NUMBER 9, 2018
» TONY BENNETT » SUSAN BROOMHALL » YIXU LU
» DAVID McINNIS » PHILIP MEAD » ELIZABETH MINCHIN
» LOUISE RICHARDSON-SELF » KIM SCOTT
THE JOURNAL OF THE AUSTRALIAN ACADEMY OF THE HUMANITIES THE ACADEMY COUNCIL President Joy Damousi Welcome Honorary Secretary It is my pleasure to welcome you to the ninth issue Elizabeth Minchin of the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ Honorary Treasurer Richard Waterhouse flagship publication,Humanities Australia, Vice-Presidents edited by Graham Tulloch faha. This publication Ian Lilley showcases some of the most exciting current work Elizabeth Minchin of humanities researchers throughout Australia, Editor Graham Tulloch and is an essential part of our commitment to International Secretary supporting excellence in the humanities and Ian Lilley communicating their value to the public. Immediate Past President John Fitzgerald For almost fifty years, the Academy has been Ordinary Members dedicated to advancing scholarship and promoting Bridget Griffen-Foley Jane Lydon understanding of the humanities across our Bronwen Neil education and research sectors, and in the broader Graham Oppy Graeme Turner community. Founded by Royal Charter in 1969, the Academy now comprises close to six hundred CONTACT DETAILS Fellows elected on the basis of the excellence and For further information about the Australian Academy of the Humanities, contact us: impact of their scholarship. Our Fellows have Email been recognised nationally and internationally [email protected] for outstanding work in the disciplines of Web www.humanities.org.au archaeology, art, Asian and European studies, Telephone classical and modern literature, cultural and (+61 2) 6125 9860 communication studies, language and linguistics,
EDITORIAL/PRODUCTION philosophy, musicology, history and religion. Academy Editor In keeping with our ongoing support of the next Graham Tulloch generation of humanities scholars and practitioners, Design and Layout this year’s issue of Humanities Australia features not Gillian Cosgrove Editorial Support only the work of our Fellows, but also that of two Liz Bradtke early-career researchers, our 2016 Max Crawford Printing Medallists. It also features edited versions of two of Canprint, Canberra Cover illustration our key lectures, the Triebel Lecture and the annual Detail, Galliput’s sketch of a native Academy Lecture, providing a platform for a wider encampment, 1833, reproduced with permission from National Archives Kew, audience to engage with the inspiring, powerful UK, CO18-13 f347. and compelling ideas presented in those addresses.
© 2018 Australian Academy of the I hope you will findHumanities Australia a Humanities and individual contributors highly rewarding reading experience. The selection
ISSN 1837–8064 of essays, poems, narratives and reflections represent only a small fraction of the outstanding Funding for the production of this work being undertaken across Australia, but publication has been provided by the Australian Government through the nonetheless demonstrate how essential the Department of Education. humanities are to the understanding of our national The views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views of the life and human cultures across the ages. ¶ Department of Education or the Australian Academy of the Humanities. The illustrations and certain identified JOY DAMOUSI fassa faha inclusions in the text are held under separate copyright and may not be reproduced President, Australian Academy in any form without the permission of of the Humanities, 2017– 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. Humanities Australia
02 GRAHAM TULLOCH Editor’s Introduction
05 KIM SCOTT Not Just Warriors or Victims
20 TONY BENNETT Museum Transactions: Negotiating Knowledges, Governing Cultures
32 LOUISE RICHARDSON-SELF Same-Sex Marriage and the “No” Campaign
40 DAVID McINNIS Shakespeare and Lost Plays
48 ELIZABETH MINCHIN The Battleground of Troy in the Mind’s Eye: Homer’s Landscape of War
57 PHILIP MEAD Romadur and Kümmel
60 YIXU LU Myth-Making for the Empire: Germany’s Colony in China 1897–1914
71 SUSAN BROOMHALL Moving Objects: Reading the Emotions of Japanese Christian Exiles in Batavia » GRAHAM TULLOCH
This year’s issue of Humanities Australia argues, for today’s Aboriginal people to limit continues the tradition of showing the range themselves to victims or warriors. Scott then and vitality of humanities research through discusses his own involvement with a project of articles by Fellows of the Australian Academy cultural recovery of the Noongar people through of the Humanities. The articles in this issue exploration of their country and their language. cover a wide range of topics and, typically for Tony Bennett’s article also explores issues contemporary research in the humanities, of Indigenous identity but from a completely they often extend beyond one discipline to different point of view. Starting from a interdisciplinary study. We are also proud very familiar object, the AIATSIS map of to feature in this issue articles by the joint Aboriginal Australia, he shows how the work of recipients of the 2016 Max Crawford Medal, anthropologists has changed the way Indigenous awarded by the Academy to an Australia-based Australians are perceived, moving ‘away from the early career scholar for outstanding achievement racial paradigm that had followed in the wake in the humanities. of [Baldwin] Spencer’s work and toward the Kim Scott’s Academy Lecture ‘Not Just territorial differentiation of Aboriginal cultures.’ Warriors or Victims’, was given to great acclaim Norman Tindale of the South Australian at the Annual Symposium in Fremantle in Museum is a key figure in this transition in November 2017. As one of the Noongar people Australia, particularly through his publication in of south-western Australia and as a novelist, 1940 of a map that, after going through various Scott draws on his childhood memories, his iterations, became in 1974 the now familiar work in promoting Indigenous identity, and AIATSIS map. Bennett then goes on to show how his experience as a creative writer. Beginning widespread and important the influence of the with his childhood encounter with Tom Sawyer ideas lying behind this transition became. and the Injun Joe, the ill-treated Indigenous The two 2016 Crawford Medallists ‘baddy’ of the story, he explores ways in which have written articles which put traditional Indigenous people can avoid stereotyping humanities research into close contact with themselves as only either victims of colonialism our contemporary world and its issues and or fighters against it. He turns to the historical challenges. Louise Richardson-Self brings a (above) record to demonstrate how the productive and philosopher’s insights to a discussion of the Academy proactive engagement of Indigenous people with same-sex marriage debate. Having written Secretariat, newly arrived Europeans cannot be confined extensively on the arguments in favour of same- Canberra, Australia. within these two roles. Nor is it productive, he sex marriage, she now turns to the arguments PHOTO: AAH ARCHIVES
