NUMBER 5, 2014
» ANNA HAEBICH » PETER HISCOCK » PHILIP MEAD
» TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI » KIM SCOTT » GLENDA SLUGA
» ANDREW STEWART » IAN TEMPLEMAN » THOM VAN DOOREN
THE JOURNAL OF THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES THE ACADEMY COUNCIL President Lesley Johnson AM Welcome Honorary Secretary It is a great pleasure to welcome you to the fifth Graeme Clarke AO issue of Humanities Australia, the annual journal Honorary Treasurer Richard Waterhouse I of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. This Vice-Presidents issue continues a tradition of showcasing some Deirdre Coleman of the most exciting current work of researchers John Fitzgerald in the humanities throughout Australia. Editor Elizabeth Webby AM For forty-five years, the Australian Academy of International Secretary the Humanities has been dedicated to fulfilling its John Fitzgerald obligations as laid out in its Royal Charter; advancing Immediate Past President Joseph Lo Bianco AM scholarship and promoting understanding of the Ordinary Members humanities both within academic institutions and Han Baltussen in the national community at large. The Fellowship Peter Cryle Majella Franzmann of the Academy comprises almost six hundred Susan Sheridan distinguished individuals elected in recognition of the excellence and impact of their scholarship in CONTACT DETAILS For further information about the Australian fields including archaeology, art, Asian and European Academy of the Humanities, contact us: studies, classical and modern literature, cultural and Email communication studies, languages and linguistics, [email protected] Web philosophy, musicology, history and religion. www.humanities.org.au Now in its fifth year,Humanities Australia is an Telephone established and important flagship publication for the (+61 2) 6125 9860 Academy. It is just one of the ways in which we seek to
EDITORIAL/PRODUCTION support excellence in the humanities and to Academy Editor communicate the value of the humanities to a broad Elizabeth Webby AM (2009–) audience. This issue’s selection of essays, poems, Designer Noel Wendtman artworks and reflections collectively demonstrate the Printed by importance of the humanities in understanding our Canprint national life and human culture, past, present and future. Cover illustration I trust you will enjoy reading Humanities Australia. ¶ Sheltered by the Loulu Palm by Margaret Barnaby. Woodblock print. Private collection. Reproduced with kind permission of the artist. © 2014 Australian Academy of the Humanities and individual contributors LESLEY JOHNSON am faha ISSN 1837–8064 President, Australian Academy Funding for the production of this publication has been provided by the of the Humanities, 2011– Australian Government through the Department of Education. The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Education or the Australian Academy of the Humanities. The illustrations and certain identified inclusions in the text are held under separate copyright and may not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the respective copyright holders. Every reasonable effort has been made to contact relevant copyright holders for illustrative material in this journal. Where this has not proved possible, the copyright holders are invited to contact the publisher.
2 Humanities Australia Humanities Australia
04 ELIZABETH WEBBY Editor’s Introduction
IAN TEMPLEMAN 06 I Have Taken to Dancing
THOM VAN DOOREN 08 Life at the Edge of Extinction: Spectral Crows, Haunted Landscapes and the Environmental Humanities 23 ANNA HAEBICH Fever in the Archive
KIM SCOTT 36 A Whisper in Stone 40 PETER HISCOCK Creators or Destroyers? The Burning Questions of Human Impact in Ancient Aboriginal Australia 53 TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI Invisible Politics
GLENDA SLUGA 65 ‘Add Women and Stir’: Gender and the History of International Politics 73 ANDREW STEWART Individuality and Innovation in Greek Sculpture
PHILIP MEAD 89 Fifty Years of Australian Literary Studies 94 IAN TEMPLEMAN Snapshot Editor’s Introduction » ELIZABETH WEBBY
Welcome to the 2014 issue of Humanities the value of a multidisciplinary perspective Australia, which opens with the 2013 on environmental issues. Sir Keith Hancock Lecture delivered at As Thom van Dooren reminds us, Sir Wthe Academy’s 2013 Symposium, held in Keith Hancock played a significant role in Brisbane last November. The Symposium the development of environmental history in theme of Environmental Humanities Australia. He was also the first President of attracted a large audience, who responded the Academy at its foundation in 1969, and enthusiastically to Thom van Dooren’s left a bequest used to establish a lecture in eloquent and stunningly illustrated lecture his honour, given every four years by ‘a young ‘Life at the Edge of Extinction: Spectral Crows, Australian scholar of excellence’. Another of the Haunted Landscapes and the Environmental Academy’s Foundation Fellows, A. D. Trendall, Humanities’. We are especially grateful to also left a generous bequest to the Academy Hawaiian artist Margaret Barnaby for allowing which funds a lecture in the area of Classical us to use some of her beautiful hand-carved Studies, given annually by either an Australian woodblock prints on the cover of the journal or an international scholar. The 2013 Trendall and to illustrate the lecture. lecturer was the distinguished art historian The crow featured in the prints and lecture Andrew Stewart, from the University of is no ordinary crow but a Hawaiian fruit-eating California, Berkley, who gave a fascinating species that is now extinct in the wild. and also beautifully illustrated lecture on The lecture outlines plans to fence off part of ‘Individuality and Innovation in Greek a forest reserve, clear it of pigs, and then Sculpture’ that we are delighted to include here. attempt to reintroduce the crow to the wild. As well as these two lectures, the Academy (above) All very good one might think, but not in the also arranges an annual Academy Lecture by Academy eyes of some native Hawaiians who see hunting one of its Fellows. These are usually given at the Secretariat, pigs as a traditional practice and the fencing of annual Symposium, but the 2013 lecture was Canberra, Australia. part of the forest as another colonial land grab. presented in Perth at the University of Western COURTESY AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE In teasing out all the factors involved here, van Australia, preceded by a reception for Western HUMANITIES Dooren provides an excellent demonstration of Australian Fellows. Given by Peter Hiscock on
04 Humanities Australia the topic ‘Creators or Destroyers? The Burning from an amateur to a professional activity. Questions of Human Impact in Ancient Congratulations, too, to Philip Mead on his Aboriginal Australia’, it tests recent claims about recent appointment as Visiting Professor of Aboriginal use of fire in the light of the extended Australian Studies at Harvard University. time scale provided by archaeological evidence. A number of Academy Fellows have also If the impact of Aborigines on the Australian been awarded Australian Research Council environment is still a matter of debate, there Laureate Fellowships in recognition of their is no doubting the devastating impact on distinguished, ongoing research contributions. Aboriginal Australia of the arrival of British Two of them have kindly contributed essays colonisers. Two contributors to this issue, both that offer perspectives on very different areas from Western Australia, draw attention to of politics. In ‘“Add Women and Stir”: A New contemporary efforts to maintain and reclaim History of International Politics’, Glenda Indigenous languages, history and culture. Sluga argues for the need to recognise the In ‘Fever in the Archive’, Anna Haebich contributions made by women in an area focuses on the archive of the West Australian often seen as exclusively male. She traces a Department of Indigenous Affairs. Its records of female line from Germaine de Staël in the late ‘totalitarian control over Aboriginal people from eighteenth century through to Alva Myrdal 1898 to 1972’ have, ironically, ‘proved invaluable after World War Two. Sluga, incidentally, was to Aboriginal people researching family and the 2009 Hancock Lecturer. community histories’ as well as inspiring If women can be invisible in the world of ‘Aboriginal writers who combined them with ‘high politics’, people involved in community community memories to create major works of activism often fail to get onto the political radar theatre, literature, history and film’. at all. Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s essay ‘Invisible One of these writers, prize-winning Politics’ begins by noting the disillusion novelist Kim Scott, describes in ‘A Whisper in with traditional politics in recent decades, Stone’ how the recovery of Noongar language something certainly apparent in Australia, and stories can help to heal damaged lives. before going on to outline the concept of Beginning with an ironic quotation from one ‘informal life politics’ or ‘survival politics’. She of the best-known pieces of colonial Australian presents some fascinating examples from her literature, Banjo Paterson’s ‘Clancy of the research in East Asia, such as the Citizens’ Overflow’, and an apology for what might Radioactivity Measuring Stations set up after seem his ‘shameless boasting’, Scott’s piece the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011. focuses on one of his readers, a Noongar man Although he has now lived in Canberra for who has spent much of his life in prison. many years, the poetry in this issue provides This contemporary story is interposed with another link with Western Australia, since Ian traditional and historical ones to stress the Templeman was the founder of Fremantle Arts importance of sharing ‘words of comfort not Centre Press, the first to publish Kim Scott, only across razor and steel-capped stone walls among many others. He trained as a painter but also across the vast, yawning chasm that and has taken up the brush again in retirement, sometimes divides us’. so we have another first here, poems illustrated Another Western Australian contributor, by paintings by their author. ¶ Philip Mead, celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the journal Australian Literary Studies. The brainchild of two poets, critics and ELIZABETH WEBBY am faha, Academy Fellows, A. D. Hope and James Editor, Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2009- McAuley, ALS was edited for most of these fifty years by another Fellow, Laurie Hergenhan. It has played a leading role in helping to transform the study of Australian literature
Humanities Australia 05 » IAN TEMPLEMAN
The sudden storm over the black lake electrified the scrub and shaggy trees on the ridgeline by Ian Templeman. 2013, oil on canvas, 60 x 60cm.
COURTESY MAUREEN AND ROBERT BROOKS
IAN TEMPLEMAN AM FAHA initially trained as a painter and in 1972 became the first director of the Fremantle Arts Centre, where he established the Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 1975. From 1990 to 1997 he was Assistant Director-General, Cultural and Educational Services at the National Library of Australia, and from 1999 to 2006 head of Coombs Academic Publishing at the Research School for Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University. He has been publishing poetry for many years; a selected poems, The Watchmaker’s Imprint, appeared in 2013.
066 } Humanities Australia I Have Taken to Dancing
I have taken to dancing on gradual evenings alone on the tilting flat rock near a creek curling its voice around a hand of wattle.
In the pleasure of collapsing day’s last light there are no tin-can rattling voices from timber-cutters working the shadow incised ridges.
I eat this silence from voices, now able to hear bush talk: the wind’s conversations with birds, murmur of water, knitted hush of casuarinas.
In my head the imagination’s pulse electrifies a response to memory’s music, choreographs a thousand small linked body movements.
I move into my storytelling without voice, words or the language of reason, dancing instead with the courage and passion of a convert, ending a lifetime of amused regret.
Humanities Australia 07 Life at the Edge of Extinction SPECTRAL CROWS, HAUNTED LANDSCAPES AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES
» THOM VAN DOOREN
It seems very appropriate that this conduct interviews and then more substantial particular symposium of the Australian ethnographic research. Similarly, I was inspired Academy of the Humanities should include by the way that others, especially the historians, Ia lecture in honour of Sir Keith Hancock. were thinking and writing, and so I began the Although the environmental humanities had task of weaving my philosophical work into not yet taken shape as a field of scholarship accessible narratives. I completed my PhD as during his lifetime, Hancock played an something other than a philosopher—although incredibly significant role in defining and my roots remain in that discipline, I have never ‘crafting’ environmental history in Australia, been fully at home there. helping to establish it as a respectable field From my perspective, it is precisely this kind of study—as Tom Griffiths and others have of interdisciplinarity that is at the core of the documented.1 That strong tradition of environmental humanities. While for some historical scholarship is now a core strand of the term might refer to an umbrella of sorts— the environmental humanities. simply gathering up existing environmental When I began my PhD at the Australian subfields within the humanities—it is also National University about ten years ago, it was something more than this. one of very few places in the world with a real At its heart, the environmental humanities concentration of research in the ecological brings the traditional concerns of the or environmental humanities. I was lucky humanities—for example, with questions of enough to be part of one of the many ecological meaning, value, ethics, justice and the politics humanities groups that have developed there, of knowledge production—into an engagement this one primarily a collaboration between with the wider more-than-human environment. Deborah Bird Rose, Libby Robin, Val Plumwood But this is no innocent alignment: both ‘the and their students. An anthropologist, an environment’ and ‘the human’ will never be historian and a philosopher—three pre-eminent the same again. Neither conceptual category international figures in their own environmental can withstand this close proximity. Here, the subfields. But more than this, three scholars nature/culture dualism implodes and we’re all keenly attuned to the value of interdisciplinary repositioned as participants in lively ecologies work on the environment. Although my of meaning and value, entangled within rich undergraduate degree was in philosophy, I was patterns of cultural and historical diversity that inspired by my principal supervisor Debbie Rose shape who we are and the ways in which we are and the other anthropologists in our group to able to ‘become with’ others.2
088 Humanities Australia In this context, the environmental extinct in the wild. But as I stood in the forest I humanities is a fundamentally experimental couldn’t help but listen and hope. field: one that asks about the new forms I had read descriptions of crows in Hawai‘i’s of scholarship that are possible when we forest by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century get beyond the various humanisms of the ornithologists writing when these birds were humanities, as well as the new forms of still relatively common. George Munro saw scholarship that are necessary in our time of them in 1891, and provided a passing reference rapid and escalating change. In taking up to their graceful movements below the this experimental role, the environmental rainforest canopy: birds ‘sail[ing] from tree humanities responds to a dual challenge: the to tree on motionless wings’.4 Standing in a need to enrich environmental research with the forest at 7000 feet elevation—in the heart of more extensive conceptual, political and critical the region where they once lived—I imagined vocabulary of the humanities, whilst at the for a moment that I could see their feathered same time vitalising the humanities themselves by rethinking the ontological exceptionality of the human. This is the approach I was lucky enough to be trained into, to inherit, as part of the interdisciplinary group at the Australian National University. Today, there are environmental humanities centres, teaching programmes and journals springing up all over the world—most of them in just the past few years: including our own programme at the University of New South Wales, which hosts Australia’s first undergraduate major in the field. At this time last year we also launched the world’s first international journal dedicated to the environmental humanities.3 Like most of my work, the research I discuss here is grounded in the cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural approach outlined above. It is an effort to bring biology and ecology into conversation with philosophy and my own ethnographic work with local communities. forms moving through the trees. I imagined This is an approach to studying and writing what it would be like for the now eerily quiet about extinction that I have developed forest, missing this and so many other species collaboratively with Debbie Rose in a series of of birds, to once again be enlivened by such a separate and joint studies that explore what charismatic presence. extinction means and what forms of life and And so, I begin with spectral crows, death are possible in its shadow. haunting a dying forest. This forest was itself in decline for a number of reasons, principally * * * because of the presence of introduced I stood in the forest listening for crows. ungulates like pigs, that uproot and graze down Listening and hoping, even though I knew any new vegetation. Where once there would it was foolish. I had been led to this forest have been a lush understorey beneath a tall (above) precisely because there were no longer crows canopy of trees, all that remained now were old At the top of here, because there were no longer free-living trees with no new growth to replace them, and the Ka‘ū Forest Reserve. A degraded crows anywhere in Hawai‘i. I knew that the no understorey to hold the soil together when landscape. last sighting of a crow had been made a decade it rained. The biologists I was travelling with COURTESY earlier (in 2002) and that these birds were now called this a ‘museum forest’, others have called THOM VAN DOOREN
Humanities Australia 09 it a forest of the ‘living dead’.5 Either way, it too and consequences of, their potential return. was perched perilously at the edge between life In particular, I am interested in how we and death. inherit and inhabit the legacies of the past to In a range of different ways, this lecture shape possible futures. In a time of ongoing is an exploration of the absence of crows, as extinction and colonisation, a time in many well as some of the many contestations over, ways characterised by interwoven patterns of
(right) Fertile Sources. Wood block print by Margaret Barnaby.
COURTESY MARGARET BARNABY
10 Humanities Australia biological and cultural loss, what does it mean arrival, almost two-thirds are now extinct. to inherit responsibly? Of the 42 species that remain, 31 are federally The crow that is my guide into these listed under the United States Endangered questions is not just any crow. Known locally Species Act.7 It is not hard to see why Hawai‘i by their Hawaiian name—‘alalā—these birds is regarded as one of the ‘extinction capitals’ of are forest and fruit specialists. Although they the world—of course, Australia is another of look very much like the common crows and these extinction capitals, with the highest rate ravens found in Australia, the United States of mammalian extinctions anywhere in the mainland, and elsewhere, behaviourally they world in the past two hundred years. are quite distinct. ‘Alalā do not seem to have And so, ‘alalā is now the largest fruit-eating taken to scavenging and a life beyond the forest. bird remaining anywhere in the islands—albeit Instead, they ate flowers and fruit, insects and only in captivity. With its passing from the occasionally other birds’ eggs. As Polynesian forest it is thought that several plant and tree and then European, Asian and other peoples species—especially some of those with larger arrived, ‘alalā stayed in the forests even as these fruit and seeds—may have lost their only places were becoming less and less hospitable remaining seed disperser. Under the rainforest for them. Some forests were cleared and others canopy, wide seed dispersal can be a vital were degraded by introduced ungulates. component of species’ survival. As birds carry Meanwhile, new avian diseases and predators seeds away from their parent trees they spread like cats and mongooses moved in. genetic diversity, they reduce competition, Eventually, roughly a decade ago, the last and they can even provide safer places for of the free-living ‘alalā died. Initially, only a germination. handful of crows survived in captivity. As a Recent research conducted by Susan Moana result of years of captive breeding, however, Culliney suggests that the ‘alalā may have there are now roughly 100 ‘alalā, and it is hoped been the last remaining seed disperser for at that one day soon they might be able to start least three plants: ho‘awa, halapepe, and the being released back into the forests of the Big loulu palms. But dispersal is not just about Island. Before this can happen, however, much movement. In addition, it seems that some of remains to be done to prepare the way. these seeds germinate better—or in the case of ho‘awa, will only germinate—if the outer fruit GHOSTS AND CO-BECOMING AT THE DULL has been removed, something that ‘alalā once EDGE OF EXTINCTION routinely did.8 A long and intimate history of co-evolution We don’t know when it was, or where they came lies within these embodied affinities that bind from, but at some point in the deep history of together avian and botanical lives. Crows are the Hawaiian islands, crows arrived. As the nourished, plants propagated and in the process islands in this volcanic chain rose above the both species are, at least in part, constituted: sea, one by one countless plants, animals and their physical and behavioural forms, their other species arrived by wave, wind and wing ways of life, emerging out of generation after and settled in. Animals and plants adapted, generation of co-evolutionary ‘intra-action’.9 co-evolving with others over millions of years. ‘Alalā haunt the forest in another way here. Completely free of mammalian predators, for Beyond my own active imagination, their the longest time these were islands of immense spectral presence is inscribed in the forest avian diversity. Fossil records indicate that there landscape. Plants call out to ‘alalā, their fruiting was once a range of large, flightless birds in the and flowering bodies shaped by past attractions islands.6 It is likely that in earlier times many of and associations that no longer exist. these birds played important ecological roles as As ‘alalā populations have declined over pollinators or seed dispersers for local plants. the past decades, the plants bound up in Today, however, most of these birds are gone. mutualistic relations with them have likely Of the 113 bird species known to have lived declined too. Halapepe and loulu palms are exclusively on these islands just prior to human themselves now rare or endangered.
Humanities Australia 11 In addition, Culliney notes with regard to is linear—from parent to offspring—but it is ho‘awa, that most of the trees encountered also more than this: it is radically multivalent, today are older and that there is now a ‘general radically multispecies. In Debbie Rose’s terms, lack of seedlings or saplings in the wild’.10 And here we see that life is a product of both so, it is quite possible that these plants are now sequential and synchronous relationships and what biologists call ‘ecological anachronisms’: inheritances.14 Who we all are as individuals, as species with traits that evolved in response to cultures, as species, is in large part a product of a relationship or an environmental condition generations of co-evolution and co-becoming in that is no longer present.11 The extent to which which we are woven through with traces of all the loss of ‘alalā has contributed to the decline of our multispecies ancestors. of these plant species remains a topic for future These entanglements mean that a species study. It is clear, however, that the absence of like ‘alalā cannot be neatly excised from our a seed disperser can only make the future of living world. Each species is a strand in a fabric, these plant species that much more precarious. what I have elsewhere called a ‘flight way’—a Here, we see that co-evolution can switch over term that aims to evoke an understanding of into co-extinction; co-becoming into entangled species as evolving ways of life, as interwoven patterns of dying-with. lines of intergenerational movement through Alongside plants and their forests, the deep history.15 In this context, extinction disappearance of ‘alalā is also felt by local always takes the form of an unravelling people. For some native Hawaiians, ‘alalā is of co-formed and forming ways of life, an part of their cultural landscape: these birds unravelling that begins long before the death hold stories and associations in the world. of the last individual and continues to ripple ‘Alalā is an ‘aumakua or ancestral deity for out long afterwards: hosts of living beings— some people, and the plants and forests that human and not—are drawn into extinctions as might disappear or change significantly diverse heritages break down or are otherwise without their seed dispersal are themselves transformed. also culturally significant in various ways.12 There is no solid line here between Many other locals are also drawn into this ‘human’ and ‘ecological’ dimensions, between experience of loss. I interviewed biologists, evolutionary and cultural entanglements: artists, ranchers, hunters and others, some of relationships and affinities cut across any whom were lucky enough to remember—and so simple divide, moving back and forth with miss—the dramatic presence of these birds in ease. The traces that we leave behind in each the forest. Many were trying in their own ways other remind us that conventional Western to reckon with the affective burden of living notions of ‘the human’ as a being set apart in a place where crows are no longer present, a from the rest of the living world, have always place in which (paraphrasing one biologist), we been illusory.16 In Anna Tsing’s terms ‘[h]uman have lost the most intelligent and charismatic nature is an interspecies relationship’; it is the component of our forests. shifting historical product of ‘varied webs of Here, crows, plants, people and others are interspecies dependence’.17 As it is sometimes tangled up and at stake in each other. But it is succinctly put by native Hawaiians: the people the particularly historical character of these arrived as Polynesians, but the islands made entanglements that I am interested in; and them Hawaiian. more specifically, the way in which life is, at a fundamental level, grounded in rich patterns SPECTRAL CROWS AND THE PROMISE of inheritance. All of Earth’s creatures are heirs OF RETURN to the long history of life on this planet. We are woven through with traces of the past: our As I travelled, observed and talked with a range own past, but also that of our forbears whose of people on a recent research trip in Hawai‘i, relationships and achievements we inherit in I encountered another important site in which our genes, our cultural practices, languages the absence of crows was helping to shape and much more.13 Some of this inheritance future possibilities for everyone. At the centre
12 Humanities Australia of this story is the Ka‘ū Forest Reserve in the of them native Hawaiians—who do not want south of the Big Island—the forest in which I to see a fence built and the pigs that they hunt stood listening and hoping for crows. Early in removed from the area. Of course, hunters my trip I travelled high up into this area with a are a diverse crowd in most places, and this group of conservationists and state and federal is certainly true in Hawai‘i. In this context, land managers, a two-hour drive on a very opposition to fencing is grounded in a diverse bumpy dirt road that crossed old paddocks, range of understandings, values and histories. forested areas, and cooled lava fields that On the surface, the most prominent opposition stretched out black into the distance as far as to this fence has been justified by the notion that the eye could see. there is not enough accessible public hunting Just a few months earlier, the state land in Hawai‘i, with too much already ‘locked government had released its management up’ in conservation.19 For these people it is plan for the area. At its core was a proposal to often simply a question of whether birds, snails fence 20 percent of the reserve, almost 5000 and plants should take priority over human hectares.18 The fenced section would still allow interests. In addition, hunters often challenge human visitors, but all of the pigs inside would the notion that pigs and other ungulates be killed so that the understorey might recover. damage the forest, some even arguing that pigs Hopes and dreams for the future of ‘alalā actually play a positive ecological role: tilling animated this proposal, at least in part. As the the soil and rooting out weeds.20 forest recovers, it is anticipated that it will be The three conservationists who led our a future release site for these birds—while also little expedition to the Ka‘ū Forest Reserve contributing to the conservation of a range of that day were all locals, born and raised in other endangered species and ensuring that the district of Ka‘ū. John, an ex-ranch hand, erosion is minimised so that the forest remains long-time hunter and conservation convert, a healthy water catchment. and Shalan, an ecologist, now both worked But not everyone supported this proposal. for The Nature Conservancy. Nohea, a young Although its drafting involved more than a year Hawaiian woman with deep family roots in of serious community consultation, it has been the area and a degree in Hawaiian Studies, greeted with hostility by some locals. The most was working as a community outreach and vocal opposition has come from hunters—some education officer for the state government.
(left) Sheltered by the Loulu Palm. Wood block print by Margaret Barnaby.
