at a corner notorious for traffic accidents. 17. Uluru is the Aboriginal name by which Ayers Rock is known. 18. Aunt Millie Boyd is quoted as saying that a crystal also lies beneath Mt Warning in New South Wales (New Age News 1987, 1(9), 6). 19. I am indebted to Hilary Tabrett for this information. 20. Mutitjulu community is located at Ayers Rock. 21. ‘Mayan hopes for harmony’, Weekend Australian, 15–16 August 1987; ‘Gathering was so harmonious’, Central Australian Advocate, 19 August 1987. 22. From the teachings and visions of Jose A Arguelles, Harmonic Convergence: The Last Call, in a newsletter distributed by Planet Art Network, Boulder, Colorado, 1986; and see also Adelaide Fountain News 39, 9 October 1987. Other meetings were

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272 Race Matters held at Mt Warning (New South Wales), Bacchus Marsh (Victoria), Victoria Square fountain in Adelaide, and at Bronte Beach in Sydney. 23. Dolphin symbolism came from America too and Lynn Andrews (1987) gives them a pivotal place in her account of the path which brought her to Australia in order to do battle with the forces of evil which are sapping the strength of Aboriginal Australians.

3. Rousseau’s Knot I dedicate this chapter to a brother who used the brief time that he had to make a difference. An earlier version appeared in Oceania (James 1993). All the incarnations of this paper are the result of research conducted with Mary Edmunds between 1989 and 1992 on the role of the print media in the creation of attitudes towards Aboriginal people. 1. For the purposes of this discussion, I am defining ‘Australian’ culture as the sum of cultural articulations which take place within the geopolitical borders of the Australian state. I include all those histories, relations and experiences which people embody as indigenous, migrating or ‘settled’ cultural actors. I also include the way in which these multiplicities exist, compete and are arranged. The culture of a multicultural society as a whole is defined by the way in which diverse enculturations come together. Many racisms emerge in Australian culture; I am discussing only one of them. 2. As I use it here, the term ‘Aboriginality’ refers to the way in which both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are perceived to live their beingness, rather than any actual Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander experience. 3. The mass media constitute a crucial institution in human culture at this point in history, as important to contemporary anthropological inquiry as the study of myth, ritual, religion, art, and gossip as social control, have been in traditionalist anthropological endeavours. It is important in many cultural formations, but, particularly in secular, multicultural, capitalist democracies, the mass media share many of the functions of these institutions. Anthropologically speaking, they are crucial to understanding what is regarded as important, common and universally known and understood within a cultural formation. They are the subject of study here for this reason. 4. The terms ‘race’ and ‘race relations’ are used here as they appear in public discourse, as unproblematic names for natural categories. They are, of course, hugely problematic in any other sense. 5. Rousseau makes both general and specific reference to various indigenous people as examples of the characteristics and faculties of ‘natural man’. Observations laid out in his notes demonstrate a high level of both interest and awareness of contemporary works which describe indigenous peoples and their cultures (Rousseau 1984, 139–72).

