After Mabo: Interpreting Indigenous Traditions (Interpretations series) 9780522844924, 0522844928

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Preface (page vii)
Acknowledgments (page ix)
1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety (page 1)
2 Lives in Custody (page 27)
3 Aborigines Incorporated (page 54)
4 Art and Identity (page 83)
5 Actors in a Landscape (page 104)
Afterword (page 128)
Bibliography (page 134)
Index (page 153)

Citation preview

After Mabo

Interpretations This series provides clearly written and up-to-date introductions to recent theories and critical practices in the humanities and social sciences. General Editor Ken Ruthven (University of Melbourne) Advisory Board Tony Bennett (Griffith University) Penny Boumelha (University of Adelaide)

John Frow (University of Queensland) Sneja Gunew (University of Victoria, British Columbia) Kevin Hart (Monash University) Robert Hodge (University of Western Sydney) Terry Threadgold (Monash University)

Robert Hodge (University of Western Sydney) | Terry Threadgold (Monash University) In Preparation: Discourses of science and literature, by Damien Broderick Multicultural literature studies, by Sneja Gunew Postmodern socialism, by Peter Beilharz Theories of desire, by Patrick Fuery German social theory today, edited by David Roberts

Interpreting Indigenous Traditions Tim Rowse

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 1993 Reprinted 1994

Designed by text-art Typeset in 10’ point Garamond Printed in Malaysia by SRM Production Services Shd Bhd for Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria 3053 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries

should be made to the publisher. © Timothy Michael Rowse 1993 ISSN 1039-6128

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Publications Sub-Committee, on behalf of the Committee on Research and Graduate Studies of the University of Melbourne, for a grant towards costs of production. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Rowse, Tim, 1951After Mabo : interpreting indigenous traditions. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 522 84492 8. (1.] Aborigines, Australian—Historiography. [2.] Aborigines, Australian—Ethnic identity. [3.] Aborigines, Australian— Public opinion. 4. Public opinion—Australia. 5. Australia—

Race relations. I. Title. (Series : Interpretations). :

305.89915

Contents

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Acknowledgements ............ccceccecseeessssttseeesessessseseeee OX

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Not a great deal to be proud Of 0.0... ceccceeccccccceseuaee eens 4

Reconstructions of Aboriginal morality ........0.0, 9 Making sense of colonisation .............ccccccsssesssereeee 12

Understanding the native police... eee 16 The possibilities of moral community... 20

From moral to practical affirmation .0......ee | 24

2 Lives in Custody ........cccccccssecsccssessseesesseeesecersne 27

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Assimilating inmates 000.0... ccc 34 Institutions Of MEMOLY oc ecccccceseesssssssssttstserereeee 36

_Erambie and the Wiradjuri nation ........0cccecee = 42 The family as prison ...........ccccccccsssssesessssseseessssttteee 44

EMPOWEYPING Parents? woo etetttttstteessessetca 47

3, Aborigines Incorporated ........ccccseeeeeeeee 54 _ The populist critique of official Aboriginality wo. | 57 The modernity of tribes... cccccssseessssstteseesssene = 59

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Contents

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An Aboriginal ethics of nature? ...... cc csssstestrereeees 106 An aesthetics Of Nature? oo... eeeccecceeeceeeeesssesesssstssssssseeee LOO

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vi ,

Preface

I have written this book primarily for Australians who are thinking affirmatively about the place of indigenous cultures in the life of

their nation. I hope to illustrate variety among ways of thinking about indigenous Australians. ‘Affirmative’ thinking includes many

strands; there are many ways to ‘recognise’ Aboriginality as a challenge for Australian politics and cultural identity. Though all representations of ‘Aboriginality’ are contentious Gncluding those

issuing from the mouths and pens of indigenous Australians themselves), we are likely to find some representations more defensible than others. The themes of this book were conceived with both academic and

non-academic readers in mind. I deal in Chapter 1 with the possibility that, newly informed by history and ethnography, we can believe Australia to possess the moral community that some

judges of the High Court implied when, in their 1992 ‘Mabo’ judgment, they revised our ‘Common Law’. In Chapter 2, I draw attention to alternative conceptions of indigenous cultural ‘survival’ which can be found in historical, ethnographic and autobiographi-

cal writing: one emphasising the damage wrought by colonial institutions, the other, indigenous resilience. In Chapter 3, I discuss

the common but barely articulated perception that ‘Aboriginal politics’ is a betrayal of ‘Aboriginal culture’ and vice versa. How to read the ‘Aboriginality’ of Aboriginal art and autobiography is the

question animating Chapter 4, concerned for the most part with Vil

Preface

Ruby Langford’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town. Finally, I turn to the

problems of representing indigenous Australians as ‘actors’ upon the natural world. A short Afterword sets out my approach to the emerging critique of what some, inspired by Edward Said, call ‘Aboriginalism’.

viti |

Acknowledgements

The time to write this book came from the patronage of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Queensland (thank you Geoffrey Bolton and John Frow), the Australian Centre at the

University of Melbourne (Stephen Knight and Chris WallaceCrabbe) and the Menzies School of Health Research John Mathews).

In Brisbane I was particularly helped by Graeme Turner, Jo Robertson, Bronwen Levy, Carole Ferrier, Bruce Rigsby, Nancy Williams, Paul Memmott and Lynne Hume. In Melbourne, David Goodman, Ken Ruthven, Terry Collits, Jane Jacobs, Martha Macintyre,

Ken Gelder, Marion Campbell, Diane Muller, Stuart Macintyre, Patrick Wolfe, Katie Holmes, Kerryn Goldsworthy, John Morton, Simon During, Chris Healy, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Helen O’Shea assisted me in various ways, usually over lunch. Jeremy Beckett,

David Trigger, Alan Rumsey and Francesca Merlan discussed particular points with me from a distance. Is my title offensive to the people of Mer (Murray Island) and, in particular, to the late Eddie Mabo’s kin and friends? Nonie Sharp helped me to pursue this question with Ron Day, Chairman of the Mer Island Council, who assured me that the title of this book is not an offence against custom or feelings.

Alana Garwood of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Library gave last-minute assistance with references. Jackie Huggins was an encouraging office-mate and John Henry Huggins was extremely patient with us both. Shovel 1X

Acknowledgements

in hand, Mark Stafford-Smith said I should not neglect to write on ‘Aborigines and Nature’, and Dick Kimber, Lynn Baker and Steve Morton, among other students of arid-zone ecology, showed me why he was right. Finally, I would like to thank Venetia Nelson and Ken Ruthven for their patient editing of the manuscript. Jan Mackay and Anna Georgia Mackay made me glad to come home from ridiculous hours in the office, and I dedicate this book to them. In a slightly different form, Chapter 1 appeared in Meanjin 2, 93

(Rowse 1993b), and much of Chapter 4 appeared in Australian Literary Studies (Rowse 1993a); thanks to Jenny Lee and Laurie Hergenhan respectively.

Xx

1

Mabo and Moral Anxiety

‘Because we know you mob now...’ For Australians who are neither Aboriginal nor Islander in descent,

the task of rethinking the nation’s responsibility to indigenous people requires both moral and practical reasoning about the coexistence of settler and indigenous cultures. To reason in moral terms about the nation’s very foundations in law, about the ‘traditional’ and the adapted ‘moralities’ of indigenous people and

about the sympathies of contemporary Australians, is to engage with matters that are not so much imponderable as endlessly ponderable, because they are not amenable either to final pronouncement or to definitive arbitration by reference to ‘the facts’. I do not mean to imply contempt for such moral discourse. I am convinced of both the necessity and the elusiveness of moral argument, if we are to reimagine our community and contribute to what John Eddy has called ‘an imaginative emergence of a true “commonwealth” (Eddy, 1992:18).

- Indigenous voices now provoke a necessary moral anxiety, In 1980, Hobbles Danayarri, a resident of Yarralin in the Northern Territory, told a story of Australia’s colonisation to the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose. Rose had asked him for something for an anthropology textbook (Rose, 1989:138); she published his ‘Saga of Captain Cook’, with her commentary, in 1984 (Rose, 1984). Around

the same time that Rose and Danayarri met, Eddie Mabo, from

1

After Mabo

Murray Island, commenced litigation in the High Court of Australia. His legal argument can be read as raising essentially the same point as that made in the Saga, that is, that ‘Australia’ is morally illegitimate to the extent that it is founded on European denial of the continent’s prior ownership by indigenous people such as himself and Hobbles Danayarri.

Both these men are now dead, but their perspectives remain within the oral traditions of their peoples and have begun to circulate within the settler culture. In this introductory chapter I want to address five topics before mapping out the rest of the book. First, I suggest that the Cook Saga and the Mabo judgments pose the same question: is the law that founds Australia a moral law? Secondly, how have non-Aboriginal writers represented the moral outlook of indigenous Australians? Thirdly, in what terms is colonialism morally intelligible to indigenous Australians? Fourthly, how have Aboriginal and non-Aborigi-

nal historians accounted for indigenous people who actively co-operated with the invaders? And finally, I want to contrast the arguments for Aboriginal ‘sovereignty’ with those upholding Aboriginal ‘property’. My point is that it is no easy matter to imagine Australia to be a ‘moral community’.

Never been give him fair go The Saga of Captain Cook is a vehicle for ‘a bit of troubling’. Complaint is its narrative point because Captain Cook has come to a peopled land and behaved arrogantly. He continues to do so, for we (non-indigenous Australians) are heirs to his acts. Sydney was

his first point of contact: ‘. . . lotta people, lotta women, lotta children, they’re owning that city’. But ‘he don’t askem, that man’. Rather, ‘Captain Cook been shooting there for, I think, nearly three weeks’ time. Shooting all, all the people’. He did so in many places, sailing on, ‘shooting right round like that and every pocket some

fellow been running away’. Why? “Really beautiful country,” Captain Cook reckoned. “That’s why I’m cleaning up people, take

itaway...”’ Aboriginal people did not like this ‘and that’s why these Aboriginal people make an army’. But are spears a match for guns? 2

1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

‘That been beat him. If whitefellow been come got no bit of a gun, couldn’t been roundem up, killing all the people. They never been give him fair go.’ The denial of a fair go did not stop there. Cook institutionalised unfairness when ‘Him been bring lotta book [Rose here interpolates ‘law’] from Big England right here now’. And that ‘book’ enables a ‘lotta government’. Gilruth (Administrator of the Northern Territory from 1913 to 1919) put Captain Cook’s ‘book’ into effect, and so did all the pastoral managers known subsequently to Danayarri and his people. Indeed, ‘Same book. Not only one book, book all over. And he still got it today’. Harsh conditions of working and living were imposed by those empowered by this book. To quote Gilruth as he is portrayed in the Saga, “If him sick and tired, he don’t liftem that thing, kill him right there”’. The coming of that book was also an act of theft. I think you two fellow been stealing this country. You, Captain Cook, and Gilruth. They really crook men. Steal it and make it them land. Because why Gilruth didn’t ask them what people been live over to Darwin. And Captain Cook went longa Sydney Harbour and people been live over there. And why didn’t you ask them? You, Captain Cook, when you came through. For Cook to have asked would have required him to acknowledge that someone was already in possession of the country. Not asking

was fundamentally at variance with the customs which then prevailed and, from the point of view of the Saga’s narrator, still do. ‘Same thing, I might go on another place, I must askem. I might stay for couple of days. You know. That’s for the me fellow Aboriginal people.’ How such custom was outraged is now the story being told.

‘And we got the story from old people. I know. The government been come up. Captain Cook been come up. Really bad man.’ - The Saga comes toa conclusion which is at least morally forceful. ‘Because I’m saying, we the one with the land. Sitting on the land,

Aboriginal people. You got nothing, all you government.’ This persisting order, in which Aboriginal possession has greater force than the spurious claims of Cook’s ‘book’, is obscured by government action. ‘Government been coverem up me. Coverem over.’ But that will not stop the truth from prevailing. ‘But anyway, I can 3

After Mabo

tell him. You'll have to agree with us, agree with the people, people on the land. You gonna agree because Aboriginal people owning.’ For Rose, the story amounts to a confident invitation to reconsider the moral and legal foundations of ‘Australia’. “Yarralin people

do not regard Europeans as lacking the ability to make moral judgments. Yarralin people’s desire to have their history and Saga presented to a European audience rests precisely on their conviction that Europeans have a moral sense’ (Rose, 1984:35). Rose makes frequent use of the terms ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ in her

commentary. The Saga ‘demonstrates that the conquest and subju-

gation of Aborigines was not the result of individually aberrant behaviour, but was rather a coherent, systematic effort which defied moral principles’. She is careful to say what she means by ‘defied’. As she understands it, the Saga does not entertain the possibility that Cook and his associates were behaving according to the principles of an exotic moral system: because the Yarralin mob ‘take their own

moral principles to be universal, they do not hypothesise about alternative moral systems’ Cibid.:36). Nor is Cook characterised as ‘ignorant’. If he is unmindful of the land’s proprieties, it is because he has rejected the evidence before his eyes. Nor is Cook mad: his aberrations ‘form the basis of law’. ‘Captain Cook thus presents a grave problem to Yarralin people: he is a human being who does not play by their rules, and he implements a law which defies their

fundamental moral principles’ (ibid.:37). Rose emphasises the resulting perplexity of the Yarralin mob. They ‘have lived under this law for many years, but they are still at a loss to really understand

how it can be’. The nub of the intellectual problem set out in the Saga is this: Cook’s book-government is a ‘law’, but it is ‘based in immorality’.

Not a great deal to be proud of The High Court judgments in the Mabo case, published in June 1992, relate ‘law’, ‘morality’ and ‘nation’ in diverse ways. Eddie Mabo’s complaint was that Queensland’s annexation of the Torres Strait in 1879 had not lawfully extinguished his customary ownership of the portion of Murray Island that had long been passed down through his family. According to Brian Keon-Cohen, ‘this was the 4

1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

High Court’s first opportunity, since its establishment in 1901, to confront the central question of the existence and nature of native title in Australian law’ (Keon-Cohen, 1992:22). Indigenous orality proved a scandal for that most prohibitively literate of institutions, the law, with its suspicion of ‘hearsay’. ‘Over 600 objections’ and much argument were occasioned in preliminary hearings of the case, when those acting for Eddie Mabo tabled such statements as ‘My father told me that this land would belong to me when he died’ (ibid.:22). In the event, by a 6/1 majority, the High Court has upheld the plaintiffs’ claims,

and entirely rewritten the common law on the effect of colonisation upon indigenous communities; has set a new agenda for

national debate on black-white relations; has presented all governments with an awesome challenge which they will avoid at their peril; and has provided some dignity, a measure of justice, real legal clout, and renewed hope for indigenous people .. . In the process, the High Court also cemented its role as the ultimate source of the common law of Australia. Gibid.:22) To put it in the terms of the Saga of Captain Cook, the High Court has reread what Hobbles Danayarri called ‘that book’.

That book now turns out to have two parts, one concerning sovereignty and the other common law. In 1979 the High Court had disposed of the sovereignty issue when dealing with a previous case brought by Paul Coe, an Aboriginal solicitor of the Wiradjuri tribe. When Coe questioned the sovereignty of the Australian state over

the continent, the High Court declared that issue to be outside its jurisdiction. Sovereignty was deemed an issue of international law;

the High Court, a ‘municipal’ court dealing with matters within Australia, accepted as a premise of its existence that ‘Australia’ is the

sovereign nation of this continent. In their verdicts on the Mabo

case, however, the judges treated the common law as an issue separate from ‘sovereignty’, and therefore as an issue within their jurisdiction. They found that the common law established throughout Australia upon colonisation includes ‘respect for the rights and privileges conferred by native title’. They also allowed that the Crown, as sovereign, held ‘radical title’ and, therefore, under certain conditions ‘native title’ could be extinguished by legislation. Such

5

After Mabo

legislation was subject, however, to judicial review; and in particular it would have to conform to Australia’s Racial Discrimination

Act 1975, the statute by which Australia ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In finding such morality as this within the ‘law’ inaugurated by ‘Cook’, the Court justified the Yarralin mob’s perception that Cook’s legatees are not necessarily bound to honour his crime in all their

actions, but are capable of a revisionary moral reasoning which respects indigenous claims. Indeed, both the Yarralin mob and the High Court mob can be understood as venturing a hypothesis of moral community. Just as Danayarri appeals to non-Aborigines’ sense of ‘fair go’, so the High Court postulates moral community when it revises what must be understood as our ‘common law’. Moral community is a dimension of the imagined community that is nationhood’s cultural basis; it must be re-created in speech, writing and action, at strategic sites which gain much of their majesty from the value they place on precedent and tradition. Justice Brennan conceded that

one did not necessarily revise common law to bring it into line with ‘contemporary values’ (High Court of Australia, 1992:17). The Court was

not free, Brennan declared, ‘to adopt rules that accord with contemporary notions of justice and human rights if their adoption would fracture the skeleton of principle which gives the body of our law its shape and internal consistency’ (ibid.:16). Rather, it was first ‘necessary to assess whether the particular rule [no indigenous property right in common law] is an essential doctrine of our legal system . . .’ Gbid.:17). Is the total extinction of any previous indigenous property in land an essential doctrine of Australia’s legal system? The posing of this

question commits legal reason to the imponderable metaphysics of

‘nationhood’. That is, what one judge regards as ‘essential’ to ‘Australia’ will appear to another as contingent. There would seem

to be no ultimate principle by which to judge what is essential to the Australian legal system. Rather we can say that if anything is

essential, it is the imaginary quality of the moral attributes of nationhood itself. This was made starkly visible by the dissent of Justice Dawson. To understand the significance of Dawson’s dissent, it is first necessary to know that, in the Mabo judgment, the same cases are cited by different judges who come to differing conclusions, or to 6

1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

the same conclusions via slightly different routes. For example, Dawson observes that ‘from the inception of the colony [New South Wales], the Crown treated all land in the colony as unoccupied and

afforded no recognition to any form of native interest in the land .. . What was done was quite inconsistent with any recognition, by acquiescence or otherwise, of native title’ (ibid.:131—2). Aware of the same historical facts, Deane and Gaudron do not assent to this reading of the Crown’s wishes. Instead, they invite our ‘speculation’ as to why, in ‘the documents encompassed by the act of State’, there was no ‘specific reference to existing native interests in the lands of

the Colony’ Cibid.:89). Deane and Gaudron do not wish such speculation to be uninformed by history. After reviewing certain documents which they take to be indicative of official British intentions, they conclude it ‘most likely’ that it was ‘simply assumed’

by the British authorities that Aborigines’ interests would not be impaired by penal settlement or, if impeded, would be compensated through on-the-spot negotiation (ibid.:89—90). In short, Dawson

and Deane/Gaudron contrive from the same sources opposed readings of the intended moralities of British colonisation. The judges also disagree on how to read the subsequent record of settlement, including the classic judicial reviews of the nature of the Crown’s possession of Australia. Dawson is in no doubt that the dispossessing actions of settlers in New South Wales and Queensland were true to imperial policy: ‘while the aboriginal inhabitants were not to be ill-treated, settkement was not to be impeded by any claim which those inhabitants might seek to exert over the land’ (ibid.:135). Nor does Dawson see in the subsequent colonial courts’ judgments on the nature of the Crown’s right in land any deviation from this practice, policy and principle. The best known and most recent of these decisions was the 1971 Nabalco case, the first with Aboriginal plaintiffs. In that case, Justice Blackburn maintained a

well-established doctrine of Australian common law: that the Crown’s radical title in Australia is not encumbered by pre-existing ‘native title’. Dawson concedes that ‘there may not be a great deal

to be proud of in this history of events’. But he insists that our contemporary misgivings about the actions founding Australia are not a reason for changing the law. If the law is to be changed, that is a matter for the legislature, not for the courts. ‘To attempt to revise 7

After Mabo

history or to fail to recognise its legal impact’, he concluded, ‘.. . would be to impugn the foundations of the very legal system under which this case must be decided’ (ibid.:138). Doubts about the truth or honesty of Australia’s legal system are simply inadmissible to Dawson. He seems to identify the standing of the Court with its continued vindication of a particular doctrine. Here is one version of that ‘essence’ to which Brennan refers.

Deane and Gaudron imply quite another notion of what is essential to Australia’s legal form. However, they do not dispute the

historical persistence of a doctrine of terra nullius in our judicial culture; rather, they question the quality of legal reasoning which has allowed it to become doctrine. Reviewing the cases on which Blackburn had based much of his judgment, they conclude that ‘little more than bare assertion’ sustained the repeated denials of common-law native title. ‘Indeed the paucity of the reasoning tends to emphasise the fact that the propositions were regarded as either obvious or well-settled’ Cibid.:95). Worse still, this poorly reasoned view ‘provided a legal basis for and justification of... dispossession’ (ibid.:100). They then ask whether legal doctrine of such infamous

efficacy should be allowed to remain as precedent binding the development of Australia’s legal framework.

Deane and Gaudron acknowledge that this is an extraordinary question to pose, but they make no bones about putting morality before legal precedent. ‘Dispossession’, they declare, is ‘the darkest

aspect of the history of this nation. The nation as a whole must remain diminished unless and until there is an acknowledgement of, and retreat from, those past injustices’ Gibid.:100). Legal doctrine must be judged for its effects on the moral claim of nationhood. Lest

nationhood be diminished, common law must be revised: the nation’s common law henceforth will allow that the Crown’s property ‘is reduced or qualified by the burden of the common law native title...’ Gibid.:101).

The difference between Dawson and Deane/Gaudron could perhaps be summarised in this way: whereas, for Dawson, nation-

hood is secured by continuity of fundamental legal doctrine, nationhood for Deane/Gaudron finds its grounding elsewhere, in the imaginatively constituted (and therefore revisable) moral pre-

suppositions ‘of Australia’s nationhood. There is thus a clear 8

1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

difference of opinion among the judges about what one might call the metaphysics of nationhood.

Reconstructions of Aboriginal morality Hobbles Danayarri asked for a ‘fair go’. Do Aboriginal traditions include a moral sensibility recognisably similar to the Europeans’? The Presbyterian missionary J. R. B. Love sketched the potential of Christian community between invaders and indigenes in his 1936 memoir Stone-Age Bushmen of To-Day. Was it possible, he asked,

to convey in Worora language the Christian concept of ‘sin, as an offence against God”

Right and wrong, good and bad, did not convey enough. Was there a word that contained the idea of essential badness, wrong and destructive? There was. A poisonous snake is called imara; a dangerous beast is called imara; a poisonous plant is called

imara, still better a dangerous, to-be-avoided man is called imara. Now the thing that is deadly, poisonous, bad or dangerous, is umara [possibly imara]. Surely here is a word that may fairly well be used to connote sin. (Love, 1936:47) Note that God makes no appearance in this semantic field. If Love was none the less happy with this approximation, it was because he needed to believe in the possibility of his evangelical project. Among those with a more secular interest in Aboriginal culture, it became possible to venture an account of the Aborigines’ capacity for moral community with non-Aboriginal Australians when offering a reading of their myths. Ursula McConnel, presenting thirty-six

myths in her collection Myths of the Mungkan, hoped that her readers would glean ‘a clearer understanding of the personality of this interesting and gifted people, and extend to them the friendship and consideration they deserve as fellow-citizens of this country’ (McConnel, 1957:xxii). Her hopes were no doubt sustained by her

perception that the myths concerned ‘experiences common to mankind . . . the age-old problems of “good” and “evil”; of punishment for disobedience; romance and quarrels; absorption in the mysteries of life and death; and the need for intercession and ritual in the crises of life’ Gibid.:171). 9

After Mabo

It is significant that McConnel qualified her use of the terms ‘g00d’ and ‘evil’; it seems that she, like Love, was not fully assured of their cross-cultural portability. Ronald Berndt devoted his 1979 Charles Strong Memorial Lecture to dispelling such doubts. Aborigi-

nal religion ‘was concerned with the meaning of life, with the fundamental patterning of human existence, and with what we can call the moral universe’ (Berndt, 1979:20, my emphasis). Restating

the argument of his 1970 paper that ‘Aboriginal mythology is abundantly supplied with what can be described as “good and bad examples” (ibid.:24, my emphasis), he instanced the western desert dingari song cycle:

the dingari provides a yardstick against which both moral and immoral actions are conceived of asa natural condition of man. Each incident categorised as being bad, or immoral, is resolved in some

way which permits a return to the status quo... An act adjudged bad’ follows its own course, which is likely to bring disaster or punishment on the wrongdoer. Cibid.:25, my emphasis)

Someone is categorising as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ certain sequences of event in myth. But who? As I understand Berndt’s earlier paper

‘Traditional morality as expressed through the medium of an Australian Aboriginal religion’ (Berndt, 1970), it is Berndt himself,

and not those relating the dingari. He uses the phrase ‘““moral” behaviour in the conventional meaning of the term’, but I think the conventions to which he refers here are his own, and not necessarily

those of western desert story-tellers. His schematic representation of the moral structure of the dingari Gibid.:234, Fig. 1) draws a boundary between ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ mythic events, but it is

Berndt’s understanding of those terms which gives rise to that boundary. He places the terms ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’ in quotation marks in his exposition of that schema Cibid.:235). Other writers who have attempted to elucidate the ‘traditional morality’ of Aborigines have differed, explicitly or implicitly, from Berndt. In the opinion of W. E. H. Stanner, moral distinctions were not a salient feature of Murinbata understandings of their universe. There is nothing in Murinbata tradition which suggests an insight

that men might be either free or perfectible . . . Their moral

10

1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

imagination has been stultified ... The Murinbata do not give any

significant impression of having, or thinking they have, moral freedom. The sense of the corruption of things lacks sharpness.

As far as one can tell from outward show the formations of conscience are not strong. (Stanner, 1963:57)

Stanner found in Murinbata myths a ‘mood of assent’ to ‘the proximate conditions of life’. Motivated ‘to observe the continuity with The Dreaming’, Murinbata religion ‘entails the endurance of

the joint imperium of good and bad’ Cibid.:58). Ian Keen has commented that Stanner ‘imposes a decidedly Protestant flavour on Murinbata thought, transforming myth into Bunyanesque allegory’

(Keen, 19806:44). If so, it serves only to remind us that one of ethnography’s impulses is to render the strange in familiar terms. Still another variant, libertarian and psychoanalytic rather than Protestant, is to be found in a paper by Les Hiatt. According to Hiatt,

Ronald and Catherine Berndt have not been able to deal with ‘the problem of the bad example’. There are many myths in which doers

of evidently ‘bad’ deeds are not punished. Indeed, they are sometimes better off after the deeds, and the misfortunes recounted in the tales are visited on others. Hiatt’s view is closer to Stanner’s; he is struck by Stanner’s suggestion that ‘a sense of injury’ pervades Murinbata myths. He looks to the psycho-dynamics of traditional Aboriginal childhood in order to propose a morally indeterminate master-theme of Aboriginal myth: ‘a primal sense of loss and injury accompanied by feelings of anger and envy .. . If reality as a whole is conceived as paradoxical or dualistic, it may be in some degree because the individual’s first meaningful experiences are marked by imperfection and ambivalence’ (Hiatt, 1975:16). Hiatt concludes a

more recent appraisal of Stanner’s work by remarking that ‘the genius of Aboriginal religion may . . . lie in the field of .. . applied psychology’ (Hiatt, 1989:xxxvi).

Clearly, the effort to elucidate traditional Aboriginal notions of right and wrong by a reading of mythology has resulted in rather diverse constructions of the moralities of Aborigines in the earliest moments of ‘contact’.

But myths are not the only evidence of an Aboriginal moral system. From his own and others’ observations of Aboriginal 11

After Mabo

behaviour Hiatt has suggested that ‘everywhere in Aboriginal Australia the highest secular value is generosity’.

As Aboriginal children seem as demanding and self-centred as

children anywhere, the altruism of adults is most plausibly explained, not as natural propensity, but as the outcome of a programme of moral education in which greed is condemned and magnanimity extolled. It is likely that this pervasive and highly-developed ethic of generosity emerged as a cultural adaptation to the exigencies of hunting and gathering . . . (Hiatt, 1982:14—-15)

It is important, however, to note Hiatt’s qualification: ‘the ethic of generosity applies primarily to resources, and only indirectly or (at a certain level) not at all to land. Ideally, estates are inalienable, indivisible, and non-transferable’ Cibid.:15). This point seems to return us directly to the Saga. We can find in the Saga a willingness

to share Australia’s resources with the invaders so long as the Aborigines’ original and inalienable ownership of the country is acknowledged.

Making sense of colonisation The above attempts to reconstruct Aboriginal moral systems and to

assess them in relation to what non-Aboriginal people call their ‘morality’ do not consider the indigenous experience of colonisation. How have Aborigines and Islanders engaged with the material facts of colonisation and with the moral frameworks supplied by the colonists?

For example, was Eddie Mabo keen to litigate because, like Hobbles Danayarri, he sensed the possibility of the colonists’ moral self-criticism? According to Jeremy Beckett, who undertook fieldwork with the Torres Strait Islanders from about 1960 to the mid1980s, ‘the world as the [Torres Strait] Islanders understood it was governed by a moral economy, and their place in it would finally be determined by their worthiness as Christians, loyal subjects and good workers’. This ‘moral economy’ ‘was based upon a developing

relationship between Islanders and white Australians, and conceived of in positive terms of growing entitlement’. The Islanders’ 12

1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

‘conformity to civilised standards, their work, their demonstrations of loyalty and Christian faith were the earnest of what they would presently achieve’ (Beckett, 1987:88, 104, 109). In conversation, Beckett has assured me that the Islanders, when he first knew them,

assumed that their ownership was evident; they litigated when it became apparent to them that non-Aboriginal law denied their ownership. To see the world through their acquired moral economy did not preclude the Islanders’ eventual insistence, before the High Court, that their land-holding traditions imposed obligations on the

colonising sovereign. They. maintained their own independent notion of their ‘entitlement’.

When Erich Kolig worked among Wolmadjari speakers in the Kimberley in 1970-71, he found them in a dilemma about Europeans, entertaining two contradictory views of the colonial relationship. One stressed fundamental similarities, the other profound differences. It was conceded that Europeans have their ‘law’, as Aborigines do, but the nature of that law—in both missionary and secular forms—remained obscure. Somehow, the working of that introduced law was. giving rise to injustice. The Wolmadjari believed that Europeans’ material wealth derived from the Europeans’ exploitation of natural resources (chiefly by pastoralism) and from the remote and possibly fraudulent workings of governments; they

saw themselves as getting an insufficient share. In 1970-71, they were ‘increasingly aware of the importance of owning and exploiting land themselves’ (Kolig, 1987a:283). To fathom the potential of the invaders’ moral system or ‘law’ has no doubt challenged indigenous people’s intellectual creativity. A

diversity of narratives bears witness to a diversity of indigenous hypotheses. Rose has mentioned that the Yarralin mob speak not only of Captain Cook but also of the emancipating figures Jesus and Ned Kelly, martyrs both to the more powerful law of Cook (Rose, 1992a:186—202). Several non-indigenous writers have found stories of Queen Victoria, who is remembered as having given Aboriginal people their reserves as compensation for the invaders’ disposses-

sion; her gesture ratified some people’s refusal to pay rent on houses provided by the NSW Welfare Board in the 1960s (Rowley,

1972c:135; 1978:109). Peter Read quotes an old Wiradjuri man, Gordon Simpson (born 1920), recalling that one family had been 13

After Mabo

granted land by Queen Victoria, but that, sadly, ‘the records went astray on that one’ (Read, 1984:132). Henry Reynolds has suggested that this oral tradition is ‘closer to the truth than the version of events

which gained ascendancy among the white community during the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’—that is, that the elements within British traditions of law which entertain the possibility of Aboriginal land rights were repressed by Whites, but retained by Blacks in the form of this folk memory of Queen Victoria (Reynolds, 1987b:146).

Among both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, however, Queen Victoria is not as widely commemorated these days as Captain Cook. Ken Maddock has offered an account of six tran-

scribed or paraphrased ‘Cook’ myths and four stories about northern coastal contact with the Macassans. The stories feature incidents of giving, taking and receiving, involving aliens in boats. Maddock discerns a common narrative structure in these ten tales, consisting of the following six points: ‘There is never a balanced exchange of advantages between Aboriginal and alien; gift and theft never occur in the same story; gifts are rarely accepted; thefts are never foiled; Aborigines never give to aliens; Aborigines never steal from aliens’ (Maddock, 1988:26). He then underlines what he thinks must be the singularly odd feature of this narrative paradigm: ‘Not

only do balanced exchanges not occur, but they are not even attempted by Aboriginal or alien’; these tales thus record ‘the absence of the reciprocity between characters which was traditionally the rule in the ritual, marital and economic spheres’ (1988:27).

Non-reciprocity is culpable but all too human as an occasional failing, Rose concedes. But ‘what [the Yarralin mob] do not expect’,

she explains, ‘is that aberrations will form the basis of law’ (1984:37). Her acquaintances in the Victoria River and Kimberley regions agree that ‘Captain Cook’s law is a law of madness. It is based in and effected through destruction, and people cannot go on destroying forever’ (1992a:197-8). She has referred to the perplexity

of her Ngaringman and Ngaliwurru friends as ‘epistemological chaos’ Cibid.:229). A world so penetrated by disorder makes little sense.