COURTESY MARGARET BARNABY
Humanities Australia 13 he conveyed the significance of the extinction of ‘alalā to local people was to draw a direct comparison between the loss of this species on the one hand, and the potential loss of Hawaiian language and culture on the other. The value of diversity, of sustaining it into the future, was the point here. While John was mindful of the fact that cultural and linguistic diversity often rely on biodiversity (and vice versa),22 his main point in making this connection in discussions with hunters was as a means of illustrating how biological ‘species’ might themselves also be a kind of valuable diversity in our world. The tragedy of lost cultures in a colonised land allows people to Together they played a central role in connect with the loss of a bird which, for some, the drafting of the new management plan had come to seem insignificant.23 for the area, especially the community I am interested in these sites of engagement process. communication and contestation between As part of this process, they took numerous conservationists and hunters, which are groups of locals, including many hunters, about much more than ‘alalā. In particular, up to the section of forest that the state is I am interested in the way in which the past is proposing to fence. After visiting the site, many imagined and inherited, how the past haunts hunters who were initially sceptical agreed the present in often unexpected ways. A key that fencing is a good idea: partly because the part of this haunting is the way in which visit impressed upon them just how remote the the particular histories that we tell, that we area is (and therefore inhabit, animate our understanding and action. inconvenient for hunting), but also because they were able to see with new eyes— with biologists’ eyes, perhaps—the extent of the damage that ungulates were doing 21 (above) to the forest. Near the top of the During these site Ka‘ū Forest Reserve. visits, John, Shalan Stopping for a rest. and Nohea also COURTESY THOM VAN DOOREN spent a lot of time talking to local (right) people on the long Maps and images drive up and back. used to illustrate John explained damage. to me that one of COURTESY THOM VAN DOOREN the ways in which
14 Humanities Australia Histories are not of the world, but in the world, and culture—that ought to be respected as Donna Haraway reminds us about stories wherever possible. In short, they recognised in general.24 And so, how we tell the past in their own way that, as James Clifford has plays a powerful role in structuring what is famously put it: ‘“Cultures” do not hold still for nurtured into the future and what is allowed their portraits.’ 27 or required to slip away. All of the rich cultural But something else was happening here and biological inheritances that constitute our too. Several of the conservationists quickly world are at stake, to a greater or lesser extent, mentioned this historical research when the in the histories that we weave out of, and into, topic of pig hunting came up. Although they this forested landscape. were clear that this did not mean that hunters Of course, some hunters opted not to go on had no claim to continue hunting, it clearly site visits to the Ka‘ū Forest Reserve, and others changed the nature of that claim. In noting remained unconvinced. Many of these people that the pigs are different and the practice continue to oppose the fencing and removal more recent than sometimes thought, a break of pigs from this area; some of the most vocal with the past is effected in which fencing and opponents are native Hawaiian hunters. pig removal are conceptually separated from For many native Hawaiians pig hunting contentious questions of native Hawaiian is understood as a core traditional practice customary practice and rights. As Michelle that ought to be widely supported as part Bastian has argued, different histories create of the continuity of Hawaiian culture. In different continuities and ruptures, with conversations with these hunters, as well as all of their attendant political and ethical in online discussion forums, I encountered consequences.28 Importantly, however, it was repeated reference to this point of view. not just haole (white) conservationists making For them, any effort to remove pigs and this claim; in fact, some of the people that limit hunting is seen as a violation of their made it most strongly were native Hawaiians Traditional and Customary Rights, protected by who see the removal of pigs from at least some the Hawaiian Constitution (Section 7).25 areas of forest as essential to the conservation In recent years, however, the notion that of not only the environment, but of a rich pig hunting is a traditional cultural practice notion of Hawaiian culture too.29 I will return has been thoroughly problematised. Detailed to this topic shortly. historical studies by Hawaiian cultural experts The desire of some conservationists Kepa and Onaona Maly indicate that prior to conceptually to separate pig hunting from European arrival pigs were kept close to home. traditional Hawaiian culture is, I believe, in They were also distinctly different animals: large part an effort to depoliticise plans to of the smaller Polynesian variety not the large remove pigs. This is nowhere more clear than European boars now found widely throughout in the prominent role that the history of the the islands. The only hunting that took place United States occupation of Hawai‘i is playing at that time was bird hunting, primarily in some of the most vocal opposition to fencing for feathers used in royal ornaments and in Ka‘ū. With the occupation firmly in mind, for clothing.26 some hunters the proposed fence is one more With this information fresh in my mind, ‘land grab’ in a long history of taking. I expected conservationists to readily dismiss The last monarch of the sovereign nation of claims by hunters to ‘tradition’, but found that Hawai‘i, Queen Lili‘uokalani, was overthrown this was not the case. Instead, almost all of the in 1893 by a group of wealthy settlers with the conservationists noted that this shorter history aid and support of members of the United did not invalidate claims to continued hunting. States government and its military. Through a Many noted that the length of time required to complex series of events over the next five years, make something ‘traditional’ was uncertain, Hawai‘i became a territory of the United States that culture is not static, and that several and fifty years later was made a state. Although generations of hunting is certainly long enough there was some attempt, both in the lead up to establish family traditions—forms of identity to the overthrow and afterwards, to provide
Humanities Australia 15 native Hawaiian commoners with some form of property rights in small parcels of land, this never really worked out in their favour.30 From the Great Mahele of 1848, and subsequent decades of dispossession and annexation ‘by the mid-nineteenth century, Hawaiians and their descendants [had become] largely a landless people’.31 For people inhabiting this history, fence building is never an innocent act. In this context, conservation is seen as one more excuse to take away people’s rights to access or use land. (right) As one hunter put it, Sanguine Moon. environmentalists Wood block print by are ‘always using Margaret Barnaby. something endangered COURTESY MARGARET BARNABY to the ilands for try grabb land’.32 Importantly, these people do not trust the Management Plan has been framed by critics intentions of government agencies in this in this way, those who speak in its favour area, viewing any fencing as the beginning of a are positioned as endorsing the occupation. slippery slope towards complete loss of access. As Shalan Crysdale put it to me: ‘to be for As another hunter put it: ‘environmentalist the plan is to be for the overthrow’.34 In this want to eventually take it all away and fence it context, publicly supporting conservation—as a in! They’re starting with these areas, and will Hawaiian or anyone else—requires one to enter start working on more. The alalā, water shed, into what another local called the ‘raging fire native plants, etc. is just a smoke screen to of emotion’ that surrounds the occupation and grab more land!’ 33 In this context, arguments subsequent colonisation of the islands.35 by hunters often explicitly challenge the In this light, ‘alalā themselves become an authority of the Hawaiian State Government, enemy of the Hawaiian people. What’s more, and certainly the Federal Government—illegal the birds’ movements through the forest governments from this perspective—to exercise become suspect as hunters fear that each time any authority in the management of these lands ‘alalā move beyond the fenced area (especially if and resources. they are nesting), the fence will expand with This connection between conservation and them. And so, ‘alalā is imagined as a Trojan occupation does important political work. horse of sorts whose conservation facilitates Once a proposal like the Ka‘ū Forest Reserve further loss of land and rights. It should come
16 Humanities Australia as no surprise that in this climate eighty percent of the area would still be open to conservationists hold real fears that any pigs and hunters. released birds will be targeted by some hunters. Speaking with Hannah that day I was reminded again and again that the histories INHERITING THE WORLD that we tell are themselves acts of inheritance. Which is to say, the aspects of the world that Towards the end of my most recent trip to we nurture into the future are, in more or less Hawai‘i I met with Hannah Kihalani Springer, significant ways, shaped by how we understand a kupuna, or elder, who lives in the district and tell the past. Histories structure our of North Kona. Deeply knowledgeable about understandings of what particular continuities Hawaiian history and culture, about hunting and mean and why they matter. conservation, I was eager to hear her thoughts There is an important dynamic at work on the past and future of the islands. Sitting in in inheritance here that deserves further her living room in her family’s old homestead, we attention. In For What Tomorrow…, Jacques talked about conservation, politics, sovereignty, Derrida excavates the basic structure of ranching, and of course, ‘alalā. inheritance.37 He is primarily interested in Hannah is a passionate and active what it means to inherit traditions, languages conservationist, President of the Conservation and cultures. At its simplest level, inheritance Council for Hawai‘i. Like many other people seems to be about continuity and retention: I spoke with, she felt that in some places pigs taking up the past and carrying it forward into and other ungulates need to be fenced out and the future. Of course, much of this inheritance removed. But she also felt that room has to be is not actively chosen; we are thrown into our made for hunters—her family hunts, and in the heritage. But this is not the end of the story. past she hunted too. And so, like others, she felt For Derrida, in any act of inheritance there is that the government could do more to facilitate also transformation. While language, culture access to existing state land for hunting. and tradition all continue from generation to In contrast to those Hawaiians who strongly generation, they are living heritages, not fixed emphasise the place of pig hunting in their once and for all. It is this ‘double injunction’ culture, Hannah noted that the islands’ forests at the heart of inheritance that Derrida draws are alive with a diversity of plants and animals, attention to, describing the act of inheritance all of which have their places in Hawaiian as one of ‘reaffirmation, which both continues stories and culture. In this context, she argued and interrupts’.38 that a singular focus on pigs is not helpful. In But this dynamic extends well beyond the her words: we need ‘the larger context that is human domains that so interest Derrida. All much more diverse and dynamic […] When we living beings are involved in their own forms so diminish the conversation we’re diminishing of life and world shaping inheritance that the Hawaiian experience and the Hawaiian include both retention and transformation. culture. The forest is important for the myriad Evolution by natural selection—that great characteristics that comprise the whole’. engine of new ways of life—is grounded in Other Hawaiians I spoke with who shared forms of inheritance that simultaneously this view often referenced another history—the retain the achievements of the past while Kumulipo, an origin story—in their arguments constantly transforming them to produce new about the need to hold onto a diversity of plants variability. This variability arises through and animals in the forest.36 For these people, recombination, mutation and other forms removing pigs from portions of the forest to aid of transformation, and is the stuff of future in the conservation of ‘alalā, other endangered change and adaptation. Moving beyond the birds and plants, and the watershed, is essential narrow genetic reductivism commonly found in for the protection of Hawaiian life and neo-Darwinian accounts, we are reminded that culture. This is perhaps particularly the case these lively processes of inheritance include in a place like the Ka‘ū Forest Reserve where, much more than genes: epigenetic, behavioural, even if this fence did go ahead, the remaining symbolic, even environmental heritages are
Humanities Australia 17 passed between organisms of all kinds in ways however, the question is usually the same. Never that shape bodies and worlds. simple, never clean: what is to be lost and what In this context, the fundamental structure retained? Which losses will we accept, and in of life is one of inheritance. Darwin knew the name of which continuities? (and vice versa). something like this when he drew a comparison It is inside this dynamic that I’d like to between language and biological species with suggest responsibility resides.43 an emphasis on the way in which both are at But how to inhabit this delicate balance their core genealogical: seemingly ‘individual’ between loss and retention? One of the languages and ‘individual’ species are in reality many things that I learnt from Hannah that simply moments within longer historical afternoon was that responsible inheritance is lineages. Here, life takes shape through the necessarily grounded in a recognition of, and constant generation of variability, only some of an attentiveness to, multiple voices, with their which ‘sticks’, only some of which is retained diverse histories and imagined futures. and so incorporated into the larger collective As our conversation was coming to an end (be it a language, a species or indeed a culture). we drifted into a discussion of the sovereignty As Derrida succinctly put it: ‘Life—being alive— movement in the islands. Hannah told me is perhaps defined at bottom by this tension about a relative of hers, deeply committed to internal to a heritage, by this reinterpretation Hawaiian sovereignty, who worked for the state of what is given.’ 39 government as a biologist. When asked about In this context, inheritance is a productive the incompatibility between her politics and concept for the environmental humanities; her employment, this relative would say that a concept with long and rich histories in she was conserving Hawai‘i’s biotic diversity so both the biological and the human sciences. that when and if sovereignty comes, the people Reading Derrida with Darwin—or better yet, and the land are in the best possible condition with more recent work in Developmental for it. Although Hannah didn’t explicitly say Systems Theory—we are able to begin to so, it seemed to me that she herself shared this develop an appreciation of entangled biocultural general view. She went on to say: inheritances.40 Here we see that the movements of genes, ideas, practices and words between The conclusion that I’ve arrived at is: ‘I am and amongst generations cannot be isolated a citizen of the land’. We have lived on this into separate channels of inheritance: ‘the land, as I’ve described to you, since before biological’ and ‘the cultural’ are inescapably Cook’s arrival. And, we’ve seen chiefs rise bound up with each other in the shaping of and fall, we’ve seen an island nation born and worlds.41 If we scratch the surface just a little, die before its time, elected and appointed these entanglements are palpable in Hawai‘i’s officials come and go, but here we stand. shrinking forests: as the island’s biotic diversity I’m less interested in the constitution that continues its long role in helping to nourish and binds us or the flag that flies over the land, shape local cultures; cultures which are in turn than I am in the quality of life on the land. remaking those ecologies and the futures of So, if there are elements within whoever’s their many inhabitants. constitution it is, that allow us to preserve But thinking of inheritance in this and pursue the righteous management of the entangled way draws us, inexorably, into resources that we call home, then I am happy the space of ethics. In a time of colonisation to pursue those […] I am loyal to this land. and extinction—a time in which so much Whatever flag flies over it is one that I am of this biocultural diversity is being lost, willing to use the resources of to continue to often violently—what does it mean to inherit be a citizen of this land. responsibly, how might we live up to our inheritances? 42 As species, ecologies and Hannah’s position is one of hope, within which cultures undergo ongoing and dynamic change, resides a profound responsibility to both the much of what is and is not passed on is not up past and the future. Hannah has not forgotten to any of us. Where we can and do play a role, the events of 1893. But she wants to inherit this
18 Humanities Australia history in a way that refuses to see support Responsibility resides in a genuine openness to for conservation as necessarily support for an these diverse voices with all of their complex illegal occupation. She wants to inhabit the pasts and futures. history of these islands, her and her family’s But, importantly, care and responsibility history, in a way that holds open possibilities for necessarily draw us out beyond the arbitrary flourishing life into the distant future. In short, and unworkable limits of a purely human she is proposing that we might care for ‘alalā, space of inheritance and meaning making. and for Hawaiian culture and sovereignty, and In short, ‘ours’ aren’t the only hauntings that for the rest of the land and its people. constitute worlds. Some plants live and are Of course, there will always be compromises now disappearing in worlds haunted by ‘alalā; and challenges here—and they will likely some crows are drawn, called, to a forest beyond always be unequally distributed. But I am the aviary. And so, paying attention to diverse inspired by Hannah’s effort not to abandon voices means recognising that nonhumans any of these inheritances, to pay attention to are not simply resources to be conserved or their entanglements and to take on the work of abandoned, inherited or cast aside, on the nourishing them as a responsibility to the past basis of whether or not current generations of and the future to come. humans happen to want them around. Here we see that responsible inheritance In paying attention to some of the diverse requires us to engage with others—their ways that nonhumans inherit their worlds, histories, their relationships—to hold open a we become aware of just how much is at future that does not forget the past or attempt stake in extinction. For example, there are to reconstruct it, but rather inherits it as a now suggestions that in captivity the once dynamic and changing gift that must be lived remarkable vocal repertoire of ‘alalā—their up to for the good of all those who do or might raucous calls and mournful songs—is being inhabit it. This is what Deborah Bird Rose has diminished. Perhaps this is because they called ‘recuperative work’, work that begins have less to talk about, or perhaps juvenile from the conviction that: birds simply haven’t been exposed to enough chatter from their elders.45 Similarly, know- there is no former time/space of wholeness how about predators and how to avoid them to which we might return or which we might may not be being passed between generations resurrect for ourselves […] Nor is there a in captivity, potentially impacting on their posited future wholeness which may yet save future survival.46 In these and other ways, the us. Rather, the work of recuperation seeks long accumulated heritage of the species—not glimpses of illumination, and aims toward just its genetics, but learnt behaviours that engagement and disclosure. The method took advantage of generations of refinement works as an alternative both to methods and adaptation—are now perhaps being of closure or suspicion and to methods of undermined to the detriment of any future life proposed salvation.44 for ‘alalā in the forest. This is not a criticism of the passionate people who look after these In this context, ‘taking care’ is always an birds, but an unavoidable reality of the captive historical and a relational proposition; if environment. Here we see in the most tragic we’re doing it right, care always thrusts us of ways that, as a species and as individual into an encounter with ghosts, our own and birds, ‘alalā are historical beings with their own others’. Some people live in worlds haunted inheritances. Much is at stake for them, not just by evolutionary ghosts: anachronistic plants in them at the edge of extinction. Furthermore, and lost seed dispersers. Others live in worlds as we are seeing, the histories that humans tell haunted by the wrongs of 1893 and dreams play a significant role in shaping whether or of a sovereignty to come. Others remember not, and in what ways, ‘alalā are able to take ‘alalā in the forest when they were children, up these heritages to contribute to the crafting or are tied to this bit of forest by memories of vibrant and thriving worlds for themselves of a grandfather who taught them to hunt. and others.
Humanities Australia 19 Ours is a time of mass extinction, a time 6. David W. Steadman, Extinction and of ongoing colonisation of diverse human Biogeography of Tropical Pacific Birds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). and nonhuman lives. But it is also a time 7. David L. Jr. Leonard, ‘Recovery Expenditures that holds the promise of many fragile forms for Birds Listed under the US Endangered of decolonisation and hopes for a lasting Species Act: The Disparity between Mainland environmental justice. Here, the work of and Hawaiian Taxa’, Biological Conservation, 141 holding open the future and responsibly (2008), 2054–61. inheriting the past requires new forms of 8. Susan Culliney et al., ‘Seed Dispersal by a Captive Corvid: The Role of the ‘Alalā (Corvus attentiveness to biocultural diversities and their Hawaiiensis) in Shaping Hawaii’s Plant many ghosts. But beyond simply listening, Communities’, Ecological Applications, 22 (2012), it also requires that we take on the fraught 1718–32. work—never finished, never innocent—of 9. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: weaving new stories out of this multiplicity: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham NC and London: Duke stories within stories that bring together University Press, 2007). the diversity of voices necessary to inhabit 10. Susan Moana Culliney, ‘Seed Dispersal by responsibly the rich patterns of interwoven the Critically Endangered ‘Alalā (Corvus inheritance that constitute our world. ¶ Hawaiiensis) and Integrating Community Values into ‘Alalā (Corvus Hawaiiensis) Recovery’, (unpublished Masters of Science Acknowledgements dissertation, Department of Fish, Wildlife I am grateful to Margaret Barnaby for allowing and Conservation Biology, Colorado State me to reproduce her beautiful images, made University, 2011), p. 21. by hand-carved woodblock printing (www. 11. Connie Barlow, The Ghosts of Evolution: margaretbarnaby.com). Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Daniel H. Janzen and Paul S. THOM VAN DOOREN is a Senior Martin, ‘Neotropical Anachronisms: The Lecturer in Environmental Fruits the Gomphotheres Ate’, Science, 215 Humanities at the University of (1982), 19–27. New South Wales. His current 12. Culliney, ‘Seed Dispersal’. research focuses on the ethical, 13. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in philosophical and cultural Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, dimensions of extinction, drawing the humanities and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life into conversation with the natural sciences. He is (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); Susan the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge Oyama, Paul E. Griffiths and Russell D. Gray, of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014), Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems Vulture (Reaktion Books, 2011), and numerous and Evolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, articles and book chapters. 2001). Françoise Dastur offers a very different but fascinating, albeit human exceptionalist, account of the way in which we ‘live with the 1. Tom Griffiths, ‘Discovering Hancock: The dead’ through rich patterns of inheritance and Journey to Monaro’, Journal of Australian haunting. See Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay Studies, 62 (1999), 171–181. on Finitude (London: The Athlone Press, 1996). 2. Deborah Rose et al., ‘Thinking through the 14. Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Multispecies Knots of Ethical Environment, Unsettling the Humanities’, Time’, Environmental Philosophy, 9 (2012), 127–40. Environmental Humanities, 1 (2012), 1–5. 15. Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss 3. See
20 Humanities Australia 19. Private land is one of the key obstacles here. in RCC Perspectives (Munich: Rachel Carson In some cases, privately owned lands are Center, 2012), pp. 59–64. being closed off to hunters (perhaps because 23. I accept J. Kehaulani Kauanui’s argument about of insurance concerns or landowners’ bad the appropriateness of the term ‘colonisation’ past experiences with hunters). In other to describe the social and political dynamics cases public land where people might hunt of Hawaiian life after what was technically an is inaccessible because private properties ‘occupation’ of the internationally recognised surrounding it—often remnants of large sovereign nation of Hawai‘i. See J. Kehaulani plantation or ranching properties—restrict Kauanui, ‘Hawaiian Independence and direct or open access to it. In addition, it International Law (Episode #23)’, Indigenous should be noted that relatively little State land Politics on WESU Radio (2009)
Humanities Australia 21 on 6 June 2012. Available online at:
22 Humanities Australia » ANNA HAEBICH Archives are already stories 1
The once serene space of the historical documents open to the public. Ironically, the archive is no longer. Outed by Derrida’s archive also contained a treasure trove of statement in Archive Fever that ‘there is no stories that proved invaluable to Aboriginal Tpolitical power without control of the archive, people researching family and community or without memory’, the archive has become histories. These stories also inspired the site of fierce debate over contested politics, Aboriginal writers who combined them with truths, ontologies and historiographies.2 community memories to create major works A side road has been the burgeoning awareness of theatre, literature, history and film. of archives as ‘active, generative substances I was fortunate to come to the DIA archive with histories’ and the growth of scholarly after first learning from Noongar people of studies of archives’ own backstories.3 For these their community memories about family, studies, John Randolph proposes biography as a country and their particular challenges and useful ‘heuristic metaphor’ since archives ‘lead achievements. I have also lived for many years social lives and have character, have histories as part of my Noongar partner’s extended of production, exchange, and use across and family. These influences immeasurably among a number of social and institutional enriched my reading of the archive and settings’ and connect with lived experiences of also shaped much of my writing from a archivists and researchers.4 doctoral thesis in 1986 to Spinning the Dream: In this context the archive of the West Assimilation in Australia published in 2008. Australian Department of Indigenous Aboriginal researchers face specific challenges Affairs (DIA) is eminently worthy of study.5 in using the archive to create Indigenous history This sprawling collection is a tangible artefact as academic Lynette Russell explains: of state power. Documenting seventy-four years of colonial hegemony and totalitarian I understood that the archival knowledge I control over Aboriginal people from 1898 would uncover was not Indigenous per se but to 1972, it has been likened to the relic rather was western or colonial knowledge instrument of ‘a repressive regime’ in the about Indigenous people and their cultures. manner of the Stasi records of former […] it was archival texts within which East Germany.6 The regime’s operations, Indigenous people were the object (and dutifully recorded and secretly guarded subject) of the gaze of colonial authorities by its administrators, caused feverish and ‘experts’.7 controversy once they became archival
Humanities Australia 23 Of the DIA archive Steve Kinnane and positive transformations when circumstances Lauren Marsh note their discomfort with of equality and respect support Indigenous its ‘subjectivity […] being that these archives knowledge and activities and promote mutual speak from the voice of a European’.8 communication and decision-making.11 In Aboriginal voices are generally absent. What this way archival knowledge recorded about the archive speaks about is the governance Aboriginal people can be reabsorbed as of subject Aboriginal populations through Indigenous knowledge. rulings, judgments, instructions, economies We can see this in Aboriginal writers’ use and calculations and their sickness, deaths, of the DIA archive, although conditions were punishments, removals, institutionalisation rarely ideal. From the 1980s writers in Perth and dire living conditions. The general lack began negotiating of humanity is between the archives distressing for and their own any reader but community stories and for Aboriginal produced a burst of people reading major works combining about their both. Working across families it can various genres of be devastating. history, biography, In addition family memoir, Aboriginal fiction, theatre and researchers have film (sometimes in to negotiate collaboration with what Russell has non-Aboriginal described as the researchers), they ‘incommensurable achieved national ontologies’ of success. The Western and enriched storytelling Indigenous powers are evident knowledge in Jack Davis’s systems. However, internationally she and archivist renowned play colleagues are No Sugar, first re-evaluating performed in the potential for 1985 at the Perth genuine interaction Festival. Director between the two Andrew Ross paradigms. The recalls the creative new position is research process that archives are for the play with Davis drawing on his own not immutable artefacts of the past but that memories and both men interviewing Noongar archival knowledge shifts as it interacts with people to collect ‘a view of the events from their society: archives are ‘both fixed and mutating point of view’ and then spending ‘weeks and as they continue to fulfill their multiple weeks every day in the archive, systematically purposes’.9 Concerning Indigenous knowledge going through material. It was exciting slowly systems, they are not static relics of the past but building up a picture of those events and the are ‘utterly modern […] dynamic and adaptive’ circumstances around those events, the world (above) and ‘continually influenced by internal in which they took place.’ 12 Cover of No Sugar creativity and experimentation as well as by Government archives like the DIA archive by Jack Davis 10 (Currency Press, contact with external systems’. Interaction originate as operational records that are 1986). between these two ontologies can bring produced by the department and systematically
24 Humanities Australia organised for re-use and reference. Then, of legislative controls over the years. Still the at a certain point in their history, they are department remained largely unaccountable transferred to an archival repository for and overlooked by government. conservation, preservation and public research. In managing Aboriginal populations the The biography of the DIA archive begins in state was divided into the frontier regions foundational principles of policy, legislation of the pastoral north and desert areas and and administration established in the first the settled agricultural south. This grid was decade of the twentieth century that set the imposed over the diversity of Aboriginal parameters of segregation, neglect and punitive cultures and lands. English was the language of controls that characterised administration of administration; occasional Aboriginal personal Aboriginal affairs in Western Australia for the names were the only reminder in the files of next sixty years.13 Yet there was also a fallibility languages still widely spoken. Records were shaped by changing historical pressures ordered according to administrative priorities and the enormous challenges of distance, and jacketed by subject and number as they communication, racism, limited resources were created from the beginning of each year. (below) and resistance to governmental policies. Like Their titles named Aboriginal people, staff Opening page of other colonial archives it was the product of members, volunteers acting locally for the Aborigines Act 1905 (WA). an ‘unsettled’ mesh of ‘uncertain knowledge’ department—police, resident magistrates, NATIONAL LIBRARY OF fashioned out of ‘events on the ground, laws pastoralists, doctors and ministers; and they AUSTRALIA, NLA. CAT. and duties, bureaucratic need and pressures’ mapped out sites of surveillance and control: VN672744 into an ‘unruly, piecemeal venture’.14 reserves, camps, institutions, prohibited areas Two legislative acts established the overarching principles of Aboriginal governance. The 1897 Aborigines Act wrested control from the British Colonial Office, slashed funding and created an impossible administrative structure with a central office in Perth and volunteer agents dotted around the state. The act applied to ‘Aboriginal natives’ and ‘half-castes living with natives’. The policy was benevolent protection: providing rations for the dying remnants of Aboriginal people and removing their children to missions. The real agenda was to ensure unhindered colonial progress and settlement. The 1905 Aborigines Act consolidated the department’s power and control, institutionalised neglectful care of Aboriginal people and legalised racial discrimination at all levels. Official policy remained protection but in practice segregation and dispossession took precedence. The department’s duties were now all-encompassing but funding remained minimal. Department files show these principles in action: the negligent segregated services; unprecedented powers to control Aboriginal employment, marriage, sexual contact, children, movement, residence, access to land and use of guns and alcohol; and special powers to discipline and punish. Amendments and regulations facilitated a creeping growth
Humanities Australia 25 1915 with the appointment of Auber Octavius Neville. During his 25 years in office Neville positioned himself to dominate the department as his own, setting policy, directing legislation, accruing institutions and controlling minutiae of the daily lives of Aboriginal people. Neville’s aggressive leadership inspired many of the later creative works by Aboriginal writers, drawing on Aboriginal memories and Neville’s own meticulously kept records. Neville was a British-born career public servant with little to recommend him apart from a sound public service record and his determination to tackle identified Aboriginal problems around the state. He appeased settler colonists’ demands for segregation in the south by building the Carrolup and Moore River native settlements to accommodate families forced out of town camps and their children excluded from state schools. There the adults eked out their remaining days while children were trained to become laborers and domestic servants. Segregation of services in centralised institutions left families with no safety net apart from lifelong detention in the settlements or minimal rations outside and Noongar poverty escalated. Neville also shaped the disorganised and places of employment, and duties such as departmental records into a well-oiled system; (above) rationing, removals, discipline and enforcing the principles of the DIA archive and the Mr A. O. Neville, controls generally. Some files contained letters bulk of its records were created under his Commissioner for from Aboriginal people protesting their watch. He streamlined the recording, listing, Native Affairs, 1940. treatment or pleading for justice, like this indexing, sorting and retrieving of files: with PHOTO: STATE LIBRARY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA Aboriginal father: reliable information close at hand he could <5000B VOL. 106>. improve management across the state. This I am afraid that [my wife] will cimmit meant accumulating and filing all decisions, sueside if the boy is not back soon for she actions, interventions, surveillance, family is good for nothing only cry day and night and personal details and data for planning and […] I have as much love for my der wife and reports. What was lacking was a parallel system churldines as you have for yours… so if you to provide transparency and accountability. have any feeling atole pleas send the boy Neville also introduced the first centralised back as quick as you can it did not take long card systems and registers for ready access to for him to go but it takes a long time for him vital statistics: issue of rations, blankets, tents to come back.15 and clothing; tallies of permits, agreements, recognisances, gun licenses and exemptions The Chief Protector of Aborigines held the granted; Aboriginal convictions generally; reigns of power; combined with limited breaches by Aboriginal people or others of the accountability this created the potential for a 1905 Act; registrations of Aboriginal marriages personal fiefdom. Early appointments plucked and deaths (but rarely births). from the colonial elite proved weak and To ensure enforcement of the 1905 Act ineffectual but this changed dramatically in Neville replaced local volunteers with police
26 Humanities Australia officers appointed as Protectors of Aborigines. to send a ten-year-old girl to Moore River His actions to ensure that they carried out settlement on the grounds that she had their duties proved effective. For example, the ‘physical and mental weakness’ and would quota of Aboriginal workers legally employed ‘probably die’ if she left her mother. She was not under special work permits under the 1905 Act sent away but he could not save her brother and doubled in 1916 and in the southwest alone sister from being removed.17 leapt from 34 to 200.16 That this further eroded In 1920 Neville was transferred to the Aboriginal rights was less important to Neville Department of the North West but returned
THAT THIS FURTHER ERODED ABORIGINAL RIGHTS WAS LESS IMPORTANT TO NEVILLE THAN MAINTAINING THE LETTER OF THE LAW.
than maintaining the letter of the law. The new in 1926 to his office in Murray Street, Perth. system increased the families’ vulnerability to From there he struggled to manage growing punitive surveillance and harassment and the complaints about town camps and also protests potential for removal of their children. They from Aboriginal people including the state’s survived by closely monitoring the police and first Aboriginal deputation to a West Australian making themselves invisible to them. There Premier in 1928. Neville’s woes escalated into were some rare acts of kindness. In 1923 at the 1930s as depression economies stretched Gascoyne Junction, Police Constable Slater his resources to the limit: his budget was cut by refused to obey Neville’s repeated instructions 20 percent in 1931 when 1240 Aborigines in the south were drawing rations (there were only 326 doing so in 1926).18 An iconic Noongar memory of Neville at this time is of a beleaguered despot directing Aboriginal people to wait their turn at the back of his office, waving files and shouting into the phone to the police while dictating missives to his secretary pounding away on her typewriter. Variations of this scene have been reconstructed in the feature film Rabbit Proof Fence and documentaries Black Magic (1988), Coolbaroo Club (1996) and Case 452 (2000). No Sugar also has a scene in Mr Neville’s office. We see Neville dictating a list of arrest warrants to his secretary Miss Dunn. He then hurriedly turns (left) to address a waiting police Permit to Employ sergeant: an Aboriginal (Implementing the 1905 NEVILLE: Right, I don’t want Aborigines Act).