Notes 6. Repeated invocation of an image provides it with a distinct historical presence to which people respond. The image may be put to various uses by diverse interests, as White (1978, 103–4) suggests, ‘either in order to effect its transformation by showing how “unnatural” it is ... or to reinforce its authority by showing how consonant it is with its context, how adequately it conforms to “the order of things”’. These possibilities are always present in any invocation of it. This multiplicity of interests and purposes for which an image may be used generates its socio-political and cultural significance. 7. This paper is only a small and partial study of the global phenomenon of racism. The links which I trace between eighteenth-century French discourse and Australian racism in the later twentieth century are not meant to hold true for the manifestation of racism elsewhere. The tendency to conceptualise and stereotype racism as a ‘white’, (neo) European north/western phenomenon is to privilege again the peoples who are already privileged by the discourse to the cost of understanding the logics of other racisms. Consider, for an unexhaustive example, the position of Europeans and Koreans in the history of Japanese discourses and policies on race; the discourses on, and treatment of, ‘fourth world’ peoples in the ‘third world’ (for example, Brazil, India and Malaysia); the treatment of ‘non-ethnic’ Russians during the unification of the USSR; or that of Tibetans under Chinese control. 8. Turner (1990, 117) actually uses the term ‘character’ in the original. 9. The United States, Canada and New Zealand are in similar positions, and South Africa has also experienced some of these contingencies. Race relations are very much a feature of national identity in these places and something by which they are understood and evaluated by other nations. 10. Earlier Aboriginal resistance to celebrations of national unity at the Australian sesquicentennial in 1938 marked January 26 of that year as a ‘Day of Mourning’ (Markus 1988, 17). Though it set a specific precedent, it received nowhere near the same amount of media attention nor was it as nationally widespread as the events organised by Aboriginal people in 1988. 11. Normative racism is a commonsense. It exempts itself from the constraints of morality by exnomination, by the way in which it exists in myriad discourses other than that of race/race relations, and by the way in which it erases the materiality of race relations from relevance. Rousseau’s use of ethnographic data is a case in point. In moral or political terms, the power relations most crucial to normative racism are those which ensure that one group is able to make its ‘commonsense’ the commonsense. Though this power relation is present in all articulations of that commonsense, not all people articulating it necessarily belong to a ruling elite or dominant. This is the challenge of Aboriginal self-representation in dominant discourses. Commonsense belongs, in the most general and encompassing terms, to all members of society and so becomes a natural category. It acquires an objective truth. Normative racism is beyond morality because it apparently has no subjective basis.

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274 Race Matters 12. Edmunds and James (1992, 156–91) contains a much more detailed, if awkward, analysis of these cartoons than it is possible to present here. 13. There is nothing intrinsically ‘Aboriginal’ about these figures nor, with the exception of Charles Perkins, with that of any of the figures in the following cartoons. Their ‘Aboriginality’ stems from the cultural associations of the other things in the cartoons as well as their meanings in wider usage and understanding. It is for this reason that Aboriginal people can be represented by stick-figures (both human and canine) and dots. These representations are abundant with signifiers of normative racism. 14. It is interesting to note how very far apart the discourses on race relations are kept from analyses or discourses on multiculturalism in Australia. While in one instance the prejudice may be called ‘racism’ and in the other it might be called ‘ethnocentrism’, the overall reality is one of disadvantage and abuse. The dubious value of separating issues of prejudice in this way was highlighted by Charles Perkins during the bicentennial year and is discussed later in the chapter. 15. This is not to suggest that ‘traditional’ Aboriginality does not possess the rhe torical power to effectively challenge the dominant. The ‘spirituality’ of ‘traditional’ Aboriginality has played a significant role for various groups and their challenges to dominant structures. It has been involved or co-opted because of ‘the inscrutability of the primordial’, the ‘mystique’ of the Aboriginal religion and culture. Such groups include, aside from Aboriginal people themselves, environmentalists and ‘New Agers’. 16. Cox argues that ‘race prejudice’ is held against people designated as ‘subsocial’ as opposed to merely ‘anti-social’ (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992, 133). Lynchings carried out against Black Americans/African Americans were intended as punishments to ‘teach the Blacks a lesson’ for attempting to assimilate into the wider United States society, for getting above themselves. I agree with Anthias and YuvalDavis’ reservations on Cox’s thesis (that ‘blacks’ are the only group who suffer racial prejudice). In the Australian context, resentment is directed at Aboriginal people who and/or when they operate in ways not characterised as ‘traditionally’ Aboriginal. Both localities and racisms privilege hierarchy as an organising logic of culture, the natural order of things and so a suitable power relation (see note 13). 17. One of the ordinary products of mass media relations with the state in the representation of race relations is the elision of daily social life in which race and ethnic relations are common and mundane. This elision encourages an understanding of race relations as exceptional, unusual, requiring authority, and marked by telltale (stereotypical) characteristics. 18. It is possible to conclude that the Coalition and the Aboriginal lobby were in common agreement that reconciliation was an artificial project with a political agenda, designed to collapse and adulterate natural categories. Especially in the case of the second of the following cartoons, it would seem that political harmony was in fact something which the hegemonic (Labor) state imposed on its unwilling