Not all indigenous narrations of the colonial encounter are overtly critical of the colonists’ order nor hopeful about such 14

1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

redeemers of the colonised condition as Ned Kelly, Jesus or Queen Victoria. Some oral traditions are triumphal discourses on the moral conditions of survival. In the Roper River area, Howard and Frances

Morphy have reported a Ngalakan presentation of the late nine-

teenth-century invasion of their homelands in which a ‘wild blackfellow’ character appears. The ‘wild’ ones were those who lived beyond the gathering of Aborigines who were given food and clothing at early pastoral stations. They are presented in Ngalakan stories as ignorant (of flour, sugar, tobacco), as naked, as unable to use English, and as violent toward Whites and toward Blacks who lived on the stations (Morphy and Morphy, 1985:465—-6). Through

such stories, contemporary Ngalakan people seem to distance themselves morally from those of their ancestors who actively resisted the invasion; they espouse the value of the Golden Age in which the (non-wild) Ngalakan survived within the pastoralists’ protectorate.

William McGregor, a linguist who has collected and studied stories from the Kimberley, has commented on a ‘lack of explicit ascription of blame in Aboriginal accounts of contact’. He argues, however, that there are ‘implicit morals which are only discernible once a significant corpus of texts has been assembled’ (McGregor, 1988b:54). McGregor’s structural analysis of the ‘police tracker’ tales

reveals that the crucial event in every story is punishment—the death or misfortune of those who are tracked down by the police and their trackers. He finds the corpus to be a moral statement which projects ‘the image of the police as a white institution devoted to capturing criminals in order that they be punished or disposed of properly (or both)’. In the stories of the Aboriginal narrator Gack Bohemia, a retired police tracker) ‘white culture offered a powerful means to enforce morality, at times a new morality, on Kimberley people’ (McGregor, 1988a:301).

If we accept McGregor’s use of the word ‘genre’ to describe the corpus of ‘police tracker’ stories, then we might refer also to the ‘Queen Victoria’ genre, the ‘Captain Cook/Macassar’ genre and the ‘wild blackfellow’ genre—and perhaps there are others. Each genre conveys a distinctive way for indigenous people to make sense of the major features of the colonial encounter. Within the one period and region, several such genres may coexist: Kolig (1979) has found 15

After Mabo

‘Captain Cook’ stories in the same region as Jack Bohemia’s ‘police tracker stories. Again, we must conclude that indigenous moralities defy observers’ attempts at summary elucidation and codification.

Understanding the native police ‘Clearly Aboriginal history has been amongst the most morally committed types of history being written in the last decade’, Peter Read remarked in 1990 (Read, 1990a:295). He has recently challenged other professional historians of ‘race relations’ to consider carefully the moral voice in which to address their readers. Critical of what he sees as Roger Milliss’s ‘moral absolutism’ in Waterloo Creek (an ‘epic’ account of a massacre in 1838), he wants scholarship to explore the diversity of indigenous responses to invasion.

In particular, he thinks that indigenous service to the invaders should be accounted for without assuming or implying that ‘those

who worked with the whites were necessarily collaborators or traitors’ (Read, 1992:52). some writers are made manifestly uneasy by the task of portraying Aborigines who killed or violently coerced other Aborigines on the settlers’ behalf. In his Darling Downs history, Maurice French

notes that some pioneer families were protected against ‘the marauders from other tribes’ by the Blacks to whom they gave food. ‘Tf the Aborigines as a whole had a distinctive national polity’, he believes, ‘this “association” with the invader would have been regarded as treason but the fragmented nature of native society negates such base motives’ (French, 1989:99). Bill Rosser deflects the possible imputation of treason by arguing that ‘owing to the white man’s rape, kidnapping, chicanery and the destruction of Aboriginal life, Aborigines altered from a race of friendly, harmless people to a suspicious misanthropic people’ (Rosser, 1990:4). David

Trigger’s intention is not so much to formulate an extenuating account of Queensland’s native mounted police as it is to insist on the absence of moral and ideological complexity in social relationships governed by naked power. In the earliest phase of invasion, he suggests, the colonisers made no effort to persuade Aborigines to ally with them; therefore ‘Aboriginal agents of the White police are best thought of as equivalent to paid mercenaries rather than 16

1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

ideologically incorporated agents . . .’ (Trigger, 1992:220). In each of these accounts, the writer seems to be dealing with the sugges-

tion—explicit or implied—of a deeply flawed indigenous consciousness, of indigenous cultures that are likely to collapse into assent to the new colonial order. This spectre of pliability or even ‘treason’ is exorcised as soon as each writer conjures up its possibility: French’s tradition of local and contingent alliances, Rosser’s externally derived misanthropy, Trigger’s surface complicity. Most historians have treated as important the accepted view that native police, like all Aboriginal people, had only locally bounded loyalties, so that people distant from them mattered little, or were presumed or actual enemies. Thus Bob Reece (1974:214) referred to the ‘bloodthirsty zeal’ of native police in New South Wales ‘in settling old tribal scores’, and Michael Christie (1979:71) wrote that the Port Phillip Protectorate’s native police refused ‘to act against

their own or affiliated tribes’. Pepper and de Araugo (1985:32) decline to characterise the motives of the Protectorate’s native police, but mention interregional feuding as fuelling their enthusiasm for policing. Gordon Reid (1990:11, 115) makes much of the South Australian policy of recruiting native police from regions far

from their deployment, though he admits to having no definite evidence of the origins of Willshire’s assistants in the country of the Arrernte. Ray Evans (1975:56-8) suggests that Queensland’s native

police were motivated not only by intertribal enmity but by offers of remission (to convicted Aborigines) and by the brutal discipline of the corps itself. Reynolds (1990:79-84) also favours the view that the native police were the colonists’ exploitation of hostile intertribal

relations.

But Evans begins to suggest the limits of our understanding of motive when he quotes approvingly Rowley’s psycho-pathological cameo: ‘the native police offered the perfect niche for the sadist’. He could also have cited Rowley’s more historically penetrating remark that ‘recruiting would be easy enough in the social chaos left behind by the frontier’ (Rowley, 1972a:168, 42). To the extent that

we accept this ‘social chaos’ theory we have less need, and less

possibility, to be clear as to indigenous motive. Rose is so committed to evoking the chaos of the Victoria River frontier that she admits the difficulty of gaining ‘a satisfying understanding’ of 17

After Mabo

the way that some Aborigines threw in their lot with Whites (as station hands and as trackers) and so made victims of those who remained ‘outlaws’. She quotes Hobbles Danayarri’s characterisation of the murderous police trackers as ‘broken-hearted’ (Rose, 1991:90). Like Rose, Reynolds reminds us of frontier chaos, suggest-

ing that the Black troopers’ hatred of their victims was aroused or intensified by the work itself and the effort to survive the outlaws’ enraged resistance. He concludes his chapter on the native police by likening them to mercenaries who were ‘making the best of the situation in which they found themselves in the wake of European invasion’ (Reynolds, 1990:84). Perhaps these evocations of frontier chaos and desperation help us to make sense of that strand of indigenous oral tradition which seems so quietist and accepting of colonising morality—the ‘wild man’ and ‘police tracker’ genres. For do not such stories restabilise the teller’s world, in which survivors come to terms with the logic and conditions of their survival, the limits and the anathemas of the colonial order? If the implication of the ‘social chaos’ thesis is to make Aboriginal

‘collaborators’ (so called) more acceptable, it may be at the cost of rendering them less intelligible in so far as it makes their behaviour

appear equally chaotic—desperate, unreasoned, unfathomable. Marie Fels was therefore bold to attempt to restore transparency to native police motivation while still seeking to rescue them from imputations of treachery. Confronting head-on the unstated charge of ‘treason’, Fels portrays the native police of the Port Phillip District

as men true to themselves, their culture and kind.

She writes of native police actions as strategies adopted by rational collective actors.

‘Joining the Corps was an attempt to share in the power and authority of the invader who was so clearly here to stay: it is argued, further, that the men of the corps used the prestige and the influence they derived from membership (and the material things they acquired) to extend their influence within traditional Aboriginal social relationships. It is very significant that all the

headmen of the sections of the tribes who owned the country around Melbourne served with the force at some stage. (Fels, 1989:3) 18

1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

But was it not treacherous for such ‘headmen’ to ‘extend their own influence’ in this way? Sensitive to this possible judgment, Fels

makes her book an extended rebuttal of the suggestion that ‘being a policeman would have meant for an Aboriginal man in Port Phillip

in the 1840s the rejection of his own traditional values’. In examining Fels’s work, I wish to underline her persistent reluctance

to confront the most problematic term in that troubling thought, ‘traditional values’.

Like French, Fels cautions readers against inappropriate invoca-

tions of the morality of citizenship and nationhood. ‘In the contemporary climate of emergent nationalism throughout the world among formerly colonised peoples’, she writes, ‘[such rejection of indigenous values] means traitor. It is not a word that was ever used about them at the time by other Aborigines or by Europeans’ Cibid.:4). ‘It is not history’ to ‘judge the past from the

standpoint of a changed world’ Gbid.:5). But nor can Fels fully accept the exonerating account given by French and others, namely the ‘tribal differences’ view, for she reads a proto-nationalism into the actions of the Native Police Force: ‘it may be seen as an early

stage of pan-Australian Aboriginal consciousness, a_ historical product, quite outside pre-contact patterns of social relationships’ (ibid.:6).

Can we discern a strategy in the actions of these leaders? Fels is not quite consistent in her depiction of their strategy. In one version, it is a strategy of powerful men preserving their powers in relation to their own people. In other passages, however, a more ambitious strategy is hinted at. Fels writes that ‘the Aboriginal strategy of co-

operation . . . did not work’ and ‘did not bring them what they expected’ (ibid.:72); later she refers to it as the strategy of ‘biding one’s time, watching and waiting for an opportunity to exploit in order to reverse the situation’. Because Europeans ‘came in such large numbers and kept coming’, this larger strategy failed Cibid.:91).

Failure is not her dominant theme, however; she puts her

invader’s police: ,

emphasis, rather, on the efficacy of the headmen who became the

An opportunity was put before them of becoming men of standing within their transformed world. They took it, and, furthermore, they used it. They bent it back, exploiting their 19

After Mabo

acquired prestige and influence to operate within traditional group politics, to such effect that while the Corps was in existence, these men were the power-brokers within what Thomas calls the Confederacy, that is, the related groups in the immediate country centred on Melbourne .. . The evidence demonstrates that within the Confederacy, the police displayed a reluctance to co-operate that in a European institution at the same time would have been described as mutiny . . .ibid.:87) Fels then comments that such effectiveness was not ‘a matter of rejecting Aboriginality, but rather of learning to live in two different worlds’ (ibid.: 87). And ‘when they found themselves acting in two social milieux, within the European as well as the old Confederacy,

called on to make choices, it seems to be the case that they acted in One system in accord with the imperatives of the other. Being native seems to take precedence over being a policeman’ Cibid.:106). But what does ‘being native’ mean? It refers us back to her opaque phrase ‘traditional values’. In at least three ways, the key terms of Fels’s innovative narrative are subtly indecisive. First, she has a problem defining the attributed

‘strategy’ and of knowing whether to emphasise its success or failure. Second, there is her evident uncertainty about whether to depict the headmen/native police as acting for some kind of indigenous collectivity, when, according to her, they were acting for

themselves and for their existing base of kin and clients. (To reinforce the latter point, I suggest that Fels has taken too little care in differentiating the terms ‘native’, ‘Aboriginal’ and ‘Confederacy’ when she raises the issue of what the headmen/native police were

or were not being loyal to.) Third, in assessing the fidelity of indigenous actions to ‘traditional values’, it will not do to leave that phrase (‘being native’) so vague. As I have shown from my review of the anthropology of Aboriginal ‘morality’ and of available oral genres, it has become quite difficult for anyone to say what these phrases mean.

The possibilities of moral community It is no less difficult to formulate the tradition of values which now defines Australia’s possibilities as a nation with moral foundations.

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1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

Henry Reynolds has devoted much of his writing to upsetting a received tradition of settler colonial values. Especially in his two books published on the eve of the Bicentennial year, Frontier (1987a) and The Law of the Land (1987b), Reynolds has sought to refute ‘the profound error of assuming that the issue of land tenure was resolved by the act of sovereignty and did not require any further investigation’ (1987a:183). What had made this error ‘profound’ is that it had hardened into legal doctrine, the view of Australian common law (terra nullius) which the High Court (with the judges’ due acknowledgements to Reynolds’s scholarship) has so recently rejected. In order to expose the contrived and amnesiac nature of the judicial resolutions of the issue of Australian land tenure, Reynolds

invokes and rehabilitates a marginal tradition in non-Aboriginal culture, a tradition of protest at colonial slaughter and of testimonies

to Aborigines’ equality with Whites. Australia’s ‘first land rights movement’, according to Reynolds, took the form of aggressive questioning, in the 1830s, of European colonising practices and doctrines (1987b:ch.4). He argues that the tasks of invasion necessarily included the suppression of such European disquiet, which was superseded by a triumphal liberalism founded upon forgetfulness of the human costs of invasion. He implies, however, that such suppression could never be complete. Somehow, a recognition of

Aboriginal land rights has persisted and is again flourishing. Reynolds, historian of the nineteenth-century, has yet to explain the

survival of this moral tradition beneath the surface of twentiethcentury colonial practice. But there is no doubt that, between Blackburn’s confirmation of the doctrine of terra nullius in 1971 and the High Court’s rejection

of it in 1992, a tradition of attentiveness to indigenous rights resurfaced and flourished. The argument for undoing, ameliorating

or compensating dispossession still faces the rejoinder offered Reynolds by that descendant of Kimberley pioneers, Elizabeth Durack. ‘The axiom that “possession is nine tenths of the law” is undeniable but the author of this book goes to infinite pains to argue both the error of that truism and the legality of that swinging tenth.’ Durack scorned as morally dogmatic those who would base their vision of the nation’s future on ‘the legality of that swinging 21

After Mabo

tenth’, recommending Frontier ‘as on-flight reading for a party of “Aboriginal” tourists en route to the lotus land of Libya’ (Durack, 1987). But Durack’s king hit failed to anticipate that, five years later,

a majority of High Court judges would definitively promote the ‘legality of that swinging tenth’ as Australia’s revised common law.

Durack failed also to appreciate the difference between the politics of Reynolds’s position and that of such visitors to Libya as Michael Mansell. Reynolds opposes Mansell’s demand for Aborigi-

nal sovereignty, upholding instead the principle of Aboriginal property. Sovereignty versus property is a debate about, among other things, the moral constitution of Australian politics. Mansell, Paul Coe, Bob Weatherall and others have argued that indigenous people have very little to gain by accepting Australian sovereignty and pursuing their interests through the political and legal institutions of Australian colonialism. Instead, through such

international arenas as the United Nations’ Working Group on Indigenous People CWGIP), which has met annually since 1983, they have proclaimed the unextinguished sovereignty of the Aboriginal nation and sought a ‘sovereign treaty’ with the Australian government. In The Law of the Land Reynolds argued that Australia’s indigenous people were more likely to satisfy their demands for

justice by asserting their property rights within a reformed framework of Australian law. Five years later, Reynolds could argue that the Mabo decision has vindicated his confidence that Australian law

can be rewritten to accommodate indigenous land rights. A moral tradition once marginalised within colonial liberalism has now been reaffirmed.

Both before and since the Mabo decision, Mansell has rejected this view of Australia’s moral potential, insisting that the sovereignty of ‘Australia’ over Aboriginal land has no redeemable moral basis.

As Paul Coe wrote in 1986, ‘Australia is still a state based upon dispossession, a state based upon mass murder, a state based upon the principle that might is right’ (Coe, 1986:163). Asserting that Aborigines are themselves a nation and a state, Coe explained that, unlike White Australians, Aboriginal people lack the ‘military means to enforce our claim’.

With military power unavailable (and evidently abhorrent) to them, the advocates of Aboriginal sovereignty look to the power of 22

1 Mabo and Moral Anxiety

‘goodwill’. However, Coe and Mansell make it clear that they look

for it outside Australia. Coe seeks ‘sufficient goodwill in the international community’ to acknowledge indigenous rights (ibid.:164); he looks to ‘friends in international communities’ (ibid.:166). It is repugnant to him and to his colleagues that the political fortunes of their case could be determined so much by the

dynamics of goodwill in Australia. An unsigned statement by the Aboriginal Provisional Government (APG) declares the aim of moving ‘towards ending Aboriginal reliance upon white sympathy as a basis for planning social reforms’. According to the APG, ‘even when Government policy was supportive of Aborigines, all of those policies were aimed at alleviating hardship but at the same time reinforcing white domination of Aborigines’ (unsigned, unpaginated APG documents in my possession). Mansell’s recent critique of the Mabo judgment continues this repudiation of domestic goodwill. First, he points out that the High Court voted by a narrow majority against compensation for loss of native land. Second, he doubts that the claim of ‘native title’, as the High Court understood that concept, could now be sustained by most indigenous people in Australia.

Third, he reminds readers that the Mabo judgment does not question Australian sovereignty. Referring to these three features of the judgment as ‘inconsistencies’, Mansell remarks that they ‘highlight the difficulties white people have . . . in wanting to be seen as

sympathetic ...’ (Mansell, 1992:5). Some Aborigines will try to promote the Mabo judgment, he predicts, because they believe that ‘the destiny of Aboriginal people rests entirely upon manipulation of white compassion to our advantage’ Cibid.:6). When Reynolds confronted Coe and Mansell on ABC radio in May 1987, the languages of morality and of political realism became increasingly confused. Although Reynolds’s position is to retrieve the fugitive moral traditions of imperial statecraft and to defend the

moral flexibility of Australian property law, he found himself warning his opponents of the political limits of moral argument. The

moral excesses of the sovereignty argument drew his fire: ‘To challenge sovereignty really, you need an army behind you’. Reynolds warned against insisting on the moral principle of ‘sovereignty’ because ‘people don’t like having their consciences continually poked’. 23

After Mabo

If Reynolds was here referring to Australian consciences, then he was pointing unwittingly to an uncertainty in his historical evocation of the moral potential of Australian political culture. The final page of Frontier depicts a faltering morality: ‘the present generation of politicians ... have showed neither the intellectual nor the moral stature to deal with [indigenous land rights]’ (1987a:196). As I read

him, Reynolds sees such faltering as contingent rather than endemic. His belief in some underlying moral potential within Australia’s colonial liberalism was certainly in need of such vindication as the Mabo decision offers. Coe and Mansell, for their part,

equivocate not about the force of moral argument in politics, but about the audience to whom their moral argument is pitched. The Australian, domestic audience seems to be both addressed and witheringly abjured in their various remarks.

From moral to practical affirmation Moral idealism requires material opportunity for its expression. How did a liberal tradition of respect for indigenous rights survive at all in twentieth-century Australia? A significant part of the answer

to that question lies in Fay Gale’s observation about the spatial characteristics of our colonial history. The sheer physical distances between fringe-dwellers and townsfolk, between remote reserves and southern cities, point to ‘spatial separation as a means of ethnic survival’ (Gale, 1990:223). To the extent that land rights have been

legislated (before the Mabo judgment), most lands granted have been those reserved to Aborigines and Islanders. An entrenched practice of welfare administration has thus provided the material possibilities for the expression of a revived, cautious, compromised, Australian sense of justice.

' Such material possibilities—for the expression of indigenous identity and for the implementation of measures of social justice— concern me here. As in this first chapter, I aim to review books and articles—academic history and anthropology, and Aboriginal and other writing which is not ‘academic’—in order to give a critical

account of the kinds of thinking about Australia that are now possible. In the next couple of chapters, I engage with two aspects of the

legacy of a major figure in contemporary ‘Aboriginal Studies’, 24

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Charles Rowley. The anthropologist Basil Sansom complains that Rowley’s work eliminates ‘any identity which is culturally constructed in order to allow people of every place and clime to be free to join the human race’ (Sansom, 1988:150). Certainly, Rowley criticised anthropology’s preoccupation with what made Aborigines primordially different from other Australians; he saw much of Aboriginal culture as that of dependent inmates of colonial ‘institutions’. Rowley’s critique of the institutional tradition of Australian colonialism was based on his liberal universalism, what Sansom describes as ‘Rowley’s mercantile doctrine of person’ Cibid.:148). After stating my reservations about Rowley’s liberalism, I explore the benefits of posing anthropology’s question, ‘How do cultures reproduce themselves?’, and the question posed by some historians since Rowley: ‘How have Aborigines and Islanders survived?’. Rowley’s important but contentious legacy is also my Starting

point in Chapter 3. Rowley argued that governments should encourage Aborigines to form corporations in. order to maintain some group identities and to give themselves a fighting chance in an Australian economy and polity that was loaded against them. In the last twenty years, as governments have encouraged Aboriginal incorporation (as land-holding and service-delivering bodies) and fostered other national organs of indigenous political expression, it

has become possible to ask the critical question: ‘Is not the imposition of these forms of political life merely a more subtle kind of assimilation”. Reviewing what anthropology, in particular, can tell us about Aboriginal ‘politics’, I pose a counter-question: ‘Does a knowledge of “traditional” Aboriginal social organisation provide

the basis for a critique of neo-assimilationist programs of indigenous political development?’ The academic disciplines of anthropology and history have a lot to say, to both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians, about what ‘Aboriginal identity’ is and how it might be affirmed, not only

in public policies, but in reading books, viewing paintings and listening to music. Since the formation of the Aboriginal Arts Board

in the Australia Council in 1973, patronage and the market have combined to afford unprecedented opportunities for expressions of

indigenous ‘identity’. In Chapter 4 I pay attention to current conversations among indigenous Australians about ‘identity’ (and in particular the relationship between ‘political’ and ‘artistic’ iden25

After Mabo

tity) in art and in an autobiography—Ruby Langford’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town. To the literatures of history and anthropology we must now add what is emerging as the most characteristic genre of Aboriginal writing—autobiography. Finally, I argue that in Australia’s heritage of ‘wilderness’ and national parks (and in the challenge of ‘sustainable development’) there lies a major opportunity for the recognition of this continent’s indigenous traditions. It is possible to give idealised accounts of the

relationships of Aborigines and Islanders to Nature, and such accounts may help indigenous Australians to gain ‘Green’ credibility. But the costs of such arguments may be a lack of policy realism

when it comes to combining, in practical programmes of land management, ‘Aboriginal knowledge’ and scientific ecology. My

book ends on a cautious note, pleading for a combination of scepticism and generosity in the terms in which, for reasons of justice, Australia affirms indigenous traditions.

20

2. Lives in Custody

‘Don't be like them.’

In 1978, Charles Rowley ventured the ‘guess’ that ‘about half the Aborigines alive now have inherited generations of accumulated tradition as inmates themselves or from parents who were inmates’ (Rowley, 1978:131). He had used the term ‘inmates’ frequently in his

trilogy Aboriginal Policy and Practice (1972a, 1972b, 1972c), having formed the view, in the early 1960s, that institutionalisation was central to Aborigines’ experience of colonialism. Noting the

lack of ‘detailed published studies of Aboriginal settlements’ (1962:260), Rowley, when director of the Social Science Research Council of Australia’s ‘Aborigines Project’, commissioned Jeremy Long to write one. Long estimated that one-third of the 75 000 Aborigines enumerated in 1961 lived on government or mission settlements—seventyeight establishments in all throughout Australia; he remarked their

tendency to ‘monopolise the administrative effort of the special authorities in Aboriginal welfare’ (Long, 1970:176). He and Rowley

saw this network of institutions as the central feature of an entire

tradition of negative welfare practice—exclusive, unhelpful to Aboriginal people and an encumbrance on contemporary policy. Two arguments in particular stand out from their work. First, Rowley identified Aborigines’ ‘frustrated urbanisation’ as

the pattern underlying this benighted tradition. That is, with the 27

After Mabo

advent of closer settlement by family farms in areas once worked as large pastoral areas, the conditions of Aboriginal subsistence had changed decisively. As country towns grew up in the midst of closer

settlement, and the demand for Aboriginal labour dwindled, ‘reserves’, ‘missions’ and ‘stations’ were of enduring value to the colonists as holding places for now superfluous Aborigines whose ways were judged too rough for genteel small-town residents. Local political elites resisted metropolitan policies favouring the assimilation of reserve folk, and so reserves and missions persisted, on the edges of country towns and, later, in remote reserves. Second, both authors traced this ‘welfare’ tradition back to the nineteenth-century governing of paupers. Rowley saw similarities between the inmates of Murrin Bridge and those of ‘the English workhouse or debtors’ prison in a Dickens novel’ (1972c:272). Long likened the replacement of ration depots by welfare settlements to

the English New Poor Law’s replacement of outdoor relief by workhouses. ‘The main function of both workhouses and settlements often seemed to be to serve as “storage bins” for incompetent people’ (1970:178).

This colonial tradition of confinement had resulted in a system

whose accretion of purposes and rationales now made them obscure to administrative reason. Their ‘diverse and ill-defined aims

make it difficult, perhaps impossible, to measure their effectiveness’, writes Long Cibid.:7), adding, in his conclusion, that ‘there is

no consensus of informed opinion in Australia ... about the aims and functions of the kind of institutional communities examined here or about how their purposes can best be achieved’ Cibid.:184).

Rowley and Long, looking forward to the dissolution of these regimes, preferred the insights of the liberal sociology of Erving Goffman to those of Australian anthropology.

Anthropologists and institutions There was no anthropology of incarcerated Aborigines. While administrators tended to see Aboriginal need in terms of their needs

as institutional inmates, anthropologists treated as incidental the institutional setting in which they ‘did fieldwork’. R. G. Hausfeld’s 28

2 Lives in Custody

1963 ‘essay on method’ shows that anthropologists usually overlooked the institutions accommodating so many Aborigines because

they aspired to look through them. For his MA thesis Hausfeld had documented aspects of Aboriginal

culture among the Bundjalung people residing at Woodenbong, a settlement of which he was resident manager from 1956 to 1960. He faced the problem of the inmates’ ‘dissembled culture’, that is, ‘the Aborigines were operating on two levels. On one level they acted and spoke as if what they claimed was true. At another level they acted as if something else was true’ (Hausfeld, 1963:48). Eventually elements of continuing customs were revealed to him, but there remained problems of reliability and interpretation, since Hausfeld found himself to be at

the mercy of residents’ willingness to attest their ways. Expected ‘to regard the information as secret’ ibid.:49), Hausfeld eventually enjoyed such trust that he could check his research report ‘line by line . . . with a group of informants, [who] explained, discussed and elaborated on it until we were in agreement’ (ibid.:50). Their capacity for dissemblance seems to have afforded Woodenbong folk a degree of power

over their manager—researcher.

‘If there is dissembled culture in one community, does it occur also in other communities?’, Hausfeld asked. At that time other anthropologists enjoyed access to Aboriginal people now residing at ‘settlements’, but apparently these scholars neither complained of ‘dissembled culture’ nor encountered indigenous strategies of researcher control. Because Hausfeld’s problems of ‘field method’ did not become a significant topic within anthropology, neither did the inmate culture precipitated by institutional life. It should not surprise us, then, that Rowley found most anthro-

pology to be irrelevant to his concerns. Indeed the discipline appeared to him to place a misleading emphasis on ahistorical features of the colonised. For example, when he commented on New Norcia mission’s failure to develop Aborigines’ work skills and reliability, he repudiated ‘those who would explain human “failure” by race or culture’. His explanation of New Norcia’s problem was

that institutions such as missions ‘smash the indigenous social structure’ and so create their own refractory constituency of ‘institutional paupers’ (Rowley, 1972a:106). As he elaborated elsewhere, 29

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If from their origins there are indeed some cultural predispositions, as there may well be, it is not necessary to postulate these as the cause of Aboriginal actions and attitudes; these may be adequately accounted for by historical and economic factors and by social factors arising from the relationship of the group with government and with non-Aboriginal society. (1972c, 173) Why bring up ‘cultural’ factors if they are in excess of what a cogent historical explanation requires? Rowley found anthropology to be irrelevant in most of its agenda, logically redundant in its ahistorical concern with ‘cultural predispositions’, and potentially apologist in

its analytical promotion of ‘race’ and ‘culture’ over the historical structures of colonialism itself.

The most important thing about those colonial structures, in Rowley’s view, was that they transformed indigenous people into inmates. As ‘inmates’, Aborigines’ ‘reactions will correspond with

those of campdwellers and inmates of institutions in all similar situations’ (1972c:278). Referring to ‘the dependent personalities which mark institutional living’, he saw Palm Island’s residents as exemplary (1972b:119). Such places could not train Aboriginal people for the wider society because ‘long dependence on an institution, no matter at what low level of subsistence this has been, creates the state of mind which makes it difficult for persons to go anywhere else’ (ibid.:117). ‘The controlled institution, by conditioning inmates, constitutes the hindrance to enterprise, mobility, and experiment’ Gbid.:111). Rowley depicts the inmate culture as selfperpetuating and pervasive of all significant transactions between

Aborigines and non-Aboriginal powers. In south-western New South Wales, managers had been withdrawn from missions by the mid-1960s, in order to de-institutionalise Aboriginal life, but habits of authority and obedience persisted.

For dwellers on stations there was the relationship with its manager; for all dwellers on reserves, and for most mothers, there was the relationship with the Welfare Board. Some are tenants in

Board houses; others will have children who are wards of the Board; and most will have something to hope or fear from actions

or recommendations of the Area Welfare Officer. In their relations with the distant Board and with its local representatives, 30

2 Lives in Custody

there is the carry-over from the background of institutions, of the camp situations, where they were under authoritarian manage-

ment. In this respect Aboriginal politics are the politics of the asylum, hospital, camp, or other authoritarian institution: of inmates against the management. (Rowley, 1972c:189~90) When Rowley referred to Aborigines’ ‘accumulated tradition as

inmates’, he drew on a recent North American sociology of institutions—Erving Goffman’s Asylums. Here was the theoretical model of what Rowley had observed as Aborigines’ ‘self-alienating

moral servitude’ Cibid.:274). : (Mis)using Goffman

Erving Goffman generalised that ‘total institutions’ are characterised by ‘closure’ (strictly controlled dealings between inmates and those

outside, resulting in a distinct mental/moral universe among management and inmates); ‘rationalisation’ (the administrative coordination of inmates’ every daily activity within a common space);

and a clear, hierarchical distinction between staff and inmates. Systems of punishment and privilege give order to ‘total institutions’. In combination, these features ensure ‘assaults upon the self—various forms of disfigurement and defilement through which the symbolic meaning of events in the inmate’s immediate presence

dramatically fails to corroborate his prior conception of self (Goffman, 1961:35). The rationales of these ‘mortifying’ regimes vary according to the type of ‘total institution’, but the common effect is to disrupt ‘one’s economy of action’ Cibid.:41), to weaken

‘evidence of one’s autonomy’ Cibid.:43). In response, inmates develop ‘secondary adjustments’—objects or behaviours which ‘provide the inmate with evidence that he is still his own man’ (ibid.:55); ‘privileges’ also enable some reconstitution of self, and so does the formation of certain lines of solidarity among inmates.

Other inmate adjustments mentioned by Goffman include withdrawal (solipsistic focus on one’s immediate self); intransigence; ‘colonisation’ (making the most of whatever minor access to the external world is allowed); and ‘conversion’ (internalising and/or acting out the role of the perfect inmate). 31

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Rowley’s and Long’s appropriation of this framework is selective,

metaphorical and even superficial. To invoke Goffman authorised their likening of Aboriginal setthements to prisons, concentration camps, mental hospitals and draconian military barracks—analogies which gave a scandalising fillip to their critique. However, it is not the similarities but the differences between many Aboriginal institutions and Goffman’s ‘total institutions’ which tell us most about Rowley and Long’s liberalism. First, in Goffman’s model, the staff/inmate distinction inside total institutions is at odds with the tendency for people to deal with each other under conditions of civil equality outside. How true is this of Australia? Have relations between Aborigines and non-Aborigines

been conducted on a basis of equality outside the Aboriginal institutions? The burden of Rowley’s trilogy is that they certainly have not. The logic of the settlers’ ruthless dispossession and its

accompanying racist contempt for the indigenous people had created a pervasive legacy of inequality. Staff—inmate relations in Aboriginal institutions were thus not an exceptional set of conditions but a variation on a pervasive and deeply embedded feature

of Australian society up to and including the time of Rowley’s research. Only in the years preceding and including that research were Aborigines and Islanders being conceded certain formal equalities with other Australian citizens. Rowley’s critique was encouraged by these developments. The 1961 parliamentary inquiry into granting Aborigines the right to vote in Commonwealth

elections ‘opened up situations generally hidden by the permit system from the public view’ (Rowley, 1972b:125). ‘In the aftermath

of the grant of the franchise, the classic colonial relationship of mission adherent to the missionary superintendent is surely outdated’ Gbid.:113). It was only against this very new tendency towards civil equality that authoritarian staff—inmate relations could

be contrasted. Rowley refashioned Goffman’s inside/outside contrast so that it became a polemical comparison of the unequal and authoritarian past with the emergent egalitarian future. Second, Long himself had generalised that, with a few exceptions, settlements had neither broken up the sexes nor broken up families (Long, 1970:178). But in Goffman’s model, inmates are detached, upon admission, from their usual domestic or kinship 32

2 Lives in Custody

groups and are henceforth dealt with as isolates; each inmate’s resulting vulnerability is exploited by further degradation of his or

her autonomy. Such institutions have been deployed against Aboriginal people, for example in welfare programmes based on child theft, the physical detachment of children from their families.

But ‘Homes’ for Aboriginal girls and boys were not among the institutions about which Rowley and Long wrote; Long specifically excluded them from his survey Cibid.:1). Their critique dealt with institutions whose clienteles consisted not of detached individuals but of whole families and networks of families. Third, Goffman’s ‘total institutions’ were ‘closed’, that is, firmly

policed at their boundaries. It is difficult to generalise about this aspect of the Aboriginal institutions depicted by Rowley and Long.