to delay you, so we’ll deal with COURTESY the matter in hand. ANNA HAEBICH
Humanities Australia 27 was already dangerously overcrowded, with 500 residents in rundown shelters designed for 200. The pretext was that some had a minor contagious skin disease but no symptoms were found on their arrival at Moore River. In fact, the Premier had engineered their removal to appeal to the voters of Northam. The Collier government lost the 1932 election with Collier also losing his seat, but still the Noongar families were detained and threated with arrest if they attempted to return home. Further examples of Neville’s erratic behavior are documented in Doris Pilkington’s family memoir, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (1996). Drawing on the DIA archive and family memories, Pilkington recounts the extraordinary feat of how her mother and two aunties, all young girls, escaped from Moore River settlement in 1931 and trekked overland following the rabbit-proof fence. Pilkington juxtaposes the warm flow of family storytelling with the terse language and content of the files as she narrates how Neville and the Miss Dunn, would you bring the Northam police pursued the girls in order to return them file, please, and the warrants? … Well, I’ve got to the settlement, allegedly for their own safety all the warrants, following your own census, and protection. Pilkington’s counter history, Sergeant a total of eighty-nine natives. fortified by Neville’s own words, suggests his motives had more to do with saving face and [He hands over the warrants] money than charitable benevolence. With two girls back home in Jigalong, Neville instructed If the list changes at all, let me know and I’ll the police to take no action against fourteen- obtain any additional warrants. It’s essential year-old Molly since ‘very heavy expenditure that the town and shire be quite devoid of was incurred in securing her, and when she natives after the seventeenth.19 decamped a lot of undesirable publicity took place’. Concerning Daisy, aged thirteen, he The DIA records confirm Neville’s increasing advised ‘I would like the child recovered if no exasperation. He began to make serious errors great expense is to be incurred; otherwise the of judgment. Davis’s play No Sugar tells the prestige of the Department is likely to suffer.’ story of one of his more audacious actions He spent ten weeks arguing with police in at the time. At the height of the depression Wiluna over costs for the third girl’s daily 20 (above) during the 1932 election year Neville, acting rations and travel back to Moore River. Cover of Follow The as the agent of Premier Collier who was Neville must have found solace in his Rabbit Proof Fence also member for the electorate of Northam, expanding record system. Kinnane and Marsh by Doris (Garimara) Pilkington arranged for between 80 and 90 Noongar counted over 27,000 new files established (University of people to be arrested and transferred under between 1926 and 1959, many created before Queensland Press, police warrant from their camps near the Neville’s retirement in 1940. They now 2000). town to Moore River native settlement, which looked more professional, being typed not
28 Humanities Australia handwritten, and their titles more uniform. Historical Society where he controversially Neville’s innovation of personal files became draws similarities between Aboriginal the principal record category comprising 54 depopulation in Tasmania and the southwest percent of all new records. With an estimated of Western Australia. In the early 1930s, writing state Aboriginal population of only 15,000 under a nom de plume in the West Australian people this indicates the level of surveillance newspaper, he advocated his controversial operating.21 new policy of biological absorption. Neville Personal files provided a powerful apparatus angered anthropologists visiting the Kimberley for invasive micro-management of individual by seeking to control and even censor their lives. Particular targets of Neville’s personal research. A. P. Elkin later referred to him as file strategy were girls like Steve Kinnane’s ‘a person who, by the light of Nature, thinks he grandmother who were removed to institutions knows all about Aborigines’.23 During the 1934 and then sent out to domestic service under Moseley Royal Commission into Aboriginal department control. Kinnane obtained a conditions in the state, Neville interjected copy of File no 1261/21—Jessie Argyle Personal and corrected witnesses, including Aboriginal File, which was three hundred pages thick. people who braved his retribution to state Revealed in its pages of notes, correspondence their case. and police reports were the details of her life Race mixing weighed heavily on Neville’s made known to Neville between 1923 to 1936: mind and he was especially alarmed by her employment and wages, requests for her statistics showing the dramatic increase of earnings, her personal spending, medical the ‘mixed race’ population in the south, problems, friendships and spats, boyfriends from 1603 in 1919 to 2616 in 1936.24 Under his (all objected to by Neville), her courtship and watch the department’s record system came marriage to Steve’s grandfather and the continued police spying on their home in East Perth. Creatively weaving together archival information and family memories, Kinnane wrote Shadow Lines (2003), a powerful biography of his grandmother and the Perth world she inhabited. Still, he calls the files ‘double-edged’: while they enabled him to reconstruct the story of her life it would have been ‘preferable’ if the files and ‘the culture that created them also did not exist’. In a poignant scene of a visit with his mother to his grandmother’s first employer, Kinnane describes how he deliberately placed her personal file on the table for all to see. But as memories were shared over cups of tea and cake the file remained unopened and untouched, a silent reminder of the many painful stories in Jessie’s life.22 Neville was also positioning himself as the creator and gatekeeper of knowledge about Aboriginal people and their culture and history. He shaped (left) public understanding of colonial history Cover of Shadow in lectures and journal articles. In No Lines by Stephen Kinnane (Fremantle Sugar Davis shows Neville reading Press, 2003). his 1936 speech to the Royal Western
Humanities Australia 29 to resemble an alarming ‘racial archive’.25 His cultural characteristics by pressuring lighter expanding family card genealogies, as detailed castes to marry white, thereby providing the as any of Francis Galton’s eugenic charts, and ultimate solution. Neville’s retirement in 1940 the personal files provided an administrative and the outbreak of war prevented wholesale apparatus to divide Aboriginal people into implementation of the policy, but the files distinct categories that set them apart from record children being classified according to each other, sometimes even their own children, color with the ‘nearly white’ children being sent and segregated them from settler colonists. to Sister Kate’s Quarter Caste Children’s Home Fractional calculations on file covers are proof in Perth to be groomed for their ‘ultimate that determining racial classifications was not absorption’.27 In 1947 Neville published always simple. Once caught, the only avenue of Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the escape was to apply for exemptions under the Community where he famously wrote ‘the native 1905 Act, which were rarely granted. must be helped in spite of himself […] the end Ann Stoler reminds us that racial categories in view will justify the means applied’.28 are not fixed but are ‘mutating ontologies’ that Kim Scott’s multi-award winning novel can be reformulated ‘again and again’ according Benang (1999) is in part a profound response to historical exigencies.26 In the 1930s when to Neville’s distorted vision and its historical National Socialist Germany was recasting context of reformulated race ontologies and its definitions of Aryan and Jew, Neville eugenic manipulation for purposes of racial proposed to extend existing racial definitions elimination, or purification.29 It is also a to include ‘quadroons’ and even lighter personal response to Neville’s treatment of castes. Neville achieved his goal in the 1936 Noongar families gleaned from Scott’s own amending legislation that adopted the policy family memories and the archive. Scott’s of biological absorption. The solution was to protagonist Harley, presented as the ‘first ‘breed out’ Aboriginal physical and white man born’, is the outcome of a eugenicist experiment conducted by his own grandfather along the lines of Neville’s absorption policy and similar programmes in other Western nations at the time. The shock of Harley’s realisation as he looks through papers in his grandfather’s office surely mirrors an anguished generalised Aboriginal response to the realisation that Neville, who was legal guardian of Aboriginal children to the age of twenty- one, subjected those under his care to this diabolical experimentation. In the way that so many removed children have searched out their birth families to find their identities, Harley attempts to reverse the experiment and reconnect with his Noongar family and culture.30 In 1948 Western Australia began a major period of reform with the adoption of the policy of assimilation and appointment of a determined new (right) Commissioner to lead the charge. Cover of Benang– This would transform Neville’s closed From the Heart shop into a modern, outward-looking by Kim Scott (Fremantle Press, department. The goal of assimilation 1999). was that Aboriginal people would
30 Humanities Australia become citizens living in suburbs and towns ‘like white Australians do’. The reforms required to achieve this were daunting: repeal of all discriminatory legislation to bring full citizenship; dismantling the department and mainstreaming services and benefits; and desegregating West Australian society. Few members of the public supported these changes. Nor were there sufficient resources to alleviate endemic Aboriginal poverty and raise living conditions to community standards. It was also the case that some Aboriginal people resented the imposed changes to their way of life, although most welcomed better living conditions and the opportunity of schooling for their children. The new Commissioner, Stanley Middleton, was a former senior bureaucrat in the Papua New Guinea field service with the necessary experience and proactive stance. His catchcry was ‘assimilation into the general community on the basis of reasonable equality in all facets of community life’. 31 Middleton genuinely sought to move the department into an interim welfare role and then redundancy. He was outraged by political opposition He began by replacing police with a field to the repeal of laws that were ‘repugnant to system along the Papua New Guinea model. basic humanitarian and welfare principles’ and He stopped segregated services and transferred ‘unparalleled in the legislative treatment of any responsibility to mainstream departments, other people in the Commonwealth or Pacific beginning with health, schooling and then territories’.32 He was shocked by Neville’s child welfare and housing. He supported personal files and ‘caste’ cards with their federal social service benefits for Aboriginal ‘obsessively mapped and meticulously recorded’ people to replace rations and blankets and fractions as far as ‘21/23rds’ and suggested in pushed for speedy legislative reform to make a note to his Minister that their ‘accidental Aboriginal citizenship a reality. destruction’ would be of ‘untold benefit’.33 He The DIA archive records reflect Middleton’s was deeply shocked by conditions in the native initiatives. Files were now stamped Department settlements where ‘inmates’ sat ‘absolutely of Native Welfare. The new decentralised silent and just stared…[saying] not a word’.34 record system that directly linked head office Middleton had good reason to distance with patrol officers in the field now had file himself from the old files. Of particular titles like ‘38/1949 District Officer of Natives concern were practices of removing and Journal’. The titles also showed the new institutionalising Aboriginal children. cooperation between government departments: A confidential report in 1949 about conditions ‘921/1949 Education of Natives Policy General for children at Carrolup settlement listed Correspondence’ and ‘412/1960 Housing for unhygienic conditions amounting to ‘gross (above) Natives State Housing and Private. General neglect’, ‘barbarous’ dormitories, insufficient Cover of Rene Baker Correspondence’. food and inadequate ablutions, and warned of File #28/E.D.P by 35 Rene Powell and These changes were grafted onto the old serious epidemics if the situation continued. Bernadette Kennedy system that resisted modernisation. Middleton In late 1952 Middleton handed the former (Fremantle Press, recorded his growing frustrations in the files. settlement over to the Baptist Aborigines 2005).
Humanities Australia 31 Mission. Evidence concerning outright from the late 1950s by growing appreciation illegalities also set alarm bells ringing. In 1950 of the historic value of the state’s archival Middleton had warned his Minister about records, beginning with the appointment of a ‘illegal and unsatisfactory procedures’ in State Archivist in 1945, the archiving of records the past when the department had ‘seldom, in the J. S. Battye Library of West Australian if ever’ obtained ministerial warrants for History and State Archives from 1956, and the the committal of children to institutions as appointment of a Records Committee in 1958 to required by law and he advised that Aboriginal oversee disposal schedules for departments. It parents could have taken legal action against was not until the 1990s that there were calls for the department.36 a moratorium on the destruction of invaluable Fifty years later Rene Powell was shocked Aboriginal records.38 to read Middleton’s comments in an archive The year 1972 saw thousands of carefully file while researching her removal from maintained and guarded records begin their Warburton Mission in 1952. Powell and her final transfer to the archival repository for co-researcher and storage, conservation, writer Bernadette preservation and public Kennedy concluded research. For the DIA that her case was files this did not mean one of many ‘not retirement but a new era so legal’ removals of fevered controversy. of Aboriginal The catalyst for children in Western change was the 1972 Australia. They Aboriginal Affairs were convinced Planning Authority Act that Middleton’s that dismantled the drive to mainstream department and repealed child welfare was the last discriminatory motivated as much by laws. The new ‘fear of litigation as by Aboriginal Affairs any desire for justice’. Planning Authority They published had only limited their findings in the operational functions book, Rene Baker File and the Department #28/E.D.P. (2005), of Community using multi-voice Welfare now managed narratives, with the Aboriginal child authors explaining and family welfare. their reasons The records were for writing the book, and with voices of split up between the Planning Authority and administrators, missionaries and police quoted the Department of Community Welfare and from the files juxtaposed with the contrasting historical files over 30 years old were cleared accounts of Powell’s removal told by her and moved in batches over several years to be Ngaanyatjara family.37 managed by the State Archivist in the Battye (above) It is likely that Middleton’s concerns Library. Then began the archival processes of Cover of For contributed to the destruction of files that listing, shelving and microfilming records for Their Own Good: began in 1938 but escalated during the 1950s. access by researchers. Aborigines and Government in Using the card registers Kinnane and Marsh In 1979, while Western Australians the Southwest of calculated the percentages of files destroyed as celebrated 150 years of colonial settlement and Western Australia, 1900–1940 by Anna 55 percent of administrative files, 21 percent of progress, a new vanguard of social historians Haebich (UWA personal files and 71 percent of staff files. At the were constructing very different accounts of Publishing, 1988). same time, they noted how this was tempered the past using the DIA archive. Already in
32 Humanities Australia 1973 archivist Peter Biskup had published his individual concerned or, if deceased, their classic study of policy and practice in Western immediate descendants. Later the department Australia, Not Slaves Not Citizens. Many more developed a one-stop service providing support radical histories would follow including my for family history research and counseling. own book, For Their Own Good: Aborigines For many of the Stolen Generations these and Government in the Southwest of Western records were the lifelines back to their mothers Australia (1992), that combined archival and families. The documentary, Case 442 research and Noongar accounts of the past. A Son’s Journey to Find his Mother, directed In these politically charged times by Mitch Torres, tells how Mr Frank Byrne controversy was inevitable. The first official found his mother in the file for Department act of obstruction was by the Minister for of Community Welfare Case 442 as well as Police, Bill Hassell, who in 1980 banned the details of his forced removal to Beagle access to all police records about Aborigines Bay Mission north of Broome. His mother’s in retaliation for the story was tragic: alleged defamation of after her son the family of a serving was taken she senior police officer had a breakdown by historian Andrew and was sent Gill in a respectable to a psychiatric academic journal.39 hospital in Perth In the following year, where she spent now wearing the her remaining hat of Minister for years and was Community Welfare, buried nearby. Hassell embargoed use The film shows of the DIA archive as Mr Byrne grieving well after a researcher at his mother’s allegedly breached grave and then his classified material; determined efforts he also threatened to successfully prosecutions. return his mother’s Aboriginal leaders remains for burial joined with in her traditional historians to dispute country near Fitzroy the government’s Crossing in the draconian efforts Kimberley.41 to gag research.40 Controversially, However, the West Australian prohibitions continued while the files government continued to validate the ‘truth’ were carefully assessed and designated as of the DIA archive over Aboriginal oral history permanently ‘restricted’ or as ‘open’ for access and memory by obliging Aboriginal people to to bona fide researchers. produce evidence from its records in various (above left) By the mid-1980s Aboriginal families were claim matters. In a cruel irony this included Cover of ‘It’s Still in also seeking access to the archive. Passions proving the case for monetary compensation My Heart, This is My Country’: The ran high as they read the often derogatory and by the Stolen Generations and for Stolen Wages Single Noongar misinformed information recorded in terse mismanaged by the government. The archive Claim History by the South West bureaucratic language. Information in many also became a vital source for Land Councils and Aboriginal Land personal files was so private and contentious Native Title claimants to demonstrate ongoing and Sea Council, that the Department of Community Welfare connections to land and culture. In 2009 the John Host with Chris Owen (UWA introduced a further embargo while it South West Land and Sea Council published It’s Publishing, 2009). developed its policy to restrict access to the Still in My Heart, This is My Country, a definitive
Humanities Australia 33 history of colonisation in Noongar country Project (2004–8) has investigated strategies based on the history report for the Single for Kurri people to become ‘co-creators’ of Noongar Claim that drew together archival archival records using ‘Indigenous knowledge, research and Noongar oral histories. memory and frameworks of evidence’. In 2010 During the 1990s simmering tensions Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social erupted into a national campaign for Aboriginal Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda called for a control of the archives. Aboriginal leaders ‘resettling of relationships’ between Aboriginal in two national government inquiries, both people and the archives through a process men from Western Australia, led the way: described by Marcia Langton and Martin Pat Dodson in the 1991 Royal Commission Nakata as ‘dialogue, conversation, education, into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and and working through things together […] and Mick Dodson in the 1997 Bringing Them means for Indigenous people to be part of what Home Report on Australia’s Stolen they determine should be done’.44 The creative Generations.42 Mick Dodson drew on works by West Australian writers cited here are international conventions and principles testimonies to what can be achieved. They show when he asserted that the child removals the passionate, rich storytelling that emerges were genocidal and gross violations of human when Aboriginal people engage with the archives rights and that it was the responsibility of state that once controlled their lives and, armed with and federal governments to return records of their shared memories and cultural knowledge, their genocidal policies to the victims. This release and transform the hidden meanings and would restore knowledge vital for their healing forgotten stories captured within them. ¶ and survival as Indigenous people. Dodson recommended a human rights framework for ANNA HAEBICH FAHA FASSA is the archives based on self-determination, non- an internationally regarded discrimination and cultural renewal. historian known for her interdisciplinary research into There was a muted response to Dodson’s Australia’s recent past. Best recommendations from the Western known is her book Broken Australian government. Significant change Circles, the first national history of Australia’s only began with the 2001 State Records Act Stolen Generations. Her current research explores that established the State Records Office, the history of Aboriginal public performance in independent of the State Library, and charged Western Australia. Anna is currently John Curtin it to review the status of all DIA restricted Distinguished Professor at Curtin University. files. Thousands were subsequently reclassified PHOTO COURTESY CURTIN UNIVERSITY, © JAMES CAMPBELL as open access. Indexes and guides to the DIA archive were digitised though few files. 1. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of The Records Office follows the now outdated History, ed. by Antoinette Burton (Durham NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 1997 Policy Statement on Archival Services for p. 20. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and 2. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian the 2005 Protocol for Libraries, Archives, and Impression, Religion and Postmodernism Information drawn up by the Aboriginal and Series (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Torres Strait Islander Library and Information 1996), p. 4. Resources Network.43 3. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Nationally, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, Islander archivists and colleagues continue to 2009), p. 1. pursue a human rights agenda, now through 4. Burton, p. 210. the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous 5. A longer version of this paper will be published Peoples adopted by Australia in 2009, and soon—Anna Haebich, ‘Aboriginal Lives have produced national statements based Trapped in the Archives’, in Australian Identity and Culture: Transnational Perspectives in Life on the declaration concerning Indigenous Writing, ed. by Paul Arthur (London: Anthem knowledge, archives and human rights. In Press, forthcoming.) Melbourne the Koori Trust and Technology
34 Humanities Australia 6. Lauren Marsh and Steve Kinnane, ‘Ghost 27. Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Files: The Missing Files of the Department of Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle: Indigenous Affairs Archives’, Studies in Western Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000), p. 289. Australian History, 23 (2003), 111–27. 28. A. O. Neville, Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its 7. Lynette Russell, ‘Indigenous Knowledge Place in the Community (Sydney: Currawond and Archives: Accessing Hidden History Publishing Company, 1947), p. 80. and Understandings’, in Proceedings of the 29. Kim Scott, Benang: From the Heart (Fremantle: Libraries and Indigenous Knowledge Colloquium Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999). (Sydney, 2004), cited in Sue McKemmish, 30. Lisa Slater, ‘Kim Scott’s Benang: An Ethics of Anne Gilliland-Swetland and Eric Ketelaar, Uncertainty’, Journal of the Association for the ‘“Communities of Memory”: Pluralising Study of Australian Literature, 4 (2005), p. 150. Archival Research and Education Agendas’, Archives and Manuscripts, 33 (2005), p. 20. 31. Anna Haebich, Broken Circles, p. 219. 8. Marsh and Kinnane, ‘Ghost Files’, p. 111. 32. Anna Haebich, Broken Circles, p. 218. 9. McKemmish, Gilliland-Swetland and Ketelaar, 33. West Australian State Record Office ‘Communities of Memory’, p. 22. 993/1945/803. 10. Russell, ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Archives’, 34. Stanley Middleton interviewed by Bill and J. M. Flavier et al., ‘The Regional Bunbury, 1986. Transcription. Library Board of Program for the Promotion of Indigenous Western Australia, np. Knowledge in Asia’, in The Cultural Dimension 35. West Australian State Record Office 993/1949/0832. Of Development: Indigenous Knowledge 36. West Australian State Record Office 993/52/1950. Systems, ed. by D. M. Warren, L. J. Slikkerveer 37. R. Powell and B. Kennedy, Rene Baker File and D. Brokensha (London: Intermediate #28/E.D.P. (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Technology Publications, 1995), p. 479. Press, 2005), pp. 44, 95. 11. McKemmish, Gilliland-Swetland and Ketelaar, 38. Marsh and Kinnane, ‘Ghost Files’, pp. 121, 125, ‘Communities of Memory’, p. 23. pp. 116–120. 12. Andrew Ross interviewed by Anna Haebich, 39. Andrew Gill, ‘Aborigines, Settlers and Police February 2013. WA Aboriginal Performing Arts in the Kimberleys’, Journal of Studies in Western Collection, Curtin University, in possession of Australian History, 1 (1997), pp. 1–8. the interviewer, p. 19. 40. Norman Aisbett, ‘Archives Clamp on 13. The history of the administration from 1898 Aboriginal Files’, The West Australian, 1981 (exact to 1972 draws on Anna Haebich, For Their Own date unknown), p. 5. Good: Aborigines and Government in the South West of Western Australia, 1900–1940 (Nedlands: 41. Mitch Torres, Case 442: A Son’s Journey to Find University of Western Australia, 1992); Anna his Mother (Alice Springs: Caama Productions, Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Screenwest Inc. and Australian Film Australia (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2008). Commission, 2005). 14. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, p. 21. 42. Commissioner Elliott Johnston, QC, National Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal 15. West Australian State Record Office 993/1912/903. Deaths in Custody, 5 vols (Canberra: Australian 16. Haebich, For Their Own Good, pp. 160–161. Government Publishing Service, 1998), II 17. West Australian State Record Office 653/1920/16. (1991); Human Rights and Equal Opportunity 18. Haebich, For Their Own Good, p. 287. Commission, Bringing Them Home Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal 19. Jack Davis, No Sugar (Sydney: Currency Press, and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their 1986), pp. 46–47. Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal 20. Doris Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence Opportunity Commission, 1997). (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 43. G. Foley, private communication, January 2012. 1996), pp. 125, 126, 126–129. 44. Mick Gooda, ‘Towards an Understanding of 21. Marsh and Kinnane, ‘Ghost Files’, pp. 120, 121. the Archival and Recordkeeping Implications 22. Steve Kinnane, Shadow Lines (Fremantle: Fremantle of Australian and International Human Rights Arts Centre Press, 2003), pp. 127, 138–139. for Indigenous Australians’, in Interdisciplinary 23. Tigger Wise, The Self-Made Anthropologist: Workshop: Archives and Indigenous Human A Life of A. P. Elkin (Sydney: George Allen & Rights, 1–8 (Melbourne: Australian Human Unwin, 1985), p. 68. Rights Commission, 2010), pp. 5–6; Martin 24. Haebich, For Their Own Good, p. 265. Nakata and Marcia Langton, Australian Indigenous Knowledge and Libraries, 36 vols 25. Burton, p. 200. (Canberra: Australian Academic and Research 26. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, p. 4. Libraries, 2006), II, pp. 2–5.
Humanities Australia 35 A Whisper in Stone » KIM SCOTT
I HAD WRITTEN YOU A LETTER WHICH I HAD, FOR WANT OF BETTER…
But I am not writing to Clancy of the I also can’t apologise for sympathising with Overflow, even though my desired reader is those of whom it is said: they write for their similarly remote and isolated. Instead, I want to conquerors, write in the coloniser’s language Bsend a message of encouragement and support and write for an audience of which their home to a prison inmate, an Aboriginal man and—as community is but a tiny minority. In such we say—a Wirlomin brother. a context even the success of publication, It’s probably unwise—let alone ethical—to use let alone the winning of literary prizes can his name or that of the prison that holds him. be strangely debilitating. ‘Let us mistrust Initially, I thought of writing an open letter applause’, says Galeano. ‘At times we are beginning, ‘Dear X’ but, since I’ve already congratulated by those who consider us mentioned Clancy of the Overflow, let’s call my innocuous.’ 2 ideal addressee Clancy (junior). I’d realised that All of which might help explain why a reader prison staff would probably be the first to read like Clancy matters so much. any private letter to Clancy, whereas an open Last time Clancy was on parole he called letter would at least allow for other readers and my name across a busy street, and I turned the potential to enlist allies. And of course, and waited as he danced through the honking eventually, Clancy would still get to read it. traffic. When he arrived he named a book of I gave up on the letter, but not on the idea of mine and said, ‘I thank you for that book and writing something about, and indirectly to, a very your journey and you make me proud. I want to special reader. Writing is such an intimate form shake your hand, Kim Scott my brother. of communication that every reader is important. I made him proud? However, on this occasion I intend to emphasise I have already apologised for boasting. just one reader in particular and it is unlikely to * * * be you. That may seem offensive enough, but— even worse—I will also be shamelessly boasting. There’s a story from the early days of the For all of this I apologise profusely. colonisation of Fremantle. An Aboriginal man However, as a fair-skinned Aboriginal (a Noongar, in this part of the world) was locked person, it’s not for me to apologise for my up. Under cover of darkness, the Noongar’s concerns being reduced to: family and friends crept up to the thick stone walls and knocked and tapped and scratched a whole new fashion in academia, the arts and on the stone to communicate with him. Chased professional activism to identify as Aboriginal1 away, they sang their voices across the wall to
36 Humanities Australia comfort him in his isolation. I’d like to think prison staff impassively watched from where reader and writer can do that too: share words they stood among Clancy’s brothers. of comfort not only across razor and steel- All eyes were on him as he stood at the small capped stone walls but also across the vast, lectern and began calling out names of those yawning chasm that sometimes divides us. who had been important to his father. Then: ‘Kim Scott, my brother, dad loved you and * * * what you and him were doing, our history and Clancy came to his father’s funeral handcuffed language.’ and chained to a security guard. His children Yes, I am boasting, telling you this proudly. wept to see him. They hung from his shoulders Clancy is a reader who matters. and hugged him and he had to shift his arms Clancy’s father and I spent a lot of time awkwardly this way and that to keep the together in the first decade of this century. shackles away from their bodies. Clancy’s father, Lomas, and aunties Hazel One at a time, people walked to the space and Audrey Brown offered me stories and where they could face the mourning crowd sounds indigenous to our ancestral country, and recount their memories of the old man. and took me to places from where those same Many sobbed as they did so. I saw Clancy’s stories sprang. We joined their words with (below) frustration, saw him lift his head like a chained fragments in the archives, linguists’ word lists Kim Scott with dancer measuring his leap… and transcriptions and, gathering with other Tegan Roberts, holding an example Handcuffs held out in front of him, he pivoted members of a ‘community of descendants’, of artwork by her and, jerking the chain between him and the began to breathe life into them. ‘Too sad and father, Anthony security guard, walked to the room’s power spot. strange’, someone said. ‘We mostly only ever get (Troy) Roberts at the 2011 launch of their Walked? What is the word to say how he moved? together like this at funerals nowadays.’ books published by It was too tentative and too graceful to be called We had sent the results of our work to UWA Publishing, a strut or swagger. He hesitated for an instant Clancy, and he began sharing his growing Mamang and Noongr Mambara body of Aboriginal (Noongar, in this instance) between each step and held his cuffed hands Bakitj. before him as if the cuffs and looping chain were language and stories with a few other inmates. PHOTO: MARY GIMONDO. the stuff of ceremony. The guard, surrounded by For over a year Clancy, with the help of another Clancy’s children, meekly followed as the other long-term Noongar inmate, held ‘classes’
Humanities Australia 37 attended by other, mostly younger inmates. illustrations for some bilingual stories we’d put They came to be called ‘culture and healing together. The prison allowed Clancy to select workshops’, and had the support of senior staff inmates to participate, most of whom had been at the prison. attending the classes he had organised. One Clancy’s father was a generous man who inmate was invited because, although ‘one of grieved for what he had not been able to leave us’, he was particularly estranged from clan and his children, though of course Clancy carries country. something of his father’s legacy of being a black For two days inmates and family from man in a little country town, even after the outside the prison walls shared the ancient arrival of citizenship (or ‘drinking rights’). It’s a language and stories of their ancestors, those legacy that includes the experience of drinking who had created human society in this part of with a farmer at the end of the week you’ve the world.3
spent slaving to clear your ancestral country for At the end of our time together, Clancy him, and then being arrested as you enter town. addressed the group. Imagine it, if you will: the policeman locks ‘Last bit of time, as you know’, he said, ‘I’ve you up, grins through the bars, talks about the been in solitary.’ weekend he’ll spend with your wife. He’d spent the time reading, he said, and Clancy and his brothers asked me to be a then listed all my books. Yes, again, I am (above) pallbearer at their father’s funeral. One of the boasting. A rock waterhole brothers—Geoff—was so free a man that he had Wiping his eyes as people prepared to leave, (‘Ngaama’ in no Centrelink number, no bank account, no Clancy said, ‘What you doing to me, Kim? I got Noongar language) along the south fixed address. I relied upon Geoff in many ways, a reputation to look after in here. ’ coast of south- and was honoured to be one of those carrying Those who remained when we left the prison western Western his father’s body that very last time. were entrusted with finishing the illustrations. Australia. Several months after the burial we held A few days later the inmate who’d been invited PHOTO: DECLAN SCOTT. a workshop in the prison to generate some because he was ‘lost’ asked Clancy what was in
38 Humanities Australia it for him. How much money was being made, needing a walking stick she crossed the wire anyway? fence and led us across the shifting soil to a ‘I nearly hit him’, said Clancy. ‘You don’t rocky outcrop. She pointed, there: a series of know who you are, I told him. That’s why we’re neat circles in the rock that grew small, then here, and we’re angry. This is our old people larger again. ‘Yongar and Miak’, she said, and talking, and this is for when we get out of here.’ told the old story of Kangaroo and Moon. ‘Healing’ and ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ are Kangaroo complains of inevitable death, and words he uses. how his bones will turn grey and crack in Clancy talks about how he must control his the sun as the hill grows around them. And anger, his drug-taking and violence. His short Moon? Moon gets very sick and wastes away, fuse lets other inmates, and security officers but doesn’t die: the moon always returns, and too, goad him into a reaction that gets him back grows strong again. in solitary and delays his release. It is both a responsibility and a privilege to We had left some art materials behind after stand beside where that story is imprinted in the workshop—good paper, paints, good quality stone, and hear its ancient utterance. Either brushes—to finish off the job. Next day all that side of a stone wall capped with razor wire, material had disappeared from the storeroom. at least one reader and writer lean forward, Weeks later a security officer told Clancy it had listening, hoping. ¶ been replaced, and held out a paintbrush. ‘A 50¢ brush’, Clancy told me. ‘We both knew KIM SCOTT FAHA is a multi- it wasn’t like what was left for us, not proper award winning novelist. He was brushes. He wanted me to be grateful. I didn’t the 2012 West Australian of the Year, having been nominated in say nothing. I let it go.’ both the Indigenous and the Clancy has spent a lot of time in solitary. Arts and Culture categories. They want you isolated from society, he says, A descendant of people living along the south coast that’s why we’re here. And then they isolate you of Western Australia prior to colonisation and proud again. He was in solitary for two weeks. But it to be one among those who call themselves didn’t work. ‘I wasn’t alone’, he said, and named Noongar, Kim is founder and chair of the Wirlomin characters and people I’d written about. ‘Man, I Noongar Language and Stories Project which, among other achievements, has to date resulted in the was with all my family and friends in that book publication of four bilingual picture books. He is you and Aunty Hazel did. Bobby too.’ currently Professor of Writing at Curtin University. Clancy choreographed dances from some of the stories we shared, and he and other inmates performed at the prison’s NAIDOC This story was first published in Westerly, celebrations. That made people proud, too. Vol. 57, No. 2, November 2012. It is kindly Clancy’s paintings were propped at centre reproduced here with the permission of stage for the launch of our bilingual picture the publisher. books. Afterwards and elsewhere, we sat * * * around a flickering campfire. Clancy was at a distance, but is intrinsic to these pulsing, 1. Andrew Bolt, ‘It’s So Hip to be Black’, Herald concentric circles. Sun, 25 April 2009
Humanities Australia 39 Creators Destroyers? The Burning Questions of Human Impact in Ancient Aboriginal Australia or
» PETER HISCOCK
INTRODUCTION: QUESTIONS OF HOW AND WHY
The Fall of Humanity depicted in the Book of Genesis portrays traumas associated with the transition from foraging to farming. That T transformation of human social and economic life is depicted negatively, and is associated with both suffering and shame. While in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had an abundance of fruits to pick, but after the Fall they and their descendants had to sweat and labour to farm the land for a living. The transformation from a life of ease to one of labour was accompanied by momentous cultural shifts, such as the transformation from peace to murder as Cain slaughtered Abel, a shift requiring the development of elaborate social processes to regulate conflict. This Old Testament narrative illustrates, actually epitomises, long-standing imagery of hunter-gatherers conjured by agriculturalists. Biblical visions of lost Edens emerge in many modern Western stories about the distant past and about the lives of foragers. (above) The story of the Fall provides one fundamental Bush fire at Captain element in the conceptual background of Creek, Central current debates about human impacts on Queensland, Australia. the environment. It is a narrative explored in visions about the nature of life and wilderness SOURCE: 80 TRADING 24 (OWN WORK) [CC- at earlier times: either before the coming of BY-SA-3.0 (HTTP:// CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/ humans or before the coming of agriculturalists LICENSES/BY-SA/3.0)], VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS to the Australian landscape.