Notes and dissenting citizenry of all colours. The tension between the apparently social and evidently natural is part of the unpleasant edginess of race relations logics. 19. Patrick Cook refused permission for his cartoon to be reproduced. In response to a widely reported comment of Charles Perkins critical of the migration policy, it depicted Perkins standing on a soap box with a placard saying ‘No Asian Crims’ with two ‘Asian’ passers-by commenting respectively ‘At least he’s right about the Viets’ and ‘At least he’s right about the Chinese’. 20. I am here referring specifically to those actors in party politics and events described in this chapter. 21. Similar ambiguities or ironies are found in the relation between rhetoric and political imperative (or action) in both the themes of Celebration of a Nation and Australia — One Nation. In the first instance, and especially in the early part of 1988, the joyful acknowledgment of nationhood was introduced in prime ministerial speeches reflecting on crimes committed against Aboriginal people in the colonial past, so that the present is placed in a certain moral and attitudinal opposition to the past. In the second instance, the theme of Australia — One Nation was a strategic response of the Coalition to the political initiatives of the then Labor government. It was based on an opposition fundamental to the framework of the bicameral system as much as on any inherent discursive logic or genuine sentiment. 22. I use the term ‘organic’ here to imply the kind of irreducible corporeal/ate identity and integrity given to individual human beings in cultures where the individual is the basic social unit. There are many other cultural spaces where the lineage, clan or other domestic arrangement forms the minimum social institution responsible for legal arrangements, production, social contracts (such as marriages), religious observance and property ownership. There is every likelihood in a multicultural society that other non-Aboriginal people might apprehend organic collectivities. But, unless these groups come to dominate Australian life and cultural institutions, common recognition of organic collectivities is extremely unlikely. Australia’s judicial system, like its political system and its economic system, is based on the individual as the basic social unit. The social reality of any one or thing in a liberal democracy depends greatly on its legal/legislative standing and existence. In this way, a legal category can become a natural category. This reality has been a poignant feature of Aboriginal lives from the moment of the first Aboriginal reserve and continues in eternal debates about ‘ownership’ in landrights discourse.

4. Rum, seduction and death An earlier version of this article appeared in 1993 in Oceania 63(3), 195–206.

5. The ‘Breelong Blacks’ 1. Anon (nd) refers to a photocopied booklet, The Breelong Massacres, sold at one time through the Dubbo gaol souvenir shop. It contains an ad hoc collection of photographs and accounts of the events which led to the execution of both Jimmy Governor and Jacky Underwood.

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276 Race Matters 2. See death certificates, reference numbers 1901: 109 (Jimmy Governor) and 1901: 1293 (Jacky Underwood) in the NSW Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages. 3. Ethel Governor waived the right of a wife’s immunity under common law to be called to testify against her husband. It is implied by some authors that she agreed to be called as a Crown witness in order to secure her own release, the testimony of Elsie Clarke alone being sufficient to have brought her to trial as an accomplice in the murders (Anon, nd; Mudford 1988, 216). 4. Refer to the article by Homi Bhabha (1984). 5. A more inclusive term has not been used because, until relatively recently, discriminatory policies and attitudes have seen Asians and other ‘coloured’ peoples besides Aborigines excluded from many of the civil rights and welfare benefits enjoyed by those of European and, in particular, Anglo-Saxon descent. This was exemplified by the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, the enactment of which was contemporaneous with the events discussed in this article. Formulated in accordance with the ‘White Australia Policy’, it remained formally in force until 1972. 6. Depending on the context, the words ‘governmentality’ or ‘governmental’ state are used here in the Foucauldian sense as referring to (i) a particular form of government, (ii) the historical tendency towards its emergence, or (iii) the transformation process through which this form of government historically emerged (Foucault 1991, 102–3). 7. Reynolds cites the evidence of Ethel Governor given at Jimmy’s trial in support of this point (1979, 19). 8. Pastoral and bio-power are two related yet not identical Foucauldian terms. Biopower was first conceptualised by Foucault (1978). According to Foucault, it always takes as its target for intervention the life forces of the population but it developed in two distinct interventionary areas. ‘The first strategy to emerge was the pacification and disciplining of the individual body so as to insert it most effectively into the emergent capitalist mode of production. The second facet of bio-power to emerge was the growing appreciation of the resource encompassed within the species body of the population. As to this latter aspect of bio-power, the individual and collective sexuality were the main targets for intervention and the strategy employed was the development of normalization standards and procedures’ (Wood 1994, 10–11). The concept of pastoral power was developed by Foucault in his essays ‘Subject and Power’ (1982) and ‘Governmentality’ (1991). Whilst it still takes the population of a state as its target for intervention, it more specifically refers to the state usurpation of community welfare and security functions formerly undertaken by the church. 9. The article by Turner (1986) draws on Marshall’s (1965) analysis of the conflicts between citizenship rights and the inequalities inherent within capitalist societies, which Marshall originally presented in a 1949 lecture on citizenship. 10. Turner (1986, 7) claims that juridic persons are persons who are the ‘bearer of rights’ and thus capable of making choices as rational agents: ‘real persons are