On the one hand there is Palm Island, Rowley’s epitome of Queensland’s reliance on the ‘total institution’; Aborigines and Islanders were removed there, sometimes as punishment, to endure

an intensive programme of social change, and ‘the surrounding ocean gave real meaning to the predicament of being “under the Act” (Rowley, 1972b:90, 97). On the other hand, many institutions were Set up in the homelands of the client population, without walls

and guards to prevent people coming and going. It tells us something important about the ideological motivation of Long’s appropriation of Goffman that he points to the ‘largely self-contained communities’ of northern Australia as those bearing closest resemblance to Goffman’s ‘total institution’. Two features of the remote mission/settlement struck Long as bearing out Goffman’s paradigm.

They are isolated physically by distance and poor communications from the society outside and the residents for the most part find their employment, their recreation, and their education on the setthement, and are born and die there . . . The barriers that

in modern life normally separate the spheres in which people sleep, play, and work are broken down. (Long, 1970:6) Long’s is a Curious argument, in two respects. First, the ‘society’

from which the institution is isolated appears to be the urban and non-Aboriginal settler culture in the south of the continent, from which derived the rationales for the Aboriginal institutions of the 33

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north and centre. Certainly this ‘society’ is remote, but there is another ‘society’ from which the mission/settlement is not ‘isolated’

and within which it is intimately embedded: the network of Aboriginal kin who are native to the institution’s locale. The second problem with Long’s view is that the inmates of remote settlements

and missions had not come from a world in which spheres are separated (‘modern life’) and then found themselves forced to undertake all these activities under the one institutional regime; their lives prior to and outside the institution were also characterised by the interpenetration of these spheres. Their lives had not been, in this sense, ‘modern’.

There is something in common between these two defects in Long’s observations about remote communities as ‘total institutions’: he tends to play down or to deny continuities—spatial, temporal, cultural, historical—between inmates’ lives within and without the institutions with which they were then associated.

Assimilating inmates The logic governing Rowley’s and Long’s (mis)appropriations of Goffman’s ‘total institution’ is a commitment to a qualified and sophisticated assimilationism. Rowley and Long hoped that the dissolution of institutional culture would release Aboriginal people for the journey they must eventually make to the towns, whose jobs,

houses and general civility had been denied them so long. ‘The settlement has operated as an anti-urbanisation measure. It forms in some respects the antithesis, socially and economically, of the town’ (Rowley, 1972b:121). Rowley hoped that town life would assist Aboriginal people to become more enterprising. He disliked what he called ‘the brawling pauperism’ of settlement life (1972c:272).

He regretted that Aboriginal attitudes militated against their embarking on small businesses (1972b:90). He hoped that Aboriginal!

corporations ‘might provide avenues for investment in things of higher appeal than the whims of the moment and make possible the amassing of material, social and cultural assets’ (1972c:302). The inmate culture was a ‘hindrance to effective economic enterprise’ (1972b:125). In Goffman, ‘total institutions’ made people inmates by robbing them of their ‘civilian self’; in Rowley, they pre-empted 34

2. Lives in Custody

the hoped-for emergence of an urbane and enterprising Aboriginal citizenry.

Rowley and Long thought that settlements and missions might block their inmates’ assimilation not only because governments were attached to them as capital investments and as social conveniences but also because the inmates themselves found comfort and social identity in the group life that the institutions afforded. For example, they knew of the insecurity generated among Lake Tyers’ residents by the Victorian government’s 1957 decision to close it down (Rowley, 1972c:21; Long, 1970:21-—3). Such resistance, Long foresaw, was likely to be repeated in many places, in both the north

and the south of the continent, for institutions had the potential to

be congenial communities once ‘welfare’ managers and other rehabilitative meddlers withdrew. Both he (1970:184—5) and Rowley

(1978:150) urged that residents be allowed to choose whether and when to leave their reserves, missions or setthements. The importance of that choice, in New South Wales, has since been underlined by Peter Read: ‘It is only in towns where the local reserve survived the Assimilationist axe that it has been possible even to have the choice of where to live’ (Read, 1984:10). In writing of that choice, however, Long took little account of people’s attachments to land, nor did he anticipate their tolerance for survival on welfare benefits; he predicted that, probably, ‘people will move from those areas that lack the resources to sustain them if there is economic advantage in doing so and that emigration will increase as settlements become more like ordinary communities, subject to similar pressures’ (Long, 1970:185). In fact recent studies have shown that Aboriginal people, particularly those in remote areas, are unlikely to migrate to job opportunities (Taylor, 1991). Rowley and Long projected Aboriginal ‘man’ as potentially homo economicus, held back by the institutions and personal dispositions of a paternalistic, premodern colonialism. A similar critical framework is to be found in the work of Frank Stevens, the management consultant and industrial relations academic whom Rowley commissioned to document the inadequacies, for Aboriginal people, of the Northern Territory pastoral industry (Stevens, 1974; Rowse,

1988:57-60). Their critique was persuasive partly for being so complicit with the deeper assumptions of assimilationist liberalism: 35

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their underlying belief that Aboriginal people would evolve towards bourgeois modernity, if given the chance. I do not wish to dispute that Aboriginal people should be allowed the choice to own

property, to earn award wages and to enjoy the privileges of citizenship as most Australians have come to understand it. But the

liberal critique of factors delaying that choice, and the model of Aboriginal potential it entailed, could also be culturally myopic. It is easier, now, to be aware of Rowley’s limited vision of Aboriginal aspirations when he diagnosed ‘the Aboriginal concern with land’

as ‘really a concern with pauper status’ (1972b:131). Rowley’s refusal of whatever cultural insights anthropology could offer and his preference for Goffman’s liberal sociology of institutions seems to have limited his cultural empathy.

Institutions of memory Since doing ideological service for Rowley and Long, the concept

of ‘total institution’, while enjoying popularity as a theoretical aside (e.g. Pollard, 1988:27; Eckermann, 1980:89; Trigger, 1992:102;

Franklin and White, 1991:10), has had little impact on Aboriginal studies. The outstanding exception is Anna Haebich’s use of written and oral sources to depict life inside ‘Moore River’, a multi-purpose ‘dumping ground’ for many categories of Aboriginal person between the world wars. Haebich emphasises the poor work conditions and resources of Moore River’s staff, leading to their ‘marked emphasis on maintaining internal order’. Invoking Goffman, she refers to the formalities of staff-inmate relations, the very restricted capacities of inmates

to complain about issues of staff and staff behaviour, and the mutual stereotyping of staff and inmates. Male staff tended to be

former police or armed servicemen; females had worked in psychiatric hospitals or migrant reception homes, though there were some qualified nurses. ‘Trackers’ recruited from this and other institutionalised populations (e.g. Rottnest Island and Fremantle Prisons) facilitated a white authority which, at its most severe, was expressed in floggings, solitary confinement in the ‘Boob’ (Moore River’s makeshift gaol), and, at least once, tarring and feathering. Calling the trackers ‘trusties’, Haebich cites Rowley 36

2 Lives in Custody

(who had cited Solzhenitsyn on the Gulag, Rowley, 1978:108, 308),

and notes how often they were men from the north of the state, supervising a setthement population consisting largely, in the settlement’s early days, of folk from the south. Not all inmates had been forced to go there. ‘A small number had come voluntarily to rejoin their families, find marriage partners or simply because it was the last avenue of assistance available to them’ CHaebich, 1988:207). For adults, Moore River was, however, ‘a final destina-

tion’; for children, ostensibly, it was a place of training and transition to self-supporting employment. The children lived in sex-segregated dormitories, the adults in a camp beyond the dormitory compound. Haebich conveys a cheerless, boring, hard-working and malnourished regime of childhood, ruptured by night-time escapes to visit the adults’ camps and to meet other sexually active adolescents. If caught (most likely by trackers) dormitory escapees were punished by a spell in the Boob. The government decided who could marry whom. Haebich cites Goffman to support the argument that such ‘training’, with its close management of individuals’ time and niggling provision of all basic

needs, is unlikely to instil a work ethic or to develop the skills necessary to maintaining life. Combined with the loneliness of trying to make a living in the outside world, this institutional culture produced young people who found it appealing to return to Moore River Gibid.:214-15). Adults camped near the compound were also unlikely to leave if their children were among those accommodated in the dormitories. Haebich describes the adults’ camp as ‘a state of limbo’—not as closely invigilated as the dormitories but part of settlement life, and

regarded as a nuisance by the staff Gbid.:215). She none the less considers the camp to fall within the ‘total institution’, referring to Goffman’s essay ‘The Underlife of a Public Institution’ in order to make sense of the ways in which the camp afforded some selfpreserving activities within Moore River: gossiping, reminiscing about the old days, and gambling. She also cites former inmates who recall such licensed pleasures as dances, community singing, poetry recitals and cricket matches. Corroborees were tolerated, provided that they were not for the initiation of young men, and maban or healers were influential among an inmate population still 37

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convinced that the world remains suffused with ancestral spirits, whatever the powers of Whites. Two recent autobiographies have enriched Haebich’s account by giving examples of how it was possible for inmates to defend the space for a life worth living. For nine months in 1932, Jack and Harold Davis were voluntarily admitted to Moore River, seeking training in farm work. Jack, then

fourteen years old, recalls that the adults organised their camp in a series of kin- and country-based groups. Some older people, without relations at Moore River, camped on their own. When, after three months, the Davis boys were weary of dormitory life, they got permission to move to the camp of an Aboriginal woman they called Aunt Lucy; they worked hard for her, fetching wood and water and foraging in nearby bush for meat. Once lucky in two-up, Jack gave Aunt Lucy most of his winnings—tobacco plugs, the Moore River

inmates’ currency—which were used to buy extra rations (from other inmates, it is implied) (Davis, 1991:125). Alice Nannup’s memoir of Moore River from 1925 to 1927 documents another kind of space which a young female inmate could make: being good and receiving privileged forms of employment. Two authority figures stand out in her account: the ‘dormitory mother’, Nanna Leyland, and Mrs Neal, the Superintendent’s wife.

Even though Nanna Leyland was really strict, she was a lovely lady to us too. When I got in favour with her I used to live like a queen. See, she used to give us her dog, Brindle, to go bush and get a kangaroo for her. There’d be me, Melba, Ruth and another Melba, and we’d go out along the river hunting, just us girls, taking the butcher’s knife and everything. Then after we’d given her the brush kangaroo, she’d make a beautiful big stew and a damper for those girls that did the hunting for her. She’d bring in that special food at night, because even though she had

her own camp outside, she was always locked up in the compound at night. (Nannup, 1992:65)

Nannup gives us less detail of her work as the Superintendent’s domestic servant, but it is clear that, in relation to Mrs Neal also, her

survival strategy was to be well behaved, trustworthy and well spoken. Unlike the many girls who were thrashed until they wet 38

2 Lives in Custody

themselves, ‘I never got a beating’ Cibid.:74) and ‘I never smudged my slate the whole time I was there’ (ibid.:82). Was Alice a ‘trusty’? She tells us twice Cibid.:73, 78) that she was

perceived as one, conspicuously privileged as Superintendent Neal’s dancing partner and as Mrs Neal’s domestic, and entrusted with handing out rations from the store. But the Davis boys’ option of going to live in the adults’ camp was not open to her, as dormitory girls were more strictly policed than dormitory boys Cibid.:84). To

go beyond the dormitory required her to seek the patronage of some authority, not only the white staff but also of the trackers. She could visit Old Bill Kimberley and Old Mary, tracker and wife in

charge of the boys’ dormitory and camped in the shade below it; and she tells the story of bribing with food a tracker who surprised her while swimming. Since food, by all accounts, was scarce and poor in quality for Moore River inmates, Alice’s trusted positions gave her access to a tradable good. She recalls giving extra rations

to Nanna Leyland, who would use them to cook more for her dormitory charges that night. The Davis and Nannup accounts corroborate Haebich’s. Nannup, in particular, substantiates a Goffmanesque portrait of the place. They refused to use her surname Bassett, calling her Cassit; she felt

‘deliberately’ degraded by the poor quality of the food (and she recalls the professional degradation of the nurses who presided over its unhygienic preparation); she was aware of efforts to disconnect her from her past; she overheard authorities dismissing the inmates’ needs for a proper education. Nannup declares that she learned nothing at Moore River. But both Davis and Nannup add something which complicates Haebich’s use of Goffman: they both describe an Aboriginal adult— child axis of power which is not reducible to the staff—inmate axis so central to the notion of ‘total institution’. That is, Aboriginal adults

seem to have retained a certain limited authority; they were not reduced to the level of the more closely supervised children, nor were they entirely accountable, in their dealings with the children, to the white staff. The Davis brothers moved from the white authority of the dormitory to the less formal Black authority of adults in the camp. Nannup’s appeal to Aboriginal authority was specific to the more circumscribed options open to girls; she cultivated, and 39

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negotiated with, an adult Aboriginal authority which had made its own adjustments by becoming trackers and a dormitory mother.

Both Davis and Nannup describe the adults’ camp as being structured by older Aboriginal notions of social organisation; these must have included, to some degree, the (no doubt vexed) relations of authority between adult and younger Aborigines. Iam not persuaded by Haebich’s attempt to accommodate adult Aboriginal authority to her Goffmanesque model of Moore River’s power structure. In seeing the powers of Aboriginal adults as part

of this total institution’s ‘underlife’, she stretches the Goffman notion to its limits, in two respects. First, the adults’ camp seems to

have been the locus of an Aboriginal authority (even if initiation corroborees were effectively extinguished) which is surely not to be

understood in the same terms as Officials’ delegation to Black ‘trusties’ who supervised the dormitories. Second, Goffman’s notion that ‘total institutions’ work by individuating their inmates does not

allow for age and kin relationships to remain of such enduring significance among inmates. It would be dogmatic to insist on the Goffman model by understanding those relationships to be no more than reactive to the rigours of institutional life. They are rather the persistence of structures which preceded Moore River’s existence.

Klaus-Peter Koepping also invokes Goffman in asking how Cherbourg’s inmates preserve their sane humanity. Part of his answer is that Cherbourg people remain aware of the relations of kinship which bind them. Such ‘historical’ awareness (as Koepping calls it) ‘is not so much directed toward lost “traditional” forms of

their culture but is instead channelled into the effort to retain a knowledge of every person an individual is related to, it is persondirected memorisation’ (Koepping, 1976:30). His conversations with Cherbourg residents revealed a common desire to remain there

‘amongst me own people’ (ibid.:44). There would seem to be something highly resistant, in the Aboriginal sense of kinship, to the degrading individuations of ‘total institutions’. The ‘total institution’ is more the counterfactual than the model of the situation Koepping

depicts at Cherbourg. If the pertinence of ‘total institution’ is so questionable, because of its inability to deal with persisting relations of kinship and of authority between Aboriginal adults and children, it is ironic to note 40

2 Lives in Custody

that Jeremy Long, six years before extolling Goffman, laid the basis

for these very doubts. Were Aborigines at Papunya settlement undergoing ‘acculturation’? he asked. Papunya possibly strengthened the Aboriginal ways which, in assimilationist theory, were

supposed to be falling into disuse. Three examples of such strengthening can be drawn from Long’s 1964 essay. First, he speculated that ‘the high level of conformity at Papunya to the ideal

in marriage choice’ may be ‘a direct result of there being a larger community, so that the finding of an appropriate partner is easier than it may often have been in the desert’. Second, ‘the assured

supply of food means that it is possible to hold ceremonies involving large numbers of people not only when the season is propitious but in any season’ (Long, 1964:78). Third, the ‘social distance between whites and aborigines inhibits the learning processes of acculturation’ (ibid.:80). Other Northern Territory settlements have been analysed in similar terms. Kenneth Maddock refers to evidence that, at Bamyili setthkement (which he visited a number of times from 1964 to 1970), ‘the big ceremonies have been celebrated more regularly and often since about 1960 than in the 1940s or 1950s’; he cited Meggitt’s conjecture that traditional Law was also afforded more time among the newly settled Warlpiri, in

the 1950s (Maddock, 1977:26). Maddock’s larger point was that Bamilyi people remained steadfast in their wish to find a way to live

under both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Law; they were thus

resistant to the settlement’s avowed purpose—assimilation of Aborigines to the ‘Australian way of life’. Tonkinson made a similar assessment of the Martu people’s resistance to Christian evangelists at Jigalong. ‘By allowing large numbers of tradition-oriented Aborigines to congregate on a permanent basis at Jigalong, the mission

has enabled them to pool their religious knowledge and has given

them ample spare time to devote to religious discussion and activity’, he reported in the late 1960s (Tonkinson, 1974:135). Finally, Donaldson’s work with Kooris with long experience of colonialism—Ngiyampaa veterans of welfare administration at Carowra Tank, Menindee and Murrin Bridge—leads her to conclude that kinship remains the ‘mechanism for identifying “our people” .. . irrespective of linguistic change and loss of country

... @onaldson, 1984:42). 41]

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Erambie and the Wiradjuri nation Peter Read’s history of the Wiradjuri of south- and central-western New

South Wales narrates a series of efforts both to institutionalise and to disperse institutional populations, all in the interests of their eventual ‘assimilation’. I want to contrast the standpoint from which he narrates the history of missions and settlements with that of Rowley and Long. The Aborigines Protection Act 1909 empowered New South Wales authorities to implement two methods of dispersing Aborigines: the closing of reserves and the taking away of children from Aboriginal parents in order to bring them up in institutions such as the Cootamundra Girls’ Home and Kinchela Boys’ Home. Read describes the period 190939 as ‘the most hateful period of [what he calls] the hundred years war’ against the Wiradjuri (Read, 1988:75), who sustained assaults not only

on what little remained of their land (the reserves which were disbanded, whatever their wish to remain living on them) but also on their family life (the theft of children, including the official effort to prevent all further contact between children and their parents).

Read compares two of the Wiradjuri responses to this assault: informal camps such as the Sandhills, outside Narrandera, comprising an extended family of 100 people by 1930; and Erambie, an official settlement managed by the Aborigines Protection Board, which became a stronghold of resentful Wiradjuri solidarity. He commends the Sandhills for its liberties and notes that Narrandera’s townsfolk were unusual in their tolerance. Partly as a consequence

of these conditions, the Sandhills were deserted by 1955. In contrast, Erambie grew, partly because the Board’s continuing policies of reserve closure, from 1909 to the 1960s, made the retention of a few growing reserves inevitable. The refugees of closed reserves were often not welcome in the towns into which the

Board hoped they would assimilate. Some refugees set up new informal camps such as Frogs Hollow and Wattle Hill, which flourished in the 1950s, but Erambie station became important as a long-term refuge and dumping ground of Wiradjuri subject to the Board’s policies of dispersal. ‘By 1935 Erambie was the largest and most complex of all the Wiradjuri living areas’ (ibid.:89). Read does not share Rowlev’s ambivalence towards institutions such as Erambie. Rowley deplored the ‘brawling pauperism’ and 42

2 Lives in Custody

‘inmate’ culture of such places while also allowing that Aboriginal

solidarity survived within them. He thus projected two positive scenarios for residents: to move off such reserves into employment

and town life; or to remain on the reserve, with government or mission managers withdrawn and replaced by grants to incorporated bodies of residents for housing, enterprise and other helpful programmes. Rowley’s prescription was unexceptionable: it was for

the residents themselves to choose between these alternative futures. However, his presentation of that choice is embedded in his repeated warnings, noted above, about the persistence of ‘inmate’ attitudes. Rowley’s ambivalence towards the culture of institutions can be

understood as flowing from a point of view basic to his work: the point of view of the Australian nation. His underlying question was always: on what terms can Aboriginal people be offered a place in Australian life, if such offers are not to be rejected as oppressive and

drive Aboriginal people deeper into the depressed subcultures forged by colonialism’s many tyrannies? Although I doubt that Read

would dispute the humane intentions of that question (and I do not), his Wiradjuri history is organised around a different point of view, that of the Wiradjuri nation. Read’s underlying question is: what challenges and affronts did governments offer to Wiradjuri well-being, and how did the Wiradjuri regroup to survive those onslaughts? His answer gives equal weight to official stupidity and

to Wiradjuri resistance. Of Erambie’s growth, he writes that ‘the system was creating the very problem it had been intended to solve: the formation of an Aboriginal bloc, united by common grievances, who insisted not only that whites keep their distance, but that they

give them due respect as the owners and spiritual masters of the land’ (1988:91). At Erambie managerial authority was challenged with growing determination; a residents’ association formed in 1950

sought to ‘combat drinking, quell disturbances and deal with unscrupulous managers’ Cibid.:94). But it was not until the 1960s

that such formations, and the Wiradjuri refusal of dispersal into widely separated houses in towns, began to reveal to officials a ‘deeply hidden truth’: ‘Aboriginal culture as it existed in New South

Wales was not bad European behaviour but modes of thought, relationships and action which the Wiradjuri would not give up 43

After Mabo

lightly’ Gibid.:114). In 1965, under pressure of ‘a series of head-on confrontations’, the last manager was withdrawn from Erambie. Thus laying claim to their few remaining reserves, the Wiradjuri preserved some pockets of land from the colonists. Read points out

that by the time the New South Wales Land Rights Act granted Aborigines freehold title to the State’s reserves in 1983, ‘all that remained of the Wiradjuri reserves of some 5000 acres was seventy

acres divided between Three Ways, Erambie, Condobolin and... Brungle’ Cibid.:137). Nor can the casualties of dispersal be denied; Read estimates that about half of the 6000 Wiradjuri do not care to identify themselves as Aboriginal at all Gibid.:132). Such an outcome does not permit a triumphal narrative of Wiradjuri resistance, but compels Read’s sobering concluding sentence: ‘In the 1980s, the

struggle for survival had been won by the Wiradjuri, but another century might pass before the wounds would heal’ Cibid.:138). To say something of the Wiradjuri wounds is an occasion to dwell

further on the limitations of Rowley’s discussion of ‘Aboriginal institutions’. His focus on missions and settlements tended to push to the margins of attention such sites as the institutional and familial homes to which children were sent, and prisons Cincluding juvenile

detention centres). These places loom large in the memories of those Kooris whom Read has interviewed. We should therefore include them within the complex institutional armature of that assimilating ‘welfare’ state whose more destructive instruments, it turns out, were refined not in the ‘Deep North’ but in Victoria and New South Wales.

The family as prison Read has estimated that there may be 100 000 Australians who do not identify themselves as of Aboriginal descent because they or their forebears were not only forcibly prevented from associating

with their Aboriginal parents but also were brought up to feel superior to other Aboriginal people (Edwards and Read, 1989:xvii). Child removal, practised in all states and territories at some time, has

been the most radical and coercive attempt to eclipse the adult authority which is essential to the social and cultural reproduction

of Aboriginality. To understand this policy tradition it is not 44

2 Lives in Custody

sufficient to know something of the conditions of such institutions as the Cootamundra Home for Aboriginal Girls, the Kinchela Home for Aboriginal Boys and the Colebrook Home in South Australia; it

is also essential to suspend our favourable presumptions about white Australian family life. State or mission institutions for Aboriginal children, even ‘Homes’ far removed from parents’ camps, could none the less effect certain solidarities among those resident; but the

adoptive or fostering white Australian family appears in Edwards and Read’s work as the colonial state’s consummate instrument for smashing the Aboriginal kinship system—all the more potent for being animated altruistically by ‘the feelings of the majority of honest and conscientious white citizens’ Gibid.:xv). Adopted when four years old, Pauline McLeod recalls being told she had been rescued from abuse and was thus privileged. Ever in fear of the loss of that privilege, ‘’d think, “I’ve lost one family, I don’t want to lose another”, so I’d always do whatever they’d say.

Even things that were quite hurtful or annoying, I’d take it’ (ibid.:15). Her adoptive father’s sexual attentions tested that stoicism most severely Gibid.:17). Even so, her decision, as an adult, to trace her Aboriginal relatives made her feel ‘a real traitor’ to those who had adopted her Cibid.:106). Nancy de Vries recalls that when,

aged seven, she was raped by another child, her new ‘mother’ threatened to cut her tongue out if she told anyone Cibid.:81). Sherry Atkinson remembers being told by her foster parents to put up with being called ‘an Abo’; she regrets that the more supportive reactions

of an Aboriginal family were denied her. By the time she was a young adult, she had absorbed Australia’s popular racism—‘just took it off the media, took off what society thinks about blacks, you know: lazy, do nothing but drink, got no initiative’ (ibid.:38—9). Writing of the life of one adopted Koori, Russell Moore, Read makes it clear that adoptive or fostering families did not have to be

sexually pathological to inflict damage; they had merely to be normal.

Family love could not protect the child or the adult ... When at school the children were called ‘a black cunt’ or a ‘dirty abo’, adopting parents could provide no relief beyond ‘Just ignore it’. It was common in many adoptive homes for every reference to 45

After Mabo

homeless, arrested or demonstrating Aborigines in the papers or television to be accompanied by the injunction ‘Don’t be like them’. (Read, 1990b:60)

Even if an adopted or fostered child somehow retained a positive conception of themselves as being, to some degree, ‘Aboriginal’,

that self-knowledge could be unsatisfyingly abstract. Jeanette Sinclair recalls resenting having to demonstrate her Aboriginal identity to sceptical fellow students at Randwick Technical College, partly because ‘I didn’t have the answers’ (Read, 1989:75).

That the Australian family could be a cold and even degrading institution for those Aborigines assigned to live within it is a theme of Glenyse Ward’s autobiographies, Wandering Girl (1987) and Unna You Fellas(1991). Humiliated daily as an assigned 16-year-old

domestic servant, Ward tells of her brief return to Wandering mission, from which she had been sent into service. Her few weeks

back at Wandering reconnected her with the only supportive community that approximated a family’s warmth: ‘I enjoyed being with Sister Headmaris, she was so pleased with me and proud of me,

as if I was her own daughter’ (1987:127). Institutions such as Wandering could generate a fellowship pre-empted or eclipsed by non-Aboriginal family placements, whether as ‘son’, ‘daughter’ or domestic.

At least, that is one version of the closely supervised life of Aboriginal and Islander children. Others might mention mission and settkement dormitories as among the worst instruments of colonial oppression of families. Ian O’Connor’s report to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody argues that ‘children have borne the full force of attempts to eradicate Aboriginal culture

.. . through processes such as dormitory living, and transfer of children to White welfare institutions and detention centres, and to placement of children in boarding schools’ (O’Connor, 1990:25). Queensland’s dormitories were in use ‘until the 1970s’ not only for

‘orphaned, abandoned or neglected children’ but also for the punishment by detention of children, young people and single mothers (ibid.:22—3). Reluctant as I am to appear to defend dormitories, I am struck nevertheless by testimony quoted by O’Connor which seems to imply that dormitories were less disrup46

2 Lives in Custody

tive of family life if they were not instruments for removing children far from parents. He quotes a Palm Island councillor arguing that no child be admitted to the dormitory there ‘unless that child was born on Palm Island or had lived there with his or her parents’ (ibid.:24).

In his history of Christian missions, John Harris (of a missionary

family) urges readers to distinguish between missions with a ‘dormitory system, where parents are still camped nearby or, if not,

were able to seek permission to take their children away for a period, and the system in use elsewhere, particularly in institutions in the southern States, where Aboriginal children were removed, often forcibly, from distant homes and raised without seeing or even knowing their families’ (Harris, 1990:706). Barbara Cummings’s history of Darwin’s Retta Dixon Children’s Home tells of the unpleasant effects of what was probably intended as a helpful change there in the early 1960s: the disbanding of the dormitories and the regrouping of children into a series of ‘cottages’ (still within the

grounds of the institution), with each cottage headed by staff ‘parents’. The dormitories had allowed solidarity among the children, whereas the cottages fragmented them. The punishment of children by staff became less ‘public’ (that is, less evident to the children as a mass) when carried out by staff ‘parents’ within each

cottage, thus provoking greater unease among the children (Cummings, 1990:118-19). Another surprising feature of Cummings’s

story is that a number of Darwin’s Aboriginal families have been linked, over three generations, with Retta Dixon and its predecessor the Kahlin Compound, partly through voluntary admissions. Evidence of such mutual entanglement of local families and ‘welfare’ apparatus makes us mindful of the specificity of the history of each institution’s ways of articulating the authority of Aboriginal adults with that of white colonial officials.

Empowering parents? If it requires some effort to see the ‘normal’, non-Aboriginal family

as the consummate site of Aboriginal confinement, it is partly because the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987-91) has again focused reforming concern on more spectacu-

lar forms of carceral oppression. The commissioners found that 47

After Mabo

although Aboriginal and Islander people, once in police stations or prison, were no more likely to die in custody than non-indigenous people, an Aboriginal person was twenty-seven times more likely than a non-Aboriginal person to be in police custody (in the survey month August 1988), and fifteen times more likely to be in prison (at 30 June 1989). The fact that ‘the flow of Aboriginal people into

prison is considerably higher than the number at any one time’ reflects, partly, the prominence of fine-default, which is an effect of poverty Johnston, 1991, vol. 1:208). The commissioners confirmed

what must long have been known by Aboriginal people: formal incarceration is an all too common feature of the Aboriginal experience. Aboriginal youths’ brushes with the welfare system and the law particularly concerned the commissioners. Forty-three of the ninety-

nine deceased ‘experienced childhood separation from their natural families through intervention by the State, mission organisations or other institutions’ (ibid.:44). Sixty-three of the deceased had been

charged with a criminal offence before their eighteenth birthday Gibid.:45). Throughout Australia, in the late 1980s, Aboriginal children were disproportionately represented among those ‘in care’, in police custody and in juvenile detention centres (ibid. vol.

2:255-62). The commissioners recommended that governments and Aboriginal organisations ‘negotiate together to devise strategies

designed to reduce the rate at which Aboriginal juveniles are involved in the welfare and criminal justice systems and, in particular, to reduce the rate at which Aboriginal juveniles are separated from their families and communities, whether by being declared to be in need of care, detained, imprisoned or otherwise’ (ibid.:252).

But this recommendation, predicated on an argument that Aboriginal and Islander people have ‘survived’ and must now take more responsibility for their own problems, sits side by side with

a sense of the continuing pathology and crisis of indigenous Australians. The difficulty of finding the balance between these themes is illustrated by the commissioners. In noting (with undoubted regret) the historical disturbances to indigenous family practice—‘the undermining of the traditional responsibility of the Aboriginal family—the commissioners are at risk of reiterating 48

2 Lives in Custody

well-rehearsed grounds for State intervention. The Commission’s

Aboriginal Issues Units’ reports are glossed thus: ‘. . . many Aboriginal people and communities feel that the undermining of

cultural and social controls in the Aboriginal community has resulted in an inability of communities to adequately supervise and

control their children’ (ibid.:286, my emphasis). If such feelings prompt parents and communities to seek outside help to control young people, then the crucial issues are: what kind of help? and who controls the process of intervention? Here the study of Aboriginal involvement in South Australia’s juvenile justice system, by Gale, Wundersitz and Bailey-Harris (1990), is relevant. The authors urge us to take note not only of the

final outcomes of the juvenile justice process—whether or not Aboriginal juveniles are sentenced and the nature and severity of their punishments when they are—but also the preceding stages. When they say that Aboriginal juveniles are ‘disproportionately involved with the law (1990:15), they refer to a sequence of three steps: police actions (arrest or report), assessment and referral by the Screening Panels set up in 1979 to decide whether a reported or arrested child should be charged in court, and the court’s process, leading to some kind of sentence or to discharge. At each stage, South Australian law provides a choice between severe and lenient options. Aboriginal juveniles were more likely to be subjected to the more severe option at each step. Aboriginal juveniles appearing before Screening Panels from 1979 to 1984 were more likely than non-Aboriginal juveniles to have been arrested (43.4 per cent of

Aboriginal appearances versus 19.7 per cent of non-Aboriginal appearances). They were also more likely to be referred to court (71.3 per cent versus 37.4 per cent) and sentenced to detention (10.2 per cent versus 4.2 per cent). There is a cumulative process of discrimination against Aboriginal juveniles. Those to whom the severer option is meted out at each stage are arguably being ‘punished’ (through protracted involvement with police and other authorities) well in advance of their court sentencing to formal detention. Police—with discretion over whom to invigilate, whether to arrest, to report or to let off with warnings, and what charges to make—are crucial gatekeepers and influential members of Screen49

After Mabo

ing Panels. Are the police demonstrably racist? Aboriginal people interviewed told of the more intense and aggressive surveillance of Aboriginal youths by South Australian police, but available crime Statistics do not allow this impression to be confirmed or falsified. Police racism may none the less be implicit. When Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal offenders with the same profile of charges were

compared, the Aboriginal cases were more likely to have been arrested than merely reported. Aboriginal juveniles are more likely to be judged ‘bad risks’ because of their disproportionate levels of

unemployment and the likelihood that they are not permanently resident in nuclear households. Both factors inclined police to prefer arrest as a method of apprehension. Because of the high residential mobility of Aboriginal juveniles among non-nuclear households (such as single-parent and extended family households), detention becomes the court’s more frequently chosen sentence. Citing previous research on urban Aboriginal people, Gale, Wundersitz and Bailey-Harris conclude that Aboriginal kinship, in particular the practices governing the distribution of young

people among urban households, is construed by the juvenile justice system as deviant and disorderly. The system requires middle-class characteristics such as parental care in nuclear households and employment status in order for it to operate to the benefit of the child... Yet this does not mean that Aboriginal families are more criminal; merely, that they are poor and often have different values and lifestyles. (1990:124)

The commissioners took note of the effects of such ‘welfare’ concerns on the treatment of Aboriginal juveniles. Ironically, the consequence of substituting ‘welfare’ considerations for strictly

judicial ones was to ‘widen the net’ cast by the state over troublesome elements of the population. As Commissioner Johnston put it,

The welfare model has had detrimental effects on young people who have not committed offences or those juveniles who have committed minor offences only. Through no fault of their own

these juveniles find themselves in custodial-type institutions along with juveniles held in detention for serious offences

50

2 Lives in Custody

because they have been neglected by those who would properly care for them. (1991, vol. 2:273) The Commissioner therefore gestured towards some non-custodial

third course, between the alternative custodial imperatives of ‘judicial’ and ‘welfare’ approaches. He called it ‘rehabilitative’, but he was unable to substantiate that term.