40 Humanities Australia Here I examine recent arguments by historians and natural scientists, as well as archaeologists, who have discussed the transformation of nature after hunter-gatherers and/or agriculturalists arrived in Australia. I focus on human use of fire and its articulation to society and belief. For reasons of time I will not deal with the ongoing debate on extinction of megafaunal taxa and whether it was a consequence of human over-predation. The propositions that have been advanced range from an argument that Aboriginal people created an Eden-like estate to the view that they destroyed the delicately balanced natural ecosystem they found in Australia. Intriguingly, both arguments adopt the narrative arc of Genesis; they both assert that Australia was once a bountiful, diverse and desirable place before the intrusion of humans. The arguments differ in their assigning of culpability for the Fall. The first reading, that Aboriginal Australia remained an Edenic place until the coming of Europeans, depicts foragers living harmoniously within the limits of their environment, most likely recognising its in a few that they are undoubtedly recovery character and enhancing it, until the intrusion narratives played out in purportedly historical of agriculturalists destroyed the balance and interpretations. I will illustrate this shortly. created the Fall. The second reading, that A related issue is the constraints on the arrival of humans in Australia led to the historical interpretations created by imposing extinction of megafauna and subsequent vivid images from the historical record upon impacts on small fauna and flora, implies that the distant past. As an archaeologist I explore Adam and Eve’s self-interest meant they would the immense span of time in which humans inevitably violate the rule of the Garden, and have occupied Australia and the rapidity and that humans are inherently destroyers of their frequency of social and economic changes that own environments. took place during that period. Recognition of (above) These biblical parallels might seem substantial change in the cultures that lived Fig. 1. Peter Brown’s incidental and accidental except that almost across Australia underpins my conclusions, evocative artistic depiction of a man twenty years ago Carolyn Merchant, then especially those that have proved challenging. from the terminal professor of environmental history, philosophy Conclusions such as my argument that, Pleistocene period, and ethics at the University of California obviously, Aboriginal people did not colonise based on Coobool Creek skeletons. Berkeley, argued robustly that much Western Australia. We know that Australia was COURTESY PETER BROWN history about the colonisation of the New colonised by populations of modern humans World can be coherently read as ‘recovery descended from Africans who had migrated (opposite) 1 narratives’. That is, as stories of decline out-of-Africa, moved across South Asia and The Expulsion Of from a golden age that finish with hope of eventually crossed the water barriers separating Adam and Eve from Eden. Fresco by redemption in the form of some return to the the Pleistocene continent of Australia (Sahul) Masaccio. 1426-27, original Edenic state or at least a reorientation from the Pleistocene continent located in Cappella Brancacci, of current environmental relationships to Southeast Asia. These humans were the distant Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. create some simulacra of that state. This ancestors of Aboriginal people; but as far as we SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA narrative arc occurs in some prominent recent know they would not have been recognisably COMMONS, PUBLIC Australian publications; indeed it is so explicit Aboriginal, physically or culturally. Their DOMAIN (PD-ART).
Humanities Australia 41 descendants became Aboriginal as they evolved, time around 3000 to 4000 years ago. Possibly adapting to the continent they inhabited. When these diffused in parallel with the Pama- confronted with scientific interpretations Nyungan spread, but that is not yet established. of the African origins of humans Aboriginal In roughly the same period some specific people sometimes object, insisting they came implement forms such as microlithic backed from Australia. In many ways they are right. artefacts began being produced in vast numbers While their immensely distant ancestors came for a comparatively short time. Around the from Africa, people who were physically and coastal plains of southern Australia, where they culturally Aboriginal evolved here. were used as craft tools to work skin, bone and This evolution of Aboriginal life may not wood, they proliferated between about 3500 to technically have been continuous, in the sense 2000 years ago.4 They were manufactured and that change happened at a constant rate, but used in great numbers for about 500 to 1000 the indications in the archaeological record years in each region, and then the technology suggest changes occurred repeatedly and was, gradually, entirely abandoned. sometimes frequently throughout the last In Northern Australia Paul Taçon and 50,000 years. The resolution on cultural change his colleagues have shown that the imagery is far higher in recent millennia as a result of used in the nineteenth century to represent the better preservation and easier discovery the Rainbow Serpent, a significant figure in of archaeological materials. So I will simply post-contact cosmology, could be traced in the give examples from the last ten millennia, the sequence of rock art in Arnhem Land. Versions final fifth of the time people have been in this of the image first appear in the Yam phase, continent.2 which might be something like 4000 to 6000 At the start of this period in the south-east years ago, and the images began to look like some populations were still deforming the those used historically probably in the last skulls of their infants so that adults of their two or three thousand years.5 Rock art from group were visibly distinct and distinguishable earlier time periods depicts the world in very from members of other groups (fig. 1). This form different ways, with images of half-animal/half- of public signalling vanished around 9000 years human beings roaming the world with humans, ago and was never again used in Australia.3 sometimes attacking them. This seems an Although linguists have struggled to archaeological signal of a fundamental change define the date precisely, they argue that the in world view, including a significant change in Pama-Nyungan language family spread from religious expression. somewhere near the Gulf of Carpentaria In the last 1000 to 3000 years there are across the southern 70 percent of Australia, notable economic reorganisations in a number perhaps between 5000 and 10,000 years ago. of regions. For instance, the intensified The precise direction and mode of dispersal earth mound building in Victorian wetlands is still being investigated, but it is reasonable probably represents not only greater emphasis to consider the impact of this major language on exploitation of wetland resources but also replacement on the way people named and increased sedentism. Meanwhile across almost thought of their world. I would expect that the entire northern coastline, the system of mythologies, cosmologies and ontologies were intensive exploitation of rich mollusc beds by substantially reworked, not simply maintained moderately large sedentary groups, leading and accurately translated. The alternative to the creation of large mounds of shell, possibility is that there may have been collapsed as mangroves colonised previously dispersals of people, invasions/replacements open beaches. The point of my two examples perhaps, creating cultural disconformities. is to emphasise regional differentiation: as one Substantial shifts in technology occur in settlement system becomes sedentary another this time period. Ground-edge axes, which becomes more residentially mobile and diffuse. had been used in northern Australia for tens Some researchers argue that the last few of millennia, began being used across much of thousand years is a period of substantial central and south-eastern Australia for the first population increase, with associated growth
42 Humanities Australia in the identity and territorial boundedness the nineteenth century was the formation of groups, eventually leading to some of the and expansion of cults, displayed through patterns seen historically. Certainly, occupation ceremonies that were the culmination and in desert landscapes studied by Peter Veth,6 focus of social gatherings, often accompanied Mike Smith,7 myself 8 and others produced by stories or mythologies and associated higher amplitude signals that are consistent with initiations and the sanctioning of and with more people or more occupation or orchestration of social actions by ‘clever significantly different modes of occupation in men’. This religious process of frequent cultic recent millennia. changes, through the invention of new cults Reconfiguration of mythology and ritual dreamed of by clever men, was well recorded practice are well documented in the last and wonderfully described in the twentieth millennium. In the north east of Australia century by anthropologists such as William Bruno David has neatly documented the Stanner.14 The capacity of Aboriginal religious creation of a mythology that described one frameworks to adopt, integrate and modify new landscape feature as dangerous, as revealed by cults, as a normal functioning of religious life, the abandonment of uplands about 700 to 800 has two meanings. years ago.9 And in the Torres Strait, David, Ian The changing series of cults and McNiven, Duncan Wright and others have built mythological stories that were the basis a detailed picture of a system of ritual sites of religious theatre provided for constant being constructed roughly 500 years ago.10 ideological readjustment to circumstances. It Culture contact in the period of historical is likely that cults were regularly invented and/ records yields many dramatic examples of or adopted, and in the process religious belief social, economic and religious changes, was regularly renewed. Consequently, when some happening remarkably rapidly. As Scott the environment or economy or social practices Mitchell demonstrated, Trepang fisherman changed, those alterations might be reflected in from Maccassar and other nearby ports the new religious narratives and rituals. This introduced metal tools to Aboriginal groups process would ‘renovate’ religious life in the living on the northwest coast, allowing sense that cults and mythologies were updated Aboriginal people to make dugout canoes for to refer to recent events and social concerns the first time and to harpoon marine mammals, rather than preserving ancient stories intact. so transforming economies and settlement Hence the ritual focus of people typically patterns.11 The cultural ‘trauma’ of this ongoing reflected current concerns rather than contact was reflected in language and belief, presenting stories about events in the distant and was embedded in myths. Notoriously, past. It therefore seems to me that notions that smallpox, a disease that probably killed far in Aboriginal myths faithfully record events from excess of 70 percent of Aboriginal people in the the Ice Ages—say 20,000 years ago—come more late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from expectations that Aboriginal stories and resulted in territorial reconfigurations, shifts myth were somehow unchanging, than from in gender roles, and even transformations ethnographic evidence of cult dynamism. of rituals such as the instances documented Take, for example, the spread of the Mulunga by Dick Kimber.12 There are even cogent cult, visibly expressed through the elaborate arguments that many myths recorded in and and lengthy Mulunga ceremony, which itself after the mid-nineteenth century dealing was the conclusion of prolonged rehearsals and with floods and the spread of illnesses were preparation of ritual paraphernalia. The set for expressions of Aboriginal encounters with the ceremony included the construction of a Christianity and Old World diseases— two-metre high beehive hut to be occupied by transformed into stories that had meaning in a grandmother spirit, one of the key characters Aboriginal terms.13 in the narrative. The most detailed description A sketch of one such transformation can of the ceremony comes from the missionary give a sense of changes in Aboriginal world Otto Siebert who observed it several times views. At the core of Aboriginal religion in at the dawn of the twentieth century in the
Humanities Australia 43 lands north of Port Augusta.15 A central part regional Aboriginal society of this exceptional of the ceremony involved characters holding event found one expression in the creation of forked sticks, symbolising white men with guns the Mulunga ritual/cult. killing Aboriginal people. In the finale of the The cult spread with remarkable speed, performance a hidden and elaborately adorned transmitted along river corridors and stock performer emerged from behind the hut, routes from near the Gulf of Carpentaria representing a water-spirit surfacing from a to the southern coastline and thence to water body, and ferociously attacked the white Eucla in little more than twenty years, as men in revenge. documented by both John Mulvaney16 and This complex and costly ceremony Tony Swain (fig. 2). The spread was assisted originated somewhere on the Barkly by the relevance of the culture-contact theme Tablelands, probably at the beginnings of to Aboriginal peoples becoming part of the the 1890s. I am persuaded by Tony Swain’s expanding pastoral industry, as well as by (above) suggestion that the massacre theme is a the accompanying threat of death, illness or Fig. 2. Map showing reference to the conflict in the Mount Isa rape to those who did not accept the cult or the dispersal of the region on what is locally called Battle Mountain who wrongly performed the ceremony. While Mulunga cult, based on information from where, in 1884, hundreds of Kalkadoon acknowledging that the origins and expansion John Mulvaney and warriors came out of cover, formed ranks and of the Mulunga cult came from aspirational re- Tony Swain. attacked and/or marched towards a contingent imaginings of intercultural relationships in the COURTESY of Native Police who shot almost all of them complex and disrupted colonial context, I also PETER HISCOCK with their carbines. The reverberation within think this illustrates the process of religious
44 Humanities Australia transformation that prevailed before the archaeologists and environmental scientists for arrival of Europeans. much of the last fifty years. Gammage argues What does all this mean? And how does this that extensive and regular use of limited, low relate to my theme of environmental impacts intensity fires by Aboriginal people reduced by ancient humans? I offer these examples tree coverage, encouraged patches of grass, to emphasise my vision of the dynamism and created parkland-like landscapes across of Aboriginal social and economic systems, Australia. His evidence for this comes from probably throughout the entire occupation two sources: recorded images of landscapes and of Australia. Archaeological and historical written impressions of fire in the land. evidence indicates frequent social, economic The expansive compilation of historical and ideological reorganisation. Aboriginal references to burning that Gammage has social systems were extremely capable of created displays abundant evidence for change, displaying dynamism that I suspect is strategic, planned burning of vegetation by probably typical of all the modern humans who Aboriginal people two and a half centuries emerged from Africa. ago. And yet there is little in those historical What I am emphasising is that the history of observations that demonstrate his claims for humanity in this continent has been dynamic universality of a particular human relationship and evolving, and we must appreciate it as such. with fire or a singular social context of burning. We should not hide this remarkable record It is worth noting that while Gammage has of adaptation and evolution behind slogans developed his argument from numerous such as ‘Aboriginal culture is the longest historical texts he does not give similar continuing culture in the world’, a slogan that emphasis to anthropological descriptions of implies a lack of cultural change, a Western Aboriginal burning, to modelling and fire myth of an ethnographic present stretching experiments by natural scientists, to vegetation back fifty thousand years. This is not an issue history reconstructions, or to archaeological of cultural authenticity. We do not need to data. Instead, his image is carefully crafted to authenticate Aboriginal culture by insisting, represent the state of human-environmental like nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists, interactions in 1788 and surrounding decades. that it was frozen in time. We can and should But his vision is not simply about the nature of hold a view of the history of Aboriginal culture Aboriginal life only in 1788. Gammage implies as impressively transformative. I am therefore the nineteenth-century use of fire had a deep perplexed by histories that present a fixed, history, writing that ‘an ancient philosophy was unchanging Aboriginal way of life. destroyed by the completely unexpected, an invasion of new people and ideas’.18 THE GAMMAGE ARGUMENT In one sense Gammage combines/reconciles the elements of that Genesis origin story, by In The Biggest Estate on Earth historian Bill having the leisurely life of foraging abundance Gammage has presented an Edenic vision of created by the foragers through farming/ human-landscape relationships in pre-contact land management. Gammage expresses this Australia.17 I discuss his book as an example in various ways; he depicts Aboriginal peoples of current views on Aboriginal history and as affluent foragers with abundant food from environmental relationships because its few hours of labour, even as he presents them publicity and prizes have made it a powerful as farming the land with fire, leading him influence on popular thinking. Of course, as to conclude that ‘in 1788 people assumed many of you will know, Gammage’s thesis abundance, and so did Genesis’.19 Gammage revolves around the practice of eighteenth- and interprets Aboriginal fire management as nineteenth-century Aborigines setting fires in ‘farming’, an imagery that evokes Alistair strategic ways that sometimes enhanced their Paterson’s recent observation that such views foraging economy. Now there is no doubt about imply ‘fire was used as a tool—like a farmer’s the reality that underpins that statement; spade’.20 In fact ‘farming’ is one of many terms it has been well observed and discussed by Gammage uses to conjure a vision of Aboriginal
Humanities Australia 45 people as counterparts to landed gentry in that is immensely environmentally varied and Britain; his claim is that Aboriginal burning has been subject to dramatic environmental created ‘estates’ comparable to the parklands of shifts during the last glacial, that is Ice-Age, rural Britain and that the complexity of social cycle, I find the notion that Aboriginal society life revealed their ‘civilisation’. persisted through the use of a single, inflexible, My first comment is that such phrasing unchanging adaptation to be extremely invokes diverse Eurocentric associations and puzzling. It creates a proposition that is difficult invites re-evaluation of Aboriginal actions to reconcile with the accompanying claim that and goals as functionally similar to those in Aboriginal people were optimally adapted to the historical Europe. The implication that such a landscape, because in an optimal relationship comparison elevates Aboriginal society in our to land that is constantly changing any forager view is a distinctly colonial approach to cultural will be required constantly to modify their comparisons. Yet even this characterisation of economic practices. Changes in economy Aboriginal interactions with the environment would flow through the interconnected web of in inherently European terms, suggesting that social practices and understandings, creating they farmed the land and made it ‘civilised’, is constantly changing cultural systems. From an not the most radical element in the argument evolutionary viewpoint, and in such a dynamic Gammage offers us. land, rigid unchanging societies are simply an His core proposition is that Aboriginal implausible fiction. people were inexorably committed to a The value of any ‘contract’ with fire must specific physical and spiritual bond with have varied geographically and chronologically. the environment that was and could only be We can identify times and places in which fire
THESE WERE ENVIRONMENTS UNLIKE ANY IN HISTORICAL AUSTRALIA AND THE VALUE OF FIRESTICKS IN THEM IS LIKELY TO HAVE BEEN LOW.
mediated through fire. This bond compelled cannot have operated in the way Gammage people to be devoted to the process of fire. In describes. The use of landscape burning at the Gammage’s view fire provided people with last glacial maximum, at the peak of the last abundant resources and a life of ease, but it also Ice Age some 25,000 to 18,000 years ago when bound them to lives of mobility as they were average temperatures were roughly nine degrees required to regularly tend all portions of their centigrade below today’s, is difficult to conceive. territory with their firesticks. This pattern was, During the last glacial maximum, dune systems for Gammage, exacerbated by his view that in the deserts were mobile sand sheets with population size was everywhere maintained little vegetation to restrict sand movement or to well below carrying capacity, obliging groups to be burned. Upland Tasmania contained alpine forage/firestick across territories much larger meadows with a mosaic of grasses so fragile and than they actually required. His conclusion unused to fire that they might easily be damaged. was therefore that ‘It imposed a strict and rigid These were environments unlike any in historical society, but it was an immense gain’.21 Australia and the value of firesticks in them is Beyond the claims that Aboriginals were likely to have been low. Of course the people at universally, constantly and optimally ‘farming’ those times and places may have operated in their estates with fire, it is this conclusion that ways unlike those in the historic period, creating Aboriginal society was strict and rigid that adaptations that suited their circumstances, most intrigues me as an archaeologist. Such but if that were the case such a conclusion claims have repeatedly been made, and the contradicts notions of a universal and long-lived imagined rigidity implies a fixedness of cultural ‘contract’ between fire and a rigid society. institutions and social actions that prevents or The cultural rigidity Gammage claims in minimises cultural change. Now, in a continent his hypothesis is underpinned by his static and
46 Humanities Australia deterministic vision of Aboriginal society. to terms with their relationship to the land He builds a story of an articulation between in some similar fashion. Leaving aside the people and environment based on his notion obvious point that the concept of being that Aboriginal treatment of land and Australian is itself a colonial imposition, landscape was a sacred dictate, shaped by the there is the more fundamental paradox that requirements of a Dreamtime law that obliged Gammage wants to congratulate or applaud them to act as they did. Gammage presents fire Aboriginal people for their fire-farming as the instrument for creating Eden, saying covenant with the land whilst simultaneously ‘It made the land comfortable, comforting, denying them any choice in the matter. We are bountiful and beautiful’.22 He also imagines left with an idolising, actually fetishising, of fires as a commandment, saying that ‘The Aboriginal culture as inherently conservation- Law—an ecological philosophy enforced by minded. This certainly weakens to breaking religious sanction—compelled people to care for point Gammage’s negative comparison with all their country’.23 This proposition not only modern non-Aboriginal society, which does misreads the complex cultural dynamic that have choice of action and is actively debating underpins the construction of and continual how to reduce its environmental footprint. His transformation of mythology, cosmology and denial of choice in the matter for Aboriginal social practice in Aboriginal society, it also Australians threatens to invert the moral that effectively dehumanises Aboriginal people Gammage advocates. and the culture within which they operated In the end the story Gammage offers, by removing any suggestion that they were including his assessment of our current active agents in their own fate. His statements position and his call for future reconciliation avoid mentioning the constant debate that with Aboriginal views and practices, is a would have taken place between individuals Christian/Enlightenment recovery narrative, about where and when and how much to burn, in the phrase of Carolyn Merchant. It is a about priorities in a landscape that cannot be desire for redemption. Gammage constructs everywhere occupied at the same time, about the Fall of our land, from pure, productive and the evaluation of opportunities in an ever well-managed, as occurring when Europeans changing landscape (such as in a dry year or a entered this Eden and failed to nurture it wet year). Consequently his discussion does not through a disregard for the Edenic rules (which consider the plausible alternative, which is that Gammage claims are encoded as Dreamtime the cultural pronouncements about burning he laws). He calls on us to rethink our destruction calls the ‘law’ only exist because people were of the Edenic estate and as far as possible using fire. Social conventions were constructed return to an innocuous interaction with to reflect social practice. Fire-lighting strategies the environment. This proposition displays did not exist because an abstracted ‘law’ remarkable parallels with the version of Genesis controlled people; rather the social norms and (Genesis J) that advocates that only human expectations existed because people employed labour and stewardship can restore Eden, fires, reflecting the use of fire. through tilling the garden and in the process Gammage represents Aboriginal people redeeming our souls, or at least moral authority. as having been without choice, obligated to follow a fixed set of actions as their ancestors FIRE AND SCALE: THE LESSON FROM always had and as their belief system dictated. ARCHAEOLOGY Curiously, his advocacy of a cultural system compelled to a specific ecological relationship As an archaeologist I receive a different by its own internal rules, creates logical image of the operation and consequences difficulties with the moral point he wants of anthropogenic fire, because human- to make. He argues that Aboriginal peoples environmental interactions are visible at a held a near-perfect ecological position and different temporal scale. In Holocene Australia non-Aboriginal people cannot conceptualise archaeological and environmental records themselves as Australians unless they come often have a minimum resolution of hundreds
Humanities Australia 47 of years, but we track trends over a very long Hughes extended this work in the scarps of time, often thousands of years. What we Western Arnhem Land where, with Geoff Hope witness is a disjunction between the decision- and Jeremy Russell-Smith, he showed that making of humans for their short-term self- when human occupation began, the floor of interest and the consequences of their actions valleys in the Arnhem Land Escarpment, such for environments and their descendants in as Deaf Adder George, were thinly veneered the long term. To see this we need to escape with sand.24 Sediments sat on the face and top from the ethnographic scale and the intuitive of the escarpment, providing niches for plant understandings of things we bring to short- communities which in turn held the sand in term events. place. After humans arrived large quantities My old colleague Phillip Hughes, a of sand were shed from the escarpment, filling geomorphologist turned archaeologist, the valley floors with sand more than three would always ask people ‘why are the caves to four metres deep. Again it was disturbance archaeologists dig filled with sediment?’. His of vegetation that released the sediment, and point was that in valleys and along some cliff the evidence of relic vegetation communities lines across Australia there are numerous caves in fire-shadow locations implicates fire. Since or overhanging shelters that formed long before the timing coincided with the appearance of humans appeared in this land. Many such archaeological artefacts it is human firing that concavities are probably hundreds of thousands of is implicated. years old. Typically they are filled with sediment. This is merely one example of the kind But the surprising observation is that those of evidence that continues to emerge, as sediments often contain artefacts at all levels— archaeologists dig down through great depths there are artefacts at or near the very bottom of of sediment that contain artefacts, and ask why most deposits. How can this be? The shelters/ it is that all this sediment has accumulated caves were largely bare for perhaps several since humans arrived? The implications are hundred-thousand years, reflecting a rough worth spelling out. In some, perhaps many, balance between the input of sediment and the landscapes the burning of vegetation had rate at which it was naturally moving out of the consequences that were not anticipated by the shelter (under the influence of gravity or water). humans who did the burning, consequences But then humans arrived and two things that took hundreds or thousands of years to happened. They occupied the shelters and eventuate, and which affected the resources dropped things on the floor, thereby trapping that were subsequently available. In this sense sediment and beginning the cycle of deposit firing of the landscape to obtain short-term formation, while at the same time they benefits in hunting, harvesting or travel was increased the rate of sediment deposition by simply an act of self-interest, an act which changing the environment. Within shelters everywhere altered natural biological niches their hearths created a pattern of fluctuating and which in some times and places created temperatures while they brushed against, transformations of the land itself. While in sometimes painted or engraved, the walls, some localities the introduction of human fires creating increased roof fall. Outside those might have set up new and balanced ecological shelters, in the surrounding landscape, systems, in others there were progressive people reduced vegetation, intentionally long-term transformations as positive feedback or unintentionally, creating a vast pool of cycles were launched. Degradation of soil exposed sediment that could be washed to nutrients, local extinctions of species, and different places, including into archaeological massive erosion and reshaping of the country sites. Hughes showed that archaeological all occurred, as well as the creation of grassy sites recorded the increased mobilisation patches that were bountiful and convenient. of sediments in the presence of humans, The impacts of humans on Australia’s documenting clear relationships between environments were complex and varied. There sedimentation rates and rates of artefact was transformation, but it was not always Eden accumulation in both shelters and open sites. that was wrought.