Notes juridic persons, and hence women, children and slaves before the expansion of formal citizenship were not proper persons’. I would argue that there is an analogy between the situation of women in the nineteenth century, who were subsumed under the jurisdiction of their husband, and that of the Aborigine, whose rights were subsumed by the Chief Protector. However, the differences are also extremely significant — race proved to be a significantly greater barrier to equality in the long term. 11. Asian immigrants were another notable exclusion, pointing to the extent that socially constructed racial difference is the primary means by which Australians identify themselves. Hence the infamous quote in the Bulletin in which Australians were told who they were not: ‘No nigger, no Chinaman, no lascar, no kanaka, no purveyor of cheap coloured labour, is an Australian’ (quoted in Lawson 1983, 140). This is not meant to diminish the extent to which gender discrimination was virulently pervasive throughout the same period (see Lake 1993). 12. The Graziers Association of New South Wales and Others v. The Australian Workers Union; The Australian Workers Union v. The Graziers Association of New South Wales and Others (1932) 31 CAR 710 at 715. The Australian Workers Union v. EA Abbey and Others; The Graziers Association of New South Wales and Others v. The Australian Workers Union (1938) 39 CAR 607 at 632. The Australian Workers Union v. EA Abbey and Others (1944) 53 CAR 212 at 214 and 216. (All cited in McCorquodale 1987, 41.) 13. The relevant Act at the time of Federation was the Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages Act 1899–1934, which repealed An Act for Registering Births, Deaths and Marriages, 19 Victoria No 34. 14. Refer to Record of Baptism, No 702, Vol 44A. Refer also to the documented Aboriginal practice of naming children after some object, ‘a bird, a beast, or a fish’, in lieu of what was perceived by white settlers to be an abstract naming system characteristic of the sophisticated intellect (Lattas 1987, 45). Ward also documents the common rural practice of taking nicknames, which operated to thwart official requirements to fix a permanent and unique identity upon the subject (1966, 78–79). 15. Refer to the Marriage Laws Consolidation Act, 19 Victoria No 30, which provides in clause 5 that a marriage will only be held valid by law if it has been celebrated either by a minister of religion or a district registrar. 16. Refer to the cases of R v. Neddy Monkey, reported in I Wyatt and Webb Reports (L), wherein it was held that the court ‘could not take judicial notice of the religious ceremonies and rites of Aboriginals’, and R v. Cobby (1883) 40 and 14 SCR (NSW) 440 at 443, wherein it was held that ‘Aboriginals have no laws of which we can take cognisance’, so that a tribal wife was forced to give evidence against her husband whilst a legal spouse would have been exempt from doing so. Both cases are referred to in McCorquodale (1987, 32). 17. Prior to the commencement of civil registration some churches were quite liberal in their accommodation of traditional and creative naming practices. There is no