02 Humanities Australia against same-sex marriage as they were exhibited clarity which persists through the millennia. in the recent plebiscite. She notes that very few By concentrating on a small number of key of those supporting the “No” case based their locations and viewing them from different arguments on opposition to same-sex relations. standpoints Homer is able to fix a picture in Instead, most of the argument centred around our minds of the sites of the Trojan War. His issues of religious freedom, education and descriptions even allow us to experience in some freedom of expression. Although the majority way the sounds of war, something which the of Australians supported same-sex marriage, Australian War Memorial now offers through these issues did resonate with some Australians audio recordings accompanying the originally and by deploying them the “No” Campaign silent dioramas. Homer’s achievement can still achieved a modest success in reducing the size of speak to us powerfully in the days of our very the “Yes” vote. Richardson-Self ends by drawing different warfare. out some of the implications of this success. The creative writing contribution to this issue, David McInnis, the other Crawford Medallist, Philip Mead’s poem ‘Romadur and Kümmel’, works within what has traditionally been one also has its origins in literary scholarship. He has of the mainstays of English literary scholarship, told me that it ‘arose from a conversation with the study of Elizabethan drama, to consider a colleague of mine in a German university who how new digital resources can help us approach was bemoaning the critical approach of some one of the great problems of the study of this scholars to early modern texts’ so its origins lie in period — the very large number of plays which the same early modern period as David McInnis’s have not survived although we have some record work on the lost plays of Shakespeare’s England. of their existence. The Lost Plays Database, of (Tantalisingly, in another connection, the only which McInnis is a co-founder and co-editor, evidence for one of those plays is a German makes available in easily accessible form all that translation of a work which does not survive in we currently know about these disappeared English). ‘Romadur and Kümmel’ with its cheeky works. In a striking combination of the old title and rich range of allusions leads us along and the new, the database provides, along with many paths and opens up all sorts of questions. other things, images of the manuscript material Susan Broomhall and Yixu Lu both write which provides evidence for the plays’ existence, about Asia, a subject that has had a lot of amongst which are such rare items as the single attention in the Academy in recent years, but sheets of paper hung backstage and providing their focus is on historical European interaction ‘a scene-by-scene roadmap of the play’s action, with the continent. Yixu Lu’s article is based including entrances and sometimes props or on the Academy’s Triebel Lecture which she special effects.’ He ends by considering what gave in Adelaide in November 2017. She reflects our knowledge of an absence can contribute on a little known episode in imperial and to our understanding of what is still present, colonial history, Germany’s brief colonisation the splendid body of drama from the age of of Qingdao (Tsingtau) in China between 1897 Shakespeare. and 1914. After a short and hopeless attempt In her article Elizabeth Minchin turns to withstand a superior number of Japanese to an even longer standing focus of literary assailants, with most of the garrison surviving research, the Iliad, but she too connects it with and becoming prisoners of war, Germany lost contemporary concerns. In the centenary year control of the colony right at the beginning of of the end of the First World War she starts by the First World War, but the resistance lasted considering exactly how the dioramas in the long enough for a whole discourse of sacrifice Australian War Memorial allow us to imagine to be built around it, part of the mythology of the battlefields of a war which still resonates German imperialism. The article concentrates deeply with us. Drawing on ‘insights from on the myths surrounding the colony and its cognitive psychology on how we process, and loss, demonstrating yet again how big a part how we generate, narratives that describe spatial mythmaking played in the imperial enterprise environments’ she examines how Homer brings (even in defiance of the facts). the battlefield of Troy before our eyes with a
Humanities Australia 03 Finally Susan Broomhall has taken a topic this year the Academy has decided to publish a within her overarching concern with the history separate and comprehensive list of such books. of the emotions and deals with the lives and Fellows and recipients of Academy grants and emotions of the wives and children of Dutch awards have been invited to provide details of men who were sent to Batavia (modern Jakarta) books since 1 July 2017 for inclusion in a new in 1639 when the Japanese expelled them. online publication, the Annual Academy Book Against the odds they maintained a connection List. The new publication will include sole- and to their homeland and expressed the emotions co-authored monographs, edited collections, they felt in their permanent exile through translations, editions and any other separately letters, gifts and wills, even as they adopted published items of book length and will provide new identities within the Dutch community some indication of the range and depth of in what was then the Dutch East Indies. At the scholarly publication associated, in one way or other end in Japan their relatives also expressed another, with the Academy. their emotional response to the exiles’ efforts to Meanwhile, the articles in this issue of maintain a connection with them. The reality Humanities Australia provide a different kind of of their emotions and the directness of their sample of the many ways in which humanities expression contrast sharply with the way the research in Australia can contribute to our experiences of the Germans in Qingdao were understanding of the world past and present. ¶ transformed from reality into myth in the service of empire. GRAHAM TULLOCH faha Although the range of articles reflects the Editor, Australian Academy practice of previous years, this year sees one of the Humanities, 2016–
innovation in the content of the journal. Instead
of ending the journal with ‘Ex Libris’, a collage
of images of the covers of selected books by Fellows and recipients of publishing grants,
04 Humanities Australia NOT JUST WARRIORS OR VICTIMS
» KIM SCOTT
It is an honour to address this Australian Honoured, and daunted too. Academy of the Humanities conference I’ve read previous lectures in this series. on Human Rights and Humanitarianism, The breadth and depth is such that I wonder any though I rarely frame my own creative work single audience could appreciate it all. in terms of ‘Human Rights’. I can’t remember I’ve decided to be led by Inga Clendinnen, the last time I approached the blank page whose work I greatly admire — and who thinking ‘Social Justice’ or ‘Social Change’ I magnanimously forgive (temporarily) for either. It’s surprising then, that a word like dismissing novelists as opportunistic entertainers ‘Decolonisation’ can be appropriate, particularly who merely ‘delight’ rather than ‘instruct or if ‘we … understand decolonisation as the reform’.4 In her own Annual Academy lecture, unravelling of assumed certainties and the Backstage at the Republic of Letters, Inga said she re-imagining and re-negotiating of common would fall back to the default position of the futures.’1 Humanities and talk about herself.5 I know at least one novelist who fancies that So I’m going to do that too. I’ll reflect on some as a job description. things I’ve read and written and — bluffing on Equally, I’m not confident of any immediately breadth if not depth — sample some pages of effective role for a novelist — or a scholar for literature, dab a little history, spatter politics that matter — in ‘fixing’ Human Rights issues. and legislation and generally attempt to provide Novelist Tony Birch sounded like family to a picture of the view from my particular me when he considered giving up writing for vantage point. activism because he didn’t want his children Firstly then, let me explain my own stumbling saying ‘he might have worked his arse off writing introduction to the Republic of Letters. The first fiction but he did fuck all for the planet.’2 book I read — the firstreal book — was Mark No, we don’t want to be remembered like that. Twain’s novel, Tom Sawyer.6 My father’s father — from whom my own father was estranged, and So, having tripped on my own diffidence so soon, from whom I get my family name — sent it to me let me begin again: in the post inscribed ‘To dear Kim with love from I’m indeed honoured to be one in a line of (above) Grandad Scott 5th September 1964’. speakers demonstrating the ‘extraordinary Detail, fig. 3, I was seven. breadth and depth of our Fellows’ contribution p. 10, Galliput’s It wasn’t Christmas. It wasn’t my birthday. sketch of a native to the Australian and international humanities encampment, 1833. community, and to enriching the cultural life of the nation’.3
Humanities Australia { 05 (right) Fig. 1. Title Page of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, American Publishing Company, 1876.
(far right) Fig. 2. Illustration of ‘Injun Joe’ by True Williams, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, American Publishing Company, 1876.