48 Humanities Australia As you can see I am in complete agreement change through pollen and plant fossils, and with Bill Gammage that the ancestors of many other techniques. These are valuable contemporary Aboriginal people transformed but challenging datasets to add to those the Australian landscape long before 1788. more familiar to researchers working in the That transformation was in many parts of the humanities. I will examine just two studies. continent probably far more dramatic and less In the first, published in 2011 inQuaternary predictable than Gammage has depicted. It was Science Reviews, Scott Mooney and his also certainly patchier than his story presents. colleagues synthesised sedimentary charcoal Each kind of landscape would have responded records from around Australia to characterise differently to the activities of humans, and the the changes in fire regimes over the last 70,000 actions of humans would have been different in years.26 Interpreting charcoal fluctuations each environment. as a measure of biomass burning, they have One of the newest archaeological findings documented that the levels of burning in the in a number of arid and semi-arid landscapes Australian landscape fluctuated over time in is that even in the last few thousand years rough synchronicity with the glacial cycle: people abandoned areas for prolonged periods. less burning during cold stages and more The rightfully famous example of this is during warm stages. They do not see people Simon Holdaway and Patricia Fanning’s studies as responsible, claiming that ‘Although there of valleys in western New South Wales.25 are marked changes in fire activity during
… THE BURNING OF VEGETATION HAD CONSEQUENCES THAT WERE NOT ANTICIPATED BY THE HUMANS WHO DID THE BURNING, CONSEQUENCES THAT TOOK HUNDREDS OR THOUSANDS OF YEARS TO EVENTUATE …
Dating stone hearths, they established a record MIS 3 […] there is no fundamental shift in of human occupation throughout the last the composite charcoal record that could be 2500 years. But their study also showed cycles associated with the colonisation of Australia by of occupation and abandonment. For instance, Aboriginal people’.27 This statement misses the it is likely that between 900 and 1150 years ago opportunity to discuss what their evidence may no hearths were constructed in the region. This actually show: when humans arrive they do not was an unusual climatic period, the Medieval increase the magnitude of biomass burning. Climatic Anomaly, and environmental changes But if humans are burning soon after they at the time appear to have triggered changes arrived, this evidence means they changed the in human settlement. In this case they nature rather than magnitude of the burning. involved exploiting different territory for a An early change in fire regimes following the couple of centuries. This is an example of the arrival of humans in the Australian landscape archaeological evidence that reveals Aboriginal is suggested in a study published in Science occupation, even in recent centuries, was in 2012 by Susan Rule and her colleagues.28 complex, surprising to people who expected to They re-examined the famous upper five find a resident group permanently occupying metres of the deep column of sediment from and uniformly exploiting well-defined Lynch’s Crater in North Queensland and territories. Territoriality and land use was showed that Sporomiella, a fungi found in the much more fluid and dynamically changing dung of herbivores as recognised from spores than Western concepts of residency and use found in the sediment, largely ceased 39,000 have anticipated. to 43,000 years ago, at the same time as the With this in mind I turn now to the evidence signal of micro-charcoal magnified. They offered by environmental scientists. A wealth interpret this as evidence that megafaunal of data is becoming available on fire history in extinction, or at least substantial reductions in Australia, acquired from sedimentary records numbers of large herbivores, occurred at that containing charcoal, studies of vegetation time, and that locally high levels of natural
Humanities Australia 49 evidence of repeated cultural change. For instance, the evidence clearly shows dramatically less burning during MIS2, the peak of the last glacial cycle. In the reduced vegetation cover of that period humans may have been lighting very few fires compared to the level of fire-lighting in the early historic period. This is a clear indicator that the pattern and extent of environmental manipulation in the distant past was almost certainly different to that in the immediate past. The magnitude of change in burning is indicated by the charcoal influx evidence for recent millennia (fig. 3). Biomass burning inferred from standardised measures of charcoal abundance in dated sediments shows that the burning histories of tropical and subtropical Australia are distinctly different. In the tropics, burning was much less frequent than today during the last glacial maximum, until 16,000 years ago, and again from 7000 to 5000 years ago. There were also periods with burning distinctly higher than the long- term average, such as about 15,500 to 14,000 fires were a consequence of the extinction of years ago and 9000 to 7500 years ago. And large herbivores increasing fuel load in the for the last 4000 to 5000 years burning levels environment and so creating preconditions have varied around the long-term mean. for wildfires. Subtropical burning histories display a more This interpretation brings us back to subtle variability, but it is still obvious that considerations of the complex intertwining from 20,000 until about 7500 years ago biomass of humans with the Australian landscape. burning levels were typically less than the long- In an ongoing debate some researchers argue term average, and from 7500 until the historic that humans created the situation because period levels resemble the long-term average. extinctions were a consequence of human These patterns in biomass burning records hunting. The evidence presented by Rule does suggest, as we should expect, that i) burning not test the role of hunting in the extinction in tropical and subtropical landscapes was (above) events, but a sequence of increased burning different, ii) the burning histories of different Fig. 3. Calculated following rather than preceding large marsupial regions are dissimilar, and iii) the historic continental extinctions is consistent with the hypothesis patterns of anthropogenic burning are unlikely biomass burning trends for Australia. of Tim Flannery, that extinction of megafauna to be more than a few thousand years old, and Top = Tropical created conditions favouring intensive may well be substantially younger. regions, Bottom = fire-management regimes amongst people The biomass burning records measure Temperate regions. Taken from fig. 4 living in some parts of Australia in order to natural as well as humanly light fires, and in Scott Mooney reduce the dangers of uncontrolled bushfires the composite burning record is primarily et al., p. 37. that intensified after the large herbivores a reflection of environmental fluctuations, Line represents standardised disappeared from the environment. of fuel load and dryness, as Mooney has shown. charcoal influx However we can also infer from the new However climate cannot have been the only trends smoothed biomass burning data that the pattern and factor involved, and rates of human burning with a 400-year line. intensity of any human burning activities are likely to have varied in response to other
COURTESY would have changed repeatedly over time and factors. For example, the intensity and nature PETER HISCOCK. across space, mirroring the archaeological of land management of all kinds,
50 Humanities Australia and certainly fire-lighting, was probably driven people modified and perhaps enhanced their by demographic conditions. At low population environment, especially in the short term. densities there is neither the need nor the It also records that the actions of foragers capacity for foragers to undertake intensive triggered the release of sediments that flooded management, nor would the returns warrant valleys and created plains, and filled rock the investment. At higher population densities shelters, changing the nature of the land. the calculation would be different: there might The ancestors of historical Aboriginal people well be the capacity to spend substantial labour were simultaneously creators and destroyers, in management schemes that would give a as they, and we, must be. worthwhile return on the social investment. There is still much to be studied. We do That demographic context alone ensures not have a robust record of the history of that there will have been transformations of Aboriginal burning or the way changing environmental relationships, including the burning regimes articulated with changing use of fire, over time as human population economies, social worlds, or even the sense sizes/densities altered in response to changing of place. But I think what we do know is environmental productivity. that the history/prehistory of human life in Australia is a history of transformation—of CONCLUSION not only the landscape but also the people who lived within it. The human occupation of The story of fire is clearly an important one Australia is an ongoing and multidimensional in human history; in Australia we have a cultural evolution. To suggest Aborigines were particular interest in the role fire played contracted to a single way of life, that there in our environments, and the role humans was but one obligatory ecological relationship played in that fire lighting. Fire and land which specified the details of daily life and were manipulated, exploited and tended by was ruled by an invariant Law, is to ignore the humans. But humans were the agents that reality of that evolutionary process. The rich made decisions in that nexus. In responding conceptual worlds of historical Aboriginal to changes in circumstance, whether driven societies, placed in a sense of an abiding by climate or by social life, humans altered the existence often called the ‘Dreaming’, were a decisions they made. part of the continuing evolution of Aboriginal To understand this long record of human life. While the sense of abiding might remain, decision-making we need all the evidential the concepts of the world could and did readily strands I have reviewed here. Historians such as change. So while there would always have been Gammage and many others have documented views of the appropriate treatment of the land, how in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the foods that were accessible and desirable, fire was habitually employed by Aboriginal the identity of potential marriage partners, people in many areas. Palaeo-environmental the stories of how humans came to be and reconstructions reinforce our understanding should operate socially, all of these have been that human society operated within and varied transformed time and time again. The study in response to the long cycles of our globe. of human evolution is a pursuit to understand Archaeological evidence reveals something change, and the burning question in studying of the frequent and rapid transformations of the Aboriginal past is how to shed images of economic and social strategies involved in land stability and comprehend the processes by use, as well as the transformations in stories which constant cultural evolution occurred. and religious beliefs that emerged from those I thank the Australian Academy of the changing social experiences. Archaeology Humanities for their invitation to deliver reveals occupation of landscapes, abandonment the 2013 Academy Lecture, and acknowledge of landscapes, fundamental changes in the the support of the University of Sydney way people moved through, made use of and Tom Austen Brown Endowment. ¶ thought about their environment. It records that, in actively creating a niche for themselves,
Humanities Australia 51 PETER HISCOCK FAHA is the the Horn Expedition: A Speculative History’, in inaugural Tom Austen Brown Exploring Central Australia: Society, the Environment Professor of Australian and the 1894 Horn Expedition, ed. by S. R. Morton Archaeology at the University of and D. J. Mulvaney (Chipping Norton, UK: Surrey, Beatty and Sons, 1996), pp. 91–103. Sydney. He was awarded a DSc by the Australian National 13. For example, Peter Hiscock, ‘Beyond the University for his contribution to the fields of lithic Dreamtime: Archaeology and Explorations of Religious Change in Ancient Australia’, World technology and Australian archaeology, and his book Archaeology 45 (2013), 71–83. Archaeology of Ancient Australia won the Mulvaney Book Award in 2010. In addition to being a Fellow of 14. W. E. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Sydney: Oceania Publications, 1989). the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a 15. Tony Swain, A Place for Strangers: Towards Research Associate of the Australian Museum, Sydney. a History of Australian Aboriginal Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 16. D. John Mulvaney, ‘“The chain of connection”: 1. Carolyn Merchant, ‘Reinventing Eden: the material evidence’, in Tribes and Boundaries Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative’, in in Australia, ed. by Nicholas Peterson Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal in Nature, ed. by William Cronon (New York: and Islander Studies, 1976), pp. 72–94. Norton, 1996), pp. 132–170. 17. Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How 2. For further information about case studies see Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen and Peter Hiscock, Archaeology of Ancient Australia Unwin, 2011). (London: Routledge, 2008). 18. Gammage, p. 323. 3. Peter Brown, ‘Artificial Cranial Deformation: 19. Gammage, p. 321. A Component in the Variation in Pleistocene 20. Alistair Paterson, ‘Enduring Contact: Australian Aboriginal Crania’, Archaeology in Australian Perspectives in Environmental Oceania 16 (1981), 156–67. and Social Change’, Occasion: Interdisciplinary 4. Gail Robertson, Val Attenbrow and Peter Studies in the Humanities, 5 (Stanford: Stanford Hiscock, ‘Multiple Uses for Australian Backed University [Arcade], 2013)
52 Humanities Australia Invisible Politics » TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI
IS THERE LIFE AFTER POLITICS? been hollowed out and emptied of meaning? What happens when each of its institutions In the late 1980s and early 1990s the fall of the has metastasised into something dangerous? Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, What happens now that democracy and and the success of democratisation movements the Free Market have fused into a single Iin South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and predatory organism with a thin, constricted elsewhere led to a surge of hope and confidence imagination that revolves almost entirely in the ideals of democracy. The Cold War was around the idea of maximising profit? over, and the forces of democracy and civil Is it possible to reverse this process? society appeared to have triumphed. There Can something that has mutated go back was a widespread belief that the continuing to being what it used to be?1 economic growth of countries like China would result in the further unstoppable global spread The problem is not just one of democracy. of democratising forces. The notions of liberalism, communism and Two decades on, the optimism has been socialism—the notion of revolution itself— replaced by widespread gloom. China did not all have lost their hold on the imagination. democratise, and in many of the countries ‘Politics’ has become such a negatively that possess formally democratic institutions loaded term that politicians compete with (‘old’ and ‘new’ democracies alike), the practical one another to distance themselves from it. workings of the system evoke cynicism United States congressional candidates boost and apathy rather than enthusiasm and their chances of election by emphasising commitment. In an article published in 2009, their lack of mainstream political experience Indian novelist Arundhati Roy evoked this and their distance from the ‘Washington mood by posing the ironic question ‘is there establishment’; Asian populist politicians from life after democracy?’. Referring particularly Japan’s Hashimoto Tōru to India’s Narendra (above) to the situation in India—‘the world’s biggest Modi flaunt their credentials as ‘accidental Help Japan democracy’ as it proclaims itself—Roy elaborates politicians’, and offer as their ultimate vision Brighton University Peace Cranes her initial question with a series of others: not the promise of better government but the SOURCE: DOMINIC promise of less government. ALVES (OWN WORK) What have we done to democracy? What The quintessential expression of this [CC BY 2.0 (HTTPS:// CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/ have we turned it into? What happens when phenomenon was surely the electoral success in LICENCES/BY/2.0/)] VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS democracy has been used up? When it has May 2012 and again, on an even bigger scale, in
Humanities Australia 53 February 2013 of Italian comedian Beppe Grillo, WHAT IS POLITICS? who was swept into parliament by grateful voters on the basis of his years of organising The term ‘politics’, so widely used in everyday a series of anti-political rallies known as life, is surprisingly seldom defined, and those ‘va fanculo’ (fuck off) days, and ‘a political who try to pin down its meaning have produced movement called Cinque Stelle (Five Stars), a remarkably diverse array of definitions. In its which seeks to encourage ordinary people oldest, Aristotelian sense, the notion of politics in every locality to come forward and speak had to do with the search by a community for the community’s distrust and dislike of of people for the physically sustaining and mainstream politics’.2 In a world where politics morally virtuous ‘good life’. Politics was seen as itself has come increasingly to be seen as the a distinctively human activity, because it relied problem, not the source of solutions, Arundhati on the human capacity for speech and reasoned Roy’s question might be reframed: ‘is there life discussion. It was also an activity whose only after politics?’ subjects were free and rational human beings; In this atmosphere of ‘anti-politics as therefore an activity (in the Aristotelian order ideology’, it seems important to reconsider the of things) that excluded children, women meaning of politics itself. To echo Roy’s words, and slaves. Aristotle recognised that a wide (above) we might ask: ‘What have we done to politics?’ variety of human groupings or ‘communions’ Renaissance Italian How is it that a sphere of human life that, in its (koinoniai in Greek) might pursue a better life Vision of the earliest Aristotelian formulation, was supposed in various partial ways, but it was the polis that Ideal Greek Polis: Raphael’s Mural of to be about the collective search for the constituted the overarching communion and the Philosophers of (materially and morally) good life has become sought the good life as a whole. So the polis Athens, with Plato a realm firmly identified with the formal was the ultimate koinonia politike, the vessel and Aristotle in the centre. The School institutions of the nation state, and with the of politics. As Kostas Vlassopoulos reminds of Athens. Fresco by opaque and self-serving actions of their office us, though, it is almost impossible for us Raphael (Raffaello bearers? The purpose of this essay is to argue fully to recapture the mental world in which Sanzio). 1509, Stanze di Raffaello, for a broader reinterpretation of the ‘political’, Aristotle’s ideas were developed, and modern Apostolic Palace, and to draw attention to a non-state world of reinterpretations of his ideas are profoundly Vatican. politics that has been relatively neglected, even influenced by the context of their own times.3 SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA in the post-1980s proliferation of writing about Notions related to the search for a COMMONS, PUBLIC DOMAIN (PD-ART). civil society and social movements. sustainable and virtuous community have
54 Humanities Australia existed in a very wide range of other societies for the ‘good life’, and could never be reduced from ancient times. Rather than attempting to the mechanisms of government. For Marx, to explore this diversity of ideas, I shall simply the ongoing conflict between political ideas illustrate this by sketching some outlines of arose out of the structures of everyday a non-European set of ideas with which I am subsistence—out of the mode of production familiar—ideas about the ordering of society and the relations of production through which that emerged from classical Chinese thought human societies sustained themselves. The aim and were elaborated and developed in Japan of political economy (in which the political in the centuries before that country was and the economic were inseparable from one extensively exposed to Western ideas of politics. another) was to understand and work with the These ideas are very difficult to summarise, contradictory forces that pushed the existing since they were extremely diverse and dynamic. order towards collapse and the emergence of a Broadly, though, concepts derived from the new order in which human potential would be philosophies of Confucius, Mencius and other more fully realised. Chinese classical writers offered two ways of In the course of the twentieth century, the thinking about the ordering of human life. growing power of the nation state encouraged One was a ‘bottom up’ approach, embodied the emergence of more firmly state-centred in the vision of the virtuous human being definitions of politics, and ‘political science’ (C. junzi; J. kunshi; K. gunja). From this became the study of the way in which nation perspective (expressed in different ways in states are governed and relate to one another. the work of thinkers like Itō Jinsai, 1627–1705 We can see this state-centred focus in two and Kaibara Ekiken, 1630–1714) a peaceful famous, though radically contrasting, mid- and prosperous society could only exist if twentieth-century definitions of politics—one each individual pursued the tasks of moral offered by US political scientist Harold Lasswell self-cultivation. Thus the creation of the and the other by German legal and political good community began from the moral theorist Carl Schmitt. Lasswell, in a work human, who existed always in the context of whose subtitle constitutes one of the most the family.4 The second approach was a ‘top widely quoted definitions of politics, saw the down’ vision (vividly articulated in the early political as a matter of ‘who gets what, when nineteenth-century writings of thinkers like and how’. 7 More precisely, he understood Satō Nobuhiro, 1769–1850) which prescribed politics as the study of ‘influence and the the tasks of the good ruler as being keisei influential’ (or ‘power and the powerful’); in saimin: to bring order to the realm and to other words, it was the study of elites and of the relieve the sufferings of the people. From material, organisational and psychological ways this perspective, the task was to consider the in which elites constituted and maintained policies and organisational arrangements that themselves.8 Lasswell’s view of politics was would best achieve order and the wellbeing of largely internally directed. He was interested in the population. (From the term keisei saimin the constitution of national societies, and his we derive the modern word keizai, which since central aim was to redirect attention away from the nineteenth century has been used as the the Marxian focus on social class as a source of Japanese translation, not for the English word power, and towards other factors such as skill, ‘politics’, but for ‘economics’.)5 attitude and personality, which he saw as being In the nineteenth and early twentieth essential but neglected bases of elite power. centuries, first in Europe and then more widely Carl Schmitt’s idea of the political emerged across the world, Hegelian and Marxian social against the background of the rise of Fascism ideas drew heavily on the Aristotelian tradition, in Europe, at a time when the state itself was while also radically rejecting elements of it.6 Both intruding on more and more areas of human Hegel and Marx were concerned with creating life, so that every aspect of economy, society forms of social order that allowed human beings and culture was in a sense becoming political. the greatest possible scope to fulfill their innate In this context, Schmitt looked for the specific potential. Politics in this sense remained a search element which characterised political life,
Humanities Australia 55 as opposed to other human realms such as beyond the realm of governmental action. aesthetic or ethical life: and he found that Another is Ulrich Beck, who has coined the element in the distinction between enemy term ‘subpolitics’ to emphasise that ‘politics and friend.9 While artistic taste distinguishes is also possible beyond the representative the ugly from the beautiful, and religion or institutions of the nation-state’.12 But the morality distinguish the virtuous from the content and form of Giddens’s ‘life politics’ wicked, politics (says Schmitt) distinguishes and of Beck’s ‘subpolitics’ remain quite vague. friends from enemies. It is, in other words, Giddens himself strongly denies that ‘life an inherently conflictual realm. Schmitt’s politics’ is confined to middle class consumer definition (unlike Lasswell’s) has a strongly culture. He insists that the very poor, as much outward-directed element. The friend-enemy as the relatively wealthy, are uprooted from distinction of course operates within the nation tradition and need to seek out their own state, but also provides the very cornerstone identities.13 But if ‘life politics’ is practised for Schmitt’s vision of international relations. by people who are largely liberated from the The political, according to Schmitt, embodies everyday struggle for physical survival, then ‘the most intense and extreme antagonism’, it is difficult to see what relevance it has for a and although politics does not always involve broad mass of poorer people in today’s world. military combat, ‘a world in which the In this sense, it is important to emphasise that possibility of war is utterly eliminated’ would Giddens’s vision of ‘life politics’ is quite different be ‘a world without politics’.10 from the ‘informal life politics’ or ‘survival politics’ to be discussed later in this essay. THE CONCEPT OF LIFE POLITICS It is interesting to contrast Giddens’s version of post-Cold War political thought with that By the end of the twentieth century, as of a contemporary but very different thinker: globalisation complicated theories of the nation French political philosopher Jacques Rancière, state, and as non-state social movements who bases his definition of politics on a reading attracted growing attention from scholars, the of Aristotle, but one that stands Aristotle’s logic vision of politics tended once again to broaden, on its head. Rancière’s criticises classical Greek opening space for the social and the political to thought for presenting an illusory equality: intertwine in new ways. A notable example of in theory, all citizens have a role to play in the this can be seen in the appearance of the notion polis, but philosophers such as Aristotle allot of ‘life politics’ in the writings of theorists like specific roles in society to the rich and the well- Anthony Giddens. For Giddens, power means born (the oligoi and the aristoi), while leaving ‘transformative capacity’, and its exercise is the ordinary people (the demos) with no role therefore clearly not limited to governments and no defined quality except their freedom. or elites. Writing in the context of the end of Freedom (according to Rancière) being a quality the Cold War in Europe, Giddens identified also shared by the oligoi/aristoi, is not a special a transition from ‘emancipatory politics’, characteristic or role at all. It is merely a role concerned with ‘liberating individuals and empty of substance, which condemns the groups from constraints which adversely affect demos to being ‘the part that has no part’ in the their life chances’, to ‘life politics’. In Giddens’ political order of things. sense of the word, life politics (or lifestyle Modern political thought inherits Aristotle’s politics) is practised by people who are not image of man as a ‘political animal’, whose bound by tradition or by the desperate struggle ability to be political derives from the power for daily existence, but are already emancipated, of speech: a capacity which distinguishes him free to focus on ‘self-actualisation’. Life politics from all other animals. While other animals therefore involves defining one’s identity and (Aristotle tells us) use their voices merely to lifestyle in a world where tradition no longer express ‘pain or pleasure’ (i.e. to make noises), provides any clear rules of behaviour.11 human voices are able to communicate ‘what Giddens is one of a number of theorists who is useful and what is harmful, and also what have helped to expand the vision of politics is just and what is unjust’ (i.e. humans can
56 Humanities Australia speak and reason).14 But Rancière inverts this what I call ‘non-governmental politics’. In using argument. For him, politics is not founded this term, I am drawing on the idea of politics on a pre-existing division between speaking as a pursuit of the materially and spiritually creatures and noise-making creatures. Politics, ‘good life’ by groups of people. In this sense, by separating those with substantive roles I see politics as centrally embodying a sense in the polis (the rich, the well-born) from the of movement through time from present to demos whose role is devoid of substance, is the future. Politics is the effort by a communion process that separates a minority, whose vocal (koinonia) of people to secure a good future— utterances are recognised as speech, from and this is true of ‘conservative’ as well as of the majority, who are doomed to the ‘night ‘reformist’ politics, since human communities of silence or to the animal noise of voices do not simply maintain themselves without expressing pleasure and pain’.15 At its core, effort. Even the attempt to prevent change or politics is a contest over the issue of whose to restore a previous state of affairs involves vocal utterances count as speech, and whose future-directed effort. merely count as ‘noise’. Drawing on Vlassopoulos’s reinterpretations This redefinition of the political rests on a of the Aristotelian polis, we can suggest that distinction Rancière draws between ‘policing’ ‘politics’ does not exist only at the macro, and ‘politics’. By policing, he does not mean or state, level. It is not confined to debates simply the control of law and order exercised about the grand design of all facets of social by the people whom we normally know as life. It also exists at the micro level, in efforts ‘the police’, but rather, much more broadly, to change, preserve or restore more limited the whole ordering of society: ‘the allocation aspects of human existence. In modern nation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of states, and in the modern international saying’, the creation of ‘an order of the visible order, this form of political activity can be and the sayable that sees that a particular carried out in two ways. The first way may activity is visible and another is not, that this be called ‘governmental’. By this I mean that speech is understood as discourse and another the subject who takes actions to achieve a as noise’.16 ‘Politics’, on the other hand, is the future goal is part of the formal machinery opposite of policing. It is action that breaks the of government—whether local, national or existing order of the visible and sayable. transnational government. So, political actions carried out by a town council, by a national Political activity is whatever shifts a body government department (with or without a from the place assigned to it or changes a formal resolution from parliament) or by an place’s destination. It makes visible what has agency of the European Union are all examples no business being seen, and makes heard a of governmental politics. discourse where once there was only place But it is important to stress that for noise; it makes heard as discourse what governmental politics does not simply involve was once only heard as noise.17 politicians and bureaucrats. Civil society plays a crucial role in governmental politics, Politics, in this definition, is always by demanding, protesting and lobbying for transgressive: it involves people ‘speaking out action, and by organising and educating voters of turn’ or acting in ways which are contrary to to vote for parties with particular political their normal, socially sanctioned roles. agendas. All of this civil society action remains ‘governmental politics’ in the sense that it ANOTHER POLITICS aims to bring about actions by the formal institutions of government. The ideas of Giddens, Beck, Rancière ‘Non-governmental politics’, on the other and others, in their diverse ways, suggest hand, occurs when people decide to seek a possibilities for broadening our concepts of the particular social goal, not through demanding political. Here I want to build on those ideas by action by government institutions, but through offering a somewhat different perspective on their own efforts. We can further divide non-
Humanities Australia 57 governmental politics into two versions— policy or bring about the reform of local and philanthropic or humanitarian politics, where one national institutions, and has had less to say group of people brings about changes in the lives about non-government actions—the situations of another group; and self-help politics, where a where groups try to shape the present and group of people seeks to change their own lives. future of their own lives without recourse to Consider a situation where a group of the intervention of the state. parents are dissatisfied with the education their children are receiving in the state (or state- INFORMAL LIFE POLITICS IN ACTION: sanctioned private) education system. One THE CITIZENS’ RADIOACTIVITY response to this would be to lobby the local or MEASURING STATIONS national government to make changes to the education system—a ‘governmental politics’ My particular interest is in groups engaged in approach. But another, ‘non-governmental’, ‘informal life politics’ (or ‘survival politics’) in self-help approach would be for the parents to East Asia. The extensive literature on issues take their children out of the state system and of civil society in East Asia seldom pays much start to educate them by themselves. attention to these groups, but their presence is We can see from this example that an important element in the rapidly changing governmental politics and non-governmental sociopolitical world of the region. politics are not necessarily distinct from or By ‘informal life politics’, I mean groups opposed to one another. The same group of who are impelled by threats to their life, people may be involved in both. For example, livelihood or cultural survival to engage in a group of parents who have decided to home- self-help, non-governmental forms of politics. school their children may at the same time A characteristic of the actions of these groups continue to lobby for changes in the state is that they are ‘political’ in Rancière’s sense education system. The problem with a rather of being transgressive: in other words, they (above) large part of the ‘civil society’ literature, involve people in activities which are outside Mushanokōji’s ‘New though, is that its interest has been weighted the limits of their everyday social roles. Often Village’ in 1919. towards the governmental side of the equation. in a quiet way, they shake up the social order SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA In other words, it has tended to focus on cases by impelling people to ‘speak out of turn’: to COMMONS, ABASAA, PUBLIC DOMAIN. where social groups have aimed to influence perform tasks that they would not normally
58 Humanities Australia have been expected to perform. Some examples first ‘new village’. The influence of this lineage from Japan can help to illuminate the nature of ideas can also be seen in places such as the and dynamics of informal life politics. The Tatsue Peace and Handicraft Folk Art Hall three cases I shall consider here are driven by (Heiwa to Teshigoto Tatsue Mingeikan), an art very different views of the world, and illustrate gallery and community centre in the small town the diversity of ways in which informal life of Mochizuki in Niigata Prefecture.21 Named politics may be practised. after Kobayashi Tatsue, a local teacher who was Japan has a long tradition of grassroots inspired by the work of the White Birch group, non-governmental political action. While the community centre continues to promote the Japanese government from the Meiji Era ideas of local autonomy, respect for handicrafts (1868–1912) onward focused on the energetic and environmental sustainability. Local promotion of industrial development, some residents meet there regularly to develop their oppositional streams of thought highlighted own proposals for community development, the social costs of high-speed industrialisation, in dialogue with the prominent Japanese and argued for a lifestyle based on self- environmental economist Miyamoto Kenichi. sufficiency and self-government at the local Their ‘Residents’ White Papers from the Rural community level.18 One prominent proponent Village’, the most recent of which was published of such ideas was the novelist and philosopher in 2013, set out collective visions of their Mushanokōji Saneatsu (1885–1976), whose ‘new region’s future: visions that have been put into village’ (atarashiki mura) movement was inspired effect in a range of schemes from community by a mixture of themes from traditional medicine to a local currency scheme.22 Japanese social philosophy, anarchism and The new villages and their contemporary Tolstoyan utopianism. Participants in the successors embody a coherent ideology of self- movement did not resist the rule of central made (indeed, hand-made) politics—a mistrust government, but aimed to create their own of the state and a desire for an autonomous self-sufficient and self-governing communities communion. They seek the ‘good life’ though based on agricultural labour, handicrafts and the building of local small-scale communities shared cultural activity. Mushanokōji’s ideas far removed from the grand designs of the were closely linked to those of other members nation state. In many cases, though, survival of the prewar ‘White Birch’ (shirakaba) group, politics emerges less from any conscious (below) such as the famous advocate of Japanese ideology than from a pressing need to react Interior of the folk arts, Yanagi Sōetsu (1889–1961).19 to a crisis which state authorities are failing Tatsue Peace and Handicraft Folk Art Though Mushanokōji himself was later to be to address, or may even have caused. Such Hall in Mochizuki. criticised for his support of Japanese wartime survival politics movements focus on specific COURTESY expansionism, the New Village movement areas of social life where the government TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI had a wide influence throughout northeast becomes incapable of carrying out its expected Asia, and its echoes are still heard in various parts of the region today. Chinese artist Ou Ning’s plan to create a self-governing rural art community—a ‘microstate’—in the village of Bishan, for example, draws heavily on the ideas of Mushanokōji’s new village movement.20 The search for a politics of self-reliance was continued in various streams of postwar grassroots activism, and survives in Japan today. One of the two ‘new villages’ created by Mushanokōji (in Moroyama, west of Tokyo) was revived after the Pacific War and still exists on a small scale. There have also been recent moves to re-establish the movement in the area of Miyazaki Prefecture that was home to the
Humanities Australia 59 functions, or where the actions of government public loss of faith in official pronouncements themselves have come to be seen as a threat to about radiation levels and health risks. the wellbeing of particular communities. In response to the crisis, on 1 July 2011 the A good example of ‘crisis-driven’ survival first Citizens’ Radiation Measuring Station was politics in contemporary Japan is the story established in Fukushima City. The station of the network of ‘Citizens’ Radioactivity was staffed by volunteers, and raised donations Measuring Stations’ which emerged following to buy relatively sophisticated measurement the Fukushima nuclear accident of 2011. equipment, including a whole body counter Immediately after the accident, people in a imported from Belarus, and to rent premises in wide area around the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear a small shopping centre. By the end of the year, plant found themselves facing a terrible a network of ten citizens’ measuring stations dilemma. They were aware that large amounts had been set up in surrounding areas and as far of radiation had been released from the plant. away as Tokyo. The stations measure radiation The government repeatedly assured them (particularly that caused by caesium-134 and that there was no danger to their health, but a caesium-137) in food, and larger centres such as wide range of media reports by journalists and the Fukushima City station also measure levels scientific experts were issuing wildly varying of radioactive caesium in the human body. and often very alarming assessments of the Anyone can request a measurement, which is radiation risks. Particularly for families with carried out for a small fee.23 young children, the choice between remaining A key part of the work of the measuring in contaminated regions or leaving their stations is the dissemination of accurate homes, jobs and schools to avoid the risk of information about radiation levels. For example, contamination was an agonising one. the results of all measurements are posted on Two key problems quickly became apparent: the organisation’s website, providing a valuable the first was that the government (both resource of information on the levels of radiation central and local) was unprepared and lacked in various foodstuffs.24 The centres also sell expertise to deal with the disaster, and was books and DVDs on radiation-related issues and very slow in establishing effective systems of participate in workshops and conferences on the (below) radiation measurement. The second was that Fukushima accident and its aftermath. Inside the Citizens’ the reassurances issued by government agencies Though some of the group’s organisers Radioactivity soon after the accident lacked credibility. Both and volunteers had a background in physical Measuring Station, Fukushima City. national and prefectural governments were or health science, most did not. For example, reluctant to release information that might Tanji Kōdai, who was one of the group’s COURTESY TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI cause alarm, and their suppression of important founding members, had previously worked in facts about the disaster resulted in a profound an organic food cafe owned by his family, and had absolutely no expertise in nuclear science before the Fukushima accident. Like many in the region, he has become a self-taught expert out of necessity. Members of the group participate in activities to lobby the government for more effective responses to the Fukushima accident, but they also see themselves as performing a vital set of activities to protect public health parallel to, but separate from, those of the government. As Tanji argues, the loss of public confidence in government authorities has made it essential for an independent body with no conflicts of interest to provide information to local citizens. From early 2012 onward the state-run radiation monitoring system has improved,
60 Humanities Australia but local people still often turn to the the measuring stations for a ‘second opinion’ to verify the information that they have received from government agencies.25 In this sense the Citizens’ Radioactivity Measuring Stations work to protect community health and provide public education by taking into their own hands ‘governmental’ activities that the government has proved to be incapable of carrying out effectively itself.
FROM INFORMAL LIFE POLITICS TO GOVERNMENTAL POLITICS…
Grassroots communions which begin by practising informal life politics sometimes develop into organisations engaged in governmental politics. A good example of this process is the history of the development of the suicide-prevention movement in Japan. about the social issue of suicide. Meanwhile, During the 1980s and 1990s, the Japanese other groups such as the Osaka-based Suicide suicide rate rose very rapidly, and in 1998 the Prevention Centre (Jisatsu Bōshi Sentā) offered annual number of Japanese people committing telephone counselling and other support suicide exceeded 30,000 for the first time. services to those at risk of suicide.26 Reasons for the rise included the pressures of As the movement expanded, though, the educational system, declining employment many members came to feel strongly that opportunities for the young, and the growing a self-help approach was not enough. They isolation of old people as the support of the wanted to emphasise that suicide was not an extended family diminished. But suicide individual psychological problem, but rather a remained a social taboo: the families of social problem which the government should victims of suicide often felt ashamed to speak address both at a national and local level. about their experiences, and politicians were From about 2001 onwards they moved towards reluctant to take up the issue publicly. a governmental politics approach, working The initial responses from community closely with parliamentarians to produce a groups in Japan were therefore to address the national Basic Law on Suicide Prevention, problem by themselves, providing counselling ultimately passed in 2007. This change in and psychological and financial support for the approach was strongly supported by the work vulnerable. A distinctive characteristic of the of particular individuals who provided the link Japanese movement was its focus on the plight between the grassroots self-help movement of children who had experienced the suicide and national government. One of the key (above) of a parent. From 1998 onward, a group called figures was Shimizu Yasuyuki, a journalist Jisatsutte the Ashinaga Ikueikai, which provided support with the national broadcaster NHK, who had Ienakatta (We Couldn’t Say it was to children orphaned by road accidents and made documentaries on the ‘suicide orphans’, Suicide), Sunmark other disasters, began to focus its attention on and been so affected by the experience that Publishing Co., Tokyo, 2002. ‘suicide orphans’ (jishi iji). It organised summer he left NHK to work full-time on suicide One of the booklets camps and other events at which they could prevention, becoming one of the founders of a produced by young express their sense of grief and trauma, and new movement named ‘Lifelink’. Another was people associated with the Ashinaga this led to the publication of a booklet and the Yamamoto Takashi, a former leading figure in Education making of a television documentary in which the support group for orphans, who became a Association. young people who had lost a parent to suicide member of parliament and worked tirelessly COURTESY spoke out openly in public for the first time to push through the Basic Law on Suicide TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI
Humanities Australia 61 Prevention. Yamamoto’s efforts won widespread attention toward the task of attempting to respect and support in the Japanese parliament, rebuild a local community based on principles particularly because he continued to fight for fundamentally different from the ‘production the law’s acceptance after being diagnosed with nationalism’ they identified as the cause of the terminal cancer in 2005.27 Minimata disaster.29 One particularly interesting For Shimizu and others, a focus on the role figure in this movement is Ogata Masato, a of government in addressing the causes of member of one of the local fishing families suicide is essential. Making suicide a formally drastically affected by the disaster: his father political issue is a way of emphasising social died of Minamata Disease when Ogata was six and political responsibility for the problem, years old, and he and his seven siblings have so helping to overcome the personal burden all been officially recognised as victims of the of shame so often endured by families who disease. Although Ogata spent most of his early have experienced the suicide of one of their life engaged in the struggle to obtain recognition members. A national policy is also needed and compensation for himself and other because piecemeal approaches to the problem pollution victims, ultimately he came to question by medical, welfare and other agencies leave the meaning of monetary compensation, and to gaps in the support system through which the look for a locally based response to the meaning vulnerable can easily fall.28 of the pollution disaster.