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278 Race Matters doubt, however, that the adoption or perjorative imposition of nicknames would still have stigmatised their bearers. 18. The exclusion clause in the Commonwealth Constitution making this exclusion explicit. 19. An example is the 1869 marriage of James Tighe and Euphemia Blackman in nearby Coonabarabran: ‘Aboriginals’ is written across the register where details of the mothers of the bride and groom are requested. 20. The strength of these colonial conventions by which the white man must necessarily encompass the black woman and the black man must never be allowed to encompass the white woman is evidenced by the fact that it was actually Jimmy’s mother who had the Irish father, Jack Fitzgerald, whereas Tommy Governor’s links to a white heritage were much more tenuous (Cameron and Job 1993, 97). These facts were constantly recast in public discourse, however, to conform to the norm by the imputation of an Irish heritage to Tommy (Anon, nd). 21. A search of the records in the nearby district of Coonabarabran reveal this to be a highly unusual occurrence. The mother usually only attends when she is in the company of the father or else is the mother of an illegitimate baby. Otherwise, the father or some other male acting in his place is the informant. 22. Evidence exists which suggests that Jimmy Governor was cheated by Mawbey over the payment for his fencing contract and that those killed after the Breelong Massacre had likewise cheated him on contract labour jobs (Cameron and Job 1993, 89). 23. Cameron and Job document the white settlers’ state of preparedness, as if for war, in the Coonabarabran shire during the period when the Governors were hiding out in the district. The Wollar tribe were all moved out of the district to distant Brewarrina in case of an uprising in support of their kinsmen (1993, 89–97). 24. Refer to Cowlishaw (1992) for an excellent critique of the role played by anthropologists and historians in perpetuating dichotomous representations of ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ Aboriginal culture based on adherence to tradition. 25. See Mudford (1988, 213), which documents the way in which John Mawbey began to apply financial pressure on the Governors for continuing to allow other Aborigines on the property. 26. This definition of the racial frontier by Jan Critchett draws out the embodied nature of racial oppression: The frontier was in fact a very local phenomenon, the disputed area being the very land each settler lived upon. The enemy was not on the other side of neutral ground. The frontier was represented by the woman who lived nearby and was shared by her Aboriginal partners with a European or Europeans. It was the group living down beside the creek or river, it was the ‘boy’ used as guide for exploring parties or for doing jobs now and then. The ‘other side of the frontier’ was

Notes just down the yard or as close as the bed shared with an Aboriginal woman. (Critchett 1990, 23)

6. Australia Felix rules OK! 1. Max draws in particular on Hill (1970). 2. Linguists state that there were at least 250 Aboriginal languages, each with its own range of dialects and grouped linguistically into a number of different families of languages (Dixon 1980; Schmidt 1990). 3. Aboriginal woman, in the language of colonisation. 4. I am grateful to Jay Arthur for our discussions of Max’s tour. It was she who first suggested that white women were being offered an honorary maleness.

7. Mrs Eyers is no ogre This article is adapted from Malin (1990). I wish to acknowledge my appreciation of Stephen Harris’ editorial advice on this article. Acknowledgement of the contributions of the many people who participated in this study in one way or another is presented in the foreword to my dissertation (Malin 1989) and I remain grateful to them. 1. All the personal names used in this paper are fictitious. 2. In the study, one year was spent in two reception (transition)/year one classrooms (of five- and six-year-olds) and a great deal of time, spread over several years, was spent in Aboriginal and middle-class Anglo-Australian homes. The ordinary activities of daily life in the classes and families were recorded by means of extensive field notes, combined with video and audiotaping. The analysis of these materials was then double-checked in interviews with both the mothers and teachers involved in the major part of the study and additional parents and teachers, both Aboriginal and Anglo. All of these people watched videotapes of the Aboriginal and Anglo families and the two classrooms and were asked to comment upon them. 3. This is easier said than done. Compulsory subjects that effectively deal with such issues as racism or even ‘Aboriginal education’ are very difficult to develop and can be counter-productive unless they are extremely carefully conceptualised.

8. Racism, egalitarianism and Aborigines This article was first published in ‘Contemporary Race Relations’, volume 3 of the Journal for Justice Studies, Charles Sturt University, 1990. 1. The use of the term ‘racist’ attracted wide media attention at the time as a result of the debate over Asian immigration and debate about an Aboriginal treaty. One consequence was the sacking of a radio personality by the broadcast tribunal for his discriminatory remarks. Those opposed to Asian immigration and an Aboriginal treaty, some of whom had been labelled racist, responded by asserting