BOTH IMAGES: PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA PROJECT GUTENBERG
Why did he send it now? I might have wondered. Didn’t he know I couldn’t read big books? My father’s name was ‘Tom.’ I loved him, but being fully immersed and yourself, but also he wasn’t around all that much in those days. someone else. Seeing with other eyes. The best I could easily read that word, ‘Tom’. There it stories, she said, allow ‘spaces where people was, on the cover. can meet’.7 Was this book about my father? Looking at Obviously, I missed a lot of Tom Sawyer the picture you’d think I should have known on that first reading, and I was hardly alive to better; the character there looks nothing like nuance, but I do remember being terrified when him. I was blind and innocent. Tom and Becky become lost deep in the labyrinth Tom Sawyer begins: of a cave at the same time as avoiding the book’s ‘TOM!’ baddy, the Native American — ‘Injun Joe’ — who No answer. was also down there, in the darkness and hollows ‘TOM!’ underground. They saw his candlelight and, in No answer. fear, snuffed out their own. The great mass of ‘TOM!’ darkness closed in. No answer. By the time I was that far into the book TOM TOM TOM… my reading had improved a great deal; I was It could’ve been a drumbeat. ‘dwelling’ in the story at that moment. I was a naïve, but very motivated reader. Tom and Becky escaped the caves. But ‘Injun I thought I would find out about my dad, Joe’ didn’t. The young reader I was didn’t think from when he was a kid. The details matched: he deserved his fate — what was wrong with an orphan, yes; being raised by his Aunty, yes… objecting to people digging up dead bodies, or I thought we had entered into a sort of wanting treasure? Injun Joe ended up trapped compact, my grandfather and I. Secretly, he inside a huge door that sealed the caves would tell me of when my own father was a boy. immediately after Tom and Becky found their Was that a betrayal of my dad? way out. When they found Injun Joe the broken Perhaps this shows how a story can make you knife he’d used to chip at the heavy door lay at complicit, part of a community excluding others. his side and, scattered all round, the candles he’d The noted Western Australian novelist, Elizabeth gnawed in his hunger. Jolley, used to speak of ‘dwelling’ in stories —
06 Humanities Australia I don’t remember much of Injun Joe. Never 1989: The Aboriginal and Torres Strait really met him. Islander Commission is established. Never met my father there either, despite 1991: The Council for Aboriginal the title. Reconciliation is established, and the In fact, it was rare in the first part of my life Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths to meet an Indigenous/Aboriginal character in in Custody presents its report. my reading, and certainly not an admirable one. Even in later readings I think I missed the 1992 (June): The ‘Mabo Case’ is won. sense of Injun Joe as villain. 1992 (December): The Redfern Speech.9 Poor Injun Joe; locked in, locked up, locked out, locked down, his pleas unheard. He was 1993: The Native Title Act is passed. both villain and victim. Not a comprehensive list, but I wanted to start I wonder whether he was tempted to turn that with ‘Self-determination’ if only because it is knife on himself. fundamental to Indigenous human rights,10 It could be an Australian story, and about our and because the change from ‘Assimilation’ to treatment of the ‘Other’. Tom Sawyer, the hero, ‘Self-determination’ is such a radical policy shift. is there from page one, getting others to white- The timeline shows a twenty-year trajectory wash the fence, do his work for him; the neo- toward a more equal power relationship between liberal huckster. Aboriginal people and other Australians. But, I go too far … The creation of ATSIC is noteworthy because some form of Indigenous representative My other reason for starting with Twain is governance is usually regarded as central to because of his take on Australian history. You achieving improvement in socio-economic will know the quote. Australian history, Twain outcomes and rights, and because there needs to said, is ‘always picturesque; indeed, it is so be some sort of ‘“power equalisation mechanism” curious and strange, that it is itself the chiefest capable of requiring government to negotiate novelty the country has to offer and so pushes with Indigenous people on equal terms’.11 the other novelties into second and third place. Further, any such model of representative It does not read like history, but like the most governance should be able to ‘influence Cabinet beautiful lies’.8 decisions, function as an advocacy body for I don’t know about beautiful, but there are Aboriginal aspirations, have a political focus, and certainly lies in our history. probably be responsible for some programs’.12 Lies, like Terra Nullius. My quotes aren’t from the formation of Lies, like those old departments for ‘Aboriginal ATSIC decades ago, but from discussions leading Protection and Welfare’ that were more about to the Uluru Statement from the Heart which the protection and welfare of non-Aboriginal was released — and quickly rejected — so very interests. recently, and its considered, pragmatic opinion Lies like we’re all equal before the law. Certain of constitutional change and the place of names resonate with this. In Western Australia Indigenous people in the nation some further we might say Ward, Dhu, John Pat, Elijah two decades from that peak of 1993.13 Doughty ... But there are many, many more. I include Keating’s Redfern Speech in Lies, as in betrayal. my timeline because a Human Rights approach to Self-determination begins with Here’s a timeline, of sorts: ‘acknowledgement of the impact of historically- 1972: ‘Self-determination’ replaces derived disadvantage on Indigenous peoples’.14 ‘Assimilation’ as the official approach to Singular in its responsibility and courage, and Indigenous affairs. more significant than an apology to the Stolen Generations, the Redfern speech acknowledges 1975: The Racial Discrimination Act is the impact of history, specifying that: passed. The ‘White Australia’ policy ends. … it was we who did the dispossessing.
Humanities Australia 07 We took the traditional lands and smashed If the commonwealth is genuine in the traditional way of life. its desire to secure reconciliation We brought the diseases. The alcohol. with Aboriginal people then full and We committed the murders. uncompromising respect for those legal We took the children from their mothers. rights and the historical truths established We practised discrimination and exclusion. by Mabo is not negotiable. For a people to It was our ignorance and our prejudice…15 have been denied their legal rights under the laws of the colonies for the past 200 These are rare cadences in Australian political- years, to face the prospect of further denial speak. ‘Well may we say’16 that the Mabo Case and extinguishment of rights — after the declaration and the Redfern Speech represent country’s highest institution has declared a pinnacle in Australian history, if our measure their existence — would be tantamount is justice and equality for Aboriginal people to declaring war against them. There will and Australian citizens. Things fell away never be peace and reconciliation if legal from there. rights under Mabo are denied or rendered The following timeline tracks a return to an impotent, and never again will there be an older power relationship: opportunity for a genuine accommodation 1997: Bringing Them Home report of Indigenous people within this nation.17 released. These words from the heady days of fresh Native 1998: The first ‘Sorry Day’, and Title legislation and the Redfern Speech indicate amendments to the Native Title Act. the compromise and negotiation that had already gone into the compilation of the Uluru 2004: The disbanding of ATSIC. Statement. Still not enough. 2006: ‘Close the Gap’ policy initiated. ‘The Apology’ may seem an anomaly in my second list. While recognising its importance 2007: The Northern Territory Emergency to many Aboriginal people, Noel Pearson Response — otherwise known as commented that: ‘The Intervention’ — which involved suspension of the Racial Discrimination We have been … victimized in history, but Act. we must stop the politics of victimhood. We lose power when we adopt this 2008: Australian Federal Parliament says, psychology. Whatever moral power we ‘Sorry’ to the Stolen Generations. might gain over white Australia from 2009: Australia signs the United Nations presenting ourselves as victims, we Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous lose in ourselves. My worry is that this People (adopted by UN in 2007). apology will sanction a view of history that cements a detrimental psychology of 2012: Expert Panel on Constitutional victimhood, rather than a stronger one of Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres defiance, survival and agency.18 Strait Islander Peoples is formed. Sanctioning a view of history is bad enough, 2014: ‘Indigenous Advancement Strategy’ but it may be worse. In Therapeutic Nations: announced. Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights, 2017: Uluru Statement from the Heart the Indigenous (Athasbascaan) academic Dion offered, and rejected. Million argues that communities seeking redress for injustices perpetrated on them by the This second list tracks a move away from ‘Self- colonial nation-state put themselves in a position determination’, and what the Redfern speech of ‘full-victimhood’ and effectively relinquish calls ‘the basis of a new relationship’ between power. That, she says, is incompatible with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. self-determination because to require apology Note these words from a prominent is to relinquish agency. Million points out that Aboriginal intellectual in 1993:
08 Humanities Australia healing, in a neo-liberal context, can come to importance, in many Aboriginal cultures, of mean a bio-medicalising of historical trauma, sound over sight.25 and emphasis on individual healing for ‘traumas Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu helps us rethink the that are actually outcomes of power relations notion of Aboriginal people engaging in random with states’.19 nomadic activity, and even provides evidence of ‘Close the Gap’ in this way is not about buildings and agriculture.26 empowerment, but quite the reverse. Tony Swain, in A Place for Strangers, explains Million is mostly discussing Canada, but gives a worldview that prioritises place instead of the Australian Northern Territory Emergency time. Not adequately characterised by a line, Response a special mention: ‘Australian nor even a circle (merely a line ‘eating itself’), Aboriginal people’s … violation by the Australian place-consciousness means an awareness of state, where the sexual abuse and incest that rhythms — the many rhythms of moon, sun, were diagnosed in a prior moment of trauma tides and winds, plants flowering and spilling then became a policy rationale for further their seeds, gestation birth and death… — and colonisation... .’20 how an awareness of the intersection of these The insistence on a certain power rhythms gives a, secondary, sense of time and relationship between Australia and its Aboriginal provides for both prediction and an acute sense people — this refusal of anything like Self- of ‘the now’. All these rhythms, he articulates, determination — seems a defining characteristic are held in stories embedded in landscape, in of Australian identity — some say it’s a ‘abiding stories’ for which topographical features psychosis.21 are the text.27 Why is Australia the only English speaking To return to the Republic of Letters for settler colony without even a single treaty? a moment: when Elizabeth Jolley spoke of Yet another lie in our history is the lingering ‘dwelling’ in stories, she meant print stories, perception that Aboriginal people are ‘inferior’. novels and works of printed fiction. But imagine, Recent scholarship has demonstrated the dwelling in ‘abiding stories’ for which landscape folly of this. In The Biggest Estate on Earth, is the text, and resonating with the rhythms Bill Gammage shows fire deployed across the of place. continent with a complexity and skill ‘greater Despite an oral tradition — or perhaps because than anything modern Australia has imagined’, of it — classical Noongar tradition led to the explains why colonists spoke of a land like ‘a Republic of Letters, although entry was usually gentleman’s park, an inhabited and improved barred. Penny van Toorn’s Writing Never Arrives country’ and how an organised ‘mosaic of Naked offers many examples of this propensity grass and trees’ of ‘springs, soaks, caches and for literacy, and I can offer examples from wetlands’ channelled, persuaded and lured prey in Noongar country.28 predictable ways.22 The nineteenth-century Bishop Rosendo Gammage explains that ‘a mobile people Salvado concluded his observations of how organised a continent with … precision … They easily a Noongar boy began to read and write by were active, not passive, striving for balance and asking ‘If the same experiment were conducted continuity to make all life abundant, convenient in the most highly thought-of school in Europe, and predictable’.23 He uses the example of I wonder if a boy of nine would learn forty intricate ‘installations’ consisting of tiny, many- letters in ten minutes, have them all off by heart, coloured feathers painstakingly glued to sand and be able to repeat their names backwards and with blood as evidence of how indigenous forwards?’29 cultures enabled abundance and ‘time to spend The colonial diarist Andrew Collie mentions nourishing the mind … a spiritual and creative the curiosity of Nakinah — his Noongar practice’ that was ‘voluminous and intricate’.24 guide — about the ‘expedition journal’ Collie is Ross Gibson, in 26 Views of the Starburst maintaining. Later, Collie notes how this popular World, articulates the strengths of oral culture literary form has influenced the Nakinah, who over print, the improvisation and fluidity has ‘treasured up in his memory a detailed it enables, and demonstrates again the recollection of the various incidents and scenery,
Humanities Australia 09 arranged in the form of a diary, where each day own traditions. That inclusiveness extends to was designated by some leading distinctive mark, language and colonial place-names. Daisy Bates (above) in place of numerals.’30 documented examples of a Noongar song using Fig. 3. Galliput’s sketch of a native Literary ‘form’ was not the only thing subject English language and names of a colonial 34 encampment, 1833 to ‘sampling’ and interrogation. Around the ‘camp’.
IMAGE: REPRODUCED same time, another south coast Noongar man This glimpse of a classical Noongar cultural WITH PERMISSION FROM 31 NATIONAL ARCHIVES KEW, produced a pen-and-ink drawing (fig. 3). Its frame containing colonial experience suggests UK, CO18-13 F347 author, Galliput, was one of three Noongar men what might have been, and perhaps what might who asked to be taken aboard a ship leaving what yet be. is now the town of Albany, so they could visit the You will note I have not been emphasising infant Swan River Colony and talk with people.32 warrior-hood. I want to think about these people The historian, Tiffany Shellam, says they were as more than just warriors, although that is of thus using ships ‘as vehicles for significantly course a trope of colonial histories. extending kin networks and enhancing The south coast town of Albany, Western geographic knowledge and perspectives of Australia, has a statue of Mokare, so called country’.33 While on that visit they also attended ‘Man of Peace’ near the top of its main street. a piano recital, performed a ‘kangaroo dance’ as The statue has a plaque: ‘In recognition of the their contribution to the occasion, and drank tea role Mokare played in the peaceful co-existence while sitting in armchairs. Galliput sampled the between Noongar people and the first European pen and ink, and no doubt the culinary delights settlers.’35 and society, at a tavern in the colony. Writing Not surprisingly, many Minang Noongar and ships were not the only novel cultural people in Albany would prefer greater attention products with which he and his people were to his resistance to the colonisers: ‘Mineng man, experimenting. Oscar Colbung, told me of the ambivalence felt There are many examples of the inclusiveness by some members of the Albany community of classical Noongar culture, its flexibility and about Mokare’s reconciliation statue. A peaceful readiness to bring new cultural products into its
10 Humanities Australia warrior? What did that say about Mineng writing at my university, though it is arguable resistance, he pondered.’36 whether that would have provided a better fit. There is danger in my emphasis. It can be I was studying literary theory, African literature, easily abused. The generous, confident spirit World literature. There was no Aboriginal of early Noongar like Mokare — the behaviour literature, at least not at that university. There I’ve been stressing — can be co-opted to tell was within a few years, but that’s another story … yet another lie: Aboriginal people didn’t resist It was the 1980s, the 1990s … I had begun colonisation. trying to write poetry and fiction, was beginning I reject that. to wonder about the loud, repeated stories I’d I take resistance as a given and as obvious. learned. I was wondering about myself and But the initial impulse of people like Mokare isolation. was not just resistance. Why should it be? Proud, I went to archives for the first time, the site of curious, inclusive, respectful, for them the ocean the language of our shared history (it is shameful was a means of communication, not a moat. to think of one’s ignorance). I read manuscripts As one among many possible manifestations of and local histories, the publications of experts place, one wants to understand and incorporate and authorities on my kind of Australia. There difference, to grow with it.37 They were much were some recurring and particularly ugly more than just warriors, and to my mind expressions, which in my notes I converted to an emphasis solely on (failed) military-style LFBA (Last Full Blood Aborigine), and FWMB resistance is as empty as the Gallipoli Myth, and (First White Man Born). in danger of becoming reactive and dependent I found a book which seemed firmly grounded on the ‘other’, in danger of being trapped within in these phrases: A.O. Neville’s Australia’s an ugly and brutal infrastructure of power. Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community. As a judge of (Indigenous) writing Unintentionally, I wrote the latter part of competitions I have read too many stories that this title as ‘their place in our community’. have been ambushed by the genre of military A ‘Freudian slip’, I was marginalised in reading history. Frustration and powerlessness already it. There are many photographs in this book, but has people turning on one another. There is too one in particular caught my eye. It is of three much lateral violence. people — three generations in a line, backs to I have offered only a few examples from each other, smiling into some distant future — among the many similar manifestations of a pre- captioned: colonial, classical culture. I find them inspiring, Three Generations and the potential elaborations and futures they (Reading from Right to Left) suggest thrill me. 1. Half-blood — (Irish-Australian father, But instead of being able to build on this, we are full-blood Aboriginal mother). obliged to first deal with the lies and, in so doing, 2. Quadroon Daughter — (Father run the risk of being ambushed and trapped Australian born of Scottish parents. within a shrill and brittle structure we were Mother No. 1). trying to escape. But I have digressed. Enough of the lies and 3. Octaroon Grandson — (Father such; I was talking about me. Australian of Irish descent. Mother I was saying it was 1964 and I was reading No. 2).38 Tom Sawyer. Lured into the Republic of Letters, I had thought Then it was the 1970s and I was entering Tom Sawyer might be my dad. Stumbling in the university, a callow youth with little political archives, I thought the fellow at the end of this awareness. I might have been in one of those line could be me. nineteenth-century novels I was soon studying, Uplift, I read in this tome. Elevate a despised moving country to city … people. Breed out the black. Fill with shame. Isolate. I was studying literature, at the ‘fag-end’ of that discipline perhaps. There was no creative
Humanities Australia 11 I wrote a novel, a kind of companion piece the wind blows the smoke a little toward to Australia’s Coloured Minority, in which my you, and you hear something like a million uplifted narrator often finds himself trapped in million many-sized hearts beating, and the the ceiling corner of white rooms. Pale, scarred whispering of waves, leaves, grasses … and damaged; a freak hovering in the campfire We are still here, Benang.39 smoke surrounded by extended family, he sings the sounds indisputably of place. A metaphor for There is only so much ‘deconstruction’ and Indigenous language. ‘resisting’ that one can do. There needs to be Allow me to read an edited version of the some source to draw on. last paragraphs of that novel. Never intended as I have briefly referred to the great resource of such, I nevertheless sometimes think of these pre-colonial indigenous cultures and languages. paragraphs as some sort of manifesto: Probably many of us here — enlightened people — appreciate this and may even wish Children, becoming white, gathering to access it. But after decades of denigration at the woodheap, learned to work for and attempted destruction of this heritage, indifferent and earnest fathers. Yes, the followed by an only relatively recent move birth of even an unsuccessfully first- toward its celebration, it should be returned and white-man-born-in-the-family-line has consolidated in its home community so that required a lot of death, a lot of space, a lot members are not further disempowered when of emptiness. All of which I have had in all — tourists, strangers, others — are more abundance. familiar with it than they. And also — it must be said — some sort Noongar language is endangered. Over of luck. I mean in that I am still here, thirty thousand people identify themselves however too well disguised. as ‘Noongar’, but the language was listed as ‘extinct’ on the Summer Institute of Linguistics Yoowarl koorl, yoowarl koorl. (SIL) catalogue until 2009 when it was updated Speaking from the heart, I tell you that to ‘living’.40 Elsewhere, it is classified as I am part of a much older story, one ‘threatened’.41 In 1996, 163 people apparently of a perpetual billowing from the sea, spoke it at home; but by 2006 this number had with its rhythm of return, return and increased to 213, and by 2011 to 369.42 remain. Even now we gather, on chilly I think these figures over-state the endangered evenings, sometimes only a very few of us, case. There are more speakers and, as you can sometimes more. We gather our strength see, the number of speakers is increasing. in this way. From the heart of all of us. However, it is undeniable that Noongar Pale, burnt and shrivelled, I hover in the classical heritage is not as strong, rich and campfire smoke and sing as best I can. I am accessible as it might be; an endangered not alone. language, ancestral country integral to culture inaccessible, a people scarred by dispossession, There are many stories here, in the ashes injustice and historical trauma. Australia is below my feet — even my grandfather’s. stolen country. Only a tiny minority of the I look out across the small crowd, hoping original population survived the first fifty years it will grow, hoping to see Uncle Will’s of colonisation in most regions. Aboriginal children, and those of his sisters, and people suffered an apartheid-like regime for theirs in turn. And my father’s other most of Australia’s colonial history. Of course the children? legacy of this history is with us today. Recovery and rebuilding an Aboriginal There is smoke and ash in my skin, and community and heritage — or so my little old in my heart too. I offer these words to novel would suggest — relies on restoring and those of you I embarrass, and who turn strengthening connections between place, away from the shame of seeing me; or people and language. perhaps it is because your eyes smart as
12 Humanities Australia I wish to now talk about just such a program, and one with which I am closely involved: the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project. The Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories Project is a community-based organisation with around one hundred members. It has been operating for over ten years and relies on volunteers and intermittent funding. The project is not primarily about teaching or learning Noongar language, though that is a component. Rather, the project tries to return and consolidate a particular region’s classical Indigenous cultural heritage (with an emphasis on language and story and song).43 The Wirlomin project flowed from a book —Kayang and Me — co-authored with Noongar elder, Hazel Brown. The workshops include language learning, There was a lot of information that didn’t fit story development, picture book illustration and (above) so well there, things like Noongar language, training in presenting to audiences. Fig. 4. Attendees at stories, songs, site knowledge and genealogical The project has published six picture-books.45 a Wirlomin Noongar Language and affiliations — the sort of material integral to Books are near its heart, though more as a Stories Workshop a sense of place and identity and to a family vehicle than an end in themselves. Developing IMAGE: KIM SCOTT faha and community of which Hazel Brown was the stories into picture-book form allows the the centre. That knowledge was in danger of core community to engage with and explore the being lost. stories in various ways; books allow multiple Hazel Brown’s personal ‘database’ has been people to be at the cross-cultural cusp as authors, complemented with material supplied by her illustrators or presenters/performers; and books siblings and other older ‘clan’ members along provide a focus and even a form of validation. with that from official archival sources. One The first workshop, for want of a better such source is the notes of the linguist Gerhardt term, was held in 2006, attended by around 60 Laves who visited Albany in 1931. The Wirlomin Noongar people, and was mostly about declaring project’s initial reference group consisted of, an intent to build language and story and a along with Hazel Brown, a number of key sense of community, and to return — if not descendants of Laves’s informants and evolved formally, then with some serious decorum — from consideration of a protocol for community copies of significant archival language material engagement with the Laves Noongar language to key individuals and also trial some ways of material.44 The Wirlomin reference group plays engaging with it. Within minutes of formally a key role in issuing invitations to the workshops gathering, everyone was crying. They were at which attendees engage with and develop sweet and sad tears. Were we weeping because, stories and songs in Noongar language. as someone said, ‘These days we only get The project is founded upon the process together for funerals? Or because we might bring these workshops allow, one of ever-expanding — something — our language, our ancient stories, and shrinking — concentric circles, with our long presence here, even our old people — members of the Cultural Elders Reference Group properly alive again?’ We were thinking to at its centre. strengthen connection to heritage, build a strong Stories and illustrations are developed, draft and grounded identity. versions distributed, presentations made to The old stories the Wirlomin Project offers schools and community events, and trips to rarely feature oppressed, marginalised figures. ‘country’ taken to reunite language, story, song Or if so, they don’t stay that way. and oral history to landscape. The stories feature protagonists with confidence and agency.