…AND FROM GOVERNMENTAL POLITICS TO The Minamata disease incident has left INFORMAL LIFE POLITICS a question that cannot be dealt with as a political issue. Actually, it is the biggest and But social action can also move in the opposite most fundamental question. In other words, direction—away from governmental politics there is a question that cannot be transformed towards informal life politics. One of Japan’s into a question of policies or institutions. greatest twentieth-century environmental That is the question of the soul.30 crises was the Minamata pollution case, in which many thousands of people in the Ogata focuses his critique on profit-oriented southwestern fishing town of Minamata production nationalism, and seeks to develop suffered incurable neurological damage an alternative. At one level, this alternative is a after eating fish contaminated with mercury personal matter: a new consciousness of one’s from waste from a local factory. The human individual connectedness to the natural world. effects of ‘Minamata Disease’ vary from But it also involves the transformation of the relatively vague symptoms of dizziness, local community, both through the creation lack of coordination, blurred vision etc. to of a spiritual sense of mutual responsibility, total physical and mental incapacity and and through practical projects such as the death. Many children were born chronically development of renewable energy sources.31 handicapped because their parents had eaten Those who have moved towards a survival mercury-polluted fish. A large social movement politics response to the Minamata crisis express emerged in response, demanding compensation their aims in terms of a desire to have their from the government and the corporation voices heard as human speech and answered responsible, through demonstrations, sit- by the voices of fellow humans. Citing one of ins and court action. Though the causes of the victims (referred to only as ‘M.’) who has Minimata Disease were identified by scientists been centrally involved in the struggle with in the 1950s, and the main sources of pollution the Chissō Corporation, which caused the were brought under control in the 1960s, court pollution, Japanese social scientist Kurihara cases by victims continued until 2010. Akira writes: Though sections of the Minamata movement continued to focus on demanding recompense M. kept insisting that it was necessary to find from the state, over the course of time some human beings within the Chissō corporation. victims of the pollution began to redirect their But even when M. called out to them, no
62 Humanities Australia human voice came back to him. All that came governmental approaches to social action are back to him was the echo of his own voice.32 preferable to governmental approaches. The purpose, rather, is to broaden our range It was this longing to go beyond the notion of of vision and imagination of the ways in financial compensation for irreparable injury, which people make their social worlds. and to recreate a mutual acknowledgement of One question to be considered is why some their own and others’ humanity, that led some groups of people choose governmental within the Minamata movement towards a approaches to the communal search for a ‘good local search for a different form of ‘good life’. (or at least a better) life’, while others choose Like many forms of survival politics, their informal, non-governmental approaches. actions are not only a struggle to protect the What explicit or implicit ideologies underlie basis of life and livelihood itself, but at the same survival politics movements? Through what time a struggle for the recognition of their voices diverse methods are survival politics practised? and their humanity: a fight to ‘make heard as Can we develop a taxonomy of survival politics discourse what was once only heard as noise’. movements that will help us to see how they relate to one another? How and where do the SEEING INVISIBLE POLITICS worlds of governmental politics and informal life politics intersect? New forms of survival politics are emerging, The roots of informal life politics run deep. not just in Japan but throughout the East Asian From the nineteenth century onward, informal region and beyond. Often, though, they remain self-help movements have often been the invisible to the outside world, falling below the starting point for the emergence of modern radar of those who study politics, and even of institutions that have shaped the nature of those interested in social movements and civil formal political worlds—as, for example, in the society. Small-scale, local, loosely structured case of the friendly societies that formed the and fluid, they are easily overlooked. To see basis of the modern trade union movement. these realms of invisible politics, we need to But in other cases survival politics has step out of some of the conventional frames remained small-scale and evanescent, yet of academic thought, and to bring together still helped to change the lives of human approaches from politics, anthropology, communions in quiet ways. Making the sociology and history. This involves going back past and present of these informal, non- to the fundamental meanings of politics, often governmental movements visible may open lost in contemporary political jargon and media new ways to think about the future, and rhetoric. Since survival politics movements are breathe new life into our vision of the themselves often creative and transgressive, possibilities and the horizons of politics. ¶ learning about (and from) them may also require a capacity to create new approaches TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI FAHA to learning itself, and new approaches to holds an Australian Research communicating what we have learnt. We might Council Laureate Fellowship at the Australian National consider, for example, the way that the Japan- University. Her research focuses based Biohistory Research Hall (one source on aspects of modern Japanese of inspiration for Ogata Masato and fellow and East Asian regional history. Recent works Minamata activists) synthesises insights from include Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier 33 diverse disciplines and communcation media; Controls in the Postwar Era (2010) and East Asia or the way in which Ou Ning combines artistic Beyond the History Wars: Confronting the Ghosts imagination with social experimentation in the of War (Routledge, with Morris Low, Leonid Petrov and Timothy Y. Tsu, 2013). In 2013 she was awarded online social artworks that develop his vision the Fukuoka Prize (academic award) for for the Bishan ‘micronation’. 34 contributions to the study of East Asia.
To learn about (and from) survival politics PHOTO: MAYU KANAMORI movements is not uncritically to endorse their aims and methods; nor does it suggest that non-
Humanities Australia 63 1. Arundhati Roy, ‘Democracy’s Failing Light’, Sekigawa Natsuo, Shirakabatachi no Taishō Outlook India, 13 July 2009,
64 Humanities Australia ‘Add Women and Stir’ Gender and the History of International Politics
» GLENDA SLUGA
It is now nearly a quarter of a century since history, since it did not help us understand how Joan Scott famously bemoaned the absence of men and women were positioned in the past, Iwomen in the history of ‘High Politics’. In the and why they so often held such distinctive 1980s, Scott, an historian of women and class, positions. In this essay, I want to argue that was a key protagonist in the cultural turn in we should revisit the methodological value of the historical discipline, which included the the ‘add women and stir’ approach because, a accommodation of post-structuralist theory, quarter of a century after Scott’s call, and despite and pushed advocates of women’s history the ‘gender turn’, women are still missing in towards the study of gender as a ‘useful category action as agents in the history of ‘High Politics’. of historical analysis’.1 At the time, her emphasis Indeed, it can be argued that (as many feminist on gender as a category of analysis ‘was a historians long feared) the gender approach to call to disrupt the powerful pull of biology history has tended to reinforce women’s absence by opening every aspect of sexed identity to from the central events of the past as historical interrogation’, since the insistence on the ‘fixity actors, even when they have been there. of that opposition… [on the essential “truth” Despite available evidence of women of sexual difference] is itself the product of a as agents and subjects in the arena of certain history, and not one we should consider international history—whether involving war, inviolate’.2 More recently, Scott has refined peacemaking, diplomacy, or foreign policy— her view, concluding that to focus on gender the core narratives of international politics ‘is about asking historical questions: it is not a remain notably depleted of women, even in the programmatic or methodological treatise’. new international history, particularly as it is Gender was the methodological mantra now focusing on international organisations. around which I formed my own historical In some recent synthetic English-language consciousness of the past. I was as eager as histories—from Paul Kennedy’s Parliament of any feminist historian to push aside what we Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United termed the ‘add women and stir’ approach, on Nations (2007) to Mark Mazower’s Governing the grounds that adding and stirring a new the World: The Rise and Fall of an Idea (2012)— ingredient into our analysis of the past was less there are no women in over two hundred years sophisticated than coming up with a whole of history. And, unlike some international new recipe for writing history. Adding women, historians, Kennedy and Mazower do not even it was assumed, did not adequately shift the address gender. I say ‘even’, since the nineteenth parameters of male-dominated masculinist and twentieth centuries that they cover were
Humanities Australia 65 coterminous not only with the ‘invention’ of international political histories through the the international, but also with the emergence nineteenth and twentieth centuries where they of what came to be known as the gendered are often assumed to be absent. This is not an separation of spheres. The template of gender argument for throwing gender aside, but a call difference that historians associate with the to remember the usefulness of adding women, rise of industrialised England was idealised, of the recovery and reintegration of women who idolised, and emulated across the European were there as political agents into the stories we continent as a new bourgeois class sought to tell of the international past, even when the distance itself from older aristocratic authority historical questions seem, at first glance, to be and power. As importantly, aristocratic and male dominated and non-gender-specific. bourgeois women were crucial agents of the * * * new ‘international’ politics as well as the new gender norms. Even a little historical research The history of Versailles and international quickly illustrates that women were intellectual peacemaking in 1919 after the end of World as well as social agents in the shaping of War One is a staple of international history. international political norms in nineteenth- ‘Versailles’ and ‘1919’ have become shorthand century Europe, including new concepts such for the epoch-marking developments that led as nationality and humanitarianism, and in to the validation of nationality as a principle of the international practices that we think of as international politics, and the creation of the diplomacy. No matter what approach you take League of Nations as the iconic organisation to international history—whether focusing on establishing a new era of cultural and political the more traditional controversies of political internationalism. Predictably, in these histories thought and foreign policy, or the creation women are rarely mentioned as agents or of international institutions—women were subjects of significant moment. Yet, once we usually involved. In the twentieth century, begin to look for women, they seem to turn women’s presence in the realm of international up everywhere, organising peace conferences politics expanded along with the opportunities parallel to the main events from which they created by the new liberal internationalism were excluded, sending delegations demanding that led to the establishment of organisations for women the same ‘self-determination’ such as the League of Nations and the United being awarded to nations, usually through Nations. Indeed, histories of pacifism and their international organisations, such as feminism have long recorded the engagement the International Council of Women, or the of European women with internationalism. Women’s International League for Peace However, their evidence and findings are rarely and Freedom, and being rejected. However, integrated into what non-feminist historians historians who bother to examine the understand as serious international history and documents of these organisations, alongside the study of Realpolitik. Similarly, the gender more conventional archival records, will histories of international politics, many of discover that even the marginalisation of these them concentrating on the Cold War, that have women and their demands was central to how proliferated in the last decade or so have added the peacemakers understood the international little to our knowledge of the roles of individual politics in which they were engaged. They will women in these same political scenarios. also discover a story that radically alters our Instead, in international history gender understanding of the processes around which hardly ever concerns women. Recognising the forms of international politics that we take the presence of women has the potential to as normative were ‘invented’. When compelled fundamentally shift our perspective on what is to consider the political status of women in important in the past, as well as to illuminate the new world order, key political leaders the role of historians in silencing women, their and experts involved in the peace process actions, and their ideas. insisted that, except as it related to labour The following discussion draws on some legislation and the League of Nations, sexual examples of the presence of women in difference was an issue of ‘domestic’ or national
66 Humanities Australia significance.3 All the delegates that comprised and the legitimacy of its sovereignty in terms the so-called Council of Ten—the political of how it treated its women, or the kinds of leaders of the United States, Britain, France, rights women had or did not have for cultural Italy, Japan, and the Maharaja of Bijkaner— or historical reasons in that specific nation- believed that the status of women was a state. This approach also illuminates as a question for national decision-making. How shared international principle the process of ironic then that their agreement was proof of transnational agreement that rendered women an international consensus that women’s status subject to national sovereignty. was a marker of national sovereignty. Adding women and stirring in this same Recovering or adding women to the history period also reminds us that European of 1919 and ‘stirring’ casts new light on the women were key figures in the propagation of reconstitution of the principles and norms of International Relations as a discipline. In 1919, international relations during the postwar and in the interwar years, female members peace-making, on the very definitions of of the Institut International de la Paix, the ‘sovereignty’ and the constitution of national World Congress of International Associations, politics in the realm of international politics. Institutions Internationales, the Workers It reveals that women organised to represent Educational Association, the Association their interests, and sought national rights for the Study of International Relations, the in the domain of international politics; Women’s International League for Peace and (above) that women’s ‘self-determination’ was as Freedom and other organisations, as well as Jane Addams significant (for them) a dimension of the new individual women such as Louise Weiss, editor on the platform of the Women’s international postwar order as the principle of of L’Europe Nouvelle, and Helena Swanwick, International national ‘self-determination’; that the political editor of the British Union of Democratic League for Peace marginalisation of women in the international Control’s mouthpiece Foreign Affairs, organised and Freedom, 2nd International sphere required ideological work, of a kind that summer schools throughout Europe on Congress, Zurich, reinforced the international as the domain of international politics. They recommended Switzerland 1919. masculine interests, and national sovereignty texts by women, including the English author PHOTO: SWARTHMORE COLLEGE PEACE as significantly determined by sovereignty over Lucia Ames Mead on patriotism and the new COLLECTION (JANE the status of women. That is, each male-led internationalism, and German members of the ADDAMS COLLECTION 00064). nation-state could emphasise its difference Women’s International League for Peace and
Humanities Australia 67 focused on the United Nations and on the conceptualisation of ‘human rights’, is also told as a story without women, even though women were prominently there. In mid-life, Alva Myrdal trod the road chosen by so many men who have come to stand for the international idealism of the mid-twentieth century. As an employee of the United Nations (UN) Social Affairs secretariat in New York from 1949 to 1950, Myrdal was a bureaucratic cog with the title of (acting) ‘Top-Ranking Director’ and then, from 1950 until 1955, lower down the pecking order, as Director of Social Sciences at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), in Paris. In both these Freedom, Lidia Auersperg and Gustava positions she remained the most senior woman Heymann on psychological perspectives on in that whole labyrinthine organisation. internationalism.4 They nurtured an idealist Her high level appointment was completely view of International Relations that by the uncharacteristic of trends until then in the 1930s was superseded by that of realists who new international world order: she was a hardened the study of International Relations woman and a feminist. At the same time, she into a masculine discipline (channelled through represented that sector of international civil the Royal Institute of International Affairs and servants, in the early post-World War Two years the Geneva Graduate Institute of International of the UN and UNESCO, who had no education Studies). Just as earlier women’s efforts to in the service of European empires, as well as (above) influence the peace of 1919 were excised from the aspirations of women for a political voice Fourth Session of the historical record, women’s texts and their and a place in the politics of the world, as the United Nations preferred subject areas were eliminated from novels of Frank Moorhouse have reminded us.6 Commission on the Status of itineraries of international studies. In the 1940s, Alva Myrdal stood at the nexus Women, May 1950. Once we start looking before and after of a dense web of international networks built Before opening 1919, it is clear too that women’s international around her interests in education, pedagogy, meeting, from left to right, are: organisations have a long history, as does their social psychology and social welfare. It was Alva Mrs Alva Myrdal, interest in international politics. What we Myrdal, along with her husband Gunnar, who Principal-Director, might call an emerging international public had helped bring into existence the Swedish UN Department of Social Affairs, sphere, comprising not only international social welfare model, a symbol of modernisation Representative relations, but international organisations, was under the aegis of social democracy. At the of UN Secretary- crucial to the demands women made for the close of World War Two, she understood the General; Mrs Hannah Sen, same national, state or even imperial rights challenge to world peace and security as the of India, Vice- exercised by men and denied them. It is little alarming economic and social inequalities Chairman; Madame wonder then, as Virginia Woolf noted in Three between European and colonised societies. Marie Helene Lefaucheux, of Guineas (1938), that so many women became During her short tenure, she brought to the UN France, Chairman; advocates of a new liberal internationalism and its agencies a perspective informed by her Madame Lina or sought to involve themselves in the new feminism and interest in social welfare. She was P. Tsaldaris, of 5 Greece; and Mrs international organisations. convinced that the Swedish model of progress Olive Remington from a rural to modern society could be Goldman, of the * * * adapted to colonial settings through ‘planned United States. The end of World War Two, and the emergence social development’. The Swedish precedent PHOTO: UN PHOTO of a new and more enduring internationalism had shown, she claimed, that giving women as
68 Humanities Australia well as men a greater stake in the improvement of quality of life had, in half a century, led that country out of its feudal past into a more democratic and modern future. Myrdal was intent on putting the ‘social’ into the UN, in a way that would radicalise what she saw as the exciting international social welfare potential of ‘Technical Assistance’, the concept that institutionally predated ‘development’ in this period. From 1949, by which time development was being backed by the United States as a Cold War strategy, she was determined to bring to the programme an agenda of balanced modernisation, built out of her repertoire of accumulated social welfare expertise, concentrating specifically on questions of housing, the maintenance of standards of living, social welfare services, the prevention of crime, social care of immigrants, and the status of women. After her year at the UN, Myrdal worked for five years as Director of Social Sciences at UNESCO, where she brought her feminist agenda to bear on the organisation as much as she could and became involved in the conceptualisation of development in the social sciences. In 1956 Myrdal gave up on international organisations, feeling they had become caught up in their own bureaucracy and that it was too hard to effect change ‘on the ground’. Although she had been able to introduce a more women-centred policy, something the first UNESCO Director- General, Julian Huxley, had resisted despite action and success. These became the rationale repeated requests from the UN, she had for the continued relevance of the UN and become increasingly disillusioned with international institutions we know as Human developmentalism. In 1964 Myrdal told a Security. Myrdal can, in effect, be added to this reporter that the Western world did not have history as the ‘mother’ of Human Security.7 the right to impose modernity elsewhere. If we add Myrdal, how does international Her argument was in effect a product of her history as we currently understand it change? frustration at the level of influence of new Myrdal’s story incorporates the significance American non-governmental organisations such of feminism as an ideology in this period. as the Ford Foundation, offering debt-intensive That history also reminds us that in this versions of modernisation, on the UN’s work international schema the demands of feminism in India. Half a century later the UN fully took were often placed in opposition to the demands (above) up her emphases on the importance of working of anti-racism. That is, women felt they had to Anne Louise with local communities rather than imposing compete with other forms of incommensurate Germaine de Staël-Holstein, development from on high, of listening to differences that hinder opportunities and 1766–1817. the women in those local communities, and rights. This was particularly so after 1948, when SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA of working with the standard of living rather the new international discourse of ‘human COMMONS, PUBLIC DOMAIN than gross domestic product as a measure of rights’ again focused on ‘self-determination’ of
Humanities Australia 69 a national/cultural kind, and women’s rights ‘liberalism’, ‘culture’, and ‘nationality’ are were sectioned off to the Committee on the attributed to her influence.10 Status of Women.8 The story of Staël as ‘thinker’ requires Adding Myrdal also links us to the role of reincorporation of Staël’s ‘diplomatic’ roles. women in the history of diplomacy and foreign The period that most interests me begins while policy. When Myrdal decided to give up on she was in exile, fleeing to Russia, then Sweden, UNESCO she became the first Swedish female then England, at the heart of her movable ambassador, and eventually a crucial advocate for salon, knitting together a European culture local solutions to the challenges of development, of ideas and politics through her networks, funded directly by wealthy national governments correspondence and writings.11 By 1813, as such as Sweden. Stirring women back into Napoleon’s forces were in increasing retreat, European history connects us to a longer common parlance in England and on the European story of women’s often ‘informal’ continent had it that there were three powers yet conventionalised roles in the history of in Europe: Britain, Russia, and Germaine de diplomacy—whether as monarchs, dynastic Staël. Her celebrity had been carried across networkers, or spousal ambassadrices—from the the Continent and Atlantic by her open and early modern period to the modern age.9 unforgiving opposition to Napoleon and the popularity of her novels and her original studies * * * of national literatures and cultures (categorised Sceptics might argue it is much easier to by some of her contemporaries as a form of add women to the international history of ‘political science’). Even in an age when women the twentieth century, a period when the were tolerated as novelists, Staël’s status as a democratisation of politics and rise of social female ‘genius’ was exceptional. She was among
EVEN IN AN AGE WHEN WOMEN WERE TOLERATED AS NOVELISTS, STAËL’S STATUS AS A FEMALE ‘GENIUS’ WAS EXCEPTIONAL.
movements gave more women the opportunity the prominent elaborators of the practical to participate in international political life. terms of liberty that became the conceptual Yet this modern history merely illuminates axis of political debate in the post-Napoleonic the absence of women in a longue durée world, a consequence not only of her ideas and narrative where they were in fact also present, discussions, but also of the influence she exerted as historical actors in the ideological as well through her salon and her political interventions. as political constitution of a modern Europe. At this crucial juncture in European history, Which brings me to my last example, the end we find Staël at the centre of diplomatic of the Napoleonic wars, 1814, and the influence negotiations, working her networks, her of Germaine de Staël on what I think of as the correspondence and publications, and her invention of the international as a political celebrity, in St. Petersburg, Stockholm, London, space. In taking Staël as my subject, my and Paris, in the interests of forging and intention is to also to reflect on the possibilities maintaining a coalition against Napoleon, and in of both historical ‘recovery’ of women as favour of a new liberal European order to replace political agents, and the relevance of that his rule. In the context of the larger political history for understanding the place of gender in shift that historians have identified, in the ‘sense ‘High Politics’. of inherent limits, acceptance of mutual rules Germaine de Staël’s major writings traverse and restraints, common responsibility to certain the period of the French Revolution, the standards of conduct and loyalty beyond the Napoleonic wars, and the early Restoration. aims of one’s own state’,12 Staël insisted on the Her studies of Italy and Germany are still relevance of liberal principles to the domain of regarded as prototypes of a new cultural international peacemaking that would follow nationalism, just as the specific terms Napoleon’s defeat. Included in her political
70 Humanities Australia repertoire of liberal ideas were anti-colonialism Since then, the ‘problem’ of Staël’s gender and anti-slavery. has persisted, as is apparent when one considers In the last years of her life, as Staël railed synthetic accounts of liberalism, and other against the limitations of the Restoration ‘recovery’ projects. In the new Cambridge established by the powers that had defeated Companion to Benjamin Constant, which, as its Napoleon, she wrote Considérations sur la editor Helena Rosenblatt explains, is intended Révolution Francaise, a defining text of liberal to salvage Staël’s companion Constant from ideology, the first conceptual history of the the margins of liberalism, one author makes Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, and the point that it is impossible to discuss the the culmination of her thinking about political influences on Constant without touching on liberty. Liberty of person, belief, religion, Staël, although he does it in a specific manner: required and guaranteed the representation of ‘And leave aside’, says Gauchet, ‘Madame de Staël, public opinion and mitigation of the arbitrary with whom he [Constant] collaborated too closely exercise of power. In effect, political power to permit attribution of responsibility for specific required regulation through the practices of ideas. Nevertheless, Constant’s answer was still ‘public liberty’ and ‘the protection of individual fundamentally new, if only in the sharpness of rights by establishing a regime limited by its formulation.’ This new answer, it is explained, fundamental laws and a constitution’. The was the view that the details of liberty are text elaborated this applied view of liberty, inspired by the need for ways of preventing its history, and its universal applicability. She arbitrariness or tyranny in political power. wrote in Considérations: In a very recent and separate history of political thought in France since the eighteenth Is the question the abolition of the slave century, Jeremy Jennings follows a long trade, or the liberty of the press, or religious description of Constant’s ideas with a footnote toleration? Jefferson thinks as La Fayette, in which he adds that the argument for which as Wilberforce […] Is it then from the Constant is best known—the distinction calculations of interest, is it from bad between the ‘liberty which was offered to men motives that men so superior, in situations at the end of the last century […] borrowed from and countries so different, should be in such the ancient republics’ and a modern ‘private’ harmony in their political opinions?13 conception of liberty—was first advanced ‘by Madame de Staël in her Circonstances actuelles The story of Staël’s effacement and qui peuvent terminer la Révolution, a text written marginalisation is as instructive for in 1796, but published almost two hundred exposing the implicitly gendered character of years later’. The point for Jennings is that international liberal theory and its lineages. Constant was the more ardent advocate of this Staël’s biographers have persistently pondered view and therefore the focus of discussion. whether she was more the prompter of Ironically, if Staël’s work was more seriously liberalism than the maker of a ‘liberal age’. considered, it would be difficult to ignore women Other assessments suggest that the greatest as the subject of liberalism and political thought, impact of her work occurred after her since she herself singled women out as having death, during the revolutions of the 1830s, a specific kind of subjectivity and role in the the Risorgimento and national liberation constitution of a liberal society and state. For movements of the mid-nineteenth century.14 example, when Staël evoked the dystopia of Few have pondered the significance of her arbitrary government, she used as her example ‘womanhood’ to her precarious intellectual women exerting influence in the public sphere position, even though in her own lifetime for personal advantage, compared with the it was that fact that caused her the most situation ‘in free countries [… where] the true difficulties. The relevance of Staël’s gender character of a woman and the true character of was obvious to her contemporaries who a man can be known and admired’, since there simultaneously reviled and celebrated her work was no need to learn to manipulate individuals and her political persona. when institutions objectively and transparently
Humanities Australia 71 protected, and balanced out, the interests of all. 4. See Glenda Sluga, ‘Gender’, in Palgrave Advances When she wanted to understand the structures in International History, ed. by Patrick Finney (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 300–19. that supported those same freedoms in England, 5. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: The she pointed to the separation of spheres that Hogarth Press, 1938). maintained the social order. Ironically, over the 6. See Frank Moorhouse, Grand Days course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, (Chippendale, New South Wales: Pan Staël’s own place in this narrative (which she Macmillan, 1993); Dark Palace: the Companion would have expected to be itself separate from Novel to Grand Days (Milsons Point, New South Wales: Random House Australia, 2000); and the fate of ordinary women) was held hostage to Cold Light (North Sydney, New South Wales: the conventions of gendered separate spheres. Random House Australia, 2011). 7. Sunil Amrith and Glenda Sluga, ‘New * * * Histories of the United Nations’, Journal of Adding women and stirring is not a project that World History, 19, 3 (2008), 251–74, and Glenda Sluga, ‘A Genealogy of Human Security: Alva demands we abandon gender as a critical tool Myrdal at the UN (1949–1956)’, in International of historical analysis. But it does prompt the Organizations and Development, 1945–1990, ed. historian, and the humanities scholar more by Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel and Corinna R. generally, to remember that women were there, Unger (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). even in the High Politics of international history, 8. Glenda Sluga, ‘National Sovereignty and Female Equality: Gender, Peacemaking and and that historians have been responsible for the New World Orders of 1919 and 1945’, in eliding them from our memory of the past each Frieden—Gewalt—Geschlecht, ed. by Jennifer A. time they have failed to remember to look for Davy, Karen Hagemann and Ute Katzel (Essen: them. The project of adding women and stirring is Klartext Verlag, 2005), pp. 166–83. about exposing the processes by which they were 9. Women, Diplomacy, and International Politics since 1500, ed. by Carolyn James, Glenda Sluga made absent; about forcing state, non-state and and Giulia Calvi (London: Routledge, 2015). personal, national and international archives into 10. Staël’s oeuvre included studies of political conversation; and about integrating the evidence events and the recent past, including De of women’s presence into the narratives we have l’influence des passions sur le bonheur des individus of international history, politics, and ideas. ¶ et des nations (1796), Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des principes qui doivent fonder la République en France (1796) GLENDA SLUGA FAHA is and Considérations sur les principaux événements Professor of International de la Révolution française (1816), although the History at the University of latter two were only published posthumously. Sydney, and the Australian 11. I discuss this period more fully in Glenda Sluga, Research Council Kathleen ‘Madame de Staël and the Transformation of Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow. Her European Politics’, International History Review most recent book is Internationalism in the Age of (published online 2014). Nationalism (2013). She is currently researching the 12. See Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of international history of cosmopolitanism through a European Politics 1763–1848, The Oxford History study of women at the Congress of Vienna. In 2002 of Modern Europe series (Oxford: Clarendon she was awarded the Max Crawford Medal by the Press, 1994), pp. vii–viii. Australian Academy of the Humanities. 13. Germaine de Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution, newly revised translation of the 1818 English edition, 1. Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category ed. by Aurelian Craiutu (Indianapolis: Liberty of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Fund, 2008), p. 755. Review, 91, 5 (1986), 1053–75; and ‘Unanswered 14. In terms of the canon of liberal thinkers, Staël’s Questions’, contribution to American Historical exclusion or perhaps, more appropriately, her Review Forum, ‘Revisiting “Gender: A Useful marginality has been defined around the fact Category of Historical Analysis”’, American that her ‘republicanism’ was not absolute, as Historical Review, 113, 5 (2008), 1422–30. well as the fact that she belonged to a French- 2. Scott, ‘Unanswered Questions’, p. 1427. speaking cohort of intellectuals, and to an era of liberal thought that has been of less interest 3. See Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and to historians than the late eighteenth century. International Politics, 1870–1919 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006).
72 Humanities Australia individuality
innovationand in greek sculpture
» ANDREW STEWART
When we encounter some new invention individuality and innovation or discovery, it is natural to ask who invented, in Greek sculpture from Wdiscovered, created, or produced it.1 The ancient antiquity to the present. Greeks were no exception. Indeed, their urge Part II offers a few cautionary to connect every novelty with a famous name remarks about craftsmanship seems almost obsessive, even pathological. The and the limitations it imposed gods were first in line. Demeter gave us grain, on individual initiative in ancient Dionysos gave us wine, Athena gave us the Greece. And finally Part III presents olive, and so on; then, coming down a notch, some test cases from the fifth Prometheus gave us fire, Orpheus gave us century BC, in order to examine what music, and the Cyclopes taught us the crafts.2 individual achievement could amount By the seventh century BC, a formula was to in that golden century. coined: the prôtos heuretês—the ‘first discoverer’ of this or that new skill, artefact, literary genre, I. SCHOLARSHIP: or social practice.3 The keyword here is technê. ANCIENT AND MODERN Basically untranslatable, it is best understood through its two English derivations, technique Although the invention of the and technology. Technê is the understanding, Doric and Ionic orders, and ingenuity, and skill that one applies to a of the two main archaic problem in order to solve it, or to brute matter sculptural types, the in order to make something useful of it.4 standing naked youth The Greeks soon realised that technê was the (kouros) and standing driving force behind the advance of civilization, draped woman (korê), and applied the word to any skill, craft, art, or seem to predate not profession that contributed to this advance. Greek curiosity per se Sailing, agriculture, divination, cooking, about inventors and their medicine, carpentry, flute playing, rhetoric, and inventions but its commemoration in writing, (above) politics were all technai in this sense. And so were later pundits soon filled the lacuna—at least in Fig. 1. Marble kouros from Attica, ca. architecture, painting, and of course sculpture. the case of sculpture. So we hear that either the 600–575 BC.
The remainder of this essay, like Caesar’s Rhodian Telchines or the Cretan Daktyloi were THE METROPOLITAN Gaul, is divided into three parts. Part I sketches the first to make images of the gods, and the MUSEUM OF ART, NEW 5 YORK, FLETCHER FUND, and occasionally critiques the scholarship on first to work iron and bronze in order to do so. 1932 (32.11.1).