To sketch the philosophy and procedures for ‘rehabilitating’ juveniles requires us to think beyond institutions, to consider the wider problem of giving political expression to adult Aboriginal authority. Gale, a geographer, noted that South Australian regions varied enormously in their articulations of adult Aboriginal authority with state power, particularly in their distribution of discretions between police and the Aboriginal community. Contrasting Yorke Peninsula with the Far North, she and her co-authors inferred that Yorke Peninsula has been a more racist environment for Aboriginal

people. There law-and-order personnel, particularly the police, have been under considerable (non-Aboriginal) community pressure to use their discretions in the harsher manner, that is, to give least scope for Aboriginal authority and to choose the more punitive options for Aborigines passing through the juvenile justice process. In the north of the state, the indigenous parents of the Pitjantjatjara Lands benefit from being represented by the Pitjantjatjara Council

(which has powers to pass by-laws for the Lands) and by the affiliated councils of each ex-mission/settlement on the Lands. Locally recruited and deployed police aides assist non-Aboriginal police and welfare personnel who, if they are to work for long in

that area, must become committed to respecting the wishes of Anangu parents. ‘There is no such willingness’, the authors note, ‘to recognise, let alone accommodate, the different cultural values of urban-based Aborigines’ (Gale, 1990:117). Is the re-empowering of Aboriginal adults a question merely of the state’s political perspicacity and will? Unfortunately it seems to be not that simple, for indigenous parents are now, as a result of many colonial changes, under challenge from their own children and youths. Pitjantjatjara parents are troubled by the seemingly

intractable persistence of youthful petrol-sniffing, and a recent study of child protection on the Pitjantjatjara Lands reported that 51

After Mabo

‘the level of despair which women were experiencing about the

realities of violence in their lives was overwhelming them’ (Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, 1991:30). Elsewhere, after describing recent changes in the land use practices of Wujal Wujal (Qld) people, which leave young men with ‘nowhere to go and nothing to do’, Anderson and Coates conclude that there is now ‘a kind of “group personality” with the young men. It is fatalistic, risk taking, immature, thrill seeking, with an ethos of

utmost indifference to life, and a complete disregard for the authority of elders’ (Anderson and Coates, 1989:51). —

Tonkinson (1988) has described a crisis in adult authority at Jigalong, after authoritarian missionaries withdrew in 1969 and children no longer slept in dormitories. In the 1970s and 1980s, Aboriginal adults showed some nostalgia for the mission’s authority, when urged to ‘repossess’ their children and to show an interest

in other matters previously managed by ‘Whitefellas’. Children, formerly under strict missionary supervision, were proving difficult to manage, now that they lived in unprecedented concentrations on

a settlement whose buildings were easy targets for vandalism. Youths and others were showing a self-destructive interest in alcohol. Young women, in particular, were increasingly dissatisfied with their parents’ authority over their sexuality and course of life. Maggie Brady’s account (1992) of the spatially uneven incidence of petrol-sniffing suggests regional variation in the transition from a colonised to a ‘self-determining’ setting for adult—child relationships. Brady’s ‘social epidemiology’ of petrol-sniffing notes that the colonial histories of regions with few sniffers, or none at all, have a common feature: the prominence of the cattle industry. In recent

histories of Aboriginal involvement in the cattle industry of the North and Centre (e.g. McGrath, 1987), pastoral managers are portrayed as less interventionist than many setthement managers and missionaries: instead of seeking to attract large groups, they employed and rationed relatively small local mobs, and did not build dormitories. It suited pastoralists to allow Aborigines to continue to reproduce their culture in an adapted form. Many of their traditional skills were necessary in stockwork, and their seasonal ‘walkabouts’ coincided with periods in which it was unprofitable to work cattle and to employ a lot of labour. 52

2 Lives in Custody

The authority of cattle station Aboriginal adults over the next generation was therefore relatively uncompromised. In the appren-

ticeship of young men in the stock camp, older Aboriginal stockworkers deployed authority that was similar in style and effects to that which they deployed in the more traditional processes of making men out of boys. Cattle work was culturally valued work.

Within this variant of colonial culture, Brady argues, there survived culturally appropriate ways for young men to express their

manly toughness and independence. Such expression reaffirmed the values of both white bosses and senior Aborigines. Outside the regions of pastoral work, missions and settlements did not give rise to such a culture; accordingly, youthful truculence has sometimes taken such forms as petrol-sniffing and ‘vandalisation’ of community property, which pit a large youthful peer group against all forms

of local adult authority: teachers, police and Aboriginal parents (Brady, 1992:183—90).

If Aboriginal people have been an institutionalised people, we

should be sensitive to the variations among those institutional orders and their consequent diversity of transitions out of welfare paternalism and into ‘self-determination’.

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3

Aborigines Incorporated

‘Competition was far from absent.’

The anthropologist Basil Sansom has noted that Aboriginal people ‘who would make representations are coerced by a pervasive and perduring imperative of Western political culture’, namely that their groups must incorporate if they are to be taken seriously by the state (Sansom, 1985:70). Charles Rowley was an early advocate of such ‘coercion’, though he would probably have disputed that term. He recommended that governments should deal with Aboriginal people as incorporated groups—‘a formally and legally uniform institutional model which meets the requirements of a single national strategy while offering the security of familiar community membership’ (Rowley, 1972c:423). In 1976 the Commonwealth government legislated the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act. The result, as Sansom drily observes, is that ‘Leviathan addresses not Aborigines, but Aborigines Inc.’ (Sansom, 1985:70). Sansom’s reputation as a writer on Aborigines is based on his evocative account of ‘Wallaby Cross’, a town camp on the outskirts

of Darwin which he frequented in 1975-76 (Sansom, 1980). Australian anthropology has generally declined to describe town camps (but see Collmann, 1987) because, as a form of social life, the ‘fringe camp’ has seemed no more than an advanced degeneration of Aborigines’ pre-colonial sociality, a morbid symptom of colonialism, a ‘welfare’ nightmare, and not an anthropologist’s instance of

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ancient civilisation. Rowley and Sansom, in their different ways, have ‘redeemed’ such camps from non-Aboriginal neglect. Rowley wrote that ‘the fringe group is raw material for a corporation in perpetuity’ (1972c:425); Sansom emphasised the fluid nature of collective life in ‘Wallaby Cross’, but, when addressing ‘Leviathan’ on behalf of Darwin town campers, also substantiated their claims to be a ‘corporation’. Wallaby Cross was one camp within ‘country’ centred on Darwin

but extending into that city’s hinterland. Inhabited by about five

hundred people, it comprised a number of ‘scenes’ or sites of residence and activity. At each ‘scene’ dwelt a ‘mob’ of variable size and composition, at ‘Wallaby Cross’ there were as many as eighty. When members of mobs were recruited to specific activities (such as a ceremony), they were said to form a ‘company’, which is a more temporary aggregation than the mob. Mobs included men, women

and children, but they were led by ‘Masterful Men’ (a local expression promoted by one particular Masterful Man, Ol’ Luke) who were assisted by Fighting Men (for the urban and peri-urban

environment was full of threats to the mob’s physical safety). Women, who managed the cooking and distribution of food, and pensioners, who provided a stable, if meagre, cash income, were essential resources of the mob’s domestic economy, for male wages were sporadic and required men’s prolonged absences. Much of the

political work of mob management was thus to ensure a balance between men and women, young and old, and to compete with other mobs within the country for those needed in one’s own mob. However, to identify such key actors is hardly to disclose what, in Sansom ’s opinion, constitutes this aggregation as a ‘mob’, for mobs are not ‘corporations’ whose anatomy can be given in terms of a series of

offices and functions. Shared experience of day-to-day happenings in the camp gives the mob its essential cohesion; and leadership consists largely of talk, a narrative and authoritative definition of the incidents which are constantly giving shape to the mob’s days and weeks. Sansom’s account is not only an ethnography of talk, but also of

an economy of income and consumption. Countrymen of the Darwin hinterland assess balance within and between mobs in a context that overarchingly is defined by their

55

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propertyless dependence on wages and welfare payments. The ability of countrymen to hold women in social attachment is a

function of the rate of the cash supply which, in its turn, is determined by the conjunction of a pattern of employment and welfare policies. (1980:243)

To describe the terms on which money and goods are exchanged within the mob is virtually to describe the mob itself. The most important good is alcohol: ‘the business of organising the grog... gives the fringe camp its character and its raison d’étre’ (ibid:44). Sansom’s account of town camp styles of collectivity, while respect-

ing its idioms, also acknowledges the campers’ dispossessed circumstances and their dedication to a style of life which is in some respects pathological. In 1976 Sansom attempted to represent the ‘mob’ who had long

camped at Humpty Doo, on the outskirts of Darwin, when they sought title to their camp. The Commonwealth’s Land Rights Bill foreshadowed the possibility of claims to land which were based on

‘need’. Pending the bill becoming an act, an Aboriginal land commissioner, Dick Ward, heard claims. In order to describe the Humpty Doo ‘mob’ Cincorporated as the Awiruk Association) as a recognisable, enduring and historically accountable entity within Aboriginal social life, Sansom glossed the campers’ distinctive lexicon, explaining ‘terms that Aborigines employ when describing

the formation of mobs and the criteria for recognising valid attachment to place and other people’ (Sansom, 1985:87). By such ‘processual modelling’ he attempted to substantiate the corporate form of a Hinterland Aboriginal Community ‘wholly characteristic of the Western side of the Top End’ Cibid:85). Because the bill was amended by the Fraser government to disallow ‘needs’ claims, this representation did not result in a land grant. None the less, Sansom’s actions demonstrated very well the tension (a negotiable tension, he implies) between the faithful description of Aboriginal ‘customs’ of collective action and the formal terms in which ‘Aboriginality’ is sometimes affirmed by the colonial state. This tension arises from an ironic historical conjuncture. On the one hand, Australian governments have become more willing, since the late 1960s, to affirm Aboriginal collectivity, and to regard it more

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positively than as a hindrance to Aborigines’ assimilation. Governments have thus been increasingly willing to recognise indigenous people as made up of ‘communities’, ‘clans’ and corporations. On

the other hand, anthropological accounts of Aboriginal social structure and political processes have become increasingly sensitive to the fluid, negotiable and transitory quality of corporate life among Aboriginal people and to the importance of autonomous

individual action. The scene is thus set for an anthropological critique of, even disdain for, the crude approximations contrived by non-Aboriginal law and policy to express Aboriginal custom and practice. Two characteristics of most anthropologists restrain this critique: their sense of political realism (demonstrated by Sansom,

I believe), and their respect for indigenous people’s evident willingness to adapt their ways to emerging opportunities for political action.

The populist critique of official Aboriginality A lack of such political realism blights one theme of critical discussion of ‘Aboriginal politics’. Typically, the critique I have in mind distinguishes between two kinds of ‘Aboriginality’. One kind is portrayed as an artefact of the colonial state’s ways of ‘dealing with’ indigenous interests. The other, which owes its existence not to modes of colonial power but to ‘Aboriginal life’ itself, functions

as a kind of authentic critical reference point against which to compare the first. A number of more or less sophisticated versions of this romantic dichotomy can be found. Michael Howard (1982a) distinguishes ‘inter-ethnic’ from ‘intraethnic’ political fields. Aboriginal men and women who work in the ‘inter-ethnic’ political field create the illusion (comforting to many and to themselves) that their presence within a bureaucracy which services Aboriginal people assures the representation of all Aboriginal people’s interests in that bureaucracy’s programmes and policies. Against this illusion, Howard argues that the ‘brokerage’ such workers seek to effect is not possible between two such unequal parties as Aboriginal affairs bureaucracies and their clients. Aboriginal ‘brokers’ are actually servants of an as yet unchallenged nonAboriginal welfare system which exploits ‘Aboriginality’ as ideology. 57

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In contrast, because of its localisation of loyalties and its cynicism

towards the racist wider society, the intra-ethnic field tends to undermine would-be indigenous leaders and brokers or to grant them only the most restricted mandates. Sally Weaver has argued that Canadian and Australian govern-

ments, unable to avoid engaging with their indigenous peoples, produce tractable versions of who the indigenous are and what they want. ‘Public ethnicity’ (the resulting artefact) is the institutionalised ‘basis upon which the nation-state formally assigns (or withholds)

resources to the aboriginal minorities’. ‘Private ethnicity’ is the practical behaviour and identity of the indigenous minority, the distinctive manner of their collectivity (Weaver, 1984:184—5). ‘Pub-

lic’ Aboriginality (as implied throughout Weaver’s paper) is more problematic and more manipulable by the state in its own interests than the ‘private’ Aboriginality which arises spontaneously from the practices of Aborigines themselves. A similarly, but more explicitly evaluative distinction is Kevin Keeffe’s contrasting of ‘Aboriginality as persistence’ with ‘Aboriginality

as resistance’ (Keeffe, 1988, 1992). Keeffe is critical of the former

because it abstracts certain features of a ‘primordial’ past and attributes them to all Aboriginal people. This gives ethnic authenticity and political credibility to public servants and political leaders of Aboriginal descent, whatever their actual and diverse political projects may be. ‘Aboriginality as resistance’, on the other hand, is defined by its lack of any essential appeal to primordial traits, and

by its contingent and refractory remaking of Aboriginality as ‘difference’.

These writers have alerted us to the state’s undoubted tendency to espouse versions of ‘Aboriginality’ which selectively authorise indigenous demands. Yet it also tends to assume that the interests

of the state (and of a suborned indigenous elite) are opposed to what the critic imagines or implies to be actual indigenous interests. For this critique to have point, one needs to show that Aboriginality as ‘resistance’ (or ‘private Aboriginality’ or ‘intra-ethnic’ political

norms) enact what we can attribute as these actual indigenous interests. Yet academic commentators hesitate, understandably, to formulate Aborigines’ ‘true’ interests. Such interests are logically implied, gestured at, or formulated in only the most general terms. 58

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The result is an incomplete argument, a romance of the unrepresentable, as ‘Aboriginality’ is assured its place as the eternal

Other of power.

Jones and Hill-Burnett, commenting on the Commonwealth government’s elected advisory forums, the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC), 1973-77, and its successor the National Aboriginal Conference (NAC), 1977-85, offer a more nuanced account of the difficulties of ethnic representation. ‘PanAboriginality’ is undoubtedly a political ideology. Such a historical abstraction, they argue, is always vulnerable to a cultural critique which emphasises that Aboriginal concerns have traditionally been

local rather than national in scope, and that Aborigines can be expected to distrust the new processes by which individuals, socially and physically distant, claim to speak for them. Such were the dichotomies (political/national versus cultural/local) typically found in diverse assessments of the NACC and NAC. Jones and HillBurnett question such terms of assessment. ‘Discontinuity between

a politically motivated ethnic elite and the rest of the ethnic population who are culturally diverse and have a traditional outlook

is an integral aspect of the political circumstances of ethnicity’ (1982:229). Jones and Hill-Burnett insist that ‘politics versus culture’ and ‘national versus local’ are rhetorical constructs generated by the

process of ethnic political representation, and not critical concepts external to that process. My discussion of Sansom and the critics of ‘representations’ of Aboriginality therefore suggests that accounts of ‘Aboriginality’ and politics which invoke ‘culture’ to question ‘politics’ may not be as perspicacious or useful as they first seem.

The modernity of tribes In the last few days of 1992, the Sydney Morning Herald reported

that the Federal Opposition had decided that, were they to win government, they would not approve mining at Coronation Hill without the consent of ‘the local Jawoyn Aborigines’. Opposition spokesman Jim Carlton was quoted as insisting that ‘all the Jawoyn people, not just tribal leaders and spokesmen,’ must be consulted (SMH 28 December 1992). As the Herald editorialised the next day, 59

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the Coalition’s stance left unresolved the issue of ‘what methods are to be used to establish permission’ (SMH 29 December 1993). What are the boundaries of the group referred to as ‘the Jawoyn people”

Are they a ‘tribe’, as implied in the terms of the Herald’s report? Whether or not a ‘tribe’, how does the entity ‘the Jawoyn people’

deliberate and make binding decisions? Another report of the Jawoyn, a few weeks later, hardly resolved these issues. The Australian (12 January 1993) reported that ‘the Jawoyn clan’ and ‘the Jawoyn Association’ had agreed to a proposal to mine the Mount Todd (NT) area for gold. Are ‘the Jawoyn people’, ‘the Jawoyn tribe’, ‘the Jawoyn clan’ and ‘the Jawoyn Association’ the same entity? The Jawoyn Association spoke to the Australian through its ‘executive officer’. Is he a ‘tribal leader’? Until the 1930s anthropologists believed ‘tribes’ were salient political units of Aboriginal society (Rumsey, 1989:70). In one influential model (Radcliffe Brown, 1930) a number of ‘families’ make up a ‘horde’, and a number of ‘hordes’ comprise a ‘tribe’.

Though anthropologists have tended to stress the middle term ‘horde’ (or more commonly ‘clan’) as the entity which owned land

and controlled its use, the entity ‘tribe’ has continued to be mentioned in textbooks (Elkin, 1954:25; Berndt and Berndt, 1981:28—

40), but with increasing uneasiness. When Ronald Berndt (1959) argued that the western desert held no ‘tribes’, and that the term was probably misleading in the rest of Aboriginal Australia, his argument enunciated ‘what had long been expressed in footnotes and asides in many ethnographies’ (Merlan, 1981:135). If such equivocations about ‘tribe’ can none the less sustain the idea, so too can ‘tribal’ maps suchas D. S. Davidson’s ‘ethnic map of Australia’ (Davidson, 1938) or the better-known tribal map by Norman Tindale, first published in 1940 and later revised (Tindale, 1940, 1974). Often

seen on the study walls of those with a serious interest in Aboriginal culture (it used to be on mine), Tindale’s map graphically sustains the notion ‘tribe’. Some of its features have recently been recapitulated, controversially (Davis and Prescott, 1992). However, Tindale did not postulate the ‘tribe’ as a ‘political’ unit. As his colleague Joseph Birdsell explained in a 1973 symposium, the ‘tribe’ (sometimes called ‘dialectal tribe’) is or was no more than a linguistic unit and ‘a breeding entity’ made up of intermarrying bands (Birdsell, 1976:96, 119). 60

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When, at the same symposium, another proponent of the ‘tribe’ notion, Robert Dixon, presented evidence for their former existence in the Cairns region, the nature of ‘tribes’ was not clarified. Dixon’s

boundaries contradicted Tindale’s for that region, and his tribes were not ‘defined on linguistic criteria’. As a linguist, Dixon based that judgement on his own clear measures of differences (or their lack, in this case) of grammar and vocabulary. In the Cairns region, at the time of earliest ethnographic records,

the tribe was the major political unit. Anyone—whatever local group he belonged to—could with impunity travel anywhere in his own tribal territory; it was possible to change one’s residence habits, and thus local group membership, within a tribe. Social

visiting and dancing or jousting gatherings, which involved members of a single tribe, were fairly informal and required little planning. Marriage was endogamous [that is, to another member of one’s own tribe] .. . (Dixon, 1976:213)

Faced with this confusing record of theory and evidence, anthropologists now find little use for the term ‘tribe’. Perhaps it refers to realities of the past, in some regions, but there remains a lack of theoretical clarity about what ‘linguistic’ commonalities and what ‘political’ functions the word ‘tribe’ specifies (Rigsby and Sutton, 1980—82). However, it takes more than that to kill off a word. In 1976

Peterson noted ‘the usefulness of tribe as a rough conceptual shorthand’ (Peterson, 1976:1). Aboriginal people themselves are among the users of that ‘shorthand’, Recently, Alan Rumsey (1989) has cited Morton Fried (1975) to explain why some notion of ‘tribe’ is likely to survive in the political

vocabulary of Australians. Throughout the world, Fried argues, ‘tribes’ have commonly been an indigenous political response to colonisation. He calls them ‘secondary tribes’, there being no ‘primary tribes’ outside the imaginations of some academic anthro-

pologists. In Rumsey’s view, Aboriginal people, encouraged by certain government policies, are in some regions forming ‘tribes’. In

the Northern Territory, the Land Rights Act allows Aboriginal people to claim land if they can identify themselves as a ‘local descent group’. When land claims began, anthropological opinion favoured the presentation of claims by ‘clans’, which were consid61

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ered to be the primary and most easily documented land-owning ‘local descent group’ of Aboriginal society. However, the Act does

not compel claimants to present their ‘local descent group’ as a ‘clan’; a ‘local descent group’ can be those making up a ‘language group’ or (as the newspapers are more likely to say) a ‘tribe’. In some regions, such groups have adopted, or become Known by, the name of the language which is believed to be associated with the

land they have claimed and won back. The Jawoyn (whose land claim Rumsey helped to prepare) is such an entity; in 1982, they claimed country which they understood

to be Jawoyn country. According to Rumsey, ‘It is called Jawoyn country because it is the region in which that language was directly installed or “planted” in the landscape by Nabilil, “Crocodile”, a

Dreamtime creator figure who moved up the Katherine River, establishing sites and leaving names for them in the Jawoyn language’ (Rumsey, 1989:75). If that is Jawoyn country, who are the Jawoyn claimants? It is not necessary, under the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act, for a Jawoyn claimant to be a speaker of Jawoyn, Rumsey points out; nor do all speakers of Jawoyn necessarily see themselves as members of ‘the Jawoyn’ claimants (especially if Jawoyn is not their first language).

Here the legislation happens to accommodate the more recent finding of linguists and anthropologists that Aboriginal political units were unlikely ever to have been defined by their members’ exclusive use of a single common language. Characteristically, Aborigines have been multi-lingual, and now number English and Kriol among their languages. In the terms of the Act, it is ‘descent’ or genealogy which links the claimants, not a common language.

Rumsey argues that the language with which the claimants identify, the language they say they own, is a defining feature of the

country claimed; both language and land belong to the people implicated in the ‘Jawoyn’ claim. The Aboriginal Land Commissioner lists the successful claimants, but this list is not definitive or exhaustive of the group of ‘traditional

owners’ of the land in question. Should the Minister grant the claimed land, a Land Trust holds its title. But when the ‘traditional owners’ are to be consulted about such land, the Land Council (a creation of the Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act) turns not only to 62

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these trustees but to a ‘Register’ of ‘traditional owners’, a list compiled by the Land Council which may stretch much further than the Land Commissioner’s list of traditional owners (Smith, 1984). In this case the Jawoyn Association seems to do the talking for those whose names appear on the register as the traditional owners of the land granted under the Jawoyn claim. The Land Rights Act encourages the formation of a land-claiming entity (the Jawoyn’) from an

older customary sense of who owns the Jawoyn language; other legislation (such as the Aboriginal Councils and Associations ACct)

enables the successful claimants to incorporate that interest as a legally and politically effective body.

The politics of clans If this has been the fate of ‘tribes’, what of Radcliffe Brown’s ‘hordes’?

Like ‘tribe’, the concept ‘horde’ fell victim to the empirical investigations of anthropologists among people only recently recruited to welfare settlements in Central Australia and Arnhem Land in the 1950s. Their reports have resulted in the disuse of the term ‘horde’, for it conflates two different kinds of Aboriginal concern. Land-owning ‘clans’ were not to be confused with landusing ‘bands’. In day-to-day foraging, it was the ‘band’ which

mattered. People co-resided in bands that were made up of members of two or more clans, allowing any band so constituted to range over the countries owned by more than one clan. But in matters to do with the ownership of land, ritual knowledge of it, and the transmission of both to the next generation, ‘clan’ was the salient unit (Hiatt, 1962, 1966, 1984; Stanner, 1965). As a result of research undertaken to support Northern Territory land claims, and ethnographies of Cape York, Arnhem Land and the

western desert, anthropologists now emphasise both the regional variation and the political dynamism of land-owning and land-using

relationships. This work shows that ‘clans’ have not everywhere been salient political units in the Aboriginal politics of allocating rights to land (Myers, 1986; Hamilton, 1982; Hiatt, 1984). Rather,

these studies have depicted owning, using and inheriting as processes of ceaseless political negotiation (structured by certain 63

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enduring ideologies) among those with ownership claims of one

kind or another. In Hamilton’s summary, ‘rather than solitary groups, each individual (or perhaps sibling set) formed the nodal link for an egocentric network of relationships, many of which were

asymmetrical . . . Competition was far from absent’ (Hamilton, 1987:138).

Linguists have recently argued that the apparently large number

of languages in Aboriginal Australia is due in part to people’s tendency to differentiate themselves from rivals and neighbours by

promoting the significance of relatively small variations in the language of a region (Sutton, 1991). Students of Aboriginal singing and dancing (among people less exposed to colonial changes) have also enriched our sense of ‘politics’ by insisting that the particulari-

ties of each performance give local and contingent nuances to Aboriginal myth, so making them media for political interaction between performers and listeners (Clunies Ross, Donaldson and Wild, 1987). This revised image of Aboriginal society shows it to have been, and to continue to be, highly politicised, its economic arrangements and political forms determined by contested and contextual meanings, rather than timeless provisions, of ‘law’ and ‘custom’ (Hiatt, 1987). One recent study of Yolngu (Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land)

illustrates this theme. Yolngu have generally been understood to exemplify most convincingly the tendency of Aboriginal people to think and act in terms of clans when dealing with matters of land ownership, and when transmitting spiritual reponsibility for land to their children. Spiritual responsibility is encoded in myths about the ancestral creation of salient features of portions of land. ‘Owners’

must be k..owledgeable about this mythology, which is a type of knowledge expressed in songs, stories and paintings. The allocation of certain lands and their myths to certain clans is attributed to

the ‘ancestral creatures whose deeds are told in song, story and image. Morphy’s fieldwork in north-east Arnhem Land in the 1970s showed that these clan/land/myth relationships were characterised by considerable political dynamism.

Morphy distinguishes two categories of myth which Yolngu deploy as knowledge of their country: myths of creation and myths of inheritance. The former tell of the formation of the landscape, its 64

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flora and fauna; the latter account for ‘the institution of human beings in the landscape’ and the formation of clans as owners of portions of it. This distinction is particularly important when, as the numbers of one clan dwindle towards extinction, another clan takes

over the responsibility for the weakened or extinct clan’s land portions. ‘Myths of inheritance’, writes Morphy, ‘are the means by which myth is adjusted to accord with political process, the means

whereby the members of clans project their ownership of a particular set of lands and the associated mardayin [sacred law] back into the ancestral past so that it can be said to have originated then’ (Morphy, 1990:314). But it is not only the calamity of clan extinction which occasions this deployment of myths of inheritance. Morphy’s paper is particu-

larly deft in presenting as a normal state of affairs the negotiated and contingent status of the clan itself.

The clan is a core conceptual element and reference point of Yolngu social organisation, yet over time individual clans are continually merging and emerging. Clan identity is manufactured for the moment as if it always existed, yet the clan is always on

the verge of non-existence. Clan identity is important in marriage, in land ownership, and in ritual, yet its importance lies in part through the position it occupies in a network of exchange which often operates at the level of the individual.

Morphy concludes this point with a sentence that Basil Sansom could have written: ‘The Yolngu clan [read Wallaby Cross mob] exists in the temporary assertion of control over part of a network of connections which are used as the ideological bases for action and existence’ (Morphy, 1990:325). Research on Cape York in the 1970s has yielded a similar picture. Sutton and Rigsby deduced that, before non-Aboriginal conquest, the size of land-owning and land-using groups in that region kept within a certain range (25 to 30 people, and sometimes up to 50).

Such constancy they attributed not to environmental limitations alone but also to constant political processes such as the segmentation of large groups and the succession of large clans to the territory of small or extinct clans. New outstation communities visited in the 1970s also seemed to keep to this range of sizes, 65

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although older ecological constraints had disappeared. A ‘politicks’ of land (as they term it) has thus been a normal and endemic feature of Cape York social organisation (though not necessarily pleasant for those involved). As in Morphy’s account of Yolngu clans, Cape York ethnographies show individuals to be creative political actors.

Many Aboriginal people, including adult women, have a choice as to their territorial attachments. Their forbears may have willed

land (and other property) to them, but they need not accept it in all cases and they may be able to invoke or create a range of ‘facts’ to establish new attachments to other land. (Sutton and Rigsby, 1982:167)

Such flexibility has no doubt been essential to these land-based people’s adjustment to colonialism; non-Aboriginal intrusions have altered land use and promoted a redistribution of people, but so far have stopped short of definitively alienating the Cape.

In the Kimberley, the penetration of pastoral colonialism has occasioned a politics of succession to Fitzroy Basin land by people from the desert. According to Kolig, the salient political units there

are not ‘clans’ but ‘corporate communities’ bound together in affiliation toa common stock of myths. Kolig’s twenty years of work

on the Kimberley has produced vivid accounts of the adaptability of mythical charters to the political needs for Aborigines’ regional solidarities (e.g. Kolig, 1981, 1990).

The duality of Aboriginal politics Scott Bennett’s book Aborigines and Political Power(1989) demonstrates that it is possible to write of ‘Aborigines and politics’ as if

Aborigines’ most important political relationships were with the structures of non-Aboriginal government. The ethnographies I have cited above show that this is only half the story. In the management

of people-land relationships through time, in their day-to-day management of marriage, residence and the raising of children to be knowledgeable people, Aboriginal and Islander people necessarily have political relationships with each other. The Yarralin mob, according to Debbie Rose, are concerned to maintain ‘balanced reciprocity and the localisation of people in country’. 66

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Over generations people attempt to effect a closure of space. Each group of people is involved in numerous marital ex-

changes. Each group can be seen as a node in a network. Networks overlap, forming a web of kinship achieved and sustained through birth and marriage. From the perspective of each group, situated at the centre of its own set of exchanges, the problem is to sustain the relationships without allowing them to ramify indefinitely ... Marriages which return people to country fulfil the goal of keeping people in country, while yet sustaining ties between countries... Since European invasion . . . the future

for many countries looks bleak, and human beings are an extraordinary scarce resource. This fact continues to inform adults’ attempts massively to control marriage. They attempt to

distribute women, and hence human fertility, to groups who desperately need people; and they attempt to sustain reciprocities between groups by making ‘paybacks’ for people who have been allocated to them. (Rose, 1992a:113, 123) This formulation of ‘Aboriginal politics’ may seem remote from the realities of ‘urban’ Aborigines from the south of the continent.

There, it is not people but land which is either scarce or totally absent. The colonial impact is also evident in the fact that in much of Aboriginal Australia the political management of fertility—the politics of marriage—the privileging of adults over youth and of men over women have been so strenuously contested that betrothal

is no longer the reliable means for extending into the future the relationships advantageous to oneself or to one’s group (Sansom, 1980:254-6, 263-4; Burbank, 1988; Tonkinson, 1990). How can Rose’s conception of ‘Aboriginal politics’ be reconciled with such facts?

Aboriginal ‘survival’ as a self-conscious, indigenous minority implies a politics which faces two ways. Obviously it faces outwards

to the pressures and opportunites provided by the colonial society

of non-indigenous Australians; but it also faces inwards, as a concern for one’s own ‘mob’, to ‘family’ and to those of one’s own

region. And in both aspects it is oriented to the future and concerned for the security and well-being of children in a world in which those to be dealt with are not only Whites but other Black individuals and groups. 67

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It is in these general terms that we can consider Yarralin concerns alongside those of Perth’s Nyungars and Darwin’s fringe-campers.

As Sansom and Baines show, the latter two sets of people, even when lacking title to land, have a sense of the ‘country’ as a range

of places in which they live and find their most significant relationships. Within each such ‘country’, children are relatively unfixed in their place of residence, and primary responsibilty for them is subject to continuing renegotiation among their ‘close kin’. Issues of guardianship and child placement therefore boil down to

three eternal and related questions: (i) in which place (i.e. sited house or hearth group) to locate a child Gi) of which set of people is the house/hearth group to be composed and (iii) which of the set of people in a house/hearth group will be allocated the prime responsibility of guardianship for the child concerned? (Sansom and Baines, 1988:349)

These are some of the primary questions of political relationships among indigenous people.

One potential for an anthropological account of ‘Aboriginal politics’ is therefore to query the ‘state-centred’ framework assumed

by a political scientist such as Bennett, and to see the duality of ‘Aboriginal politics’, which involves facing not only outwards to the

state (with its laws, policies and welfare benefits) but also inward

neighbouring mobs. |

to the perpetuation of one’s own ‘mob’ and its dealings with

Community Australian governments have tended to understand the contemporary Aboriginal polity as an ensemble of local communities—exmissions, ex-settlements, town camps—managed by representative assemblies incorporated as councils or associations. Among the populations ‘represented’ by such councils and associations, however, there are other salient lines of ‘family’ solidarity, as Aboriginal people concern themselves with their futures. Nancy Williams’s

work at Yirrkala (NT) (Williams, 1987) and David Trigger’s at Doomadgee (Qld) (Trigger, 1992) are sophisticated explorations of the gaps and continuities between these two orders of ‘politics’. 68

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In 1969-70, Nancy Williams found that land-holding clans had survived thirty-five years of missionary impact at Yirrkala. Not only were they units of land ownership and the basis of funerary rituals,

but they had also acquired financial importance: they held bank accounts and exacted levies on their members, owned motor cars and engaged legal counsel. Yirrkala’s village council was composed of leaders of clans and sub-clans. In disputes among Yolngu, clan leaders were leading actors in the procedures (both interclan and intraclan) which Williams calls ‘moots’. To secure this domain from the encroachment of non-Aboriginal law, Yolngu elaborated their notions of Yolngu and non-Yolngu jurisdictions, calling them respectively ‘little trouble’ and ‘big trouble’.