Humanities Australia 13 In Mamang, the ‘hero’ dances out onto the of positive attention for sharing their sense of back of a whale that surfaces near the rocks identity and heritage. upon which he is standing. Trusting a story and After a week of presenting to different schools song of his father’s he dives into the whale’s for the first time Connie Moses said, ‘I’m just so spout and, the words and melody resonating proud to be part of the journey. We are a team, in the cavernous whale’s interior, he sings his you know, and we’re growing together. I just father’s song in which a character does exactly can’t wait to get up and dance and sing. It’s just as he is doing now. He trusts his heritage to so wonderful to hear everyone speak, especially take this risk. When the whale surfaces he looks the elders. Uncle Russell, from earlier in the through — or it might be with, the language is week to now has just been inspiring, listening to ambiguous — its eye, and sees no sight of land. you. Fantastic.’47 Eventually, the whale is stranded on a sandy After also presenting for the first time, and beach, and two women standing there are on the same tour of regional schools, and being surprised and delighted when our hero emerges asked to reflect on the experience, Elder Russell from the whale. The women’s people welcome Nelly said that: him, and all feast upon his story and song. I want to tell you it’s a privilege to Years later, he returns to his home with the two share what we feel with the kids … I get women and children. He has trusted himself and emotional at times, but when I get his heritage to expand his — and their — world, emotional I’m listening to the old fellas. orbited home again with this knowledge. Because they’re talking to me, along with Similarly, in Noongar Maambara Baakitj the them talking to you guys … Prior to this hero follows a trail no one else can even see; I was lost. I had circumnavigated Australia weaponless, he nevertheless succeeds in the three times looking for my identity hunt. He encounters spirit creatures respectfully, and it brought me all the way back to even engages in contests with them. In this Katanning. I heard of the Wirlomin mob, journey he discovers new dimensions to his I thought no, they don’t want me. That’s abilities and identity, and also returns with the all changed now. We’ve got something story of his adventures to delight his family. tangible, I always tell you we’ve got In both these stories young people orbit away something tangible. What we’ve lost, we from and back to home, face challenges, and are resurrecting it. So my people, we go expand their sense of self and their community’s with our head up high, proudly.48 capabilities by doing so. Yirra Boornak Nyininy is a colonial story; A member of the ‘Stolen Generations’ who there is a farm, relationships with non-Noongar never knew his mother and father after he was people and sheep. Like the song I quoted earlier, a baby, Russell Nelly articulates the importance colonial experience grafted to the ancient roots of reconnection with people and country, to of Noongar culture. identity and culture, as against the experience Ngaawily Nop tells of a boy who goes looking of being subject to racism. His father was an for family. Initially rejected, he is claimed by informant for a linguist. The Wirlomin Project the place itself and transformed into a being allowed him not only to hear his father’s stories more wonderful again. At workshops, this story in language, but also to reunite a Creation Story spoke particularly to members of the Stolen of his father’s with the landscape which serves, in Generations who were in fact strengthening part, as its text.49 community bonds in joining us. The return of people to their ancestral I mentioned that the project does country appears to be beneficial beyond presentations at schools and community events, reuniting creation stories and landscape. offering stories, songs and the like.46 On such a trip in 2008, elder Roma Winmar It is still unusual for many Noongar explained that: people, accustomed to being at the margins of institutions, to find themselves the centre
14 Humanities Australia It’s very emotional. I feel full. I feel full of The formality of these occasions was in large tears, I feel full of joy. It’s hard to explain, part derived from the act of calling individuals like when somebody’s been away for from the audience by name, and presenting a very long time and they’ve returned them with the picture books in front of the on a journey and you rush out to meet little crowd. The elderly individual in question them and there’s all these hugs and tears was accorded this treatment. A photograph and … It’s a joy, but you’re shedding tears of him returning to his seat shows tears in his and it’s the same sort of thing … Being eyes. I guess he felt honoured. Perhaps forgiven. here with this mob it’s great. Before my Perhaps, that he belonged. mother died — she had a massive stroke — His reaction surprised some of us, and and before she died she said, ‘Roma, soon suggested to me the potential of the structure as I get better I’ll take you back down to of the storytelling situation to transform, where I came from and I’ll take you to all even if only temporarily, pre-existing power these places’. The project now has enabled relationships. It also suggests the latent power me to come to these places but without of regional Indigenous heritage and a paradox; my mother, and I suppose it’s feeling the empowerment through giving. loss of her not being here … But maybe It is a risky strategy, especially in the context she is here, in spirit, and that dream is of a history of lies and betrayal. being fulfilled for me I just … (indicates On one occasion, while trying to locate a story tears) … Take no notice. It’s a spiritual in its landscape by tracking a story along a trail journey, to be walking this way again, of shifting place names, memories, oral histories reinforcing that bond to country.50 and local history archives, the Wirlomin Project was invited onto a property infamous as being Research confirms Roma Winmar’s words; the place of origin of an historical massacre. improved social and personal well-being comes It was a decision to consider: accept from strong attachment to Indigenous cultural the invitation or not? Some strands of the traditions.51 Notably, such improvement is community had not visited the area for the not dependent on pleas of victimhood, or on generations since the massacre, and those many relinquishing power. Further, the benefit — and decades of legislation controlling movement and the ‘healing’ implied herein — is not limited to rights made it hard to get back and reconcile Indigenous people. oneself with what had occurred. The Wirlomin project, as already indicated, We accepted. After a barbeque lunch, the formally distributes pre-publication copies of current owners presented us with grinding stories to members of the local community at a stones they’d collected decades ago. They felt public meeting. As one of the people involved in ashamed at having done so, they said, and the project, I must confess my intention at this understood our group represented descendants stage was, as part of consolidating the stories in of the Noongar people who’d lived here. a ‘home community’, that only Noongar people They took us to what they thought may be would receive these copies. However, elders significant sites, and which proved to be, in the reference group insisted that an elderly including a dance ground, lizard traps and rock member of a pioneering family of the region be pools of spring water. given that honour also. I objected to this, arguing About twelve months after the above visit, that this individual’s family had stolen our land, I returned to a rock water hole in the area and that members of our Noongar community — eighteen months ago with a small party that in fact, some of the elders with whom I was included one of the elders who received the discussing this — had lived like slaves on the grinding stones. The elder told one of the men man’s property. The elders held their position with us to reach into the water hole, feel for because, they said, the man in question has something left there. When one of the ancient, grown up with them and knew some Noongar hand-shaped stones was lifted glistening into language. the sunlight it felt as if we recreating part of a ceremony.