Humanities Australia 73 And Daidalos, no less, invented the kouros (fig. 1). archaic sculptors active between Daidalos and His statues, we are told, the Persian wars. But it was the invention of the classical style and particularly of (above left) were exactly like living beings, for they contrapposto, apparently in the 470s, that Fig. 2. Plaster say that they could see and walk, and were greatly increased the range of innovation reconstruction so completely true to life that the statue that was possible in sculpture and prompted after Roman marble copies of produced by art seemed to be a living being. increasing public and private comment upon the Tyrannicides For Daidalos was the first to represent the it. For once these sculptors had invented Harmodios and eyes open and the legs separated as they are contrapposto—the counterpoise of limbs and Aristogeiton by 6 Kritios of Athens in walking. resulting asymmetrical distribution of the and Nesiotes. body’s weight—there was no going back. Bronze originals, Perhaps not surprisingly, the century that The whole field of movement and composition, 477/6 BC. Museo dei Gessi, Rome. allegedly saw these discoveries, the seventh of what the Greeks called rhythmos, was
PHOTO: SCHWANKE, century BC, also produced some of the earliest now open to individual experiment and COURTESY DEUTSCHES artists’ signatures. They appear on a kouros innovation. Moreover, other technai were ARCHÄOLOGISCHES INSTITUT, ROME, INST. base by Euthykartides of Naxos, and on a taking off at this very time, including medicine, NEG. 84.3300. fragmentary late geometric sherd from Ischia.7 cosmology, physics and rhetoric. It was the As Alison Burford has remarked, ‘During Age of the Sophists. So it is not surprising (above right) the 7th century BC craftsmen ceased to be that the first comments about individual style Fig. 3. Bronze Apollo anonymous; never again in antiquity did there concern sculptors of this period, and the first from the Piraeus, occur so momentous an alteration in their judgements of quality as well. ca. 500–475 BC. 8 Archaeological status or in their thinking as this.’ Thus we read that bronzes by Kritios Museum, Piraeus. Now, thanks largely to these signatures and Nesiotes were ‘compact, sinewy, hard, 9 PHOTO: U.C. BERKELEY and the indefatigable Roman-period traveller and precisely divided into parts by lines’. PHOTO ARCHIVE. Pausanias, we know a certain amount about The implied comparison is between their
74 Humanities Australia famous bronze Tyrannicides of 476 BC (fig. 2), ‘nothing beside their father’. Soon, Plato today known only in marble replica, and the famously turned the entire discussion on its statuesque, kouros-like late archaic bronzes head, declaring that precisely because Greek such as the Piraeus Apollo (fig. 3). At about art changed and developed, it was inferior to this time Aeschylus, too, supposedly remarked Egyptian, which supposedly did not.11 that ‘the old statues, though simply made, are By the early Hellenistic period, these ad hoc thought divine; while the new ones, though value judgements had begun to lengthen into superbly made, have less of the divine in them’.10 narratives. Thus around 280 BC, Poseidippos Presumably he was comparing works such as the of Pella produced this long, recently discovered Piraeus Apollo with the supple and very human epigram praising his particular hero, the ‘musing’ pose of its early classical successors. fourth-century bronze caster Lysippos: The next generation fared somewhat better with the critics. The sculptor Pheidias set such Imitate these works, and the antique laws of a standard with his Athena Parthenos (see colossi, fig. 10) and Olympian Zeus and the sculptor Statue makers—yes!—outrun them! Polykleitos with his Doryphoros (fig. 4) that For if the ancient hands of [Dry]ops or of (above) Socrates, Xenophon, and Aristotle all judged Hageladas, Fig. 4. Two them the best in their respective professions. A pre-Polykleitan, wholly primitive reconstructions by Erin Babnik and Just as they ranked Homer the best epic poet, practitioner of the art, Andrew Stewart Melanippides the best lyric one, Sophocles the Or the hard creations of [the Daidalids] had of the Doryphoros best tragedian, and Zeuxis the best painter, entered the field, by Polykleitos of Argos. Bronze they agreed that Pheidias made the best statues There’d be no reason at all to invoke original, ca. 440 of the gods and Polykleitos made the best ones Lysippos’s new grace BC. The sheathed of mortals. Indeed, Socrates went further, As a touchstone. But if need should arise, sword and shield are conjectural. contemptuously dismissing Polykleitos’s And a contest among moderns occur, he’d 12 COURTESY sons, who had followed in his footsteps, as thrash them all. ANDREW STEWART
Humanities Australia 75 informed not only about the virtuoso artists and architects, but also about many others whose contributions were far more modest. Individualism is built into Greek and Roman discourse about art from start to finish, so we should not make light of it. As for innovation, these writers signal it in three main ways. As we’ve seen, the artist may be described as: (1) a discoverer of a new technique or image type (as its prôtos heuretês or primus inventor). But like Kritios, Nesiotes, Polykleitos, and Lysippos, he may be singled out also as: (2) a stylistic paradigm, and/or as: (3) the founder of a school. We shall return to these three criteria shortly. But in the 6th century AD or thereabouts, art history itself stopped, only reviving over a thousand years later. For the discipline’s real founding hero was not the sixteenth-century painter and scholar Vasari, nor even Aldrovandi or Ursinus, but Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the mid-eighteenth century. Convinced that ‘good taste was born under the skies of Greece’, Winckelmann began his career by systematically In the same period, Douris of Samos produced tackling the issue of the sculptural and a series of anecdotal artists’ biographies, pictorial models that contemporary artists including one of Lysippos. Douris may be should use, predictably endorsing only those responsible for those anecdotes in Pliny the that he felt exhibited the ‘noble simplicity and Elder’s Natural History, composed in the 70s quiet grandeur’ of the classical ideal—such as, AD, that elevate the artist almost to culture- curiously to our eyes, the Laokoon (fig. 5). hero status, the companion and occasionally Winckelmann’s second and most important counsellor of kings like that other gadfly, the book, the Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums court philosopher.13 (Dresden: Waltherisches Hof-Buchhandlung, Meanwhile Xenokrates of Athens, a pupil of 1764), was the first such systematic account Lysippos and a practising sculptor in his own ever. But surprisingly, it says very little about right, wrote handbooks on the development of personalities. Winckelmann was of course Greek sculpture and painting, apparently based thoroughly familiar with most of the ancient on formal criteria such as the artist’s individual sources on Greek art, particularly Pliny and contributions to the development of symmetria Pausanias and their rosters of artists great and or proportion, rhythmos or composition, and small. But his interest in environmental, social, akribeia or naturalistic detail; and in painting, and political factors and his desire to define ideal to the development of line, colour, composition, beauty itself pointed him in other directions. (above) and perspective. Some of Pliny’s stylistic Notoriously, Winckelmann never went 14 Fig. 5. Marble judgements probably are taken from his work. to Greece, and despite the wealth of ancient group of Laokoon The floodgates were now open. By the end of sculpture on display in Rome, he ventured and his sons, by Hagesandros, the Hellenistic period, the foundations for the only eight actual attributions, of which only Athanodoros, work of Vitruvius, Pliny, Quintilian, Pausanias, two—the Apollo Sauroktonos (fig. 6) and and Polydoros of Lucian, and Philostratos—and art history as Resting Satyr given to Praxiteles—are taken Rhodes, ca. 50–25 15 BC. Rome, Vatican enshrined in our own textbooks, the present seriously today. Others were less reticent. Museums. author’s included—were firmly in place. It is Reproductions in miniature on the coins of
PHOTO: HANS GOETTE largely because of them that we are quite well Knidos had already enabled seventeenth-
76 Humanities Australia century scholars to identify Praxiteles’ Knidian Aphrodite, and by 1800 Emilio Quirino Visconti, then director of the Vatican Museums, had both debunked a number of Winckelmann’s attributions and added some of his own. Visconti’s ventures on this front included giving the Lancelotti-type Diskobolos to Myron, the Vatican Ganymede to Leochares, and the seated Vatican Tyche to Eutychides.16 In each case the ancient critics had described the work in enough detail to enable its identification among the mass of marbles on show; but Visconti was fully aware that he was dealing not with Greek originals but with Roman copies that translated them from bronze into marble. And he also knew that the Ganymede and Tyche were less than faithful copies at that, because both of them were mere statuettes. It was upon this foundation that the first systematic history of Greek sculptors, published by Heinrich Brunn in 1853, was created.17 Now Brunn felt somewhat differently than Winckelmann about art and artists. A Kantian, he believed that great art was the product of individual genius. So the individual artist automatically became his focus, and resurrecting him—the process of Meisterforschung—became his solemn duty. By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the rapidly growing corpus of sculptures and inscriptions, the refinement of archaeological positivism with its focus upon the telling detail, and the adoption of the new technique of photography—all these had greatly increased both the scope and the ambitions of the attribution game and its practitioners. proceeded to document his attributions with an The big breakthrough came in 1893 impressive array of them. Yet mere attribution with Adolf Furtwängler’s Meisterwerke der was by no means his prime goal. As he indicated griechischen Plastik.18 This bold attempt to by his choice of subtitle, Kunstgeschichtliche reconstruct the output of the giants of classical Untersuchungen or ‘Art-Historical Studies’, he Greek sculpture, penned by Brunn’s star pupil wanted to historicise, to trace development, and and dedicated to him, caused a sensation. he carefully subordinated each ‘masterpiece’ to Furtwängler adopted the methods of the this agenda. His address to the ancient literary (above) positivist connoisseur Giovanni Morelli (aka sources, however, was deliberately casual—a Fig. 6. Apollo Ivan Lermolieff), who from 1874 had published slap at the text-based art history for which Sauroktonos, Vatican. Bronze hundreds of re-attributions of Old Master Brunn’s book had been the bible. original by Praxiteles, paintings that tabulated and compared the From then on, all serious scholars of ancient ca. 350 BC. formulae their authors employed for anatomical sculpture began to use photographs as a SOURCE: J.J. WINCKELMANN, details, drapery, and so on. In his preface matter of course—some so recklessly that in MONUMENTI ANTICHI Furtwängler declared that only photographs 1908 the sculpture specialist and topographer INEDITI (ROME: WINCKELMANN, 1767), could sustain such a programme, and Adolf Michaelis felt he had to protest. While VOL. 1, CH. 4, P. LXXV, PL. 40
Humanities Australia 77 conceding that photographs had been So far, every scholar mentioned in this essay instrumental in converting Greek sculpture has been German or at least German-speaking. studies from a text-based methodology to a In the rest of the scholarly world both the style-based one, he warned that Furtwängler’s attribution game and totalising evolutionary attributions were both inflated and inattentive schemes such as these were less popular than to the texts, and his imitators were beginning in Germany, and still are, though monographs to arrive at wildly contradictory ones for the on individual Greek sculptors still continue same pieces. Stylistic analysis without external to appear. They include Giorgios Despinis’s controls was a perilous enterprise indeed.19 dissertation on Agorakritos, Olga Palagia’s on Furtwängler’s critics had also chastised him Euphranor, Paolo Moreno’s three books on for his over-reliance on Roman copies. For since Lysippos, Antonio Corso’s quartet (soon to be a Greek originals by the great masters were in quintet!) on Praxiteles, and the present author’s short supply—in fact, all but non-existent—both own dissertation on Skopas. Not to mention the Brunn and he had been compelled to devote recent Praxiteles exhibition organised by Alain most of their pages to works preserved only Pasquier and Jean-Luc Martinez at the Louvre. in copy. Furtwängler had blithely used these All of them rely heavily upon copies.21 copies as if they were Greek originals, whereas In the United States, the leading postwar it was crystal clear not only that in many cases theorist was the charismatic American scholar they translated bronze into marble, but also Rhys Carpenter. A brilliant teacher and that often they reproduced details somewhat powerful writer, in 1960 Carpenter produced capriciously—truly a Morellian nightmare. a highly influential survey entitled Greek So the next generation began to develop Sculpture: A Critical Review.22 Although all but the science—some might call it the pseudo- ignored on the European continent, this book science—of Kopienkritik, ‘copy criticism’, to took the world of Anglo-American sculpture overcome these problems, and worked ever studies by storm. (One of this author’s own harder to refine the attributions based upon it. professors, Robert Cook, declared it the best Meanwhile still others, disturbed by thing ever written on the subject, and gave it a Michaelis’s warning, began to step back and glowing three-page review.)23 look at the entire scene afresh. Inspired by Carpenter too was a disciple of Hildebrand the great formalist critics Adolf Hildebrand, and Wölfflin. Although apparently he never Alois Riegl, Franz Wickhoff and Heinrich cited them, he must have known their work: his Wölfflin, they sought, in Wölfflin’s famous approach is too close to theirs for coincidence. words, to offer the world an ‘art history For he too wanted an ‘art without artists’ and without names’. In Greek sculpture studies, an ‘art history without names’ but pressed his the two favorites were Stilphasen, a quasi- case even further. Bluntly characterising Greek deterministic sequence of formal antitheses sculpture as the ‘anonymous product of an such as closed to open, haptic to optic, linear impersonal craft’, he argued that it was ‘strictly to painterly, planar to recessional, and simple conditioned by evolutionary laws which are in to complex; and Strukturforschung, which turn dependent upon the unchangeable dictates tried to discover the essential structure of the mechanism of human vision’.24 Names (psychological and thus formal) of a given do, in fact, crop up in his book—Polykleitos, culture and its artworks. Gerhard Krahmer Pheidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippos in particular. was the acknowledged master of Stilphasen But its thrust is quite different—a challenging, and Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg of highly rhetorical, and often unorthodox sketch of Strukturforschung.20 Krahmer preferred to an inexorable, even deterministic evolution from write articles rather than books, however. a purely frontal art to a fully three-dimensional Students of Hellenistic sculpture, largely one, and from glyptic to plastic form. deprived by the ancient classicising critics of Carpenter’s most influential pupil was names, dates, texts, histories, and frequently Brunilde Ridgway, who began to teach at Bryn even of copies, found overarching schemes of Mawr College in 1960, and in 1977 was named this kind particularly appealing. Rhys Carpenter Professor of Classical and Near
78 Humanities Australia Eastern Archaeology at that college. Although The upshot of all this activity, at least as Ridgway’s approach is more nuanced than regards current work on Greek sculpture, Carpenter’s and cannot be easily summarised, is that personalities and period styles now she too is an enthusiastic debunker, banishing coexist quite uneasily. While some foreground many works formerly attributed to the great the individual sculptor, his teachers, and his masters to the later Hellenistic or even Roman pupils to the almost complete exclusion of any periods, and casting grave doubt upon others.25 overarching vision, others focus upon the big Ridgway and her many pupils now constitute picture to the almost complete exclusion of what can fairly be called a school. the individual sculptor. And still others—the Yet Carpenter’s ‘art history without names’ present author included—attempt to reconcile has not gone unchallenged. In particular, many the two approaches, often with mixed results. historians of ancient sculpture heartily disliked Moreover, the Roman copies have become an approach that not only denied the artist’s quite controversial, at least in the United States. existence as a social being, but also brusquely Traditionally the backbone of our reconstructions expelled many works from their cosy niches of the history of Greek sculpture, they are now in the 4th century BC and banished them decidedly problematic. Again following the
… INDIVIDUALITY AND INNOVATION ARE CENTRAL TO GREEK AND ROMAN DISCOURSE ON ART, SO WE ARE NOT ENTITLED TO IGNORE THEM.
to the advanced Hellenistic period. In 1980 Germans, this time the 1970s generation led by Richard Wollheim briskly critiqued this whole Paul Zanker and Raimund Wünsche, some now enterprise on a theoretical level in his path- argue that Latin literature should be our guide— breaking book Art and its Objects: especially texts such as Plautus’s comedies and Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid that [First, these formalist scholars] had far ‘emulate’ Greek models rather than copy them too narrow a conception of the range of outright. As this author’s former student and now devices operative in art […] Secondly, they colleague Christopher Hallett has noted, had no theoretical means of fitting together stylistic changes on the general or social level Our failure to recognise this in the visual with changes of style on an individual or arts (so this line of reasoning runs) may be expressive level: Wölfflin’s famous program put down mostly to prejudice and a lack of of an ‘art history without names’ is in effect imagination. On this analysis, if we can only the denial that there is any need to make learn to overcome our modern parochialism, the fit since all change occurs primarily or the genuine Romanness of all this material operatively on the more general level. Thirdly, will become unmistakably apparent.27 all these writers were confused about the status of their investigation. From the fact Yet not only have Zanker, Wünsche, and the that it is in the nature of art that it changes others turned away from what one might or has a history, they tried to move to the call this ‘irrationally exuberant’ Romanitas conclusion that the particular history it has, of the 1970s, but both images and texts offer the particular changes that it undergoes, are little support for it. Whatever the status of grounded in the nature of art.26 these pieces as Roman art—and here there is certainly much room for reconsideration—their As regards Greek sculpture, we might add, credentials as replicas of Greek originals, more- fourth, that individuality and innovation are or-less, are impeccable. central to Greek and Roman discourse on art, The facts are well known and shouldn’t so we are not entitled to ignore them. need repeating, but apparently they do. First,
Humanities Australia 79 when one lines the copies up it is clear how So where do we go from here? Not, surely, astonishingly similar they often are, which down the road so often taken, of trying to link presumes the existence of a common—surely every Greek original and Roman copy with a Greek—archetype. Second, quite a few of them name. Still less should we join those who rush can be matched directly with surviving Greek to attribute new discoveries in the same way. originals, such as the well known Erechtheion Guesses of this sort hamper our address to the Caryatids and the fragments of Agorakritos’s work in question, skew our discussion of it, Nemesis so brilliantly rediscovered by Despinis substitute sloganeering for thought, and seldom and placed in his reconstruction precisely with lead anywhere productive. If the Holy Grail the aid of the copies. In recent years, Despinis of three centuries of advanced scholarship on and other Greek scholars have identified and two continents and in six languages is simply a joined original fragments of more than a dozen name, one may justly ask, ‘What’s the point?’. classical statues on the Akropolis using this So instead of obsessing over names, it is method, some of them masterpieces by named better to reorient the discussion and ask, first sculptors seen and described by Pausanias in of all, what possibilities were available to the his tour around the citadel.28 The Romanitas individual sculptor in ancient Greece? Second, movement, as one might call it, has ignored this what did innovation in this medium actually work entirely. consist of? And third, what can we learn Third, a sculptor’s workshop buried by the from the monuments and sources about such eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and excavated in innovations in the particular case? the 1960s has yielded hundreds of fragments of ancient plaster casts. Moulded from Greek II. CRAFTSMANSHIP, ANCIENT bronze originals such as the Tyrannicides, AND MODERN they show that although the marble replicas are legion, in each case a core group of them As to possibilities, in ancient Greece (it will be conforms faithfully to the spirit and often to recalled), sculpture was a technê—art and craft the letter of its Greek archetype.29 And finally, combined. Moreover, what today’s war-gamers as Hallett also has pointed out, the crucial would call the ‘action horizon’ of a Greek Latin word aemulatio, ‘emulation’, seems to sculptor and what sociologists would call mean in fact not ‘rivalry by being authentically his ‘power of agency’ was quite limited and obviously Roman’ but ‘rivalry by being as (and of Roman ones even more so, though Greek as possible’.30 that is beyond the scope of this essay). So when Pliny describes Nero’s commission To begin with, the time required to train a to the great Zenodoros to make facsimiles of good craftsman is often estimated (most two cups by the classical Greek silversmith recently by Richard Sennett) at around 10,000 Kalamis, he says that Zenodoros ‘reproduced hours or about seven years.33 Or, if one wants to them in such a way that there was almost no be apprenticed to Jiro Ono, reportedly the finest difference in workmanship between them and sushi chef in Tokyo, at least ten years—and that the originals’. The word he uses for ‘reproduce’ is just the beginning, according to David Gelb’s is precisely aemulare, ‘to rival’.31 So as Michael superb documentary on him.34 Pliny records Koortbojian has shrewdly remarked, in ancient a similar training regimen in the studio of the Rome: ‘It is a striking paradox […] that […] notoriously exacting fourth-century painter what made something recognisable as roughly Pamphilos of Sikyon: to study with him cost equivalent to our modern notion of a “work of a tidy 500 drachmas per year for twelve years, art” was, more often than not, the fact that it and involved instruction ‘in all branches of was not an original invention but a “copy”.’ 32 learning, especially arithmetic and geometry’.35 Surely it is this uniquely Roman attitude to Lengthy apprenticeships such as these would replication that needs more thought and more tend to turn all but the boldest pupils into work, not the replicas’ departures from their plodding conservatives. Greek models, which often are trivial and Then, once our young sculptor struck out probably fortuitous. on his own, he faced a society where such
80 Humanities Australia work was always done on commission and was narrow, and that a formalist obsession with constrained by genre, function, and the need style often has led to other, more interesting always to please a public. For in ancient Greece avenues being overlooked or underestimated. and Rome, sculpture was a public art form, even when (as later) displayed in private houses. III. FIVE TEST CASES Moreover, the risk involved in experiments that might turn bad—ruining an entire block of First, Kritios and Nesiotes, the authors of the marble, losing time, losing money, losing face, Tyrannicides (fig. 2). These statues, originally and so on—was great. That is why, in ancient of bronze and set up in the Athenian Agora art, period style usually eclipses personal in 476 to replace an earlier group stolen by style almost completely. So one must expect the Persians, are each represented today by innovators to be few and far between, and their half a dozen Roman copies, another half- innovations perhaps not always of the sort that dozen fragments of plaster casts from the one would expect. aforementioned copyist’s workshop in Baiae, Bearing all this in mind, Part III of this essay and numerous echoes in the Athenian minor selects some test cases from the fifth century arts. Moreover, part of their original base has BC. Essentially, the argument will be that survived, plus over a dozen ancient texts that our view of innovation in this medium is too mention them and sometimes even describe
(left) Fig. 7. Herakles hands Athena the Stymphalian Birds, marble metope from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, ca. 470–457 BC. Archaeological Museum, Olympia, and Musée du Louvre, Paris.
PHOTO: HANS GOETTE.
Humanities Australia 81 described by Pausanias and dated by him to ca. 470–457 (figs. 7–9).40 Although he attributes them to Pheidias’s pupils Alkamenes and Paionios, this cannot be right, since these two men lived over a generation later, in the last third of the century. Nevertheless, over the years some diehards predictably have expended considerable quantities of ink in defending this attribution, just because its source is the usually reliable Pausanias: plus ça change. But most of us continue to call their author simply the ‘Olympia Master’. Now this individual could not have carved all these figures himself, and they are not particularly innovative stylistically.
(top) their style, such as Lucian’s comment, quoted Their contributions to the Severe Style are Fig. 8. earlier, that they were ‘compact, sinewy, hard, incremental at best—indeed quite modest Reconstructed and precisely divided into parts by lines’.36 So when one compares the spectacular bronzes elevation of the east façade of the Temple (miraculously) their identity, date, and form are discovered in 1972 in the sea off Riace Marina in of Zeus at Olympia, all secure. Italy, for example.41 So why include them here? ca. 470–457 BC. The It’s now clear on archaeological grounds Simply, because the Olympia Master was the contest between Oinomaos and that the style they exemplify, the early first Greek sculptor to create what we would Pelops for the hand Classical or Severe Style, postdates the Persian call a world: a rounded, wholly credible kosmos of Hippodameia. invasion of 480.37 So it seems likely that, in of gods, humans, and beasts. His theme is SOURCE: E. CURTIUS AND F. Brunilde Ridgway’s felicitous phrase, they grand: nothing less than the Justice of Zeus. ADLER, OLYMPIA I (BERLIN: A. ASHER, 1897), PL. 10. do indeed mark the ‘legal birthday’ of this On the temple’s twelve metopes (fig. 7), new Severe Style.38 They break decisively Herakles’ inborn talent duly expands under (bottom) with the sleepwalker pose of the kouros and Athena’s mentorship to fill the space allotted Fig. 9. Central part its derivatives (see figs. 1–2), the mannered to it, taming the earth for humankind. The of the marble east formalism of the late archaic period, and the pediments (figs. 8–9) show the results of pediment from the Temple of Zeus at startling realism of some contemporary reliefs such training in the lives of Pelops, Theseus, Olympia (Fig. 8), ca. and bronze statuettes of athletes. Perhaps and Peirithoos, and of their anonymous but 470–457 BC. The this is why Pliny and Pausanias give Kritios obedient families and retainers, when pitted contest between Oinomaos and and Nesiotes a substantial list of pupils— against its opposite, the villainous Oinomaos Pelops for the hand four generations of them, in fact.39 It is the and the bestial Centaurs. Each class has its of Hippodameia. ancient way of signalling that they innovated own path to tread, its own predetermined Archaeological Museum, Olympia. stylistically, and that their innovations stuck. destiny to fulfil: That is the Justice of Zeus.
PHOTO: ERIN BABNIK Next, another Severe Style ensemble, the It is universal, because the gods are sculptures of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, omnipresent to enforce it; it is intersocial,
82 Humanities Australia because all responsible participants know and accept their places in it; and it is absolute, as clear-cut as the geometry of the great temple itself. Elitist and conservative, the Olympia Master’s sculptures neatly complement and complete the well-ordered fabric—the kosmos— (above) of Libon’s building. His innovations, then, are Fig. 10. thematic and programmatic, not stylistic or Reconstruction by Candace Smith iconographic. and Andrew Thirdly, we come to Pheidias, generally Stewart of the acknowledged in the ancient world as the chryselephantine statue of Athena greatest of Greek sculptors. But why? First Parthenos by and foremost, perhaps, because of the sheer Pheidias of Athens, grandeur of his two most famous works: 447–438 BC. the Athena Parthenos (fig. 10) and the Zeus COURTESY ANDREW STEWART at Olympia.42 After describing them, Pliny declares that, ‘Pheidias is deservedly judged (left) to be the first to have revealed the capabilities Fig. 11. Silver-gilt and indicated the methods of toreutice’.43 repoussé (toreutic) sea-shell perfume Now, toreutikê is a Greek technical term. box from Taranto Emphatically not to be translated merely with a Nereid as ‘metalwork’, still less as ‘sculpture’, it is riding a ketos, 3rd century BC. the technê of metal embossing or repoussé: of SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA hammering metal sheets into a mould, turning COMMONS/JULIE WOLF
Humanities Australia 83 whose beauty, Quintilian tells us, ‘is said to have added something to the traditional religion; to such an extent is the majesty of the work equal to the majesty of the god’.45 Beauty of facture, then, and formal beauty too. But there is more. The Amazonomachy and Gigantomachy embossed on the exterior and interior, respectively, of the goddess’s shield were but two of the many mythological narratives to embellish these enormous statues. Whereas the Olympia Master had created a world high on the exterior of the god’s house, Pheidias now brought this world inside it, into its very heart. By repeating on the Parthenos several of the temple’s exterior themes (the Amazonomachy and Gigantomachy included), and by adding still others to the Zeus, he both enabled the awed visitor to follow the great chain of being to its source, and channelled the divinity’s cosmic power back to him in response. His innovations, then, were technical, stylistic, iconographic, and programmatic. No wonder the ancient critics regarded him as the greatest of Greek sculptors. Fourth, Polykleitos and his Doryphoros or them over for final finishing, and assembling Spearbearer (figs. 4, 12).46 Here, it seems, we them into a larger composition. Used—as are faced with two innovations, one easily it happens—for the Statue of Liberty but spotted and the other not. The naked warrior rarely practiced today, it receives no space in had been a staple of Greek sculpture since at either the new Oxford Classical Dictionary or least the sixth century. It came in two types: the new Grove Dictionary of Classical Art and the striding and the standing. Polykleitos’s first Architecture. innovation was to combine these types into a Originally a Near-Eastern technique, single, compelling image, by making the statue toreutikê is well represented in archaic Greece throw its weight all on one leg, as the pundits by works ranging from gold and silver diadems immediately noticed and as Pliny duly pointed and belts, through the embossed golden drapery out.47 This posture of mobile repose neatly kills of some sixth-century chryselephantine two birds with one stone, proclaiming both the (above) statuettes at Delphi, to the embossed, lifesize subject’s steadfastness in the landscape and his 44 Fig. 12. Three silver bull from the same site. In Classical and active engagement with the world. Roman copies Hellenistic times, however, it became a major By contrast, Polykleitos’s second innovation, (marble, marble, and basalt) of art form, apparently thanks largely or wholly his perfected proportional system or Canon, the Doryphoros to Pheidias. which others followed ‘like a law’,48 cannot be by Polykleitos of Today, though, only small-scale examples read directly off the statue (still less its copies)— Argos, Fig. 4. Bronze original, ca. 440 BC. survive, chiefly bronze case-mirrors and the reason why no one has yet succeeded in From left to right: Hellenistic silver cosmetic boxes (fig. 11). reconstructing it to general approval. At best, it Museo Archeologico So what Pheidias achieved was a tour-de- manifested itself only subliminally, unless one Nazionale, Naples; Staatliche Museen, force of technê toreutikê on a colossal scale, read his accompanying textbook. It therefore Berlin; Museo using over a ton of beaten gold for each statue, differs in kind from all the other innovations Archeologico and deftly combining it with ivory, enamel, discussed here. Again, though, such canons Nazionale, Florence. glass, and other precious and semiprecious were not new. They had been central to Greek PHOTO: HANS GOETTE. materials. The result was two stunning colossi sculpture for two centuries, ever since the
84 Humanities Australia many numbers, and that ‘the work is hardest when the clay is on the fingernail’.49 Along with the statue’s controlled pose, the Canon enthrones it as an icon of male beauty: the perfectly measured man. This ideal is fourfold, and recalls the sixth-century philosopher Thales’ famous statement that he was glad that he was a human being not an animal; a man not a woman; and a Greek not a barbarian.50 So:
1. The Doryphoros is a model human being, Nature personified; 2. He represents the best human type, a Greek male; 3. He is a model Greek male, the perfect citizen warrior; and 4. He is an artistic standard or law as well.