However, this adjustment between the domains of colonisers and colonised was flawed on four gounds. First, it appeared to Williams that, at that time, ‘white Australians did not acknowledge the existence of a special Yolngu jurisdiction’ (1987:144). Second, Yolngu ‘viewed Australian law as based on values contradictory to their own’ Cibid.:149). Third, although most missionaries saw the village council as consultative—a mere extension of their administration—the village council president, applying Yolngu notions of

reciprocity, saw his powers as equivalent and complementary to those of the mission superintendent. Finally (and most importantly from the point of view developed in this chapter), Yolngu adults were particularly at odds with Australian law over the control of

young girls and women. Frequent disputes arose from young females’ rebellion against adult control over their marriage choices.

But according to Williams, it was not easy for Yolngu and missionaries to agree in their allocations of such disputes and their ramifications to the categories ‘big trouble’ or ‘little trouble’. David Trigger found Doomadgee to be divided into ‘blackfella’ and ‘whitefella’ domains. The persistence of a blackfella domain—

a matter of spaces, languages, etiquettes and mores—helped residents resist the intrusive and paternalistic efforts of an evange-

lising mission administration. However, that domain was not internally harmonious, but animated by ‘a vibrant pattern of competitive status relations’. Residents invoked cross-cutting affili-

ations to language, country and kin in order to win social honour 69

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for themselves and their associates, against the claims of other residents. Such ‘blackfella politicking’ militated against their political unity and their forceful articulation of specific common interests

as residents. Such disunity, combined with their economic and administrative dependence on whites and the diffusely individual-

istic and particular quality of their grievances and resentment against the Doomadgee administration, led to resigned acceptance

ofIn Trigger’s mission authority. , opinion, only a few Doomadgee people accorded that administration legitimacy—Aboriginal councillors, Aboriginal police and those of active Christian observance. The official notion that councillors were representative of all mission residents was not

credible to their supposed constituents; ‘representativeness’ was inconsistent with the competitive norms of the Aboriginal domain. Councillors were widely perceived as self-interested. Both Williams and Trigger pose the question: how is power wielded in this place? Tackling that question requires some consideration of the interests of the indigenous residents and of the extent to which those interests are met or denied by the ultimately superior

mission authorities in both places. Because trouble over young women emerges as the vexing, unclassifiable issue at Yirrkala, Williams’s account comes closer than Trigger’s to specifying a blocked or compromised indigenous interest (that is, of having allocated to their jurisdiction the responsibility for troubles over women). Trigger is more vague about the nature of the ‘interests’ which were blocked or compromised by Doomadgee’s power structure, referring only to Doomadgee residents’ ‘broad interests as members of a colonised minority within Australian society’ (1992:216).

The aspiration to wrest control of Doomadgee from the administra-

tion, or at least to get the maximum material benefit from it, is implied, but such an interest is never specified in Trigger’s account. ‘In correspondence, Trigger has clarified that this implied interest

characterises some residents more than others, so let me propose another way to think about the ‘indigenous interest’ at Doomadgee. Trigger’s period of fieldwork, 1978 to 1983, preceded the granting of portions of the Northern Territory (Nicholson River) to claimants including some Doomadgee residents. Other grants of land Cinclud-

ing Doomadgee itself) will benefit Doomadgee residents, under 70

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Queensland’s recent Aboriginal Land Act. It is conceivable that these grants will alter the significance of the power and status struggles described by Trigger. In these new circumstances, a culturally introverted, competitive politics of status could become more than jockeying for advantage within Doomadgee: it could be a renewed politics of dispersing ownership and use of the Gulf region’s claimable lands among kin groups. To control the mission itself (through a council with a ‘genuine’ Aboriginal mandate and powers uncompromised by mission tutelage) may not have been such a prize. The competitive status politics of the Aboriginal domain could thus be reread as having allowed the public persistence of person—country links, in anticipation of mission residents’ eventual retrieval of their homelands. Williams witnessed a redistribution of people over country from 1970 to 1985, when, as the non-Aboriginal mining town of Nhulunbuy

grew beside Yirrkala mission, most of the Yirrkala clans resettled

their region, constructing a network of outstations up to 250 kilometres from Yirrkala. But she says little of the effects of this change on the thorny issue of conflicting jurisdictions, that is, on the

evident battle between Yolngu and the wider society to determine the values and behaviour of young people (Williams, 1987:160).

If there has been a ‘White versus Black’ issue in these two regions, then perhaps it has been something bigger than the standing of the Aboriginal councils in relation to missionary or government officials. The greater issue, harder to ‘politicise’, is where and how young people choose to live once older ones return

to the mission hinterland, and what values they acquire through those choices.

Factions in communities If ‘communities’ threaten to become a taken-for-granted category in ethnography, there is no doubt that they are assumed to exist in the discourse of administration (Hamilton, 1987:136-7; Smith, 1989:

Rowse, 1992:50-8). When suppositions of ‘community’ appear doubtful, the problem of ‘factions’ is often remarked. A Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) discussion of barriers to ‘self-determination’ itemises ‘factionalism’ as ‘a cause of organisational dishar71

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mony and community disintegration’ (DAA, 1988:240). In David Pollard’s view, government officials have been slow to recognise ‘factions’ as a problem; they fail to understand ‘the inner sociology of Aboriginal communities’ and hold ‘romanticised views of Aboriginal community life’ Gbid.:60, 78). What are factions, and what is their significance? That ‘factions’ are not simply differences of opinion is illustrated by a story from Paul Memmott’s Humpy, House and Tin Shed(1991).

At Wilcannia, in the years 1975 to 1985, differences arose on the rehousing of those known as the ‘Mallee people’. A proposal first formulated in 1975 had been so delayed by Shire doubts and so poorly managed by DAA and by the Bakandji Association that it had never been fully realised. Transportable houses were then tried but

their design was found wanting. By 1984 houses were being designed for the Mallee mob, but local DAA officers were impatient with architects’ wishes to consult future users at some length. The

DAA officer’s approach to consultation was to select what he thought were some suitable house designs and to show photographs and models of them to users. In the architects’ absence, he obtained approval for one design, subject to certain changes of size

and some modification by the architects. The junior architect objected that government policy required him (and not the DAA officer) to consult the users, and to do so with a more open mind. In his subsequent meeting with the Bakandji Association some

directors agreed with the architect that more consultation was needed, while others wished to proceed with the design whose ‘approval’ had been obtained by the DAA officer. Was this factionalism? Memmott finds no use for the word. Nine years of delay and difficulty in implementing a community-

based housing project had persuaded one key actor (the DAA officer) that the housing need was urgent and that it was in the best interests of those needing houses to observe only minimal protocols

of consultation. In good faith, other key actors (the architects) believed that the users’ interests would be better served by a more considered approach, even if it were more expensive in time and money. That both constructions of the Mallee mob’s interests are

plausible and appealing is attested to by the fact that the Mallee mob’s representatives (the Bakandji directors) were divided when 72

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confronted starkly with these opposed points of view. We can make

sense of such differences of opinion without referring to an Aboriginal tendency to factionalism (Memmott, 1991:ch. 9). Some writers, while noting ‘factions’ as features of Aboriginal political processes, have made little of them. Pierson’s generally optimistic review of Aborigines’ voluntary organisations in Adelaide in the early 1970s mentions ‘factionalism’ three times (1982:195, 205, 208), and remarks that ‘white influence sometimes increases these problems’. Dagmar (1990:115) cites historical influences that promote factionalism, such as the bringing together of traditionally dispersed peoples in settlements and missions. He cautions anyone interested in Aboriginal political development that ‘narrow personal, family and other organisational interests’ Cibid.:117) play

their part. None the less, while warning us not to expect ‘direct cooperation of groups larger than extended families’ (ibid.:113), he

looks ahead to the possibility of ‘larger regional and national networks’ Cibid.:112).

Writers who attach significance to ‘factionalism’ propose diverse interpretations. According to Pollard’s critique of New South Wales’s Aboriginal Affairs policy, programmes which presume an Aboriginal capacity to articulate needs and to administer resources are in jeopardy because ‘Aboriginal localism often operates against a background of extreme internal factionalism and community disunity’ (Pollard, 1988:67). NonAboriginal bureaucrats were impotent to deal either with ‘the operation of family networks within communities’ Gbid.:105) or with the ‘self interest [which] often cloaks itself as community interest’ (ibid.:89).

Community-based organisations provide, among other things, ‘personal benefits for those controlling them’ Gibid.:71). Aboriginal leaders

become detached from their grass roots not only because they seek to benefit their own families first, but also because of ‘the unwillingness of Aboriginal communities to delegate leaders to speak and negotiate on their behalf Gbid.:86). Lacking a mandate from this Aboriginal constituency, Pollard concludes, policy tends still to come from the government. Land rights policies—a romantic conception of guiltstricken whites who fail to see the implicitly assimilationist aspirations of most Kooris—were among the unfortunate results of these failures by governments to be realistic. 73

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If Pollard sees governmental rationality as the victim of Aboriginal factionalism, other writers have depicted ‘factions’ as an effect of government. Anna-Katrin Eckermann’s work (1977, 1980) illustrates the difficulties of assigning cause and effect. After association dating back to 1969 with Koori and Murri residents in country towns in southern

Queensland and northern New South Wales, she proposes a cultural model of factionalism. Her earlier studies of child-rearing and group values portray Kooris and Murris as necessarily defensive

and suspicious towards anybody who has not intimately shared their racial oppression. They tended to form groups or factions made up of alliances of families. Factions attain eminence by living up to the standards of ‘good people’ and by dominating community organisations. Group or factional coherence is based less on kinship

than on exchange and indebtedness. Decisions, she suggests, are not made ‘communally’. Rather, (a) individual interest takes first priority, after which comes the interest of the family in the narrow sense. Family interest in its wider sense is then considered, and finally, and perhaps rarely, the interest of the ‘community’; (b) complete trust and reliance is generally placed only in people who belong to the same alliance or faction; (c) individuals rarely give up their right of veto even when they have elected a person from ‘the

community’ (or even their own faction) to represent their views (Eckermann and Dowd, 1988:60-1; Eckermann, 1988:35). When applied to a particular case, such as the tribulations of a regional Aboriginal medical service (the DMS), the limits of this model become apparent. Using information from 1985, Eckermann and Dowd argue that because the (DAA’s) budget categories did not

match the objectives of the DMS, the training of Aboriginal administrators was neglected. The DAA supervision of expenditure was maintained through the quarterly release of funds, subject to the DMS’s correct acquittal of previous funds. Aboriginal managers

were made insecure by this, and by their having to rely on white

professionals for much of their administration. In ‘the annual scramble to gain or maintain power and control’, Koori bosses manipulated election times, favoured their own faction in the allocation of jobs, and communicated little of their intentions to the rest of the ‘community’. They reassured themselves that, because 74

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they were in charge, the organisation was independent of White influence: ‘the illusion of power generates the aspiration to control’ (Eckermann and Dowd, 1988:71-2). Defensively poised between

the non-Aboriginal bureaucracy and their Koori constituency, managers did not seek to cultivate the wider legitimacy of their organisation. In this case, the DAA removed the Aboriginal Board of Directors in 1986 and installed a non-Aboriginal administrator, pending an investigation of alleged misappropriation and mismanagement. Factionalism prevented the election of a new board, and

the DMS was temporarily closed. |

Eckermann and Dowd in effect propose two significantly different approaches to ‘factionalism’. On the one hand, as my summary

has shown, they develop a generalising cultural model of the restricted scope of Aboriginal solidarities and the fragility of Aboriginal mandates. On the other hand, their account of the DMS’s

troubles points beyond Koori culture to the state. In this second view, factionalism is the result of the state’s ‘structural violence’, in

which ‘the legislation and its administration continue to be at variance with Aboriginal social structures, values and norms’ Cibid.:74).

Their own cultural model, however, suggests that we might question the phrase ‘at variance with’; could we not as easily say ‘in (perverse) sympathy with’? That is, the DAA’s processes arguably

created a fertile climate in which existing factional tendencies among Kooris could flourish; factional strife then generated a crisis which justified the DAA’s intervention. In describing the contemporary political cultures of Aboriginal people, it proves difficult to disentangle the processes of administration and community activism in order to assign primary responsibility for this

or that state of affairs to officials or to Kooris. The attribution of responsibility is very often part of the game of politics itself.

Lee Sackett (1988) has told a story of competitive political relationships, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, among three Adelaide agencies assisting Nungas with alcohol problems: the Adelaide Central Mission (ACM), the Aboriginal Sobriety Group (ASG) and the Woma Secretariat, all funded by the DAA. Ina series

of reviews by the DAA, Woma was found to be ineffective. In Sackett’s telling, although Woma had been the object of persistent 75

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complaint by the other two bodies, its demise at the hands of the DAA was resented as an attack on the Nunga community’s selfdetermination in matters of alcohol rehabilitation. To the DAA’s Officers, the clashes among activists in the three bodies evidenced a Nunga failure to sink differences in a common cause.

Sackett is sensitive to the complex play of antipathies and solidarities, and reports that ‘shared knowledge of the existence and

use of disparaging comments in itself served to define and unite Aborigines’. Being in on the gossip substantiated one’s membership of the Nunga constituency which the three organisations variously represented, since ‘those who gossiped with and about one another constituted a cohesive unit’ (Sackett, 1989:142). Sackett concedes

that this is a politically risky but nevertheless real form of ethnic solidarity. His need, as an anthropological investigator, to sustain relationships with Nungas of different factions may have enabled his perception and inscription of them as ‘a cohesive unit’ in this underlying sense. He subscribes to a view of the DAA which would seem to reflect some of the common ground among Nungas. The DAA’s stinting of funds and ceaseless supervision of grantees’ affairs

helped, he suggests, to produce ‘the intense infighting in the drink rehabilitation arena’; and the self-interest of DAA officers prevents them from seeing or acknowledging that this is so Gibid.:143). In short, ‘factionalism’ is a way of thinking and talking about the political processes by which indigenous people and state officials deal with each other. ‘Faction’ enjoys its currency because it may

serve many purposes in accounts by observers and activists of where lies the responsibility for certain developments. We should be wary of taking it as describing a distinctively ‘Aboriginal’ approach to politics.

Architects of representation Aboriginal Affairs ministers Ian Viner and Clyde Holding chose, respectively, Les Hiatt (Hiatt, 1976) to review the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC) and H. C. Coombs (Coombs, 1984) to review its successor, the National Aboriginal Conference

(NAC). To what extent did they base their evaluations on their understandings of ‘Aboriginal culture’? 70

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One of Hiatt’s main conclusions about the NACC was that elected ‘tribal members’ of that assembly experienced practical difficulties

in participating because they lacked the necessary skill of literacy and public speaking in English. There was thus a risk of ‘non-tribal’ representatives ‘replacing or competing with whites as spokesmen for tribal people’ (1976:39-40, 45). Hiatt rejected the argument that ‘representation’ was foreign to ‘tribal’ tradition, but conceded that

the large scale of the NAC’s electoral units caused difficulty for representatives used t6° working in smaller traditional political arenas. He recommended raising the numbers of ‘tribal’ representatives by reducing the size of some electorates in ‘tribal’ regions of Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory. The recommended increase in electorates, from forty-one

to forty-six, was solely to the numerical advantage of ‘tribal’ representation within the NAC. Acknowledging that these electorates would still be large, he endorsed Nic Peterson’s suggestion that Aboriginal people be encouraged to adapt their social organisation

to the historical requirement for more inclusive political units (ibid.:61). The only critical relevance of ‘anthropology’ to the report

was Hiatt’s sensitivity to the possibility that Aborigines from the North and Centre—those ‘tribal’ people cherished as subjects by anthropologists—suffered disadvantage through lack of knowledge, illiteracy and the novelties of working on a larger political scale. H. C. Coombs, in The Role ofthe National Aboriginal Conference (1984), had far more to say than Hiatt about the differences between

non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal political processes. Coombs’s concerns were no doubt stimulated by what he knew of the representation of local groups of Arnhem land people in negotiations over

uranium mining (Coombs, 1982). He suggested that Aboriginal people gave pride of place to the local ‘community or group meeting’ at which decisions were unhurried and possibly spread over several meetings. Delegates were messengers obliged to report back to their communities rather than to make decisions. For

the authority and representativeness of leaders to be accepted, certain principles of classic social organisation had to be respected, such as the complementary relationships between individuals and

groups in the conduct of rituals, and the reciprocity and mutual 7/

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obligations between generations. Coombs hoped that ‘a way could be found to incorporate reciprocal accountability into the institutional structure’ (1984:21). The NAC procedures, Coombs argued, tended to be at odds with these cultural requirements of politics. Not only had linguistic and ‘tribal’ fragmentation prevented some delegates from representing sections of their constituency effectively, but the NAC structures did not ensure that delegates referred back frequently to their constituencies Cibid.:18, 22). Because localised and immediate relations are valued in indigenous politics, it was necessary for critics to make a more sympathetic assessment of factionalism Cibid.:24). Aboriginal people were more inclined to put their faith in organisations which were not only more local than the NAC but also delivered goods and services (ibid.:22—3).Through ‘trial and error’ such local Aboriginal

corporations were establishing their legitimacy Cibid.:26), and federations of local groups were now starting to arise. Coombs’s proposals for reforming the NAC rested on his assess-

ment of this new importance of the locally based, functional corporation; such organisations should be integrated within the NAC, and a tier of regional assemblies established in order to bring the NAC leaders closer to the highly practical concerns of Aboriginal corporations and associations.

Gender equality Coombs’s list of Aboriginal criticisms of the NAC included its failure ‘adequately to represent the interests of Aboriginal women and [that it] should have more women in its membership’ Cibid.:12). His own

reform proposals, however, do not address that defect. What is the

pertinence of the liberal ideal of gender equality to a critical consideration of indigenous politics? As the above discussion makes clear, it is difficult to distinguish

a specifically ‘anthropological’ perspective within the array of commentaries on how best to facilitate the political expression of indigenous views. ‘Anthropologists’ (and writers with other professional identities) may write from a respectful knowledge of ‘Aboriginality’ as they variously understand it, knowledge which is gained from books, museums, film, video and first-hand contact 78

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with indigenous people. Nevertheless, their views are further diversified by other points of reference. The writers I have cited, for example, work within a broadly liberal democratic tradition, and necessarily make certain judgements about what is politically possible nowadays in Australia. There are thus no pure constructs

of ‘Aboriginal tradition’ on which to base a critique: on every issue, the nature and relevance of ‘Aboriginal tradition’ must be argued for. There is a further complication: Aboriginal people themselves give various accounts of what ‘Aboriginality’ is and what behaviours

and institutions it may now warrant. For example, Merv Gibson (1987), a Murri from Hope Vale (Qld) who has studied anthropology, recently took that discipline to task for propounding the ‘myth’

that for Aborigines, alcohol consumption ‘has become an expression of identity and culture’. Many Aborigines, he suggests, have

internalised that representation of Aboriginality, much to their detriment. Similarly, Judy Atkinson (1990:6-7) and Audrey Bolger (1991:52-5) expound a widespread complaint of Aboriginal women that violent Aboriginal men have sometimes been able to persuade non-Aboriginal male lawyers and judges that, in ‘Aboriginal tradition’, it is normal and acceptable for men to deal violently with their spouses, sisters, mothers and daughters.

The contemporary political warrant of ‘Aboriginality’ is thus made complex and controversial by two factors: indigenous people

differ on what is essential and desirable in their identity and traditions; and by doing so they draw not only on what they know of ‘Aboriginality’ (from whatever sources) but also on received notions of fairness and equity in Australia’s liberal political culture, and on judgements of what is politically feasible. Diane Bell appeals implicitly to liberal notions of gender equity when she complains that the official and non-Aboriginal encour-

agement of Aborigines to participate politically results in the representations of men and the eclipse of women. ‘The colonisation of indigenous peoples’, she generalises, ‘has created a niche for the

consolidation of male power in the emerging political structures established by the state to “represent” the interests of the colonized . . . The most consistent outcome appears to be that while men assume the political spokesperson role, the women run the welfare 79

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structures’ (Bell, 1992:344). Worse, advocates of indigenous interests have been reluctant to acknowledge these differential colonial impacts: ‘If Aborigines are neglected in a First World country, that

is a crime against humanity: if women are denied access to all important decision-making fora, that is culture’ Gibid.:353). A glance

at the gender composition of most Aboriginal decision-making bodies will confirm that, as in most non-Aboriginal forums, there is a marked disproportion of men.

Bell (1987:123) is perhaps too ready to judge as failures the exceptions to this pattern of male-only or male-dominated forums,

for Goodall and Huggins (1992:406) point to a number of realisations of women’s political power in the 1980s. The histori-

cal and conceptual dimensions of Bell’s argument are equally controversial. Do Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people share the

same understanding of ‘power’? How do we assess the balance of ‘power’ between men and women? Do we know enough about pre- and post-colonial social orders to make a judgement about the nature of colonial changes? Bell herself is inconsistent on such issues as whether women’s camps C(ji/imi in Central Australia) are an asset or a diversion in women’s political projects, and whether

women have more or less economic autonomy in an economy of cash welfare benefits. She has been accused of representing the interests of Aboriginal women through a non-Aboriginal ideology of separatist feminism Cibid.:418); in particular, she has had to defend strenuously both the ethical and the ethnographic basis

of her comments on rape and violence in Aboriginal men’s behaviour towards Aboriginal women (Bell, 1991). Bell’s persist-

ent (and courageous) concern for Aboriginal women as victims of Aboriginal men shows the many difficulties (ethical, empirical and conceptual) of combining respect for traditional custom with advocacy of women’s human rights. When anthropology gave up thinking of Aboriginal social organisation as an order of ‘tribes’ and ‘hordes’, the politics of ethnography was revealed to be patriarchal in tendency. Men’s constructs of their rights to land and to other valued goods came more sharply into focus as an ideology of gender dominance, uncritically transcribed into anthropological models of ‘patrilineal’ social organisation. In his influential reinterpretation of the research SO

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on Aboriginal social organisation, Bern (1979) depicts religion as the determining structure of a politics which gave dominance to

mature men in their possession of ritual powers, control of the material surpluses of women’s labour, and disposition of young people’s sexuality and fertility. Merlan’s review (1986) of the literature on Aboriginal conception beliefs distinguishes controls of

reproduction from controls of sexuality, in order to give a more complex account of traditional Aboriginal patriarchy. In Peterson’s review of the study of ‘bands’ and clans’, the ‘patrilineal ideology’

through which rights in land are articulated is revealed to be strategic rather than prescriptive (Peterson, 1983:142), a politics of

land ownership and land use to assert and win male privilege. Hamilton’s point is similar: that men seek in their rituals to secure

father-to-son transmission of ritual property (knowledge of and rights to the country), while ignoring the fact that it is largely from women’s labour that they gain the material possibility of spending so much time in ritual pursuits (Hamilton, 1982:106). Recent reviews of the literature on gender relations stress that, notwithstanding these patriarchal tendencies, women in Aboriginal societies have been effective agents and not mere chattels of men (C. Berndt, 1980; Merlan, 1988; Williams and Jolly, 1992). Hamilton (1981), for example, has argued that, however successful men were in defining the world and its powers through their own masculine ‘discourse’—a success guaranteed ultimately by violence—there

remained a subordinate but autonomous discourse generated by the ‘homosociality’ of women, especially in Central Australia. Bell’s ethnography (1983) of women’s social and ceremonial life vividly and powerfully illustrates these themes of women’s agency and autonomy. She argues, however, that the political ascendancy of men is largely an effect of colonialism, and in comparison with the other writers mentioned she understates the patriarchal continuities of Aboriginal culture. This historical understanding embold-

ens her critique. For if gender inequality is largely a product of colonial pressures, then instead of criticising the traditions of Aboriginal patriarchy she invokes ‘Aboriginal tradition’ in a critique of a patriarchal colonialism. That new patriarchal order gives rapists

rather than their victims the benefits of Aboriginal Legal Aid, and contrives male majorities in most Aboriginal political forums. 81

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Within this perspective, it is not clear how one should regard the claims of Aboriginal women who contest the authority of ‘custom’ over young people’s marriage choices. Bell is aware that a ‘liberal’ position is an uneasy one: though ‘promised marriage’ and ‘infant bestowal’ seem to violate individual human rights, the exercise of those powers ‘binds kin in a web of reciprocal obligations, rights, and responsibilities that have implications for land ownership and ceremonial duties: in short, they were part and parcel of the survival of the culture’ (Bell, 1992:349). As an advocate of the recognition of customary law and of women’s restored agency within it, Bell appears to align herself with ‘custom’ as it has been represented to her in the field by older women who are vexed by the ways of their young folk (Bell and Ditton, 1980). Guiding Law Reform Commis-

sion staff, she assented to the political convention that while younger, literate women ‘deal with the problems of stocktaking in stores, the running of banking agencies and the like... on matters of law, it is the older women who speak’ (Bell, 1988:308-9). Her

own work with Ditton reports older women’s opinions of the problem of young girls, but not the views of young girls on adult authority. In contrast, Burbank (1988) and Tonkinson (1990) give an account of younger women’s difficulties in achieving some kind of personal autonomy. In wishing to help adults articulate ‘custom’ to the Law Reform Commission, Bell seems to have overlooked the views of young women. In articulating the claims of ‘custom’ against colonialism, it is not possible to avoid taking up positions—made available by a colonising liberalism—within what we might call an Aboriginal politics of ‘tradition’.

§2

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Art and Identity

Tf you're going to get shot, get paid for it.’

In 1971 Diane Barwick took up one of the issues facing those who

would recognise the traditions of indigenous Australians: the elusive ‘subculture’ of the dispossessed Kooris, Nungas, Murris and Nyungars of Australia’s southern regions—such folk as the ‘Aborigines of Victoria’. For many, writes Barwick, that culture,

developed in a rural setting, maintains certain features which are both adaptive extensions of traditional norms and typical characteristics of migratory workers. These include job opportunities and preferences; their necessary nomadism; their generosity in sharing what they have; and their disinterest in possessions and achievements which are status symbols to settled white collar workers. Migratory workers everywhere have a distinctive style of life and create a world for themselves. Their lively scandalous gossip and distinctive, slangy, vivid language serve to demonstrate the separate-

ness of such groups from the larger society. Their world is demarcated, closed to outsiders who do not share their wanderings and their interests and their jokes, who cannot join in their prideful recounting of their own history and their legends of the wonderful and funny exploits of their own heroes. (Barwick, 1988:29)

The culture depicted is not exclusively ‘Aboriginal’; Barwick even declines to say which traits might be particularly ‘Aboriginal’.

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Then she adds a sentence which is slightly ambiguous. ‘All such worker groups have closed communities, but the basis of recruitment, of belonging, is different here, for Aborigines are recruited at birth’ Gbid.:29). To which ‘community’ are Aborigines recruited at birth? The community of ‘migratory workers’? The ‘community’ of

Aborigines (many of whose lives have been spent as migratory workers)? The ‘community’ made up of those migratory workers who are also of Aboriginal descent? I don’t think there are answers

to these questions, but they point to a certain haziness in the outlines of the indigenous identity which Barwick wished to evoke. In pre-colonial Aboriginal culture, people did not have identity

as ‘Aborigines’. As Bain Attwood and others have reminded us (Attwood, 1989; Reece, 1987), the category ‘Aborigines’ is an artefact of the colonial process. In the earliest invaded regions of the

Australian continent, colonisation has severed the links between particular family groups and portions of land over which they enjoyed ancestral ownership. A specific social identity—as the owner and user of a portion of land and its myths—was no longer possible and therefore had to give way to other social and cultural identities. Assimilation policy dreamt that the substitute identity would be that of the ‘citizen of Australia’; Aboriginal resistance to assimilation has ensured that, for a quarter of a million Australians, their identity as ‘indigenous’ people remains important. For many it is primary. But if a majority of those indigenous Australians have no particular portion of land to which they can refer as the anchor of their indigenous being, what external and impersonal symbols of ‘Aboriginality’ are available to them? Ruby Langford’s autobiography Don't Take Your Love to Town(1988)

can be read as an answer to that question. Born at Box Ridge Mission (NSW) in 1934, Langford spent much of her early adulthood as a rural

labourer in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales,

before becoming more permanently resident in Redfern and in Sydney’s western suburbs. To combine mothering with labouring was hard, and she recalls reflecting one day on its difficulties, having just averted the drowning of her son in a south Queensland weir.

I felt like I was living tribal but with no tribe around me, no close-

knit family. The food-gathering, the laws and the songs were 84

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broken up, and my generation at this time wandered around as if we were tribal but in fact living worse than the poorest of poor whites, and in the case of women living hard because it seemed like the men loved you fora while and then more kids came along

and the men drank and gambled and disappeared. One day they’d had enough and they just didn’t come back. It happened with Gordon and later it happened with Peter, and my women friends all have similar stories. Neddy and I have talked about it often as we get older, and how it’s not always different for our daughters and their kids . . . langford, 1988:96) This is a useful corrective to Barwick’s emphasis on the warmth of rural labourers’ ‘community’. Being landless is only part of the Koori story told by Langford; your own kind could make you lonely too, particularly men, in their fickle attentions to the women alongside whom they worked and camped. ‘Neddy’ is Langford’s old friend Nerida; among women,

perhaps, there is something more like ‘community’, a shared experience of men’s stinting individualism. Don’t Take Your Love to

Town is an important book because it shows loneliness and community to have many dimensions. As I have shown elsewhere

(Rowse, 1993), Langford’s identity as a Koori is shown by her writing to be in some respects less problematic than her identity as a woman.

Soliciting identity Langford recalls what would seem to be her first attempt to convey in writing something about herself.

I entered a NAODQ (National Aborigines Observance Day Quest) writing competition. The subject was what you would like to become, and I wrote about doctoring. A while later I received notification that I'd won the quest. My prize was one guinea, and I was very happy to have it though the prize for this quest today

is an all-expenses trip overseas. There you go. (1988:109) Nowhere else in Don’t Take Your Love to Town is there any mention

of this aspiration to be a doctor. To realise it would have been

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virtually impossible for a female Aboriginal rural labourer with little formal schooling; in the jauntiness of this passage I see no evidence

that Langford’s sensé of realism ever faltered. What was possible was to produce, in prose, the aspirations of a model client of the Aboriginal welfare bureaucracy. Her self-writing artifice was modestly rewarded. State policies and certain commercial developments have more recently combined to encourage expressions of Aboriginal identity rather different from this mimicry of Whites. In the 1960s Australian

audiences for the visual and performing arts began to ‘discover’ Aborigines’ traditions of artistic expression, a development with consequences for Kooris. As a member of the Aboriginal Progressive Association, Langford found herself in a group booking to attend a Sydney performance by Mornington Island dancers, her first ‘corroboree’ and her first time in a ‘big theatre’. Yet ‘something

inside me understood everything that was going on’. Permitted to visit the dancers backstage, Langford and her party found them wary and wordless, until one dancer, who could speak ‘pidgin’, ‘explained that we were part of them’ Cibid.:116). Another incident, twenty years later, again suggests her openness to being moved by manifestations of ‘Aboriginality’ which are, in a sense, packaged as a commodity for any person to enjoy. Langford and her sewing class decide to raise money for a group trip to ‘Ayers Rock’— Uluru National Park. As well as selling cakes, the group benefits from the sponsorship of two government agencies, the Australia Council’s Aboriginal Arts Board and the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

The ABC’s payment gives it the right to film ‘twenty-seven urban Aboriginal women seeing Uluru for the first time’ Gbid.:232). (If you’re

going to get shot, get paid for it’, in Mum Shirl’s words.) Langford recounts that she is thrilled and moved by their trip. What inspire her are not those features of Uluru National Park which anthropologists have documented as ‘traditional’ Aboriginal culture, namely a number of specific sites which are the focus of several spatially coincident western desert myths. She refers to ‘the spirit of the great rock we call Uluru’, but Iam not aware of such a ‘spirit? in ethnographic accounts of western desert culture (Layton, 1986:3-16). It was ‘the Rock’ itself that intimated spirituality to Langford, the same magnificent object which has impressed millions of visitors, 86

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including me. Langford’s vocabulary for this experience, with one important exception, is not significantly different from what can be found in tourist brochures.