Humanities Australia 15 coast of Western Australia. My sense is that programs like that which I have outlined offer an opportunity, as Nicholas Evans says in the 2017 Humanities Australia journal, to create ‘a more authentic view of who we are in this part of the world, grounded in the intricate and diverse cultural products of fifty millennia of human occupation … an opportunity to create a type of culture that so far we have failed to nourish in this country.’53
I am talking about the starting point for the possibility of anchoring a shimmering nation state to its indigenous roots being the descendants of regional pre-colonial Australia, It has been claimed that ‘language loss, and have suggested — by the example of a (above) language retention, and the possibility of small and isolated project — the potential for Fig. 5. Professor language revitalisation, then, can be emblematic a transformed, nourishing and inclusive culture Kim Scott faha of the whole history of colonial dispossession, to be built from there. Stories connect people to delivers the 48th Academy Lecture Aboriginal persistence and a self-assertive and one another and to place. They are an important in Fremantle, self-determined Aboriginal future.’52 part of the currency of identity and belonging. November 2017. Indigenous languages, stories and songs are IMAGE: GAYLENE GALARDI This is a different way of telling our history, major denominations in that currency. and of connecting the future with ancient I talk about stories being returned and traditions. But I am talking about more than just consolidated in home communities of people language revitalisation, although that is a major descended from those who created human component of story and song revitalisation. society there. I don’t suggest the stories are This helps us escape from a reactive trap, or an locked away forever. Stories grow from the impoverished narrative reduced to the binary exchange of breath, from moving to and fro, of ‘Stolen Generations’ vs ‘Native Title’. It gives from investment and exchange; that is, they us something more than violent warriors or grow from story-business. I would like them suffering victims, and offers a recovery from to be invested in and appropriate exchange invasion by rebuilding ancient stories and songs negotiated. In using such terms — currency, in regional communities. denomination, invest, negotiate — I perhaps Of course, this is a small and isolated move away from literature and story and toward project I speak of that may not be replicable something like implementation, something like elsewhere. Of course, it could easily falter legislation, something like the benefits of a new and die along with some of its key people. relationship. Something like a treaty. Of course, connecting language traditions with Let me finish with an anecdote from an older country often relies on negotiation with private Noongar man, since passed away. A man scarred landholders. But there is the possibility of by racism, who’d learned to utilise violence as the transformation of social structures and identity. only way to deal with it in small country towns. Which I think brings us back to things I was Returning to a little country town after a talking about earlier, legislation and policy and week clearing his ancestral country for farmers, ‘Treaty’ and the like; the ways and means needed he was picked up and imprisoned by the local (along, I would argue, with story and song) to policeman. The policeman took the trouble change power structures. over the weekend to tell him that he — the Aboriginal Australia is diverse. I’ve not policeman — was enjoying time with his, the been speaking about what’s usually regarded prisoner’s, wife. And then, released from prison, as remote, traditional Aboriginal Australia. my uncle was run out of town. My focus is Noongar country along the south
16 Humanities Australia He found a way to rain violence upon that KIM SCOTT faha is a multi-award policeman. winning author, Professor of That’s Human Rights some decades ago, Writing at Curtin University and of course. an Honorary Fellow of the But all that was just by way of introduction Australian Academy of the to the source of the anecdote. Let’s call the Humanities. His most recent source, Fred. novel, Taboo (2017) won the Book of the Year Award and Indigenous Uncle Fred told me about this man who Writer’s Prize in the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary approached him in a public space, came up Awards, and was longlisted for the 2018 Miles very respectfully. An immigrant. A dark man, Franklin Literary Award. His other books include Uncle Fred told me. Indian, he thought. Uncle That Deadman Dance (2010), Lost (2006), True Fred, scarred from white Australian oppression, Country (1993), Benang: From the Heart (1999), was colour-conscious, but for all that far more and Kayang and Me (2005) — co-authored with accommodating than a great many non- Hazel Brown. He has won many prestigious Australian literary awards, among them the Miles Aboriginal people living in the towns and regions Franklin Literary Award (twice), the Western where he spent his time. Australian Premier’s Award (twice), the Kate Challiss ‘May I shake your hand?’ the stranger said, RAKA Award (twice), the Victorian Premier’s Literary offering his own. ‘Thank you for having me in Prize, the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and your country.’ the Australian Literature Society’s Gold Medal. He is Nobody had ever said anything like that to also the recipient of an Australian Centenary Medal Uncle Fred before. Certainly no white man (2003) and was named the 2012 West Australian of the Year, having been nominated in both the ever had. Indigenous and Arts and Culture categories. He shook his head in amazement. He was A descendant of people living along the south coast very pleased. It mattered. He considered the of Western Australia prior to colonisation and proud possibility of an alliance between Noongars and to be one among those who call themselves such immigrants. ¶ Noongar, Kim is founder and chair of the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Story Project which, among other achievements, has resulted in the publication of two English/Noongar language picture books, Mamang and Noongar Mambara Bakitj (UWA Publishing).
1. Rob Garbutt, Soenke Biermann and Baden 7. Brian Dibble, Doing Life (Crawley, W.A.: Offord, ‘Into the Borderlands: Unruly Pedagogy, University of Western Australia Press, 2008), Tactile Theory and the Decolonising Nation’, p. 253. Critical Arts, 26:1 (2012), 62–81. 8. Mark Twain, The Wayward Tourist: Mark 2. Stephen Romei, ‘Quotes from the author’s Twain’s Adventures in Australia, with an mouth: Tony Birch, James Bradley, Alice Pung’, introduction by Don Watson (Carlton, Vic., The Australian, 19 April 2017. Melbourne University Publishing, 2006), p. 65. 3. Letter of Invitation to Kim Scott to present the 9. More than an apology, this was an 48th Annual Academy Lecture. acknowledgement of what many of us call the 4. Inga Clendinnen, The History Question: Who ‘truth’ of Australian history, and what should Owns the Past? (Quarterly Essay 23), (Melbourne, follow from the recognition of Native Title. Vic.: Black Inc, 2006). 10. Amy Maguire, ‘The UN Declaration on 5. Inga Clendinnen, ‘Backstage at the Republic the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Self- of Letters’ (The Australian Academy of the Determination in Australia: Using a Human Humanities Annual Lecture), Proceedings Rights Approach to Promote Accountability’, of the Australian Academy of the Humanities New Zealand Yearbook of International Law, 12 (2003), 97–107: ‘I will follow the time-honoured (2014), 105–32. investigative strategy of the Humanities of 11. Noel Pearson, in Maguire, p. 125. taking myself as subject to assess grander issues’ 12. Linda Burney, in Maguire, p. 125. (p. 97). 13. ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, Indigenous 6. Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer (London: Thomas Law Bulletin, 8.29 (2017), 8. Nelson and Sons, 1963). 14. Maguire, p. 121.