A true microcosm—a kosmos in a capsule— the Doryphoros was not only innovative iconographically and stylistically, but also represented what any fifth-century intellectual would kill for: a perfect synthesis of nature (physis) and culture (nomos). Predictably, then, the sources tell us that Pheidias and Polykleitos each inspired a school: two generations of pupils in Pheidias’s case, and three in Polykleitos’s.51 Now it may be no coincidence that all these men except for the Olympia Master were (top) metalworkers. Mistakes in this medium are Fig. 13. Marble easier to repair, since metals can be recycled Nike by Paionios of Mende, dedicated and reused but stone cannot—at least, not at Olympia by without considerable piecing and jointing, and the Messenians sometimes not even then. So in conclusion, we and Naupaktians, ca. 420 BC. turn to a marble worker, Paionios of Mende. Archaeological He is known only from two references in Museum, Olympia.
ancient literature (one of them almost certainly PHOTO: HANS GOETTE. wrong, as we have seen) and one signed 52 statue. As noted earlier, Pausanias’s remark (bottom) that he made the east pediment of the Olympia Fig. 14. Plaster temple can be discarded. This leaves us with his reconstruction of the Nike of signed Nike erected on a pillar in front of the Paionios (omitting temple (figs. 13–14).53 the 9-metre high Pausanias and the Nike’s dedicatory pillar she stood on), Fig. 13. Marble first kouros (see fig. 1), but Polykleitos’s was inscription tell us that Paionios made it original, ca. 420 apparently the first totally comprehensive and and the Messenians and Naupaktians BC. Archaeological mathematically integrated one. And it was also dedicated it, presumably after their daring Museum, Olympia. most difficult to apply: he himself said that and unconventional victory (alongside the PHOTO: U.C. BERKELEY PHOTO ARCHIVE. perfection comes about ‘just barely’ through Athenians) over the Spartans at Sphakteria
Humanities Australia 85 in 425. Succeeding in marooning a company of sculpture’s meaning and reception. One only Spartans on the island, they achieved a coup has to imagine the eastern sun rising over the hitherto thought impossible: the capture of a sanctuary of Zeus and shining through those hundred and twenty of them alive. The myth translucent marble wings and billowing cloak, of Spartan invincibility had taken a body blow in many places less than 1 cm (one-third of an from which it never fully recovered. inch) thick, to understand that what he had Anyone seeing this project in progress must created was truly an epiphany divine. Bronze have thought that Paionios had gone completely could never match it. insane. His statue, carved from a single piece Not surprisingly, then, Paionios’s inscribed of Parian marble, required a flawless block of it signature deftly exploits all this. Punning on measuring 3 m high x 1.8 m wide x 1.2 m deep, the title of his work, he boasts that he made it or roughly 10 x 6 x 4 feet. Since marble weighs ‘when he had won (enika) the competition for about 2560 kg per cubic metre or 168 lbs. per the akroteria of the temple’, thus making his cubic foot, this monster would have weighed no clients’ victory his own. But even this was not less than 16.5 metric tons or 16.25 English tons. enough. For apparently the first time in Greek How could it be quarried and ferried all the way sculpture, his Nike brazenly bares a breast. Now from the island of Paros to Olympia? this was no innocent ‘wardrobe malfunction’.55 Of course, up to a third of the stone could A culture that instinctively gendered the be removed at source. But roughing out of this spectator as male, carefully shielded its women kind could only go so far: the delicate projecting from the prying eyes of strangers, anxiously parts—wings, cloak, head, arms, and feet—had defended the prerogatives of the gods, and to be safeguarded at all costs. And when the regarded vision as long-distance touch, would roughed-out block reached the site, another see this gorgeous, provocative young woman as dilemma presented itself. The Nike had to stand ravishingly sexy and inviting. Victory teasingly atop a 9-metre or 30-foot high pillar. Cut away too presents herself in the flesh—and what flesh! little of the excess, and the task of hoisting and So if this essay has achieved nothing else, supporting it up there would be all but impossible; it may serve as a reminder of the centrality of cut away too much, and breakage was certain. individuality and innovation in the ancient So now perhaps we can begin to understand understanding of Greek art, and of the need what an awesome feat of sculptural technê this to credit them properly when we study it. was. Paionios’s innovations were not stylistic. Moreover, perhaps it is now clear how varied His bravura drapery style is prefigured on the these innovations could be, at least in the field Parthenon pediments and directly anticipated of sculpture, and how diversely and decisively on the Nike Temple parapet in Athens a few the individual sculptor could put his own stamp years earlier.54 Indeed, if the strong similarities upon his work. ¶ between his work and the Nikai attributed to the parapet’s Master B are anything to go by, ANDREW STEWART FAHA is apparently he pioneered it there. Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Instead, Paionios’s triumph is a triumph of Greek Studies in the Departments of History of Art what art historians call facture: of material plus and Classics at the University of skill. A prudent man would have used bronze, California at Berkeley, and Chair but he chose marble. Yet in his hands, the of the Graduate Group in Ancient History and stone has daringly defied—even negated—its Mediterranean Archaeology. His recent books own nature, becoming as supple as bronze and include Attalos, Athens, and the Akropolis: The as weightless and insubstantial as gauze. So Pergamene Little Barbarians and their Roman and he has beaten both stone and bronze on their Renaissance Legacy (2004); and Classical Greece and the Birth of Western Art (2008). A book on own home turf, just as his Messenian and Hellenistic art is in press. Naupaktian clients had daringly beaten the supposedly invincible Spartans on theirs. These innovations are by no means purely technical: they touch the very heart of the
86 Humanities Australia 1. This is an edited version of the Australian 18. Adolf Furtwängler, Meisterwerke der Academy of the Humanities’ Trendall Lecture griechischen Plastik. Kunstgeschichtliche given in Sydney on Friday 18 January 2013. Untersuchungen (Leipzig and Berlin: Giesecke I thank Graeme Clark and the Academy for and Devrient, 1893); published in English inviting me, and also the Australasian Society as Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture: A Series for Classical Studies for the warm reception my of Essays on the History of Art (London: W. wife Darlis Wood and I received during our stay Heinemann, 1895). in Australia. 19. A. Michaelis, Ein Jahrhundert 2. See K. Junker and S. Strohwald, Götter als kunstarchäologischer Entdeckungen (Leipzig: Erfinder: die Entstehung der Kultur in der E. A. Seemann, 1908), pp. 301–7; published griechischen Kunst (Darmstadt/Mainz: Philipp in English as A Century of Archaeological von Zabern, 2012). Discoveries (London: J. Murray, 1908). 3. See A. Kleingünther, ‘Protos Heuretes’: 20. See esp. G. Krahmer, ‘Stilphasen der Untersuchungen zur Geschichte einer hellenistischen Plastik’, Römische Fragestellung (Philologus supplement 26.1, Mitteilungen, 38–39 (1923–24), pp. 138–184; Göttingen, 1933). and ‘Die einansichtige Gruppe und der 4. See J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art (New späthellenistischen Kunst’, Nachrichten von der Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 32–7. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, 1927, Phil.-Hist. Klasse 1, pp. 53–91. G. von 5. Diodorus Siculus 5.55, 64; Strabo 14.2.7; etc. Kaschnitz-Weinberg, Die mittelmeerischen 6. Diodorus Siculus 4.76. Grundlagen der antiken Kunst (Frankfurt 7. Euthykartides: A. Stewart, Greek Sculpture: am Main: V. Klostermann, 1944); and his An Exploration (New Haven and London: posthumously published Die eurasischen Yale University Press, 1990), p. 22, fig. 40; Grundlagen der antiken Kunst (Frankfurt am J. Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Main: V. Klostermann, 1961) and Ausgewählte Period (London and New York: Thames and Schriften (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1965). Hudson, 1991), p. 21, fig. 56. Ischia: Boardman, 21. G. Despinis, Symvoli sti Meleti tou Ergou tou Early Greek Vase Painting (London: Thames Agorakritou (Athens: Hermes, 1971); and Hudson, 1998), p. 53, fig. 162. O. Palagia, Euphranor (Leiden: Brill, 1980); 8. A. Burford, Craftsmen in Greek and Roman Society P. Moreno, Testimonianze per la teoria artistica (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), p. 212. di Lisippo (Treviso: Libreria editrice Canova, 9. Lucian, Rhetorum Praeceptor 9. 1973); Moreno, Vita e arte di Lisippo (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1987); and Moreno, Lisippo: l’arte 10. Quoted by Porphyry, de Abstinentia 2.18. e la fortuna (Milan: Fabbri, 1995); A. Corso, 11. Xenophon, Memorabilia 1.4.3; Plato, Meno 91D; The Art of Praxiteles, 4 vols. (Rome: L’Erma di Plato, Hippias Major 290A; Plato, Protagoras Bretschneider, 2004–present); Stewart, Skopas 328C; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 6.7.1, of Paros (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press, 1977); 1141a9–12; Aristotle, Poetics 6, 1450a25–8; A. Pasquier and J.-L. Martinez (eds.), Praxitèle Aristotle, Politics 8.5.7, 1340a35–40. (Paris: Musée du Louvre and Somogy, 2007). 12. Poseidippos 62 ed. Austin and Bastianini. 22. Carpenter, Greek Sculpture: A Critical Review 13. Pliny, Natural History 1.34; 34.61 (Lysippos); cf. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 35.79–89 (Apelles, Alexander, and Ptolemy I); 23. Classical Review N.S. 12 (1962), pp. 287–90. see Pollitt, pp. 77–8 for sources, bibliography, 24. Carpenter, pp. v–viii. and discussion. 25. B. S. Ridgway, The Severe Style in Greek 14. See Pollitt, pp. 74–7 for sources, bibliography, Sculpture (Princeton: Princeton University and discussion. Press, 1970); The Archaic Style in Greek Sculpture 15. For full information on these early attributions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, and those that follow, see Francis Haskell and 1977); Fifth-Century Styles in Greek Sculpture Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900 (New Haven: Fourth-Century Styles in Greek Sculpture Yale University Press, 1981). (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); 16. Stewart, figs. 300 (Diskobolos), 626 (Tyche); Hellenistic Sculpture I–III (Madison: University Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Classical Period of Wisconsin Press, 1990–2002). (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), fig. 60 26. R. Wollheim, Art and Its Objects (Cambridge: (Diskobolos); Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 145. Late Classical Period (London: Thames and 27. C. H. Hallett, ‘Emulation versus Replication: Hudson, 1995), fig. 29 (Ganymede). The Art of Roman Copying’, Journal of Roman 17. Geschichte der griechischen Künstler Archaeology, 18 (2005), 419–35, at p. 419, (Braunschweig: C.A. Schwetschke und summarising the work of these German Sohn, 1853–1859). scholars and reviewing (1) The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and
Humanities Australia 87 Tradition from the Present to Antiquity, ed. 39. Pliny, 34.85; Pausanias 6.3.5; both misspell his by E.K. Gazda (Ann Arbor, MI: University of name, respectively calling him Critias and Michigan Press, 2002); and (2) E. Perry, The Kritias; a not uncommon name, it is often Aesthetics of Emulation in the Visual Arts of misspelt this way. the Ancient Romans (Cambridge: Cambridge 40. Pausanias 5.10.2–10; Stewart, Greek Sculpture, University Press, 2004); cf. also (3) M. Marvin, pp. 142–6, 253–4, figs. 262–84; Boardman, The Language of the Muses: The Dialogue Classical Period, pp. 33–50, figs. 23–6. between Roman and Greek Sculpture (Malibu: 41. Stewart, Greek Sculpture, pp.147–8, figs. 292–6; J. Paul Getty Museum, 2008). Boardman, Classical Period, pp. 53–4, figs. 38–9; 28. Despinis, passim; and, e.g., Despinis, update, Stewart, Classical Greece, pp. 88–101. ‘Klassische Skulpturen von der Athener 42. Stewart, Greek Sculpture, pp. 150–160, 257–263, Akropolis’, Athenische Mitteilungen 123 (2008), figs. 361–375; Boardman, Classical Period, pp. 235–340, at pp. 301–4 (list). pp. 110–2, 204, figs. 97–110, 181–2; update, 29. C. Landwehr, Die antiken Gipsabgüsse aus Stewart, Classical Greece, pp. 134–43; see, Baiae: griechische Bronzestatuen in Abgüssen most recently, C. Cullen Davison, Pheidias: römischer Zeit (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1985). The Sculptures and Ancient Sources (London: 30. Hallett, p. 435. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 31. Pliny, 34.47: aemulatus est ut vix ulla Supplement 105, 2009). differentia esset artis. 43. Pliny, 34.54. 32. Koortbojian, in Gazda (ed.), p. 179. 44. For good colour photographs of these stunning 33. See K. A. Ericsson, R. T. Krampe and C. discoveries, see D. Musti et al., L’Oro dei Greci Tesch-Römer, ‘The Role of Deliberate Practice (Novara: Istituto Geographico DeAgostini, in the Acquisition of Expert Performance’, 1992), figs. 96.1–9; also B. C. Petracos, Delphi Psychological Review 100.3 (July 1993), 363–406; (Athens: Esperos, 1971), pls. 21–33. R. Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven: Yale 45. Institutio Oratoria 12.10.9. University Press, 2008); for the ancient world, 46. Stewart, Greek Sculpture, pp. 160–3, 263–6, figs. Burford, pp. 87–93 remains fundamental even 378–82; Boardman, Classical Period, pp. 205–6, though many specialised contributions to the figs. 184–7; update, Stewart, Classical Greece, subject have appeared in the interim. pp. 144–8. 34. Jiro Dreams of Sushi, directed by David 47. Pliny, 34.56. Gelb, starring Jiro Ono and Yoshikazu Ono 48. Pliny, 34.55. (Magnolia Pictures, 2011). 49. Philo Mechanicus 4.1, 49.20; Plutarch, Moralia 35. Pliny, 35.76. 86A, 636B-C. 36. Lucian, Rhet. Praec. 9. For the evidence, see S. 50. Diogenes Laertius 1.33. Brunnsåker, The Tyrant-Slayers of Kritios and Nesiotes: A Critical Study of the Sources and 51. Pliny, 34.50 (Polykleitan school); 34.87; 35.54; Reconstructions (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet 36.16, 17 (Pheidian school). i Athen, 1971); updates, Stewart, Greek Sculpture, 52. Pausanias 5.10.6, 26.1; W. Dittenberger and K. pp. 135–6, 251–2, figs. 227–31; Boardman, Purgold, Die Inschriften von Olympia (Olympia Classical Period, pp. 24–5, figs. 3–9; Stewart, vol. 5, Berlin: A. Asher, 1895), pp. 378–84, no. Classical Greece and the Birth of Western Art 259 (Nike: dedication and signature). (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 53. Stewart, Greek Sculpture, pp. 89–92, 165, 271, 2008), pp. 70–74. figs. 408–11; Boardman, Classical Period, p. 176, 37. Stewart, ‘The Persian and Carthaginian fig.139; update, Stewart, Classical Greece, pp. Invasions of 480 BCE and the Beginning of the 189–202. Classical Style in Greek Sculpture’, American 54. Stewart, Greek Sculpture, pp. 166–67, figs. Journal of Archaeology 112 (2008), 377–412, 419–24; Boardman, Classical Period, pp. 149–50, 581–615; Stewart, Classical Greece, pp. 52–63 figs. 129–30; update, Stewart, Classical Greece, (summary). This lower chronology has been pp. 198–202. adopted by the new Akropolis Museum for 55. Coined by singers Justin Timberlake and the labels of its late archaic and early classical Janet Jackson on 1 February 2004, to explain sculptures, and also underpinned a recent the former’s bodice-ripping antics during the exhibition at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt: see televised United States Super Bowl XXXVIII Zurück zur Klassik: ein neuer Blick auf das alte halftime show. Griechenland: eine Ausstellung der Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Frankfurt am Main, 8. Februar bis 26. Mai 2013, ed. by V. Brinkmann (München: Hirmer, and Frankfurt am Main: Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, 2013). 38. Ridgway, Severe Style, p. 12.
88 Humanities Australia FIFTY YEARS OF Australian Literary Studies » PHILIP MEAD
In 2013 the scholarly journal Australian documents and reviews of Judith Wright’s Literary Studies reached fifty years of stories, of Rawlings’ biography of Charles publication. At the University of Queensland, Harpur (by A. D. Hope), of Hadgraft’s scholarly I in November, at the celebration to mark this edition of the ‘plausible liar’ Henry Savery’s notable achievement, Michael Wilding spoke convict narrative Quintus Servinton (by about the history of the journal, emphasising Brian Elliott), and of a comparative study of its role as the first ‘fully professional’ journal nineteenth-century Australian and Canadian of Australian literature. Over the years since poetry. The serious infrastructural intentions the journal was founded commentary and of the journal are signalled in founding editor scholarship about Australian literature by Laurie Hergenhan’s brief note on the final ‘non-professionals’ like ‘journalists, clergymen, page about the publication of an annotated (background) printers and writers’ and by independent bibliography of Bernard O’Dowd, No. 12 in An appreciative scholars like A. A. Phillips or Nettie Palmer, Walter Stone’s series Studies in Australian audience at the ALS 50th celebration. has gradually given way to the work of Bibliography. This item presages what would PHOTO: ANDREW YEO professional (that is university or university- become a core contribution of the journal FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF affiliated) critics, editors, literary historians and to the development of professional literary QUEENSLAND LIBRARY biographers.1 ALS, as everyone knows it, has studies in Australia, its ‘Annual Bibliography been a dynamic centre of activity within that of Studies in Australian Literature’ (from 1964). (left inset) cultural development. Wilding also admitted The bibliography was an important forerunner Editor Leigh Dale that he may have been attracted to buying the of the comprehensive, online AustLit Resource speaking at the 50th celebration. first issue in a bookshop by Leonie Kramer’s (from 2002). The dearness of this aspect of PHOTO: ANDREW YEO article on Adam Lindsay Gordon, who had gone ALS to Hergenhan’s editorial heart is obvious FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF to the same school as him. from his account of the role of bibliography QUEENSLAND LIBRARY The first issue opened with J. C. Horner’s and book history in his 2013 memoir: ‘[Stone’s defence of Henry Kingsley’s genially imperialist series] served as a reminder that amateurs and (right inset) romance The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn enthusiasts like Stone, book collectors, printers Laurie Hergenhan (1859). As well as Kramer’s article, it also and antiquarians had helped to keep Australian AO FAHA cutting the 50th included H. P. Heseltine’s study of J. Le Gay literature alive at a time when it was neglected anniversary cake. Brereton and A. G. Stephens’s Bulletin, Ellen by the academy’.2 ALS, as Hergenhan recounts, PHOTO: ANDREW YEO Malos’s article on themes in Katharine ‘was intended as a journal not only of literary FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND LIBRARY Susannah Prichard’s fiction, as well as notes, criticism but of information’.3 I don’t know if
Humanities Australia 89 Hergenhan deliberately designed it that way in university humanist studies. As Hergenhan but the cover livery of the first issue is a version recalls, Hope had visited the United States of the ‘national’ colours, with print in the sere in 1958 as a Carnegie Fellow to study the yellow of desert ruins, against a background of university teaching of its literature as providing drab field-uniform green. a guide to what might be done in Australia. ALS began at the University of Tasmania In celebrating twenty years of ALS, Hope in 1963, when that university was a dynamic repeated what he had said at its launch, that and productive locus of studies in Australian the pioneering academic journal American literature, past and present. E. Morris Miller Studies (dating from the 1920s) seemed to him had published his bibliography Australian to foreshadow a possible role for an Australian Literature from its Beginnings in 1940 and academic journal in his Pressmen ‘providing a centre for and Governors: the exchange of views Australian Editors and information, a and Writers in forum for scholarship Early Tasmania in the field […] a in 1952. Laurie record of historical Hergenhan and bibliographical was a Lecturer reference’.5 in the English That opening Department. article of Horner’s A Sydney and about Geoffry Hamlyn London trained would have made Victorianist, writers like Miles he was then Franklin, Joseph embarking on Furphy and Prichard authoritative splutter with fury, critical studies of with its partiality convict fiction. to Kingsley’s In his memoir in destination ALS’s ‘50 Years of marketing, for Publication’ issue English readers, Hergenhan gives of the summery an account of the Australian countryside. But that’s not the beginnings of the journal, the ‘brain child’ whole story. Wilding makes the point that of ‘two poets and professors, James McAuley Hergenhan’s editorial instinct was to avoid a and his friend Alec Hope’.4 Its first editorial dependency on the critical orthodoxies of the committee included the then University of time. Perhaps Wilding’s observation is one Tasmania librarian, bibliographer and print only a transnational scholar, with a fellow historian D. H. Borchardt, McAuley (recently feeling for Adam Lindsay Gordon, and who appointed Professor of English), librarian, ex- has made a major contribution to Marcus Vice Chancellor and Professor of Philosophy Clarke scholarship, could make. At any rate, and Psychology E. Morris Miller, Michael Roe Wilding reads Horner and Kramer’s articles from the History Department and Edward on obviously non-native writers as ‘against Stokes from English. McAuley had co-founded the developing nationalist trend’ of the 1960s, the polemical Quadrant in 1956; Borchardt, a trend that was at the same time driving the also a discipline-builder, would found the slow infusion of Australian literature teaching (above) scholarly journal Australian Academic and into traditionally English university curricula. Cover of the first Research Libraries, in 1970. A revealing aspect of A related provocation, Wilding suggests, was issue of ALS. ALS’s inception was A. D. Hope’s attraction to his own article in ALS (‘DHL in Australia’, COURTESY ALS a North American model of professionalisation 1980) about D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo, the
90 Humanities Australia ‘bête noir of the nationalists’. Referring to a Peter Carey, Carl Harrison-Ford and Martin kangaroo as a bête noir is walking on the wild Duwell, statements in poetics and cultural side. Wilding is certainly right to recognise politics from John Tranter, Jennifer Maiden, Hergenhan’s impulse to ‘extend the traditional Vicki Viidikas, Robert Kenny, questionnaires concerns of literary criticism and […] the from a large sample of new writers of the conception of what was acceptable beyond the time, all created a rich dissensus from an literary’.6 And at the beginning of his memoir exuberant period in Australian literary culture. Hergenhan emphasises Again, there his sense of the was a useful journal’s responsive bibliographical and developing addition of career, ‘its changing ‘A Checklist of relationship with its New Writing readerships, with in Australia’. universities, and with Another the public promotion memorable of Australian special issue literature’.7 This is was the warmly a legacy of alertness celebratory to boundaries Oodgeroo tribute and sources of of 1994 (16.4), literary and critical guest edited by innovation that the Adam Shoemaker. evolving discipline In 1988 a special of literary studies in issue appeared Australia is deeply in the form of indebted to, and that The Penguin New is extended into the Literary History present by ALS’s of Australia second editor, Leigh (13.4). Here also Dale, of Wollongong Hergenhan’s University. impulse is one Against the New of critique: ‘why Critical orthodoxy a “new” literary about the irrelevance, to understanding history of Australia literary texts, of the author’s biography or when there has been no lack of histories, intentions, Hergenhan published interviews including recent ones?’ 8 In this multi-authored with writers (Ann Whitehead with Christina volume, unsettled by reorientations about Stead, for example) and incorporated genre the national that were occasioned by the writing into serious literary study (Stephen bicentennial ‘celebration’, Hergenhan argues Knight on ‘Carter Brown’). For my generation, that literary historiography needs regularly one landmark issue of the journal was the to re-examine the limits of its provincial and ‘New Writing in Australia’ special issue of derivative practices. The ‘New’ here refers October 1977 (8.2), with its acknowledgement of to the sense that such ‘history needs to be American avant-garde influences on writers of reconceived: that approaches to the past (above) the late 1960s. The first line of Charles Olson’s do not simply reveal, they help to create it’. Cover of the special ‘The Kingfishers’, the opening poem of Donald This literary history was designed to balance issue Oodgeroo tribute of 1994 Allen’s The New American Poetry (1960), was the narrative and analysis and to avoid arbitrary (16.4), guest rubric over this issue: ‘What does not change | divisions into ‘periods predetermined by edited by Adam is the will to change’. Surveys of poetry, fiction metaphors of progress or evolution’, or Shoemaker. and little magazines from Frank Moorhouse, rigid generic categories, or assumptions COURTESY ALS
Humanities Australia 91 of hierarchised literary value.9 Chapters Gerhard Stilz, Lars Jensen) and by European- about melodrama, romance, documentary, based Australianists like Russell West-Pavlov speculative fiction, censorship, and literary and his empirical study of translations of production were included for the first time in Australian literary works in the German an Australian literary history. Twenty-five years Democratic Republic. later, Paul Giles’s article in the fiftieth-year ALS, But there is something else that has very ‘English Studies in Australia: Repositioning the noticeably occurred over the course of ALS’s Subject’, takes up Hergenhan’s counsel with its career, and it is clearly signalled in the titles call for a more ‘coherent and characteristically of the fiftieth-year number, ‘The English Issue’, antipodean approach to literary history’, with and of Leigh Dale’s introduction, ‘Reading its updated view to North American ‘historical English’. Editors Leigh Dale and Tanya Dalziell literacy’ and to Asia’s Australia.10 would be well aware of the estrangement Hergenhan’s impulse to seek archimedean effect of such an emphasis on ‘English’ in a points of observation on Australian milestone issue of the canonical journal of literature is also reflected in another special Australian literary studies. The change they issue, of 1991 (15.2), European Perspectives: are signalling is clear. They couldn’t be less Contemporary Essays on Australian Literature. worried about national literature, or national This first collection devoted solely to studies identity, or national anything. What they in Australian literature by overseas critics are worried about, though, is the ‘discipline’. drew Australian literature into debates on Dale’s introductory essay frames the issue Eurocentrism and its complicated relations to as providing a series of ‘snapshots’ of ‘the Commonwealth Studies, national literature/ discipline of English at universities in the
CHAPTERS ABOUT MELODRAMA, ROMANCE, DOCUMENTARY, SPECULATIVE FICTION, CENSORSHIP, AND LITERARY PRODUCTION WERE INCLUDED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN AN AUSTRALIAN LITERARY HISTORY.
new literature paradigms, and postcolonial Australasian region’.11 This comparativist thinking. These European critical perspectives perspective includes articles by English studies often fastened on to the literary-geographical scholars in India and New Zealand. It also imagination, not surprisingly, given ‘Australia’s’ finds space for acknowledgement of the wider outline in the cartographic history of European discourse about the modern university, some of discovery and exploration, its exotic, imaginary ‘the most interesting’ of which, as Dale argues, existence at the antipodes. Giovanna Capone, comes from North American literary scholars the Bologna-based editor of this ALS issue, like Frank Donohue, Christopher Newfield rightly acknowledged the emergence of and Sheila Slaughter.12 The depth of Dale’s Indigenous and ‘ethnic’ (or multicultural) interest in the history of English disciplinarity writers and was quick to recognise the in Australia is no doubt a motivating factor transplantation in Australian writing of in this issue. Her Enchantment of English: European idealism: McAuley’s Quiros and Professing English Literatures in Australian his mythical Australia of the Holy Spirit; Universities (Sydney University Press, 2012) Patrick White’s Laura Trevelyn and her is essential reading for anyone involved ‘Knowledge was never a matter of geography’. with the humanities in Australia. Dale had Together with the European Australian previously presented, when Reviews Editor Studies Association, which had its inaugural of ALS, a ‘New Directions’ section in a 1999 conference in the same year, the 1991 European issue of the journal about the need for ‘some Perspectives ALS has fostered an environment “paradigm shifts” in thinking about Australian for important, independent work on Australian literary culture’.13 Once again the North literature by European critics (Xavier Pons, American paradigm is influential: this set of
92 Humanities Australia three articles (by Dale herself, David Carter cultural infrastructure. Now, evidently, ALS and Gillian Whitlock) took its cue from the has evolved into (Australian) Literary Studies, Modern Language Association’s Association of a wide-reaching journal of literary studies Departments of English section with its focus in Australia. It remains one of the primary on the ‘state of the discipline’. The concerns in resources for (post-nationalising) knowledge these three perspectives make an interesting about Australian literature but it also comparison with those in the fiftieth-year continues to be one of the important forums ‘English’ issue of ALS; all sorts of things have in which the conversation about the history, shifted in the intervening years. The fiftieth- theory and practice of literary studies, or year issue provides multiple viewpoints on local English as it is trending back to, is conducted variations in English studies, with some more in this country. ¶ panoramic approaches, like Paul Giles’s and Vijay Mishra’s. Clearly, the articles here provide PHILIP MEAD FAHA is Chair of a map of new thinking about disciplinarity, Australian Literature and after the post-disciplinary turn of previous Director of the Westerly Centre, University of Western Australia. decades. It is significant, for instance, that Anthony Uhlmann’s article about the founding of the Australian University Heads of English initiative appears in this issue. But there is a regretful note in the midst of 1. Michael Wilding, ‘History of Scholarly Journals this anniversary that I think it is important to Writ Large’, The Australian, 20 November 2013,
Humanities Australia 93 » IAN TEMPLEMAN
The tilting, slightly melancholy house above the lake, with a half-eaten moon by Ian Templeman. 2013, oil on canvas, 60 x 60cm.
COURTESY CAROLINE FULTON
94 } Humanities Australia Snapshot
Postcards, maps, snapshots pasted haphazardly in the scrapbook trace the brief shared years; falling days when the sky responded awkwardly to our passion for flight, when childhood fears muffled laughter or love was given other names. The photographs trace the incomplete moment, a happiness is misplaced between exposed frames, lost is the off-camera dance—intimate vibrant.
Within three summers we built an intricate honeycomb of images to house the heart’s language, indexed landmarks, heathland, dry thicket of this border country where we are held hostage.
Temporary prisoners we document yesterday, listen to frontier gossip, travellers’ hearsay.
Humanities Australia 95 Ex Libris
The Fellows’ Library of the Australian Academy of the Humanities contains a wide collection of modern and historical publications reflecting the authoritative and richly diverse output of humanities scholars in Australia and internationally. Apart from volumes subsidised by the Academy’s Publication Subsidy Scheme, many book publications of or about Fellows have been donated to the Academy over the years. The Academy welcomes the following recently released books into the Fellows’ Library:
Tony Bennett (ed) Diana Eades, Paul Giles, Challenging (the) Aboriginal Ways of Antipodean America: Humanities Using English Australasia and the (Melbourne: Australian (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Constitution of U. S. Scholarly Publishing, 2013) Press, 2013) Literature *Donated by Diana Eades FAHA Oxford Studies in American Literary History series, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) *Donated by Paul Giles FAHA
96 Humanities Australia Publications by, or about, our Fellows are always sought for the Academy Fellows Collection. Such generous gifts help the library to remain a relevant and up-to-date repository for humanities research. Books received during 2014 will feature in the next edition of Humanities Australia, provided they were published during or after 2013 and are by or about an Academy Fellow.
Bruce Mansfield, Francis J. Moloney, SDB, Bruce Steele, Summer is Almost Over… Love in the Gospel Walter Lindesay Richardson A Memoir of John: An Exegetical, MD: A Victorian Seeker (Canberra: Barton Books, 2012) Theological, and (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly *Donated by Bruce Mansfield Literary Study Publishing, 2013) AM FAHA (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker *Donated by Bruce Steele AM Academic, 2013) FAHA *Donated by Francis J. Moloney SDB AM FAHA
Humanities Australia 97