It was like a huge animal that was asleep in the middle of nowhere. We came closer and I could feel the goosebumps and the skin tightening at the back of my neck. Everyone was quiet. It made me think of our tribal beginnings, and this to me was like

the beginning of our time and culture. (1988:234) Most tourists would have to say ‘their tribal beginnings’; Langford

and her companions, Kooris, can say ‘our’. A packaged item of ‘cultural tourism’ the Rock may well be, but it addresses different tourists differently, according to the cultural identity of the visitor. The Rock made Langford mindful of the historic specificity of her Koori identity. She recalls wishing, at that moment, that she’d ‘been born fullblood instead of the degree of caste that I was’. However, although ‘longing for the relaxed tribal sense of time and of looking after the earth’, she adds: ‘I knew I enjoyed luxuries like not having to boil the billy for a cup of tea. . .’ Gibid.:236). Later still in her story, Langford reads a newspaper item about an old lady, Millie Boyd, who is said to retain some of the spirituality

of her land, the land of the Bundjalung people. Langford knows herself to be Bundjalung, by virtue not of speaking that language but of having come from the part of New South Wales where the Bundjalung once flourished. Langford is strongly affected by the reporter’s evocation of the spiritual powers of Millie Boyd and other

Bundjalung women. ‘The hair was standing up on the back of my neck. Here was information about a culture J had lost when I came to Sydney. Only it wasn’t lost. There was a direct line from Uncle

Ernie Ord [who had looked after her as a child] to the women singing in the lingo at Yamba, calling the porpoises in. . .’ (ibid’:261). At a low point in her life, because of ill health and the

misfortunes of her jailed and therefore endangered son Nobby, Langford reflects on the diminished Aboriginal heritage of urban Blacks: ‘““Surviving culture”, I thought, “I hope Nob survives”’. But

she is heartened by the report of Millie Boyd, feeling ‘connected again, not just to my Bundjalung origins but to positive forces happening now, to these people who carried the culture and kept 87

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it strong, who were concerned with ecology and spiritual health’

(ibid.:261-2). Notwithstanding a tabloid’s exotic rendering of Aboriginality as mysticism, Langford’s life has attuned her to the story’s hopeful implications. These incidents and Langford’s way of writing of them suggests that ‘Aboriginality—a contemporary ideology of indigenous identity—has a diversity of sources and occasions, none of them to be prejudged as more or less ‘authentic’ than others. The thought that Langford has been seduced by Aboriginality as kitsch must contend

with the evident sincerity of her epiphanies, a depth of feeling which arises not so much from the jejune stimuli (seeing ‘the Rock’,

reading an article in a Sunday tabloid) but from the need to find personal strength in such evidence of the historical continuity, against great odds, of a deracinated people. In that perspective, Helen Semmler’s cover for the Penguin edition starts to make better sense than I found at first. Why adorn an urban Koori’s autobiography with a bark painting from Arnhem Land, a Mimi figure? Is this not to collapse two historically distinct strands of indigenous heritage? Is it not to slight the new tradition of urban Koori art, forcefully present since the 1984 exhibition at Sydney’s Artspace? Worse, is there not a suggestion that Langford’s (mixed descent, urban) Aboriginality needs assuring or boosting by being adorned with an image which is indubitably and ‘tradition-

ally’ Aboriginal? Perhaps Langford herself deals best with such doubts about the tact of the cover design. The question she poses herself after watching a video about Pintupi sand-painting—‘what is an autobiography compared to a dreaming track?’ Gibid.:255)— is answered by her actions: she continues to write. You can’t have faith in your culture if you lack confidence in yourself.

The traditional, the urban and the secret Langford’s experience of these popular tracings of classical Aboriginal culture—videos about ‘Dreaming Tracks’, ‘the spirit of the Rock’ and newspaper and magazine articles about the spiritual powers of

wise old women—is grounded in her sense of herself as a Koori, but it is also marked by a sense of a gap between ‘their’ traditional Aboriginal culture and ‘our (Koori and non-Koori) urban consump88

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tion of it. Nearly all who will read this book face that gap. “The classical traditions are hard to learn about if one has not grown up with them’, writes Peter Sutton. The Aboriginal classical cultural tradition is far more difficult to

grasp than the contemporary scene, and it is much harder to delve into it without having to leap the barriers of Aboriginal languages that one does not understand, and cultural concepts and practices that are both complex and far removed from one’s

own in design, values and cosmological foundations, not to mention the added barrier of esoteric anthropological writings which, for all their faults, remain the major attempts to represent

for a literate audience the older Aboriginal cultural realities in something like their fullness. (Sutton, 1992a:30)

Worse, the knowledge gap may be filled by the art-consumers’ vapid cultural self-confidence. Commercial success has plunged Aboriginal art into what Vivien Johnson calls ‘a rarefied, insular and self-reflexive domain, the mirror stage and apogee of the system of

societal circulation of imagery, which subjects all attempts at signification to attenuation of meaning and emotional intensity’

(1990:21). This world makes possible such moments of uncomprehending appropriation of ‘Aboriginality’ as ‘an hour of cocktails with prospective plastic button exporters in front of the Clifford Possum at the embassy in Kuala Lumpur’ (Sutton, 1992b:8).

Luke Taylor sees better possibilities than these (and Sutton and Johnson would probably not rule them out) when he writes that ‘Aboriginal art has the subversive effect of slipping Aboriginal values past an otherwise staunch opposition to mainstream Aborigi-

nal culture’. His rider, however, is that exhibitions must provide contexts and interpretations for Aboriginal art which ‘challenge the popular knowledge of Aboriginal culture possessed by the average viewer’ (1988:88-9, 92).

Some fine ethnographies have recently made it clear just how removed from our casual understanding the classical artistic expression of Aborigines can be, not only in painting but also in song. The western desert painters, using acrylics at first on boards and then on canvasses, have usually employed a rather abstract and restricted graphic vocabulary. Working with Pintupi people since 1973, Fred 8&9

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Myers reports that such designs ‘cannot be “read” except by those

with the necessary mythological information . . .’ (1989:171). Indeed, the ‘dominant communicative functions’ of such work depend less on the design vocabulary itself and more on the social rarety of the knowledge essential to their elucidation. When these

designs are used locally by artists, it is through a certain social distribution of the rights to produce them, to display them and to elaborate their meanings. Enacting these tutelary relationships is part of the work’s meaning. North-east Arnhem Land art combines figurative images with abstract designs. Morphy’s work (1991:295) shows that it is the abstract elements (such as cross-hatching and the underlying pictorial template of a clan’s paintings) which are most crammed with meaning, provided that the artist or another knowl-

edgeable and authorised person ‘reads’ those meanings. Morphy learned to change his question from ‘what’ something means to ‘how’ it means, that is, to attend to the carefully structured social

process of revelation. Both Myers and Morphy use the term ‘multivalency’ Cone might prefer ‘polysemy’) to refer to the fact that

the most abstract imagery, in western desert and in north-east Arnhem Land art, is the richest in meaning, in the social processes

(ritualised or not) of conferring significance. Francesca Merlan reminds us that such ‘multivalency’ is an effect of what she calls ‘the

opacity of Aboriginal expressive media’; she refers to the arcane languages of song as well as to the graphic tradition. Opacity ‘forces the learner (whether outside analyst or local person) to rely largely, even entirely, upon knowledgeable interpreters’ (1987:146).

The relationship between possessing knowledge and enjoying ‘legitimate’ rights to reveal it is a relatively recent topic of ethnographic research. Merlan comments (about the area east of Katherine, NT) that ‘The few men who become renowned singers tend to learn a much vaster repertoire than is their right in the strictest sense, and

the’ vagaries of transmission are such that their sons do not necessarily follow in their footsteps. There is an idea, however, that a man should hold and perform his own songs’ Cibid.:152). Peter

Sutton goes further, seeing the competitive idiom of classical Aboriginal politics enabled by the ‘variety of mismatching relation-

ships between the meaning of Aboriginal songs, the language of their words and the property interests of people who have certain 90

4 Art and Identity customary rights in those songs’ (Sutton, 1987:87—-91). He suggests

that knowledge and the legitimated rights to knowledge are never perfectly matched in the dynamics of Aboriginal political life. It is therefore essential to the political utility of songs that they are open

to many and changing glosses of their meanings. Their textual opacity is a condition of their ‘multivalency’, their multivalency is

integral to their significance as tools of political competition (Sutton, 1987). The latter point—about multivalency—would seem to hold also for the more figurative visual traditions, such as western Arnhem Landers’ representations of the Rainbow Serpent. Taylor

reports that such imagery is now used to symbolise emergent regional political interests (1990:338). In the light of this work, we misunderstand the classical artistic expression of Aborigines if we expect to know what it means. The

‘meanings’ of graphic symbols and sequences of song are too particular, contextual and changing. Yet painting, in particular, has

been developed by the people of Arnhem Land and the western desert for consumption far beyond the local contexts in which such esoteric ‘truths’ of the art are possible. ‘If non-Aborigines stopped buying the paintings, the Aborigines would stop producing them’ (Anderson and Dussart, 1988:142). What new ‘meanings’ are made possible by that wider, commercial circulation?

Referring to Pintupi acrylics, Myers has remarked the ‘happy historical circumstance that the beauty of visual organisation of the forms themselves is one that speaks to contemporary western tastes’ (1989:192). Pintupi acrylics appeal not only to the western taste for abstraction and pure form, and a wish to own and enjoy something decorative and ‘Australian’, but also to a desire to glimpse the spiritual power of Aborigines. As Gabrielle Pizzi (an art dealer) recently told the

art historian Roger Benjamin, ‘Even if one doesn’t understand the iconography (particularly in the Pintupi work one doesn’t and never will), one can feel the power and commitment inherent in the work’ (Pizzi, 1992:26). Inscrutability is no disadvantage. One might protest that such ‘Aboriginality’ as Pizzi finds is a prettified,

domesticated and abstracted fantasy made possible by the market. Urban Koori artists, in particular, might be challenged by that objection,

for they seem to have had to find their own relationships with commercially available ‘classical’ Aboriginal art and to decide what is 91

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possible and proper in their own learning from it, as Kooris. The Fraser Island artist Fiona Foley does not advocate deriving imagery from the northern and central artists, although she has benefited, she says, from visiting them. She criticises ‘Aboriginal artists who feel they can take imagery from anywhere. I think more than being Australian they have

to be true to themselves, research their own history and where they came from and look at the images from their particular area and then branch out’ (Foley, 1990:12). Brenda Croft, a member of the Boomalli co-operative of Sydney Kooris, is also disturbed that Aboriginal people are appropriating the work of other Aboriginal artists ‘which they have no right to access’ (Croft, 1992:21). Other Kooris emphasise the positive

potential of exchanges between the urban and the classical. The Victorian Koori artist Lin Onus is pleased that ‘dispossessed Aboriginal

people throughout the country are presently engaged in the most extraordinary salvage operation’. He instances the learning of languages such as Pitjantjatjara and Bundjalung which, although they are not their ‘original languages’, are ‘an expression of desire for knowledge and cultural awareness .. .’ (Onus, 1990:19). Djon Scott-Mundine, a Koori from New South Wales who has worked for Arnhem Land artists for many years, suggests that it has been necessary for artists from the south to borrow techniques from northern and central Australia in the

process of establishing a Koori identity, ‘as a tool in the learning process’. He praises the tact of the many Koori artists whose visits to the

north he has witnessed, and looks forward to longer visits in which remote artists might learn something from the urban artists (ScottMundine, 1990:8).

Like Ruby Langford, urban Koori artists have had to think about what is ‘Aboriginal’ in their artistic expression when their images and preoccupations do not derive from what museums and galleries have demarcated as ‘traditional’ or ‘classical’ Aboriginal culture.

One interpretative strategy is to see in such work a ‘Koori’ statement, that is, ‘an ethics-based overt analysis of the social order’

(Sutton, Jones and Hemming, 1988:204). According to Roberta Sykes, Koori art can indeed be defined by its ethical mission:

In a world rapidly being dominated by Western European ideology, religion, language and culture, Aboriginal urban people join the few remaining groups in the world who largely stand

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outside, or reject, this influence, and the community’s political

stance, literature and visual and performing arts reflect this position. As such, Aboriginal contemporary art has begun to draw a warm reception and appreciation from many people throughout the world who are disillusioned with the materialism and spiritual emptiness of the dominant societies. (Sykes, 1990:6) Yet it is surely reasonable of Marcia Langton (1992:8—9) to say that to politicise the poetic of Koori art in this way is to narrow it. Tracey

Moffatt, while glad that ‘black women in the arts is where it is all happening right now’, hopes that ‘black kids entering the arts will have the confidence to know that making art is not about exploring black issues all the time’ (Chenery, 1993:15). Fiona Foley (1990:11)

acknowledges that hers is ‘a relatively obscure and a personal symbolism’. And, as Sylvia Kleinert (1992:44-5) points out, some Koori art is (as far as we know from the artists) simply decorative: the Ngarrindjeri art on permanent display at the South Australian Museum since 1989 is a good example (Sutton, Jones and Hemming, 1988:188—-90).

The cost of achieving an identity for Koori artistic expression— independent of the well-established identity of ‘classical’ art, song and story—may be a certain type-casting of Kooris, an assumption that they will always address a certain political and ethical agenda. Sally Morgan’s My Place may encourage such generic expectations of autobiography. But Don’t Take Your Love to Town demonstrates that the disclosure of an Aboriginal self need not be the defining theme of Aboriginal autobiography, for the simple reason that life can be tough or joyful for Kooris in other ways as well. It is their human fate to go beyond the Koori identity readers might imagine for them.

Self, kin and community Diane Barwick, Jeremy Beckett and Chris Birdsall have illuminated one of the outstanding features of Koori life in ‘settled’ Australia since World War II: the dispersal of related families and individuals

between country and city locations, and the efforts to sustain a sense of community among such dispersed people. In 1965 Jeremy

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Beckett (1988) suggested that each individual Koori in western New South Wales had a ‘beat’ consisting of dispersed households of kin

whose help he or she was assured to receive. He did not consider explicitly how such ‘beats’ could be configured so as to include households in far-away Sydney (for they had not yet migrated that far), but he argued that, with intermarriage between regions, the size of ‘beats’ was tending to increase. Diane Barwick’s accounts

(1964, 1988) of Victoria’s Kooris in the 1950s and 1960s also emphasise the efforts made by Kooris in Melbourne to maintain family and regional identities. ‘Each person’s circle of kin, known throughout life, is his or her main source of security, companionship, and economic and emotional support’ (Barwick, 1988:28). More recently, Chris Birdsall (1988) has documented specific ‘lines’ and ‘runs’ (the latter equivalent to Beckett’s ‘beat’) developed by Nyungar families which connect households in Perth to others in rural Western Australia. Birdsall’s account emphasises the socially integrated quality of each line and run, and she identifies the relationships and forms of

action which seem to her to be essential to continuing such integration. The bonds between children and those who rear them are particularly important, and so are those between siblings and cousins who were reared together. Mothers are focal. Nyungar experience their wider kin group by being reared, for a time, by their maternal kin; and mothers have tended to be the enduringly central figures in households. Aunts, mothers and grandmothers combine to give extended families their cohesion. Travel between households which constitute the ‘line’ or the ‘run’ reaffirms their continuing interrelatedness (Birdsall, 1988:143—4). Such integration gives individuals their security. ‘It is only within this group that the

individual is able to exhibit the full flowering of his or her social being, because only this group has the knowledge necessary to evoke and support the individual’s personal style’ Gbid.:144). Ruby Langford’s life coincides with the massive, post-Depression

urban migration of New South Wales Kooris. At the same time, Kooris ranged widely over rural districts in ‘settled Australia’, to get work and to be with spouses. The maps of Koori relatedness were

thus redrawn, and the connections of kin were put to the test of greater distance and new propinquities. We should not presume 94

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that every network of kin passed this test. If ethnography tends to presume the integrated character of the ‘runs’, ‘beats’ and ‘lines’

which it wishes to describe, the autobiographies of individuals attest the contingencies of such integration, and even its decline and breakdown. Such is Ruby Langford’s story. From childhood, her mobility—between city and country, and between various parts of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland—exhibits the rupturing of her kin network. Let me quote three illustrative passages. In the first, Langford is a young girl, staying with relations at Casino. Her mother has gone; she is living with another man and having his children, in Sydney. Her father also lives and works in Sydney: he has a new wife, but he comes back to see Ruby and her siblings when he can. She has recently been living with her uncle Ernie, but she is no longer doing so, and hasn’t seen him for a while.

One of the Koori kids in the school... came to me in the playground and said she’d heard I knew a man called Ernie Ord. I said I did. She said, did you know he died not long ago? J stared at her. Come on, I'll show you where he is, she said. After school she took me to the cemetery and showed me his grave. The soil

was raised up and fresh, it was a decent burial. The girl went away and I sat down next to the grave and I stayed there a long time, until it got dark. Remembering Uncle Ernie, what a good mother he was, what a big jovial fellow, and then feeling sorry that in the ways of our people moving around I hadn’t seen him for so long. (1988:28-9) I saw a little boy pedalling like mad on a small two-wheel bike. When he noticed me he screeched to a stop. ‘I know who you are,’ he said. J was taken by surprise. ‘How do you know who I am?’ I said.

‘ve never seen you before.’ ‘You're my tita,’ he said, holding out a packet of lollies in his grubby little hand. Cibid.:29-30)

In the third incident, Ruby, now a young woman, is woken during the night, feeling the presence of a spirit which is trying to take her baby out of her arms. The next day she bumps into one of her exhusbands, Sam Griffin. He expresses sympathy about her father’s 95

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death, which is the first she has heard of it: ‘Didn’t you know, your father passed away about two months ago. The family’s been trying to get in touch with you’. Ruby describes her grief C(I gave way to great sobs’) and then continues: The truck Sam was on had just called to the camp to pick up more

workers, and they went on their way. He didn’t go to say hello to the kids, who were playing nearby, I don’t know if he even looked at them. But I only registered this underneath the emotion about Dad. Cibid.:100—1)

In such stories we see some of the sad consequences of a spatially dispersed kin network lacking the material resources to overcome distance.

The absent mother If the dispersed rural-urban kin network tends to be as matrifocal

as the ethnography suggests, then it is significant that Ruby Langford’s most problematic relationship, as a child, was with her mother. Her deserted father’s hurt reticence makes even memory of Mother elusive. On one of her father’s visits to see his children, Ruby opens his suitcase to get him his shaving gear and sees a photograph

of her mother amongst his clothes. Dad came in with a towel around his neck and said, ‘Haven’t you found my shaving gear yet?’ When he saw the photo I said, ‘Is that our mother?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. I stared at the picture. ‘Isn’t she beautiful,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She’s very beautiful.’ He closed the lid of the suitcase. Cibid.:13)

‘I met my brother. His name’s George.’ Dad nodded. ‘I’ve seen him a few times,’ he said. ‘He lives at the Webbs’.’ ‘T know.’

‘Is Eddie Webb his father?’ Dad shifted in his seat, pretending to rearrange Rita on his lap. ‘Well, he lives with them.’ ‘Do you know where our mother is?’ 96

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‘I think she’s still in Sydney.’ ‘Is Eddie Webb with her?’

‘Probably. Ruby—’ he moved Rita again and seemed to be hugging her tight. He didn’t finish his sentence. We looked out the window at the trees flashing past and after a while Dad started to talk to me quietly about school, and other ordinary things. (ibid.:31—2)

The economy of such writing—understating or excluding reference

to her curiosity about or longing for her Mother, and barely disclosing her father’s troubled mind—is effective. Such spare narration is consistent with Langford’s apparently defensive strategy towards her troubled life, her self-protective effort not to imagine or feel too much. In March we heard from Dad that he’d got a job in Sydney. The letter was from his new place in Great Buckingham Street, and he was working at a furnace where they made springs. I knew my mother was somewhere in Sydney too, but there was no news of her. I wondered whether she and Dad would find each other, or whether he was looking for her. I knew she was living with another man, and would have other children by now. I tried not to imagine what they looked like, where they lived, what kinds of things my mother said to them. Cibid.:19) We kept asking Dad where our mother lived, and if we could go to see her. I wanted to see what she looked like. He told us she lived in Waterloo, but we’d never been to Waterloo, how far was it? ‘She didn’t want you kids, so stay away,’ he said. He wasn’t

having any more of this conversation. I went on machining trousers and wondering about her and whether she had other kids and trying not to think about it. Gbid.:43) While she and her siblings and father lived in the inner city and

therefore stood the chance of bumping into their mother, there remained tension in their home. When it happens, out shopping one Saturday, her father yells at Mother not to come near his kids, and herds Ruby and Gwen away. Eventually, after the lapse of an unspecified amount of time, her mother was allowed to visit and Ruby made efforts to be friends with her. She recalls seeing her at an Aboriginal Ball. 97

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I was tanked up, I saw her across the room looking dressed up and very beautiful as she was then, and being drunk and not caring what I said I went to her table and sat myself down and raised my glass to her, and I said, ‘I thank you for every breath I take.’

Straightaway she put her head in her hands and burst into tears. I thought she’d misunderstood me. ‘Look, I love you,’ she said. And she went on crying, whether it was finally a softness she felt, or guilt, I don’t know, but later

again in her old age we spent a lot of time together and talked ... Gibid.:48)

It is important to note one of the conditions of this encounter— ‘being drunk and not caring what J said’—and its consequence, two people unable to secure a reading of the other’s intended meanings.

The feeling subject is elusive in a world of attenuated kinship. Ruby Langford’s rapid promotion from teenage girl to mother of

three children by the age of nineteen posed a problem for her identity as a woman, a problem she outlines in one of those rare passages of reflection on past problems of her subjectivity: Sometimes I felt like a mother and other times it was like I was the kids’ big sister, still a kid myself and playing with them for

the day, waiting for the real mother to come home and take charge of us all. And the real mother was me, but where had all these children come from so fast to change my life so much? The days when I felt old and responsible I would look at the kids as separate beings, I’d think about the differences between them, and about their personalities. For instance, Billy was an animal lover. Pearl was a mother hen. I would think about what they’d be like when they grew up. Cibid.:84)

This is how she recalls behaving upon coming to the town of St George, after a long stint of fencing with Gordon. This town was a mecca of civilisation to me, look, here was a dress shop—I went right in. I needed a new dress. Halfway into the shop I saw myself in the long mirror, close up. Here was a pregnant woman with blistered hands like a man’s, her face peeling like flaky pastry and black, but her arms were BLACK and the hair ginger. I stared at myself for a long time and then I bought 98

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a sleeveless cotton dress and went outside. I hadn’t been in town for so long I was lonely for another woman to talk to, so every woman I passed I said hello, hello, just to hear them talk to me.

(ibid.:93) ,

Ruby Langford’s isolation was never so simple as not having ‘enough Kooris to go around’, as she puts it when explaining her move from Katoomba back to inner Sydney Cibid.:126). Her book has much to do with being a woman who is cut off from her mother,

in a milieu of inconstant men, and with a large brood of children. It was all too possible for the woman to become submerged in the kids. She refers to staying with her stepmother, Mum Joyce, in Redfern. ‘She asked where I’d been all the time. I said ?'d been moving around, working in the bush. I didn’t know how much to say, there was no point worrying her, but I would’ve liked to tell

someone close what was happening. In the end I talked mostly

about the kids’ Gibid.:113). | Ruby and her kids

In Don’t Take Your Love to Town, writing about her nine children

is overshadowed by the tragic deaths of three of them and by her efforts to convey her grief. When grief is not the subject of her stories about her kids, however, we are given more glimpses of

her sons than of her daughters. Her boys are both wild and vulnerable, minor players in a desperately amateurish criminal subculture of booze, guns, cars and petty theft. Not once does Langford censure her sons or comment on their morality. What grounds this

lack of censure, however, is not amorality but a different, barely articulated practice of loyalty to one’s kin. Diane Barwick noted the dual morality of those Kooris, whom she called ‘the self-conscious people of Melbourne’: A person’s reputation among other part-aboriginal people finally depends on his personality, his relations with his kin and friends, and on his identification as ‘one of the dark people’. Perceived differences in respectability come second to this self-identifica-

tion when people choose their friends. Many criticize lawless and anti-social behaviour before white listeners, and many are 99

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genuinely anxious and resentful that the behaviour of a few reinforces unfavourable stereotypes about all Aborigines, but in private gossip friends and relatives excuse and condone. (Barwick, 1964:27)

Langford’s loyalty to her childen and their friends sometimes takes the form of dismissing police claims about her kids, but a detail in One passage suggestively illuminates an entire moral economy.

One evening Nob [her son] came in with seven thousand dollars worth of watches. He and a mate had taken a van for a ride and then discovered the loot. He brought some of the watches in and handed them around. When I went to tuck Jeffrey [Nob’s little

brother] in he was already asleep with watches up both arms. (Langford, 1988:166)

That morality of kin loyalty and mutual indulgence and forgiveness would be easy to romanticise, of course. Langford does not let us do so, because she tells us that one of her ways of handling stress

is to push her beloved kids away. ‘Autonomy’, in Langford’s case, is evidently the space necessary to feel that which is demanding to be felt. Neither sending the kids

away nor spending hours in the pub are solutions. Ruby’s grief at

her father’s death takes her to Sydney where she must live on fortnightly welfare cheques which are not enough. ‘I thought if I could put the kids in the Church of England homes and go back to machining I'd manage better. I think I must have decided this in the numbness of shock over Dad’s death.’ But after arranging for this, and while waiting for the kids to be picked up, she has a sleepless

night in which, she says, ‘my mind was in a turmoil and I came slowly to the realisation of what I was doing. The people would be picking the kids up in a few days and I couldn’t bear it’ Gbid:1023). So she cancels the arrangement with the church. Grieving for her daughter Pearl is so demanding as to cut her off from her other children. Her daughters take her aside in the pub one day, to tell her not to be so hard on her youngest son, Jeff: ““You come home drunk and you really give it to him,” Dianne said... .’

Well, I didn’t think about it while I was in the pub but back at home I had a good solid hour of going back over things I’d said 100

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to Jeff and how I’d behaved. The girls were right, there was a definite pattern. I spent the next hour thinking about my health.

I was always dieting and then I’d get low blood sugar, and alcohol made it worse. I’d started drinking when Pearl died and twelve years later it hadn’t drowned my sorrows. Every morning

when I woke up my sorrows were there again, worse if I was hungover. So I decided to give it away; and I haven’t been drunk since. (ibid.:216) After many years of having to deal with police, prisons and the subculture of minor criminals which her sons join, she acknowledges

the need to get away from her family. ‘At sewing class I’d heard about an Aboriginal hostel in Granville for people who’d raised their families and didn’t want to become live-in baby-sitters for their kids. It was the first of its kind. I moved there on 11 August 1987’ (ibid.:267). This is one of the very few precisely dated events of her

life, a mark of the new self that reflects and writes. Ruby Langford Ginibi’s recent book, Real Deadly (1992), refers several times to this hostel as the site of her recent writing. Populated with its own characters, it is also, and most importantly, a place where

she is in better control of her life, because there her children, their friends and their problems, are no longer her immediate and daily responsibility. In going into the hostel she can realise the potential delivered to her life by the completion of a family cycle: she can withdraw from lots of dependent children. This withdrawal, we can infer, is one of the conditions of her writing; another is her effort to assert

control over her own body by giving up drinking and undergoing two operations to deal with her obesity.

Beyond My Place Sally Morgan’s My Place (1986) has been enormously popular. Bain

Attwood, evidently not seduced by the book, has none the less listed what he thinks its appealing features are.

The book’s success undoubtedly owes something to what [Stephen] Muecke has called its ‘literary filiation’, it being the daughter or sister of A Fortunate Life. Its success can be further explained by reference to both form and content. It combines 101

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genres which are either traditionally popular—autobiography, detective story or Gothic novel, and by women about women’s experiences and oral narratives by ‘ordinary Australians’. Unlike many other Aboriginal biographies it succeeds because, as Eric Michaels noted, Morgan collapses the distinction between subject and object which characterises anthropological and historical accounts and so acquires ‘a more convincing authority and more compelling authenticity’. Perhaps more importantly, My Place deals with issues which are currently of deep interest to Australians, in that as ‘a genesis story’ it appeals to the deeply felt

need to know our origins and find a secure sense of belonging. In this way it mirrors the exponential growth in genealogy and family history. Furthermore, Morgan’s triumph in discovering and affirming ‘a real self’ no doubt gladdens readers and inspires hope that they too can ‘find themselves’. (Attwood, 1992a:317)

Comprehensive as this list seems, I think Attwood has overlooked

another factor: a common feeling of regret among Australian readers that so much damage has been done and offence given to indigenous Australians. Morgan offers such readers a knowing and ultimately triumphal relationship with history. My Place is a narrative of discovery. As we read, Sally Morgan finds a hidden truth about herself (her Aboriginality) by investigating her family history. The life stories of her relations have to be brought to light, after having been covered over not only by self-

censoring but also by official attempts to disrupt and silence Aboriginal memory through the cultural apparatus of assimilation. Although My Place retells this discovery, it does not enact it; it can

stage the discovery only as the re-enactment by a narrating consciousness already in possession of the knowledge which will be delivered ultimately to persistent readers. The relationship of this

narrating subject to history is thus a knowing one. The narrating subject nurtures the reader by revealing more and more. As readers

we are offered security in the care of this knowledge-endowing Aboriginal subject. Like the narrator, we oppose and are shocked by a culturally oppressive officialdom which obscured the past, as, page by page, we penetrate the imposed heritage of self-censorship and self-ignorance.

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This is a more comfortable positioning of the reader than Ruby Langford’s story affords. Don’t Take Your Love to Town does not marshal the incidents of a life into such an easily intelligible pattern; rather we are treated to a proliferation of incidents, a life set out for

review but not presented as something already reviewed and understood by a narrating subject. The subject whose life is narrated is frequently rendered in terms of its opacity to itself. We are invited

to witness the frustration of her efforts to realise her inner life in autonomous statement and action. But if there is an obstruction to

the emergence of ‘Ruby Langford’ as the subject and assured interpreter of her own destiny, it is neither non-Aboriginal hegemony, nor (as in My Place) the weight of colonial history. It is something more immediate: the contingencies of kinship, fractured by rural-urban migration and by the fickle vulnerabilities of men. We have to work harder to see the coherence of Langford’s book than we do to get what Sally Morgan has to show us, and the effort

delivers a more innovative and uncomfortable knowledge of the gendered contingencies of Koori experience.

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Actors in a Landscape

It’s the wild. Just the wild.’

Have indigenous Australians been better than their colonists in managing their relationships with ‘Nature’? Blowes has formulated what seems a popular view. The European tendency is to view land as a material object which

may be bought and sold, exploited and expended. Aboriginal reality sees life, spirit and sustenance embedded in a landscape which can no more be bought and sold than one’s mother and which must be cared for as a friend and provider. Consistent with

such world views, 200 years of European occupation has seen much more radical and extensive alteration of the landscape and much greater destruction of natural heritage opportunities in Australia than 40,000 years of Aboriginal occupation. (Blowes, 1992:149)

If Aborigines used the land well and the invaders have used it badly,

is it not time for non-Aborigines to learn from Aborigines, to reconsider western philosophies of nature, and to reconstruct capitalist uses of land? But what is there to learn? John Mulvaney wrote in 1975 that research made it impossible any longer to think of Aborigines as ‘unchanging people living in an unchanging environment’ (1975:121). Scholarly and popular representations now endow Aboriginal ‘actors’ with some kind of 104

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consciousness, as having moral, aesthetic and material investments in, and attachments to, the natural world. This chapter surveys such representations.

Crisis in the Australian biota The well-documented processes and effects of land degradation include soil erosion (by wind and water); salination of the soil: reduction in the density of plant and animal species in a given area Coss of biodiversity); pollution of soil and water; loss of soil fertility and soil structure; and the waterlogging of soil. Because post-1788

land use, particularly commercial agriculture and grazing, has intensified each of these processes, Australians are losing the productivity of their lands at an alarming rate. Recent government attention to the crisis of the Australian biota dates from the joint Commonwealth-State study of 1978 called A Basis for Soil Conservation Policy in Australia. By the early 1990s, Australian governments had inaugurated a number of ‘land management’ programmes to arrest, and even to reverse, land degradation: the National Soil Conservation Program (commenced in 1983); the ‘One Billion Trees Program’; the ‘Save the Bush’ Program; the Murray—Darling Basin Natural Resources Management Strategy Program; the National Estates Grant Program; the National Rainforest Conservation Pro-

gram, and others. Environmental protection laws have added regulation to the financial incentives and educative interventions of these programmes, to produce a growing armoury of government efforts to write ‘biological sustainability’ into a revised definition of the public interest. As well as setting new conditions for private land use, governments have also continued to preserve more of the continent from

such extractive uses as agriculture, grazing, mining, fishing and forestry. In 1989, 3.7 per cent of Australia’s land surface was set aside as national park or reserve. The mandate to set land aside continues. The platform upon which the Goss government was elected, for example, included a promise to double the area of Queensland’s national park estate. It is consistent with Aborigines’ and Islanders’ interests that land degradation be arrested and reversed, whether their title to land is 105

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established or still to be won. At present, indigenous owners enjoy

tenure, of various legal strengths, over about 13 per cent of the Australian landmass. And there is another, more particular indigenous stake in environmentalism: how are they implicated in the assembly and management of a ‘national park estate’? National parks are a contemporary means of colonial expropriation if, as has often been the case, they fail to accommodate the proprietary and other interests of Aborigines and Islanders. This chapter will say little about public policies. My aim is rather

to argue for careful reflection on the terms in which we narrate Aboriginal action upon the land.

An Aboriginal ethics of nature? That Aboriginal people have made a unique moral or ethical commitment to Nature is the theme of a number of commentaries.