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280 Race Matters that this was a new form of McCarthyism, which sought to silence critical discussion and debate. Simper, writing in the national newspaper, The Australian, set out the position against ‘political correctness’ for those tagged racist. The contribution of Simper and others was to hang upon a racism narrowly defined as a belief that ‘his own race or culture is superior to another’ (1988). The expression of racism is reduced to biological or evolutionary notions of race. 2. I have drawn the use of the terms ‘victims’ and ‘problem’ from the approach taken by Gilroy (1987). 3. This has been facilitated by a shift to the specialised bureaucratic management of Aborigines, which has opened the way for the growth of quantitative studies of them and of the wider population in general. Numerous survey studies have been carried out by government departments and academics in the areas of Aboriginal employment, income, crime, housing, health and education (see Morris 1989, ch 7). Such forms of knowledge are symptomatic of the expansion of bureaucratic forms of intervention into Aboriginal communities since the 1960s. 4. A comparison of the available survey data between 1965 and 1980 reveals a significant decline in Aboriginal employment (Young 1982; Rowley 1982). Young’s figures reveal that males earning a wage dropped from 56.5 per cent of the surveyed population in 1965 to 41 per cent in 1976 and to 28.7 per cent in 1980 (1982, 22). 5. In 1945, the Public Service Board employed 30,000 people (including teachers). By 1978, there were 77,000 (excluding teachers), an average increase of 4.33 per cent per year (NSW North Coast Region 1978, Part II, 269). 6. Kapferer’s (1988) significant work provides a detailed and comprehensive analysis of formative cultural and historical processes associated with the ethos of mateship and egalitarianism in the Australian context. 7. Gould (1987) provides a compelling account of the relationship between the development of the modern state and the rise of the human sciences. Historical research reveals the role of human science in the processes of evaluation and differentiation of certain groups in terms of race and gender within the modern state. The claims to truth of the human sciences, as Foucault (1987) has pointed out in regard to criminals, played an interstitial role in the process of creating differentiation within the egalitarianism of the modern state in terms of the citizenship/noncitizenship rights and notions of personhood. 8. For example, Aboriginal people had been excluded from the local counciloperated swimming pool in Kempsey since it opened in 1949. A council by-law banned them from using it on the grounds of hygiene. The by-law was revoked in 1965 (Morris 1989, 159–60).

9. Where is racism? This article was first published in ‘Contemporary Race Relations’, volume 3 of the Journal for Justice Studies, Charles Sturt University, 1990. Only a few editorial changes have been made.

Notes 1. Nowhere is cultural difference attended to in the Acts. Under the New South Wales Act, ‘race includes colour, nationality and ethnic or national origin’. Under the Commonwealth Act, ‘Aboriginal’ means a person who is a descendant of an indigenous inhabitant of Australia but who is not a Torres Strait Islander. 2. I make this claim on the basis of field studies of racism in several western New South Wales towns and in the Northern Territory, and evidence from other researchers’ findings. 3. The illustrations are taken from western New South Wales, particularly Wilcannia, Walgett, Brewarrina and Bourke. 4. This over-representation has been recognised for many years; it was overwhelmingly confirmed by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Now, evidence is emerging that the rates of detention are still increasing. 5. The assertion that the graziers are the wealthiest section of the community is based on their control of capital and their own assessment of their economic worth, rather than on incomes. Individual pastoralists vary greatly in their financial worth and their incomes range from negative income to a net income of over $100,000. The taxable income is often very low. Some of those who get additional assistance pay more in educational fees than they declare as disposable income for the purposes of taxation! 6. Isolated Children’s Assistance is provided on the basis of distance from the nearest school or transport to school and thus benefits others besides the graziers’ children (Cowlishaw 1988, 204–5). Fifty-four per cent of recipients were primary producers in 1988. 7. Forty-four per cent of those eligible in all of New South Wales get an additional allowance. 8. A crucial factor in the re-creation of racial inequality is the oppositional nature of Aboriginal culture which is unstated and obscured so that it appears as individual pathology rather than as an expression of ‘politics’. For instance, Aborigines do not accord the law the legitimacy that even poor or criminal whites do and the police have little success in trying to recruit the more respectable blacks to assist in their policing of the community (Cowlishaw 1988). 9. Racial criteria for eligibility for ABSEC creates further tensions and divisions. Applicants with ‘Aboriginal descent’ whose eligibility is questioned need to prove group identification. Disputes occur in relation to those who were fostered, or adopted or have obediently assimilated in an earlier era. The final arbiter of who is eligible is a Department of Education bureaucrat who is usually an Aboriginal person (Cowlishaw 1988, 207). 10. The potential for improvement in the standard of the local high school through the demands and ambitions of grazier parents could have been an interesting element in the discussion of these plans, but it was hinted at and passed over in embarrassment. The implications of manifest inequality are apparently better not discussed.