Indeed, at least one Aboriginal person claims that ‘we opted to become part of the environment itself (Burnum Burnum, 1987:94). He has also remarked that ‘the blacker you are in skin pigmentation

in Aboriginal terms, the easier it is for you to have this spiritual connectedness with the Earth’ Gin Jones, 1989:35). But to see (genetically ‘pure’) Aborigines as part of nature is at best sentimental; it makes it unnecessary, and even impossible, to think about the cultures and histories of indigenous Australians’ engagement with

the natural world. Ethnographies have made culture (and sometimes history) the focus of their enquiry. Debbie Rose, for example, seeks to elucidate the Yarralin mob’s ‘biocentric’ understanding of their place in Nature. ‘The biocentric concept’, according to Taylor, ‘envisions the whole of humanity as one global community, within nature and inextricably linked to the

biophysical systems of its planetary habitat’ (Taylor, 1990:413). Unlike the western tradition’s presumption of the rightful sovereignty of humans within or over Nature, the Aboriginal ‘land ethic’ is not human-centred, Rose argues. Instead, human responsibility

is conceived of as merely one element in a huge system of complementary responsibilities and capacities. Yarralin people think biocentrically, according to Rose; and they give moral character to what western science would understand to be the 106

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material relationships of those ‘biophysical systems’. Rose refers to the Yarralin mob’s belief in ‘a sentient cosmos inhabited by many different categories of moral agents, whose moral agency has as a basic element the taking of responsibility for those portions of the system in which they operate .. .’ (Rose, 1988:383). David Bennett has also argued that the natural world is conceived

by Aborigines to have a moral and not merely instrumental character. ‘The complementary relationship of the landscape and the moral system provides a physical manifestation of the truth of the moral system, if such proof were needed, and gives a sense of

the solidness, resilience, and resistance to change of the moral system’ (Bennett, 1983:20). Accordingly, he assures us, ‘concern for the survival of non-human animal species [is] a vital and personal concern of each individual’ (ibid.:21). ‘Non-human animal species

... are not granted intrinsic value in themselves, but they are intrinsically valuable to the moral system’ Cibid.:22). But Bennett does not ask: what are the conditions necessary for the persistence of this moral intelligence among Aboriginal people?

He uses the present tense to convey an Aboriginal world-view elucidated by anthropologists half a century ago. Rose is more tough-minded, acknowledging that the challenge offered Yarralin cosmology by the ‘epistemological chaos’ of the colonial order makes the Aboriginal land ethic vulnerable. Kingsley Palmer asks whether Aborigines’ classical environmental values can now be sustained. Such values are best understood, he argues, in relationship with the hunting and gathering mode of life: ‘a cultural and economic system forms a package that works as a whole’ (Palmer, 1991:7). In particular, their values were made possible by the relative simplicity of their technology for extracting what they needed from Nature. ‘The sort of technologies a people possess test the values it holds dear, and changes in technology will ultimately affect values’ CGibid.:8). A lot rests on that word ‘ultimately’. The technologies of Aboriginal people have undoubtedly been transformed in the last two centuries, but how their environ-

mental values are changing, and how quickly, is left open in Palmer’s argument. To indicate one direction of change, he cites instances of Aboriginal land-owners enthusiastically embracing mining for its material rewards. 107

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It is not difficult to find counter examples in which the changed modes of Aboriginal life seem to be giving new life to a ‘biocentric’, moralised and humanised view of Nature. According to Tony Swain (1992), a number of Aboriginal intellectuals now give accounts of

‘Aboriginality which emphasise an innate spiritual connection between Aborigines and ‘the earth, our mother’. Citing statements from the Reverend Djiniyini Gondarra, Patrick Dodson, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Eve Fesl and Anne Pattel-Gray, he outlines an emerging

theology: ‘God creates, Whites destroy, Mother Earth endures, Aborigines understand’. Swain sees this as an historically appropriate spirituality. Mother Earth perfectly suits the needs of contemporary Aboriginal spiritual life. Unlike specific lands whose traditions are open to those who have the privilege of an often esoteric traditional education, Mother Earth is open to all of Aboriginal ‘Blood’ who feel for land in an Aboriginal way. She provides a new, radically

transformed, spiritual continuity for those denied their place. (1992:134)

The terms in which such Aboriginal people are understood to articulate an ethical or moral commitment to ‘the Earth’ or to Nature are arguably incomplete, however. What is their commitment to the social order of which they are members? That the social order can

be morally problematic for indigenous people is evident from Rose’s account of the Yarralin mob, from Burnum Burnum’s essay and from Swain’s summary of the New Age turn in some Aboriginal thinking. Can we be sure that Aboriginal people, especially those who have been dispossessed, are committed to a collective (global or Australian) reaffirmation of respect for a sustainable biota? Peter Sutton (1981) argues that indigenous people whose dispos-

session remains unrecognised and uncompensated have understandable reason to become anomic, and to remain morally adrift on the surface of Australian society rather than embedded within whatever moral consensus helps to reproduce social order and

common civility. This line of argument is to be found in an important submission made in 1978 by H. C. Coombs, then chairman of the Australian Conservation Foundation, to the Warlpiri

and Kartangarurru—Kurintji land claim. The land under claim 108

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included the Tanami Wildlife Sanctuary. Would the claimants, if they became ‘traditional owners’, use this land in such a way as to defeat the purposes of the sanctuary? As well as suggesting that the conservation and the Aboriginal interest were, in this case, largely

overlapping, Coombs pointed to a problem that would arise for sanctuary management if the claimants were denied title over land which they were, in any case, continuing to use and to regard as theirs by right. ‘Aboriginal communities and individuals will not feel

morally or legally committed to decisions in which they were not fully involved and... the task of policing a unilaterally imposed settlement will be divisive, destructive and ineffective’ (Aboriginal Land Commissioner, 1979:75). A similar, historically informed view

of indigenous morality appears in a recent critique of government land management programmes. Aboriginal people still denied their rights in land ‘will have little reason to emphasise land management

as an important future priority’, the authors claim (Young et al., 1991:107). These comments are a caution against idealising presumptions.

An aesthetics of nature? In setting out the argument that Cape York is not ‘wilderness’ but

a landscape long humanised by Aboriginal use, Bruce Rigsby remarked his Aboriginal friends’ appreciation of ‘the aesthetic pleasures of bush life’ (1981:3). The status of the ‘aesthetic’ can sometimes be doubtful. Because Rigsby made it clear that Cape York Aboriginal people also named the country, hunted on it, set fire to it, fostered certain useful plant species, painted rocks and

cleared tracks, his argument about ‘humanisation’ did not risk relying on the fact of ‘aesthetic pleasure’ alone. But what is ‘aesthetic pleasure’? How can we relate it to the ethical systems

mentioned above? And what is its relationship to practical knowledge? In 1988 Les Hiatt and Rhys Jones published a paper on ‘Aborigi-

nal conceptions of the workings of nature’ in a bicentennial historians’ symposium Australian Science in the Making. Brutally to

abbreviate their case, they presented Gidjingarli totemism as aesthetic contemplation and useless knowledge. The Gidjingarli’s 109

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‘unified and systematic ontology’, as the authors put it, is at once their ‘religion, philosophy and science’. That ontology is ‘dualistic and totemistic’. It is ‘dualistic’ in the sense that the world consists of two domains. ‘One is inhabited by living human beings, and knowledge of it is gained through the senses. The other is inhabited

by gods, ghosts and demons.’ The first of these domains, ‘the domain of mortals’, is dependent on the second. For the Gidjingarli,

‘enlightenment consists in learning the nature of the dependence’ (Hiatt and Jones, 1988:10). Gidjingarli ontology is ‘totemistic’ in that the second domain’s creatures, embodied in the forms of landscape,

animals and plants, are characters of song, story and graphic images. Groups of people and portions of land are known in terms of their association with one or several of such creatures; it is in this sense that these creatures are totems. The totems of one’s family line and one’s inherited or acquired portions of land are conceived to be one’s ancestors. From a Gidjingarli point of view, according to Hiatt and Jones, to be knowledgeable (or ‘enlightened’) is to be able to sing and enact the stories of the totems of one’s group and place. Hiatt and Jones ask: can we attribute purpose or utility to such knowledge? Their answer, on the whole, is ‘No’. They note that many Aboriginal peoples (not only the Gidjingarli) are known to have practised ‘increase’ rituals whose purpose was to make the land abound in those plants and animals necessary to human life. But is this the only social rationale for totemic knowledge? they ask.

They suggest that the treasuring and performance of narratives about the totemic ancestors were (and probably, in many parts of Australia, remain) ends in themselves. “‘Totems figure in the Aboriginal mind more as objects of contemplation than sources of sustenance.’ They liken this contemplative and ‘epiphanic’ knowledge to some themes of ancient Greek philosophy, expounded most notably by Plato, for whom ‘true knowledge .. . is to be sought

through a contemplation of essences, not by an investigation of appearances’ Cibid.:18).

Sensitive to the diminished reputation of Platonic theories of knowledge, Hiatt and Jones mounta defence of Gidjingarli totemism.

They agree that, as in Plato, the promise of a divine knowledge effected through contemplation is inimical to the western scientific tradition. However, ‘totemic philosophy . . . spawned representa110

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tions of great subtlety and singular beauty’. Non-Aboriginal Austral-

ians are thus indebted to Aborigines for aesthetic rather than scientific reasons. ‘Although Australians of the future may not remember the indigenous inhabitants for their contributions to science, we can be sure that they will always contemplate with wonder and admiration the unique vision of nature enshrined in their art’ Gibid.:19).

This paper is of great rhetorical interest. Appropriate to its published context (an ethnographic preface to a commemoration of colonial science), it restores, in the course of arguing for the aesthetic plenitude of the ‘Aboriginal mind’, a hierarchy of western science Over non-western knowledges, of modern rationalism over ancient belief, and of purposeful utility over delighted contemplation. Jones and Hiatt address their readers as if our common wish

or duty is to ‘remember’ Aborigines rather than to undertake contemporary dialogue with them about land use. It is not what Aborigines know, but what they knew which dignifies them, their

ontology was only an aesthetic preface to western scientific investigation.

Later in this chapter I will suggest an alternative conception of Aboriginal aesthetic pleasure which is closer to what we might call practical knowledge, a knowledge that persists as useful and relevant.

Black against green When land use becomes a political issue, it is no longer possible

merely to speculate, on the basis of ethnography or any other evidence, about the ancient land-use values or aesthetics of ‘Aboriginality’. Certain political events have thrown conservation-

ists into dialogues with indigenous people, dialogues for which they may sometimes have been ill prepared by the kind of cultural generalisations I have just surveyed. In the Alligator Rivers region of the Northern Territory, there

emerged in the 1970s a three-way clash between traditional Aboriginal owners, mining companies wishing to exploit a number of large uranium deposits, and conservationists impressed by the region’s magnificent natural heritage qualities and appalled by the nuclear industry’s global hazards. The Aboriginal owners wanted 111

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legal ownership of their land; it had been part of the old Arnhem Land ‘reserve’ since 1930, and now they wished to bring it under the

strong form of title allowed in the Aboriginal Land Rights Act. Conservationists wanted a national park, and miners wished to extract minerals and construct a town to house and to service their employees. According to one observer, the outcome was ‘a political defeat for the conservation movement’ (Allen, 1981:26). Allen criticises the representation of Aboriginal interests on two grounds. First, he asserts that the Northern Land Council and the Oenpelli Council failed to convey ‘many Aboriginal viewpoints’

(ibid.:30). Unfortunately he does not elaborate on that remark, though his argument implies that the point of view which became marginalised was the local Aborigines’ long-standing hostility to uranium mining in the region Cibid.:37). Second, Allen criticises conservation activists for relying too much on such Aboriginal Opposition; they were insensitive to the compromised and divided character of the Northern Land Council, and insensitive also to the

fact that a small group of local Aboriginal people were finding themselves under unprecedented pressures from all parties— ‘ripped apart as they were bombarded with propaganda’ Cibid.:39). With the traditional owners positioned as the frontline troops of the conservationists, the mining industry was inspired to lobby against the land rights legislation itself. The Aboriginal point of view, as Allen represents it, was that both miners and conservationists ‘were domineering and manipulative, seeking to use Aborigines as pawns in their own struggles and for their own European-designated ends’ (ibid.:40; and see Schrire, 1985). Tasmanian Aborigine Michael Mansell has criticised those who championed the Franklin River and who helped to save it in 1983 from

being dammed. ‘For conservationists there was no need to seek Aboriginal approval to defend the Franklin . . . That is not to say they ignored Aboriginals completely. Under the dubious heading of “Prehistory”, Aboriginal sites rated a mention’ (Mansell, 1990:103).

When Queensland’s Douglas Shire Council began to upgrade a

rainforest track to a road in 1983-84, conservationists all over Australia lobbied and demonstrated their opposition. Among other

objections, they pointed out that several sites sacred to local Aborigines, the Kuku-Yalanji people, would be interfered with. Conservationists were therefore surprised when Kuku-Yalanji 112

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spokespeople welcomed the prospect of a better road. To show why conservationists found it difficult to win the Kuku-Yalanji to their cause, Chris Anderson draws attention to political traditions among the Kuku-Yalanji. These people consist of a series of ‘mobs’ or jawunkarra, identified with particular tracts of land. Within each ‘mob’ strong men of different clans vied to be bosses or majamaja. Since Europeans began to inhabit the region, mobs and bosses have established more or less stable and very localised relationships with

particular European individuals, enterprises and households. In these relationships, a long-staying European could be a kind of ‘boss’ too, offering certain resources to the mob which established some kind of working relationship with him, a ‘reasonably symbiotic relationship’, in Anderson’s words (1989:223). Anderson argues

that conservationists have yet to find a place in this enduring, if informal, political framework of European—Kuku-Yalanji interac-

tion. Because they have never needed to engage with the local mobs, their ideas about ‘Aborigines’ tend to be rather abstract and

not based on familiarity with powerful Kuku-Yalanji men and women. To the Kuku-Yalanji, the national movement against the road was identified with these new settlers and their alien, unfamiliar and economically self-contained ways. Anderson’s lesson for conservationists is this: forget general ideas about Aboriginal culture and world-views, and get to know the local political structures, customs and personalities. By not engaging in

the consultation that would generate such local knowledge, nonAboriginal conservationists are at risk of appearing, to Aborigines,

to be just another variation on a colonial theme. When the Queensland Wet Tropical Rainforests were proposed for World Heritage listing in 1987, Aborigines of the Yarrabah community,

outside Cairns, were apparently not pleased. They had been planning to win some economic independence for themselves by logging the local forest. Would the Plan of Management which ensued from World Heritage listing allow them to log? According to Frank Brennan’s account of this contretemps, the then Minister for

the Environment, Senator Richardson, consulted the Yarrabah Council only very late in his dealings with the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), a year after the first approach from the Yarrabah people. The ill feeling that

such overlooking of their interests occasioned among Yarrabah 113

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councillors was eventually placated by promises of Commonwealth government aid, including the upgrading of the Yarrabah sawmill (Brennan, 1992a:75-8).

The career of one politically active person, H. C. Coombs, illustrates the possibility and the necessity of moving from general

accounts of ‘Aboriginality’ to an engagement with the land use wishes of particular Aboriginal people. Coombs was among the first to see prospects of a ‘Green—Black’ alliance, writing in 1970 that ‘the Aboriginal was conservative and a conservationist’ (Coombs, 1978: 26). He reported research showing that, when living as hunters and

gatherers, Aboriginal people had exploited natural resources in such a way as to permit their regeneration. This was partly an effect of ‘the inadequacy of their technology’, for the ‘Aboriginal had only fire and the dingo with which to impose his will on the world’. But

Aboriginal culture also grounded their conservationism. Seeing themselves ‘as a part of nature rather than its antagonists, cooperating with their environment rather than attempting to subdue it’, Aborigines enjoyed a materially austere ‘life in harmony with their environment’ (Coombs, 1978:26, 28). Addressing an audience of economists on ‘the quality of life and its assessment’ in 1977, Coombs discussed with more careful realism

the ‘relevance’ of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle: it illustrated, in simple form, that human behaviour can and must adapt to environmental contingency. However, he did not idealise the way Aborigi-

nes once lived. Indeed, there were aspects of the society which were brutal and ruthless

... The means by which population growth was limited seem callous and inhuman and the treatment of women was often degrading. Violence in personal and family feuds and in interclan strife occurred and was often destructive. Apart from such violence, relations between different tribal groupings were more often marked by suspicion and distrust than by cooperation and friendliness. (Coombs, 1990:115)

Nevertheless, the fact that Aboriginal people were directly involved with Nature emerges as something admirable—a demon-

stration that both physical and psychic needs can be met by an economy adapted both technically and politically to the physical world. The pre-invasion social organisation of Aborigines, he 114

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suggests, can be understood as a means of apportioning collective

responsibilities for Nature to particular families and individuals belonging to particular tracts of ‘country’. Their life had thus evolved, both technically and politically, to ‘sustainable’ forms (ibid.:97-9). But what of the Aboriginal present? Coombs has for many years acknowledged that Aboriginal people have become environmentally destructive because they live a more ‘sedentarised’ life in larger aggregations (1978:151, 188).

This threat will be intensified as the groups become more dependent on motor vehicles, European-style stores, fire-arms

and other gadgetry, as their exploitation of the indigenous physical and biological resources becomes more intense, and as their numbers grow as a result of their extraordinarily high net reproduction ratio. Cibid.:151—2)

The outstation movement (decentralisation away from missions and settlements, back into smaller family groups) was therefore to be encouraged, as it ameliorated some of these regressive tendencies. Coombs and his colleagues spent much of the 1980s surveying the possibilities of arresting the degradation of land in the Kimberley and of enhancing the roles of Kimberley Aborigines as owners,

managers and planners. Their final report, Land of Promises, endorses Aborigines’ bid for land rights, declaring that Aborigines’ ‘concept of responsibility for the land has much in common with contemporary principles of sustainable development’ (Coombs et al., 1989:9). Later in their report, they are more cautious and support pastoral lease acquisition provided the new owners’ ‘purposes are

compatible with the preservation or restoration of the land’s productive capacity’ Cibid.:91). That is, contemporary Aboriginal culture in the Kimberley, while ‘innovative, flexible and pragmatic’, should not simply be assumed to be in a sustainable relationship with the environment. Cattle-raising is a major part of the Kimberley’s colonial heritage of land degradation. Erich Kolig suggests that Aborigines now take pastoralism as seriously as they take ‘the Dreamtime’. What may have been seen initially as an alien and incomprehensible activity, seems fairly early on to have been whole-heartedly embraced by Aborigines. By now it has the aura of sanctified, 115

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time honoured activity which has almost completely dislodged whatever faint memories of hunting and gathering they have. (Kolig, 1987:125)

Coombs and his colleagues came to a similar conclusion. ‘Where change has the appearance of being “natural”’, they cautioned,

Aborigines are more likely to accept it... Thus the progressive degradation of grazed lands in the Ord River catchment region seems to be accepted as ‘natural’. It may be that Aboriginal people are aware of the degradation and its causes but ‘play them down’ because they too wish to use the land for cattle pasturing.

Aborigines in the region appear to accept the presence of introduced animals, some of which have become feral, particularly cattle, donkeys and horses. One reason is that some of these animals have helped fill gaps in the Aboriginal diet previously

held by native species now threatened or extinct. (Coombs, 1989:9)

These representations of contemporary Aboriginal ideas about land

use are informed by history and marked by uncertainty. For the culture being reported is reducible neither to some anthropological model of ‘tradition’ nor to economists’ notions of economic rationality. ‘When Aborigines have a chance to acquire or occupy a pastoral property they seize it irrespective of the condition of the land or its commercial potential. This is seen as a chance to reestablish their relationship with the land in terms of Aboriginal ownership, control and stewardship. The land will be used as a home for those of the traditional owners and their relatives who can and wish to return to it, as a focus for their religious and subsistence activities, as a place for their kin from town to visit, as a source of food and other bush resources and for the education of the young. These considerations may be as pertinent as the intention to raise

cattle’ Gibid.:91). Even when cattle-raising is not high among Aboriginal priorities, their attitudes toward regeneration and land use diversification should not be taken for granted. Conservationists’ programmes to eliminate feral animals are not assured of a welcome, and nor have Aboriginal people resolved their views towards the possible commercial exploitation of indigenous animals (ibid.:93). 116

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In short, Land of Promises sets out the potential for an alliance

between Kimberley Aborigines and the advocates of a more balanced and sustainable strategy of regional land use. As Coombs and his colleagues see it, the Aboriginal interest is shaped but not entirely determined by Aborigines’ experiences as cattle workers and as consumers of introduced animal species. They imply that the Aboriginal perspective is open to continuous definition, and will be further shaped by cooperative research with ecologists and through a more effective participation by Aboriginal people in regional land use planning.

Narrating nature’s history What drives this chapter's movement from ‘cosmology’ (totemism

as moral system and as aesthetic contemplation) to a more defensible (contemporary and practical) notion of the ‘aesthetic’ is a necessary insistence on the historical particularities of ‘culture’. The Kimberley materials I have cited suggest that ‘culture’ might

be thought of as comprising at least two kinds of thing: new technologies around which a way of life is built (the cattle station,

for example) and a new sense of the orderliness, despite some changes, of social being and of nature itself. This sense of an underlying order may, in turn, be thought of as spiritual and aesthetic. The world is still animated and imbued with ancestral

presences; and its shape and order are available to sensory experience, to be enjoyed as well as endured. Aboriginal people are not the only ones to experience ‘Nature’ as ‘aesthetic’. Non-Aboriginal thinking about ‘Nature’, however rigorously scientific, also remains, to some degree, poetic and

metaphoric. The same can be said of our thinking about ‘Aboriginality’. Put the two themes together and you have a potently poetic discourse. Taylor reminds us that ‘the concept of naturalness

is implicit in all attempts to assess humanity’s role in landscape change’ (1990:411). She finds immense confusion in the use of ‘naturalness’; and ‘nowhere is there more confusion associated with the use of the terms “natural landscape”, “natural ecosystem” and

“natural vegetation” than in Australia’ Gibid.:412). In particular, ecologists working in Australia have commonly viewed as ‘natural’ a landscape much transformed by Aboriginal use. 117

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Lesley Head (1990, 1991) has drawn lessons for conservationists from the different summary models of Australian ‘prehistory’ now available. Some scholars point to an intensification of Aboriginal settlement patterns as recently as 4000-5000 years ago. Others claim

to identify Aborigines’ transitions, in some regions, to more complex networks of economic and political co-operation; and others question models of linear trends in social organisation and land use, arguing for short-term dynamism and contingent variability in these features of Aboriginal life. Paleontologists debate the relative contributions made by Aborigines and climatic change to the extinction of many large animal species and to the contraction of certain floral communities, including Araucarian rainforests. These changes are coterminous with the known period of Aboriginal occupation, namely the last 50 000 years (Head, 1991). According to Head, these advances in research should prompt us to question the descriptive terms and imagery we use. Is there in Australia

any ‘wilderness—any Nature untouched by human hand? And we should be sceptical, she urges, of a Romantic view that Aborigines always lived ‘in harmony with nature’. Contemporary Aborigines are at risk of being judged, to their political disadvantage, a degeneration from such ‘natural men’. The ‘harmony with Nature’ argument can lead one to exaggerate the ‘conservationist’ traditions of Aboriginal people. In Head’s view, the sustainable relationship with the environment achieved

by Aboriginal people has had ‘more to do with technological and population limitations, in association with detailed local knowledge, than with people being inherently conservationists’ (1990:452; and see Sackett, 1992).

How we might characterise ‘Aborigines’ as actors within a narrative history of Australian landscape depends partly on the narrator’s choice of time-scale. That is, if a midterm view (over hundreds of years) is taken, Australia’s natural landscapes apparently were in a steady state for at least several millenia [sic] before the European invasion. With a shortterm view (one to tens of years) .. . this steady state can be seen

as a series of sudden and extreme local fluctuations about a notional mean state as the natural landscapes responded to and recovered from human-generated (i.e. Aboriginal) and other 118

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kinds of natural disturbance (e.g. fire, flood, drought, etc.). With a long-term view of thousands of years, the steady state disap-

pears, to be replaced by a pattern of relatively slow but major landscape changes on a continental scale caused by global climatic events and Aboriginal land use practices. (Taylor, 1990:414~-15)

What is a park? In 1979 the Australian Conservation Foundation’s (ACF) second

national wilderness conference celebrated and advocated The Value of National Parks (Messer and Mosley, 1980). Only one address, C. W. Bonython on ‘Outback Australia’, mentioned the indigenous interest; he welcomed the possibility that Aborigines who had recently leased Kakadu National Park to the Commonwealth might also participate in the park’s management. But Bonython went on to warn that park regulations permitting Aboriginal hunting would have to be revised should Aborigines adopt modern hunting technology. When Judith Wright mentioned Aborigines at this conference, it was to argue that Australians’ fear of wilderness, once based partly on the possibility of murderous

clashes with Aborigines, was now abating, for ‘the last of the Aborigines, of the bushrangers, and even of almost all the cattleduffers have now been cleared from the bush’ (Wright, 1991:23). Two years later she found Aboriginality in the landscape when her

Preface to the ACF’s Tasmanian Wilderness Calendar of 1981 (reprinted in ibid.:29-30) evoked Australia as ‘a haunted country’. Her point then bespoke a familiar literary sensibility: Tasmania’s oft-

remarked ‘Gothic’ atmosphere (Davidson, 1989), and the Jindyworobak poets’ sense of the numinous land. For the Jindyworobaks (a group who displayed a self-consciously nationalist tendency in Australian writing, from the 1930s to the 1960s) the Aborigines’ tragic passing warranted invocations of their spirits and

quotation of their ancient language, thus lending a singular mystique and grandeur to poets’ versions of Australia’s lyric tongue. Wright, an advocate of both ‘wilderness’ and Aboriginal land rights, did not remain content with such well-worn conceits. In 1983

119

, After Mabo she brought contemporary Blacks and conservationists together in an essay for the ACF journal Habitat called ‘Whose country is it anyway? (ibid.:47-9). Cautiously affirming that ‘traditional Aboriginal attitudes to land are not very different to those of the most

enlightened conservationists’ Cibid.:47, my emphasis), she reminded ACF readers that national parks alienated Aboriginal land. This had been demonstrated in 1979, when the Aboriginal Land Commissioner ruled that the Pitjantjatjara people could not claim Ayers Rock National Park because the title to the park was held already by the director of the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service (ANPWS). Wright found not only that her own values were thus in tension, but also that the two political movements through which she advanced her values could be rivals.

The Hawke government took up the Ayers Rock issue and in 1983 began to negotiate with the traditional owners a title and leaseback. The owners insisted on their rights of park residence and hunting, and won substantial powers over the framing and implementation of Uluru/Kata Tjuta’s Plan of Management (Alexander,

1991; Rowse, 1991). Two of the non-Aboriginal advisers of the park’s owners at that time, Ross Johnston and Philip Toyne, have recently reminded Habitatreaders of Wright’s point, that is, that ‘the creation of national parks, wilderness areas or wildlife sanctuaries

could be every bit as threatening and destructive to Aboriginal people as were the pastoral stations or the farms of past generations’ (Toyne and Johnston, 1991:9). They applaud the current ‘attempts

.. . to acknowledge Aboriginal ownership; to reinforce culture which can restore an equilibrium with the natural world; and to enlist the skills of Indigenous people in managing conservation areas and wildlife’ Gbid.). Lesley Head Gwho might dispute Toyne and Johnston’s phrase ‘restore an equilibrium’) has given this view a more philosophical formulation, arguing that we should ‘increase

our awareness of cultural as well as natural heritage. The logical

outcome of such a stance is a recognition of the concept of inhabited national parks’ (Head, 1990:453). Such recent rethinking of the notion of a national park has yet to become national policy, according to a survey published in 1992 (Allen and Altman, 1992).

In 1991 only four out of Australia’s eight States and Territories (Northern Territory, Western Australia, Queensland and the Austral120

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ian Capital Territory) gave Aborigines the right to forage in national

parks; with specific proclamation, they could do so in South Australian parks. Aborigines owned parks only in the Northern Territory, and were soon to be enabled to do so in New South Wales

and Queensland. Only in the Northern Territory and Queensland were Aborigines ‘involved in park management’, though legislation to effect this was either proposed or in draft in New South Wales, Western Australia and South Australia Gbid.:Table 12.1). The New South Wales Bill has been accused of compromising the Aboriginal

interest (Lipman and Don, 1993). Policies on these matters are developing too quickly to enable a definitive review. Let me step back from policies, and return to representations. Aboriginal people have been adapting their land use practices, values and aesthetics to the new land uses to which they have been admitted by the colonists. We have seen some accounts of Kimberley Aborigines’ participation in the cattle industry. How are they

adapting to the land use opportunities afforded by their joint management of national parks?

Parks, wilderness and fire A small but important literature has begun to emerge from the experiments in joint management being pursued at Kakadu and Uluru National Parks. At Uluru, ANPWS managers and Anangu (local

Aborigines) have been working together on a number of projects, such as regulating tourist access, developing displays of Anangu culture, and, with CSIRO scientists, surveying the park’s biological features. In a recently completed survey of vertebrate fauna, local Aborigines (Anangu) and scientists combined their knowledge of species and habitats (Baker and Mutitjulu Community, 1992). This partnership is being promoted as exemplary of the dual agency of science and tradition, as in the title of their recent paper in Search, ‘Traditional Knowledge + Ecological Survey = Better Land Management’ (Reid et al., 1992). In characterising Aboriginal involvement

the researchers question the term ‘informants’. ‘Anangu who assisted in the survey were paid at a higher rate specified as “traditional consultancy” rather than at the typical day labour rate’ (Baker, Woenne-Green and the Mutitjulu Community, 1993:79). The benefits, to Anangu, of their involvement were said to be: 121

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reaffirmation of the worth of the specialist knowledge of Anangu;

opportunities to teach non-Aboriginal people appropriate landmanagement techniques; direct economic benefits from employment; training in (non-Aboriginal) management and scientific skills; further employment arising from the study’s recommendations; encouragement of younger people within Anangu society

to value traditional knowledge and culture, as well as direct teaching which occurred on-site; better land management resulting from this research. (Reid et al., 1992:250) The agency and interests of some Aboriginal land users thus appear

to have become more complex where a decolonising political framework allows. As the project reports remind us, these Anangu comprise a majority on the Uluru Board. At Kakadu, according to Lewis (1989, 1992), the big cultural and management issue has been fire. Park staff were at first uneasy with local Aboriginal techniques of firing the country, though the first (1980) plan of management committed park staff to maintaining a burning regime, with Aboriginal co-operation. Since the second plan of management in 1986, he reports, staff have been more enthusiastic about burning, but with some continuing reservations. NonAboriginal people, he points out, have had to overcome a deeply held settler view that fire is basically destructive; from the point of view of sound management, Aboriginal firing also seems rather ad hoc and unsystematic (Lewis, 1989:943—5). These may turn out to be short-term problems amenable to co-operative solution. Lewis’s papers raise an issue that goes beyond the details of park management, ‘What do we mean by “technology”?’ He suggests that non-Aboriginal Australians have tended to see Aboriginal technology in narrowly material terms. But when the material culture of Aborigines changed (as it undoubtedly did), their practical knowledge of country and seasons was not necessarily forgotten. Contemporary Aboriginal residents, while not appearing to be ‘traditional’, possess more knowledge relevant to park management than many non-Aboriginal staff realise. That knowledge, Lewis suggests, is their ‘technical’ competence and should be recognised as such. In what terms can this ‘competence’ be represented? Putting it crudely, when Aborigines set fire to the country, do they ‘know’

what they are doing? If the answer is ‘yes’, then what kind of 122

5 Actors in a Landscape knowledge is it? At least one scientist of the region, the CSIRO’s Dick Braithwaite, doubts that there is a retrievable tradition of indigenous

‘knowledge’. The key question for research, he suggests, is to identify the pattern of burning [‘mosaic’] which best preserves the

flora and fauna. ‘Aboriginal knowledge can never tell us much about that mosaic’, he argues, because ‘the traditional patch mosaic

was an emergent property of the quasi-independent actions of about 2000 individuals [in the Alligator Rivers region)’ (Braithwaite, 1992:114). To formulate a knowledge of the appropriate mosaic will

require ‘well-designed, ecological experiments’ (Braithwaite, 1991:248). For those wishing to write Aboriginal agency back into the landscape, this issue of the relationship between ‘knowledge’ and ‘behaviour’ has turned out to be surprisingly delicate.

Scientific awareness that Aborigines have actively shaped the landscape with fire dates only from the late 1950s. In 1957 J. B. Cleland wrote that he knew ‘nothing to suggest that .. . firing by the Aborigines has altered the covering of vegetation, for instance, of open grassy areas, replacing forest, or by the burnt country being especially subject to wind erosion’ (1957:151). But two years later Tindale warily began to reverse this orthodoxy, suggesting that ‘in using the firestick, man played the same role as that long time fire-

maker of Nature, lightning .. . Thus man probably has had a significant hand in the moulding of the present configuration of parts of Australia’ (1959:42, my emphasis). Nine years later Rhys Jones (1969) abandoned words such as ‘probably’ and coined the influential, agency-promoting phrase, ‘fire-stick farmer’. Despite the memorable boldness of this phrase, Jones refused to characterise the ‘knowledge’ possessed by fire-stick farmers. ‘It is in some ways as irrelevant to me whether or not the ancient Aborigines knew what they were doing as it is to the palaeontologists whether or not the giraffe knew why his neck was growing’ (1969:227). In

a later article Jones referred to ‘their own knowledge of the relationship between fire and the environment’ (1980:15), but again did not characterise that ‘knowledge’. In 1975, another noted scholar of Aboriginal fire practices referred to Aborigines of south-

west Australia as ‘skilled developers’ and ‘ecologists’ (Hallam, 1975:05, 15, 38), but she characterised somewhat awkwardly the relationship between knowledge and action. ‘The importance and antiquity of fire in the ritual, as in the extractive, schema emphasises 123

After Mabo

that here we have not two systems but one, in which symbolic activity is meshed inextricably into the knotted design of total activity’ Gbid.:97). Yes, but did they know what they were doing?

Geoffrey Blainey was characteristically alert to this issue of narrative representation. In Triumph of the Nomads (1975) he suggests that the ancient firers were like ‘farmers’; as ‘cultivators’ they were clear, in their own fashion, as to the connection between firing the country and appropriating its bounties. ‘It is doubtful’, he

continues,

whether aboriginals ever expressed the logical sequence of destruction and growth which the fire initiated: if they did express it, it was more in terms of their convention of causation.

They simply knew that the burning was effective and they continued to light grass fires year after year. Nevertheless, simply because their own explanations of their fires are, by our criteria, not necessarily coherent, it would be unfair to conclude that they

did not know what they were doing. (1975:78)

Blainey’s point seems to be that the issue of representation is ultimately an ethical one—being ‘fair—whether or not we understand or can formulate ‘their convention of causation’. David Horton, though sceptical of some aspects of the ‘firestick

farming’ argument, implies that Aboriginal people understood ‘community ecology’, that is, ‘the characteristics of different habitats

on a seasonal basis and on a long term basis’, including ‘an understanding of the long term effects of fire’. It is clear that there was this understanding—come back one year after a fire in woodland and there will be kangaroos, and many plants with fruit, two years after a fire and wattles are beginning

to produce seed and native rodents are beginning to become abundant. After about five or ten years some small wallabies will be available, and wattles will be mature and in mature woodland after perhaps twenty years small wallabies, possums and bandicoots are available. (Horton, 1982:248)

Josephine Flood’s recent summary of the topic, ‘Fire-Stick Farmers’ (1989), shows another way to deal with this problem of representation. Opening with the observation that ‘there were many 124

5 Actors in a Landscape

reasons for the extensive burning’ (1989:223), she then mentions signalling, clearing tracks, killing snakes, and hunting animals. She

goes on to write of the other effects of burning, such as plant regeneration, but refrains from suggesting that these effects were reasoned or intended by the firers. However, Flood points to a kind of solution to this non-Aboriginal problem of representation. The

Anbara people of Arnhem Land, she reports, have stated their reasons for lighting fires. ‘Fire was seen as necessary to clean up the

country, and they regarded un-burnt grassland as neglected’ (ibid.:224).

This notion of ‘cleaning up the country’ was already in the literature. Jones and Meehan’s work with Anbara people in Arnhem Land in the 1970s Gones 1980) had made them aware of the notion of ‘cleaning’ and Dick Kimber (1983:40) had reported ‘cleaning’ to be a term in use in the 1970s among arid-zone Aboriginal people.

Lewis reports that, to Kakadu’s Aborigines, country which is overburdened with combustible plants and grasses is ‘dirty’ and requires ‘cleaning’.

What are aesthetically unpleasing, impractical, and undesirable for Aborigines are over-aged forests, largely unproductive stands of vegetation, ‘dirty’ with build-ups of ground litter and understory

growth, resulting in what some Aborigines called ‘rubbish country’. Aborigines do not consider burnt areas as having been destroyed nor are they aesthetically unpleasing; quite the contrary. (Lewis, 1992:22)

This Aboriginal English word ‘cleaning’ is turning out to be important. In my understanding, it has both moral and aesthetic connotations. Although non-Aboriginal writers have not found it possible to elucidate Aborigines’ understanding of fire mosaics as a conservation technique (and even, in some cases, doubt that such ‘knowledge’ existed), at least Aborigines themselves have provided

us with a term which condenses and summarises their burning imperative. We might call this their ‘practical aesthetics of country’;

it is a far cry from the ‘aesthetics’ evoked by Hiatt and Jones as magnificently useless contemplation. ‘Clean’ may not be the only Aboriginal English word produced by Aboriginal people to account for their own agency as land 125

After Mabo

managers. Debbie Bird Rose reports that Victoria River country Cdegraded’, in the western scientific sense, by pastoralism) was termed ‘wild’ by her friend Daly Pulkara. He contrasted it with other ‘quiet’ country which had been well looked after (1988:386).

The terms in which Aborigines narrate their land-management

practical aesthetic may be presented as a table of oppositions between positive and negative conditions of country (with terms from the non-Aboriginal world-view, as suggested by Rose, in

italics): : Positive Negative

clean dirty, rubbish

quiet wild wilderness degraded natural spoilt

We can see a major inconsistency between Aboriginal aesthetic/ moral dichotomies and those of non-Aborigines. As Rose points out, the Aboriginal English word ‘wild’ (negative) is in tension with the standard English word ‘wilderness’ (positive). We (non-Aborigines) might value ‘wilderness’ because it has not been tamed or domes-

ticated; Aboriginal people of the Victoria River region reportedly think that ‘wild’ country should be made ‘quiet’ by appropriate human intervention. Two different evaluations of human activity are implied: one (non-Aboriginal) is suspicious of human transformations; the other (Aboriginal) welcomes them. Yet non-Aboriginal

civilisation also values using and not ‘wasting’ natural resources; and in its zeal to use and not waste, non-Aboriginal culture has filled terra nullius with human activity, much of which we now regret as destructive. Meanwhile, Aboriginal people, sometimes mistakenly represented as part of Nature, are seeking the legal powers to persist in their humanisation of the land. I do not need to labour the ironies of these contrasts.

Yet these are not fixed and unbridgeable cultural differences.

Non-Australians could regard their national parks not just as reserves for species and sites of spectacular enjoyment, but also as

Aboriginal-owned sites of cultural experiment—experiments in practical aesthetics. The ‘hypothesis’ being ‘tested’ is a hypothesis 126

5 Actors in a Landscape

of convergence. The European aesthetic which mistakenly exalts ‘wilderness’ can give way to a fully humanised concept of ‘the natural’; Aboriginal people, who seek to make ‘quiet’ ‘the wild’ and to ‘clean’ the country back to its humanised best condition, will find something to value in the ecological sciences. We might get better country from that.

127

Afterword

I want to say something about this book’s ‘politics of representation’.

What I have tried to cover does not amount to a system of knowledge, nor is it the ‘core’ or the ‘essentials’ of a field of study called ‘Aboriginal studies’. ‘Aboriginal studies’ comprises many fields of study; an attempt to collate these knowledges systematically and comprehensively is under way elsewhere, an ‘encyclopedia’ to be published by Aboriginal Studies Press. Nor is this book intended to tell readers ‘what Aborigines are like’ (recall the subtitle of early editions of A. P. Elkin’s The Australian Aborigines. ‘how to understand them’). None the less, I welcome readers who want to ‘find out more about Aboriginal culture’, for two reasons. First, I have referenced my essays as richly as I can, in order to point readers to books, articles and interviews which they might find it interesting to read. I see my book as one possible bridge over

a gap separating the discussions available in newspapers and electronic media from the more esoteric knowledges stored in academic libraries. (Respect for cartography inhibits my touting such an unsystematic book as a ‘map’.)

Secondly, I have tried to show that to ‘find out more about Aboriginal culture’ requires us to think hard about how we could

even frame our curiosity in those terms. A new or renewed intellectual self-consciousness among those ‘interested in Aborigi-

nes’ may be one effect of these essays. Representations of 128

Afterword

‘Aboriginality’ are artefacts of the process of colonising them; ‘intellectual self-consciousness’ is thus an awareness of one’s place

in that process, a historical and cultural self-consciousness. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers (or artists or film-makers) and Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readers of what they write, paint or shoot, have the opportunity (sometimes the urgent necessity) to

puzzle over their place in Australia’s colonial history, to ponder what it means to be aware of ‘Aboriginality’, whether that be ‘their Aboriginality’ or ‘my Aboriginality. My book is not addressed to non-indigenous Australians, about indigenous Australians; it is for

both categories of reader, readers who are seeking ways to make sense of the ongoing colonial encounter which we call ‘Australia’.

Most of the material covered in the foregoing essays is the product of non-Aboriginal research about Aborigines and Islanders.

As reporter of such ‘findings’, am I not reproducing an all too familiar structure in which ‘we’ (non-Aboriginal writer and implied reader) possess a self-assured knowledge of ‘them’ (Aborigines)? Following Edward Said’s notion of ‘Orientalism’ (Said, 1978), a few

writers have begun to depict as ‘Aboriginalism’ this structure of colonial privilege, this tradition of scholarly (and not so scholarly) objectification of the indigenous (Hodge, 1990; Hodge and Mishra, 1991, 1992, 1993; Attwood, 1992b). Let me explain how I see my work in relation to their critiques. Hodge writes that ‘Aboriginalism’ depicts ‘Aboriginals as “primitive”, in a binary opposition to “civilised”’ (1990:202). A ‘privileged

class of interpreters’ (such as anthropologists) mediate an ‘Aboriginality’ to a non-Aboriginal public which needs expert help

to understand the ‘primitive’ mysteries of Aboriginal culture. Aborigines themselves are effectively silenced by the currency and

academic prestige of the ‘Aboriginality’ expounded by experts. Hodge and Mishra concede that though ‘Aboriginalism’ has effectively disallowed Aborigines’ self-representation, it has also made it much harder for Australians simply to forget that Aborigines exist. Aborigines’ struggles would have been even more difficult without

Aboriginalist allies, and the political value of ‘Aboriginalism’ to Aboriginal emancipation has changed according to historical cir-

cumstance and according to different readings of what the Aboriginalists were saying (Hodge and Mishra, 1991:29~30, 47-8). 129

After Mabo

They also acknowledge the good intentions of many ‘Aboriginalists —

‘artists, missionaries and anthropologists motivated by idealism and good will’ (1993:615). But they stand by their view that ‘its vague positivities commonly are cancelled out by the negative meanings that are strongly encoded in it: smugness and sense of superiority,

racist stereotypes, and assertion of rights of ownership in the intellectual and cultural sphere to match power in the political and economic sphere’ (1991:27). A tone of suspicion and even ethical disdain therefore marks many of Hodge and Mishra’s references to ‘Aboriginalism’ (ibid.:61, 63-4, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 98, 102, 107, 113).

What alternative to Aboriginalism can they propose? Their answer appears to be that a more open-ended and historically sensitive notion of ‘Aboriginality’ would be far less inhibiting of Aboriginal people who diversely seek to say who they are and what they want. But, as they admitted to a critical reviewer, there is a ‘contradiction at the core of our enterprise’ (Hodge and Mishra, 1992:883) because they cannot write from ‘outside’ Aboriginalism. Post-structuralism ‘has exposed the politics of textuality to the analytic gaze, problematizing the acts of reading and writing so thoroughly that there is no longer a place outside textuality and

outside politics that can guarantee the innocence of any act of writing’ (ibid.:881).

Bain Attwood also wishes to make an ethical case against ‘Aboriginalism’, referring to (but not naming) ‘European scholars who claim that the indigenous peoples cannot represent themselves

and must therefore be represented by experts who know more about Aborigines than they know about themselves’ (1992b:i). He enjoins ‘those in the field of Aboriginal studies’ to do their work differently: first, to be more modest, provisional and tentative in their claims for their work as ‘truth’; second, to commit themselves vigorously to defending ‘those ideas and perspectives which one considers to be more valuable and more important’; third, to oppose ‘orthodox systems of knowledge’, to ‘overturn Aboriginalist struc-

tures of power and knowledge’; and fourth, to consult and collaborate with Aboriginal people Cibid.:xiv—xv). Like Hodge and

Mishra, Attwood calls for historical sensitivity to the colonial circumstances shaping and reshaping representations of Aborigines. But Attwood’s prescriptions would be more interesting to think 130

Afterword

about had he considered the implicit tensions among them; it’s not easy being good.

Who could deny the ethical attractiveness of the critique of ‘Aboriginalism’? But the analytical value of the term is not so evident. In these authors’ works ‘Aboriginalism’ is deployed at a high level of generality. Analytically blunt, the term becomes little more than an ethical and political gesture of support for indigenous self-representation. To gather so many representations of indigenous Australians under the label ‘Aboriginalism’ does little to illuminate their particular qualities. Hodge and Mishra’s book is

most valuable when the authors leave themselves open to the complexity of this or that ‘Aboriginalist’ text, when they show that

‘Aboriginalism’ has been a complex tradition, not only in the knowledges it has generated but also in the ethical and political intentions it has enacted (and see Hodge, 1990:223). When a less cautious Attwood gets to particulars, as in his recent essay on Sally Morgan’s My Place, he demonstrates how a critique of Aboriginalism can also enact Aboriginalism. His bid for analytical rigour (a critical

position not compromised by ‘Aboriginalist’ notions) enables him to write more knowingly of Morgan’s ‘Aboriginality’ than she herself can (Attwood, 1992a).

Introducing Orientalism, Edward Said pointed to the perilous necessity of moving between the particular instance and the general

structure of Orientalist discourse (1978:15—25). ‘The history of Orientalism has both an internal consistency and a highly articulated set of relationships to the dominant culture surrounding it’ (ibid.:22); and ‘all texts are worldly and circumstantial in... ways

that vary from genre to genre, and from historical period to historical period’ (ibid.:23). Ihave taken heart from these sentences.

For example, Chapter 3 seeks to build up an archive of moments in which representations of ‘Aboriginality’ have been entangled,

both necessarily and variously, with commitments to liberaldemocratic practices and values. I also show some intellectual transitions within ‘Aboriginalism’, such as the implicit shift in points of view from the ‘national’ history of Charles Rowley to the ‘ethno-

history’ of Peter Read, a move affected by emerging political conditions and changed sources of theoretical inspiration. Moreover,

I have come to appreciate the significance of generic differences 131

After Mabo

among representations by and of Aborigines. For example, in Chapter 1, I suggest that the various understandings of colonialism to be found in Aboriginal oral history can be better understood as generic than as individual differences of viewpoint; and in Chapter 41 point to generic differences, between ethnography and autobiography, in the renderings of dispersed networks of kin. I have also suggested, in Chapters 1 and 5, that certain issues of representation can be usefully specified as problems of narration. In short, the basis of my ‘method’—-emergent and eclectic, rather

than preconceived—is, first, to endorse, with a reservation, the critique of cultural essentialism, a critique which goes back, before

Said, to Frantz Fanon (1967, 1970), and which Gill Cowlishaw (1986) first articulated in relation to the anthropology of Aborigines.

Though IJ accept that indigenous cultures (like all cultures) are historically dynamic, I also know that they remain subject to both hostile and sympathetic portrayals of their ‘essential’ continuities.

‘After all, to put a name to something is to identify its key characteristics and thereby essentialize it’, James Carrier has argued. ‘The problem, then, is not essentialism itself’, he continues, ‘but a failure to be conscious of essentialism, whether it springs from the assumptions with which we approach our subjects or the goals that

motivate our writing’ (1992:207). Second, my exposition empha-

sises the particular and conveys the diversity of a tradition of representations (liberalism, Aboriginalism, indigenous oral tradi-

tions) in order that my critique might minimise its own moral essentialism and remain alert to the possibility that much of my own thinking may be sourced to the very tradition about which I might

be tempted to make summary judgement. In particular, I have sympathetically assessed the relevance of anthropology to an understanding of Australian colonialism. J admire Stephen Muecke’s commitment to the worldliness of the text and to the significance of genre. As I read his remarks on the

emancipation of the indigenous voice, Muecke is clearer than Attwood, Hodge and Mishra about the futility of anyone seeking to speak from ‘outside’ ‘Aboriginalism’. He is more at ease than they

are about even the indigenous writer’s inability to vault ethically over political difficulty. ‘Rather than seeing the text as a place where the desire to speak is liberated, it could be seen as a site of multiple 132

Afterword

constraints pertaining both to form and to contextual relations. These constraints are not negative; they tend to make sure that a text will have a specific application in renegotiating meanings’ (Muecke,

1992:138). To negotiate meanings and ‘subject positions’ (for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal readers) which minimise the pressures of colonisation (can they do more?) requires strategic engage-

ments with ‘Aboriginalism’ in its particulars, I believe, not a generalising ethical dismissal of its ‘complicity with colonialism’.

133

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152

Index

A Basis For Soil Conservation Policy uages, 41, 61-2, 64, 92, see also

in Australia, 105 under individual tribes; mining

A Fortunate Life, 101 and, 60, 77, 107, 111-12; moral

Aboriginal Arts Board, 25 perspectives of, 1, 4, 9-12, 14-15,

Aboriginal Councils and Associations 19-20, 22-3, 99-100, 105, 106-9, see

Act (1976), 54, 63 also moralities; and Nature, 26,

Aboriginal Land Rights Act (NSW) Ch. 5 passim; oral traditions, 5, 9-

(1983), 44; see also land rights 10, 12-16, 18, 40, 43-4, 64-5, 66, Aboriginal Land Rights Act (NT) 86, see also writing; and pastoral (1977), 62, 112; see also land rights industry, 14, 15, 35, 52-3, 115-16;

Aboriginal Provisional Government, and police, 15, 16-20, 49-50, 51,

23 100, 101; political processes

Aboriginal Sobriety Group, 75 among, 17-19, 25, 39-40, 50, 51-

Aboriginal studies, 128 2, 54-7, Ch. 3 passim, 90-1; Aboriginalism, viii, 129-31 psychology of, 11, 17-18, 114;

Aboriginality, see Aborigines sovereignty of, 1, 5, 21, 22-3, 69;

Aborigines, vii; and alcohol, 56, 75- and the state, 54-5, 57-9, 66-8, 716, 79; and child theft, 44-6; and 8, 120-2; survival of, 24, 25-6, 43Christianity, 12-13, 41, 52, 70, 100, 6, 53, 84, 87; and technology, 107, see also religion; and citizenship, 114-15, 119, 122-5; and tourism, 32, 36, 84; clans, 63-6, 69; eco- 86-7; traditions, 78-82, 83-4, 88-9; nomic concerns of, 35-6, 56, 113- tribes, 59-62, 84-5, see also under 16, 121; factions, 71-6; historical individual tribes; ‘urbanisation’ of, viewpoints of, 1-4, 12-16; and 27-8, 54-6, 67, 87, 91-5; in ‘welfare’ history, 117, 130, 132; imprison- institutions, 27-44, 46-7, 50-1, 69ment of, 47-51; incorporation of, 71; women, and male power, 7854, 63, 78; as ‘inmates’, 27, 29-31, 82, 84-5, 98-9, 103; youth, 48-53, 34-41, 42-3: interests of, 58-9, 70- 69, 71, 82, 100-1; see also Anbara; 1, 72-3, 74; kinship, 32-3, 39-41, Bundjalung; Gidjingarli; Jawoyn; 44-7, 48-50, 66-8, 73, 74, 82, 84-5, Kuku-Yalanji; Martu; Murinbata; 93-101, 103; as kitsch, 88; lang- Ngalakan; Ngaliwurru; Ngaring153

Index

man; Ngarrindjerri; Ngiyampaa; Benjamin, Roger, 91 Pintupi; Pitjantjatjara; Wiradjuri; © Bennett, David, 107

Wolmadjari Bennett, Scott, 66, 68

Aborigines Protection Act 1909, 42 Bern, John, 81 Aborigines Protection Board, 42 Berndt, Catherine, 11, 60, 81

Adelaide Central Mission, 75 Berndt, Ronald, 10, 11, 60

Alexander, Lynne, 120 Birdsall, Chris, 93-4 Allen, Harry, 112 Birdsell, Joseph, 60 Allen, Linda, 120 Blackburn, Justice Richard, 7, 8, 21;

Altman, Jon, 120 see also High Court of Australia

Anbara, 125 Blainey, Geoffrey, 124 Anderson, Chris, 52, 91, 113 Blowes, Robert, 104

anthropology, 1, 9-12, 24, 25, 26, 28- | Bohemia, Jack, 15-16 30, 56-7, 60, 68, 76, 78, 80, 86, 89, Bolger, Audrey, 79

107, 129, 132 Bonython, Warren, 119

artistic expression and aesthetic tradi- | Boomalli Co-operative, 92 tions, Aboriginal, 25, 64, 86, 88-93, Brady, Maggie, 52-3

109-11, 125-7; see also writing Braithwaite, Dick, 123 assimilation, theory and practice, 34- | Brennan, Frank, 113-14

6, 41, 43, 44-6, 57, 84 Brennan, Justice Sir Gerard, 6, 8; see

Atkinson Judy, 79 also High Court of Australia Atkinson, Sherry, 45 Brungle, 44 Attwood, Bain, 84, 101-2, 129-31, 132 Bundjalung, 29, 87-8, 92

Australia: history, nationhood and Burbank, Vicky, 67, 82 traditions, 1, 4, 6-9, 20-4, 43, 78-9, Burnum Burnum, 106, 108 111, 129

Australia Council, 25, 86 ‘Captain Cook’ (stories of), 1-4, 5, 12, Australian Broadcasting Commission 13, 14, 15-16; see also Jesus; Kelly,

(ABC), 86 Ned; Queen Victoria

Australian Conservation Foundation Carlton, Jim, 59 |

(ACF), 119-20 Carowra Tank, 41

Australian Law Reform Commission Carrier, James, 132

(ALRC), 82 Chenery, Susan, 93

Australian National Parks and Wildlife | Cherbourg, 40

Service (ANPWS), 120 Christie, Michael, 17

Australian Science in the Making, Cleland, John B., 123

109 Clunies Ross, Margaret, 64

Awiruk Association, 56 Coates, Alison, 52 Ayers Rock, 86-7, 120; see also national Coe, Paul, 5, 22-4

parks; Uluru National Park Colebrook Home, 45 Collmann, Jeff, 54

Bakandji Association, 72-3 Condobolin, 44

Bailey-Harris, Rebecca, 49-51 conservation, politics of, 111-17

Baines, Patricia, 68 Coombs, H. C. ‘Nugget’, 76, 77-8,

Baker, Lynne, 121 108-9, 114-17

Bamilyi, 41 Cootamundra Girls Home, 42, 45 Barwick, Diane, 83-4, 85, 93-4, 99-100 | Coronation Hill, 59

Beckett, Jeremy, 12, 93-4 Cowlishaw, Gill, 132

Bell, Diane, 79-82 Croft, Brenda, 92 154

Index

Cummings, Barbara, 47 Gale, Fay, 24, 49-51 Gaudron, Justice Mary, 7-9; see also

Dagmar, Hans, 73 High Court of Australia

Danayarri, Hobbles, 1-4, 6, 9, 12, 18 genre, 15-16, 18, 93, 101-3, 131-2

Davidson, D. S., 60 Gibson, Merv, 79 Davidson, Jim, 119 Gidjingarli, 109-11

Davis, Jack, 38-40 Gilruth, J. A., 3

Davis, Stephen, 60 Ginibi, Ruby Langford, 101; see also Dawson, Justice Sir Daryl, 6-9; see Langford, Ruby also High Court of Australia God, 9; see also Jesus; religion

de Araugo, Tess, 17 Goffman, Erving, 28, 31-4, 36-7, 39-

de Vries, Nancy, 45 41; see also liberalism Deane, Justice Sir William, 7-9; see | Gondarra, Djiniyini, 108

also High Court of Australia Goodall, Heather, 80, Department of Aboriginal Affairs | Goss, Wayne, 105

Ditton, Pam, 82 ; 120 Dixon, Robert, 61 Habital, , Haebich, Anna, 36 Dodson, Patrick, 108 Don, Karen, 121 ; 63-4, 71, 81 , Hamilton, Annette, ; Hausfeld, R., 28-9 (DAA), 71-3, 74-6

Hallam, Sylvia, 123-4

Donaldson, Tamsin, 41 Don’t Take Your Love to Town, 85-8,

93, 95-101, 103; see also Langford, Head, Lesley, 118, 120

Ruby ’ Hemming, Chris, 92

Doomadgee, 68 Hany, Tes, 11-12, 63, 64, 76-7, 109-11, Dowa, Lynette-Toni, 74-5 High Court of Australia, vii, 2, 4-9, 12Durack, Elizabeth, 21-2

Dussart. Francoise, 91 13, 21, 23, 24; see also Brennan, Justice Sir Gerard; Dawson, Justice

Sir Daryl; Deane, Justice Sir Eckermann, Anna-Katrin, 36, 74-5 William; Gaudron, Justice Mary;

Eddy, John, 1 Mansell, Michael; Reynolds, Henry

Edwards, Coral, 44-5 Hill-Burnett, Jacquetta, 59

Elkin, Adolphus P., 60, 128 history, 7-8, 16-20, 24, 26, 43, 81, 102-

Erambie, 42-4 3, 118-19, 124; see also Aborigines;

Evans, Ray, 17 prehistory Hodge, Bob, 129-30, 132 Fanon, Frantz, 132 Holding, Clyde, 76 Hope Vale, 79

Fels, Marie, 18-20,;; Fesl, Eve, 108 ; Howard, Michael, 57, Flood, Josephine, 124 Foley, Fiona, 92, 93 Huogine kie. 80 Horton, David, 124

Humpy, House and Tin Shed, 72

Franklin, Margaret-Anne, 36 uggins, Jackie, Fremantle Prison, 36

French, Maurice, 16-17, 19 Jawoyn, 59-60, 62

Fried, Morton, 61 Jesus, 13, 15; see also ‘Captain Cook’,

Frog’s Hollow, 42 God, Kelly, Ned; Queen Victoria; Frontier, 21, 24; see also Reynolds, religion

Henry Jigalong, 41 155

Index

Jindyworobaks, 119 McConnel, Ursula, 9-10 Johnston, Elliott, 48-50 McGrath, Anne, 52 Johnston, Ross, 120 McGregor, William, 15 Jolly, Lesley, 81 McLeod, Pauline, 45 Jones, Carolyn, 106 Maddock, Kenneth, 14, 41 Jones, Delmos, 59 Mansell, Michael, 22-4, 112; see also

Jones, Philip, 92 High Court of Australia

Jones, Rhys, 109-11, 123, 125 Martu, 41

Meehan, Betty, 125

Kahlin Compound, 47 Meggitt, Mervyn, 41

Keeffe, Kevin, 58 Memmott, Paul, 72-3

Keen, Ian, 11 Menindee, 41

Kelly, Ned, 13, 15; see also ‘Captain Merlan, Francesca, 60, 81, 90

Cook’; Jesus; Queen Victoria Messer, John, 119

Keon-Cohen, Brian, 4-5 Milliss, Roger, 16 Kleinert, Sylvia, 93 Mishra, Vijay, 129-30, 132

Kimber, Dick, 125 Moffatt, Tracey, 93

Kinchela Boys Home, 42, 45 Moore, Russell, 45 Koepping, Klaus-Peter, 40 Moore River settlement, 36-40 Kolig, Erich, 13, 15, 66, 115-16 moralities, 1-2, 16; ‘moral commun-

Kuku-Yalanji, 112-13 ity’, 1, 6; ‘moral economy’, 12-13; see also Aborigines, moral per-

Lake Tyers, 35 spectives of

land management policies, 105-6, Morgan, Sally, 93, 101-3, 131

111-16, 120-2, 126-7 Mornington Island, 86 Land of Promises, 117 Morphy, Frances, 15

land rights, 1, 3, 13-14, 35, 36, 44,56, | Morphy, Howard, 15, 64-5, 90

61-3, 66, 71, 73, 120-2; see also Mosley, Geoff, 119 Aboriginal Land Rights Act, High Mount Todd, 59 Court of Australia; Warlpiri and Muecke, Stephen, 101, 132-3

Kartangururru-Kurindji Mulvaney, John, 104

Langford, Ruby, vii-viii, 26, 84-8, 93- | Mum Shirl, 86

101, 103 Murinbata, 11

Langton, Marcia, 93 Murray Island, 2, 4 Law of the Land, 21, 22; see also Murrin Bridge, 28, 41 Reynolds, Henry Mutitjulu Community, 121

Layton, Robert, 86 My Place, 93, 131; see also Morgan,

Lewis, Henry, 122, 125 Sally

liberalism, 28, 35-6, 79, 82, 132; Myers, Fred, 63, 89-90, 91 see also Goffman, Erving; Long, Myths of the Mungkan, 9 Jeremy; Rowley, Charles

Lipman, Zada, 121 Nabalco, 7 Long, Jeremy, 27-8, 32-6, 42; see also Nabilil, 62

liberalism Nannup, Alice, 38-40 Love, John, 9 Narrandera, 42

National Aboriginal Consultative

Mabo, Eddie, 1, 4-5, 12, 22 Committee (NACC), 59, 76-7

Australia 77-8

Mabo judgment, see High Court of National Aboriginal Conference, 59,

156

Index National Aborigines Observance Day Reid, Gordon, 17

Quest (NAODQ), 85 Reid, Julian, 121

national parks, 105, 119-22; see also religion, 10-11, 41, 64-5, 81, 87, 91, Ayers Rock; Uluru National Park 108, 110-11; see also Aborigines,

‘naturalness’, 117, 126-7; see also and Christianity; God; Jesus

wilderness Retta Dixon Children’s Home, 47

New Norcia, 29-30 Reynolds, Henry, 14, 17, 18, 21-4; see Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, Yan- also High Court of Australia kunytjatjara Women’s Council, 52 Richardson, Senator Graham, 113

Ngalakan, 15 Rigsby, Bruce, 61, 65, 109

Ngaliwurru, 14 Role of the National Aboriginal ConNgaringman, 14 ference, The, 77 Ngarrindjeri, 93 Rose, Debbie Bird, 1-4, 13, 14, 17-18,

Ngiyampaa, 41 66-7, 106-7, 126

Nhulunbuy, 71 Rosser, Bill, 16-17

Northern Land Council, 112 Rottnest Island, 36

Noonuccal, Oodgeroo, 108 Rowley, Charles, 13, 17, 25, 27-37, 423, 54-5, 131; see also liberalism

O’Connor, Ian, 46 Rowse, Tim, 35, 71, 85, 120

Onus, Lin, 92 Royal Commission Into Aboriginal

orientalism, 129, 131; see also Said, Deaths In Custody, 46, 47-9

Edward Rumsey, Alan, 60-2

Palm Island, 30, 32, 47 Sackett, Lee, 75-6 Palmer, Kingsley, 107 Said, Edward, viii, 129, 131-2 Pattel-Grey, Anne, 108 Sandhills, 42 Pepper, Philip, 17 Sansom, Basil, 25, 54-6, 59, 65, 67, 68

Peterson, Nicolas, 61, 81 science, 111, 121-2, 123

Pierson, James, 73 Scott-Mundine, Djon, 92

Pintupi, 88 Schrire, Carmel, 112 Pitjantjatjara, 51-2, 92, 120 Search, 122 Pitjantjatjara Council, 51 Semmler, Helen, 88

Pizzi, Gabriele, 91 Simpson, Gordon, 13

Plato, 110-11 Sinclair, Jeanette, 46

Pollard, David, 36, 72, 73-4 Social Science Research Council of

prehistory, 112, 118-19, 123-4 Australia, 27

Prescott, Victor, 60 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 37

Pulkara, Daly, 126 Smith, Barry, 71

Stanner, W. E. H., 10-11, 63

Queen Victoria, 13-14, 15; see also Stevens, Frank, 35 ‘Captain Cook’; Jesus; Kelly, Ned Stone-Age Bushmen of To-day, 9 Sutton, Peter, 61, 64, 65, 89, 90-1, 92,

Racial Discrimination Act (1975), 6 108 Radcliffe Brown, Alfred, 60 Swain, Tony, 108

Randwick Technical College, 46 Sykes, Roberta, 92-3 Read, Peter, 13, 16, 35, 42-6, 131

Real Deadly, 101; see also Langford, Tanami Wildlife Sanctuary, 109

Ruby Taylor, Luke, 90, 91

Reece, Robert, 17, 84 Taylor, John, 35 157

Index

Taylor, Sandra, 106, 117, 118-19 Weatherall, Bob, 22

terra nullius, 8, 21 Weaver, Sally, 58

Three Ways, 44 White, Sally, 36 Tindale, Norman, 60, 123 Wilcannia, 72

Tonkinson, Robert, 41, 52, 67, 82 Wild, Stephen, 64

Torres Strait Islanders, 12-13 wilderness, 118, 119, 126-7; see also

‘total institution’, 31-4, 36-41 ‘naturalness’

Toyne, Philip, 120; see also Australian Williams, Nancy, 68-9, 71, 81

Conservation Foundation Willshire, W. H., 17

Trigger, David, 16-17, 36, 68, 69-71 Wiradjuri, 5, 13, 42-4

. Woenne-Green, Susan, 121

Uluru National Park, 86, 120, 121; see Wolmadjari, 13

also Ayers Rock; national parks Woma secretariat, 75 Union for Conservation of Nature and Woodenbong, 29

Natural Resources (IUCN), 113 Worora, 9 United Nations Working Group On Wright, Judith, 119-20 Indigenous People (WGIP), 22 writing, Aboriginal, 24, 26, 38-40, 47,

Unna You Fellas, 46 79, Ch. 4 passim; see also artistic Value Of National Parks, The, 119 expression and aesthetic tradi-

Viner. Ian. 76 tions; Aborigines, oral traditions

oo Wujal Wujal, 52

Wandering Girl, 46 Wundersitz, Joy, 49-51 Ward, Dick, 56

Ward, Glenyse, 46 Yamba, 87

Warlpiri and Kartangururru-Kurindji: | Yarrabah, 113-14

land claim, 108 Yarralin (NT), 1, 4, 6, 14, 66, 106

Waterloo Creek, 16 Yirrkala, 68-9, 71

Wattle Hill, 42 Young, Elspeth, 109

158