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282 Race Matters 10. The ethics of the allocation of health resources This article was originally published in a modified form in 1992 as ‘Access, Equity and the Ethics of Resource Allocation for Minority Groups: A Koori Perspective’, in Choice or Chance? The Ethics of Resource Allocation for Minority Groups, A Summary of Papers Presented to the Public Health Association Seminar, Canberra, September 1992, Australian Health Ethics Committee, National Health and Medical Research Council.

11. Mabo: towards respecting equality and difference This article originated as one of the Boyer lectures of 1994. We thank the ABC for permission to republish here.

12. Aborigines and contemporary Australian nationalism An earlier version of this article appeared in 1990 in Social Analysis 27, 50–69. 1. There is here an interesting blending of spiritualism with the scientific rationalism of biological theories about sustainable ecological systems. Ethics and spiritual harmony come to be measured through achieving a ‘balanced’ physical relations between humans and the land. 2. Techniques for producing alienated selves have a long history within our culture. Originally bound up with Christianity, they have over time moved into other, more secular institutions, like state penitentiaries and psychoanalysis (Foucault 1979). These more modern and secularised techniques for producing alienated selves came out to Australia originally through the convict system (Lattas 1985; 1986). Demands by reformers that these techniques become part of the late eighteenth century British penal system underpinned the origins of the colonisation and the beginning of state power in Australia. These secularised confessional techniques are now reproduced in the media as part of a strategy for making us aware of our sense of national identity. 3. Here I agree with Dixon’s comment that ‘the natives provide a constant standard against which the philosophical reader may measure the progress of colonisation’ (1986, 58). Drawing upon the work of Ward (1964) and White (1981), Beckett writes how: the frontier, or the outback, ... has assumed a symbolic importance in the construction of Australian nationality, with the antiquity of the landscape contrasted with the newness of the European settlement. The Aborigines have been an integral part of this metaphorical frontier, ‘an ancient people in an ancient land’, as one scientist called them. Indeed, the ‘antiquity’ of Aboriginal culture, if not its human bearers, has rarely been absent from constructions of Aboriginality, whether popular or official. (1988, 196)

Notes 4. Underpinning this discourse is a notion of materialism as being superficial and outside the true world of deep meanings. A whole language of depths and surfaces underpins the materialism–spiritualism dichotomy. I want to argue that this language works to obfuscate the way ‘materialism’ (read ‘consumer culture’) is itself a deep world of cultural meanings into which people are immersed. 5. Aborigines have also internalised these romantic primitivist constructions of themselves. Indeed, they now empower themselves by objectifying and reflecting back to the West the very image of sacred primordiality which the West has projected onto them (Taussig 1987). 6. There has since emerged in newspaper articles and in academic circles a white backlash against this culture of guilt. Many conservatives reject as oppressive the notions of a white moral debt which this culture of guilt seems to imply. Historians Blainey and Hirst have been at the forefront of critiques and attempts to alleviate the burden of guilt felt by a white conscience. 7. Jeremy Beckett has aptly characterised this conceptual process as one in which ‘Progress, if not history, has lost its linear form, to be folded back upon itself in the search for the ‘‘primitive’’ spirituality that ‘‘civilisation’’ had lost’ (1988, 206). 8. These discourses are often characterised by a search for the original primordial voice of nature; that is, they search for a ‘direct’ discourse outside of the mediations of one’s own culture. 9. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody also came across the paranoid fear that Aborigines might become a terrorist threat. Indeed, so taken for granted and real had this fear become that police had no reservations about putting it down in their official ‘intelligence reports’ (Wootten 1991). 10. Blainey claimed that ‘Australia is no longer one nation, and Mr Hawke’s decision to negotiate a treaty with Aborigines points to further fragmentation’ (Weekend Australian, 18–19 June 1988). 11. Blainey was quoted in the Advertiser as saying: ‘I respect the contributions made by countless migrants to our nation but I believe Australia should be one nation and not a cluster of tribes’ (13 June 1988). 12. The Sunday Telegraph quoted Blainey as prophesying that ‘the policies presently pursued could ultimately poison daily life and even imperil the nation if they are not repaired ... Multiculturalism, in my view, is too often divisive, a danger to national security and suspicious of democracy’ (12 June 1988).

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