Humanities Australia 17 15. Paul Keating, Redfern Speech (Year for the 29. Rosenda Salvado, The Salvado Memoirs: World’s Indigenous People) delivered in Historical Memoirs of Australia and Particularly Redfern Park by Prime Minister Paul Keating, of the Benedictine Mission of New Norcia and 10 December 1992. of the Habits and Customs of the Australian 16. Of course I am quoting E. G. Whitlam here, Natives, trans. and ed. by Edward James Stormon echoing the cadences and pointing to the (Nedlands, W.A.: University of Western Australia betrayal of the coup most often referred to as Press, 1977), p. 121. ‘The Dismissal’. In this instance I plucked the 30. Alexander Collie, ‘Anecdotes and Remarks quote from the Guardian newspaper
18 Humanities Australia Jinjannup (another name for Kooranup) Looking West, ed. by Anna Haebich and Julianne women dancing with averted faces, Schultz, Griffith Review, 47 (2015), 200–14; and Koorannup women dancing with averted faces, Kim Scott, ‘From Drill to Dance’, in Decolonizing Singing here on the sea shore. the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia, 35. Plaque on statue of Mokare, York St, ed. by Beate Neumier and Kay Schaffer Albany, W.A. (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014), pp. 3–22. 36. Tiffany Shellam, ‘Tropes of Friendship, Undercurrents of Fear: Alternative Emotions 47. Connie Moses, quoted in Kim Scott, ‘Not So on the ‘Friendly Frontier’, Westerly, 57.2 (2012), Easy: Language for a Shared History’, p. 211. 16–31. 48. Russell Nelly, quoted in Kim Scott, ‘Not So Easy: 37. I use terms like ‘manifestations of place’ to allude Language for a Shared History’, p. 211. to some of the discussion in Swain. 49. See Kim Scott, ‘The not-so-Barren-Ranges’, 38. A. O. Neville, Australia’s Coloured Minority: Thesis 11, 135.1 (2016), 67–81. Its Place in the Community (Sydney, N.S.W.: 50. In Kim Scott, ‘Not So Easy’, pp. 210–11. Currawong Publishing Co., 1948), p. 133. 51. See for example Alfred Michael Dockery, Culture 39. This is an edited extract from the last two and Wellbeing: The Case of Indigenous Australians pages of Kim Scott, Benang (Fremantle, W.A.: (Bentley, W.A.: Curtin University Centre for Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1999). It was edited Labour Market Research, 2009); H. Anderson and performed for the opening of the Perth and E. Kowal, ‘Culture, History and Health: The International Arts Festival’s opening event, Case of Utopia, Northern Territory of Australia’, Home, in February 2016. Medical Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in 40. ‘Documentation for ISO 639 Identifier: Nys’, Health and Illness, 31.5 (2012), 438–57; Nicholas SIL (2015). Available at: http://www-01.sil.org/ Biddle and Hannah Swee, ‘The Relationship iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=nys [accessed between Wellbeing and Indigenous Land, January 25 2018]. Language and Culture in Australia’, Australian Geographer, 43 (2012), 215–32; Michael 41. ‘Nyunga’, Ethnologue
Humanities Australia 19 MUSEUM TRANSACTIONS Negotiating Knowledges, Governing Cultures
» TONY BENNETT
I expect that most readers of Humanities Tindale — played a significant role in re- Australia will be familiar with the Australian mediating the relations between anthropological Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Indigenous knowledge practices. Studies (AIATSIS) Map of Indigenous Australia In the AIATSIS map, finally, these relations (fig. 1). Some, particularly the Academy’s are set within a nationalist cartography. While anthropologists, will be acquainted with it territorially distinct from one another, the professionally. But most, I suspect, will have different ‘language, social or nation groups’ come across it in one or another of the more the map presents are located within what is general contexts in which it has been circulated. unmistakably a map of Australia. The map, These include museums. It forms a part of the in this respect, is an instance of what James visitor’s orientation to the First Australians: Scott has called ‘seeing like a state’.1 It is from Gallery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders this perspective — the gaze from above of at the National Museum of Australia, and, since a nationalist cartography — that the map it was first made available in 1996, has performed orchestrates the relations between the ways of a similar function in relation to exhibitions of ‘seeing like an Indigenous Australian’ and ‘seeing the cultures of Indigenous Australians at many like an anthropologist’ that it brings together. Australian museums. This is not surprising. AIATSIS is a state The role the map plays in these contexts is institution. So are the National Museum of a complex one shaped by the ways in which it Australia and the other museums in which the negotiates the relations between the different AIATSIS map, or ones like it, cue in the visitor knowledges that it brings together. These to the curatorial logics underlying exhibitions of include, most obviously, the Indigenous Indigenous materials which anchor culture to knowledges of the relations between language, country.2 My interest in such maps, then, is with culture and country that the map foregrounds. the role they play in shaping the transactions However, in giving these knowledges a particular between state and citizens that are enacted cartographic form, the map also testifies to across the relations between museums, their (above) the influence of the anthropological concept visitors and other constituencies. As such, they Detail, fig. 3, p. 25, An of culture areas. Associated originally with provide a productive point of entry into the unidentified the Boasian school of American anthropology, broader questions I want to pursue: the means Māori speaker is this concept and the accompaning practice of by which the civic and other transactions that recorded at the Dominion Museum, mapping Indigenous cultures to territory has — museums effect are shaped by the distinctive Wellington. since its introduction to Australia via Norman
20 Humanities Australia orderings of the relations between the been taken.4 This was effected, in the lay-out knowledges that they bring together. of the exhibition, by locating the objects in the The arrangement of Encounters, the exhibition context of these source communities which of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander materials were, in their turn, presented as territorially- on loan from the British Museum that was held defined cultures mapped on to different parts at the National Museum of Australia in late 2015 of Australia. All, that is, except for a miscellany and early 2016, is a good example of what I have of the British Museum’s objects which, since in mind here.3 The exhibition was the product no source community could be found for them, of a complex set of relations: between two were assigned to a territorially unmarked aisle national institutions; between Indigenous and like lost souls in search of the meanings that anthropology curators (with some combining eluded them. both statuses); and between all of these and the The result was a nuanced set of transactions Indigenous source communities represented on through which a state agency engaged with its the exhibition’s Indigenous Reference Group. visitors, insofar as these were also citizens, in The main organising principle of Encounters a range of different registers. Non-indigenous presented the exhibits as ‘stolen objects’ which visitors were addressed as individualised temporarily recovered their true meanings — citizens but in ways that invited and enabled ones they had lost on the varied routes through a reconceputalisation of their relations to which they had reached the British Museum — Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in in being symbolically returned to the source according these both shared and differentiated communities from which they had originally Indigenous identities and cultures. And
(left) Fig. 1. AIATSIS Map of Indigenous Australia This map attempts to represent the language, social or nation groups of Aboriginal Australia. It shows only the general locations of larger groupings of people which may include clans, dialects or individual languages in a group. It used published resources from 1988–1994 and is not intended to be exact, nor the boundaries fixed. It is not suitable for native title or other land claims.
IMAGE: DAVID R. HORTON (CREATOR), © AIATSIS, 1996. NO REPRODUCTION WITHOUT PERMISSION. TO PURCHASE A PRINT VERSION VISIT:
Humanities Australia 21 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders were de l’Homme, and the American Museum of engaged with in three registers: as members of Natural History, for example); and the social differentiated source communities identified in consequences of those forms of ordering when the exhibition, as the collectivity of Indigenous translated into programs for governing both Australians, and as Australian citizens. This all colonised and metropolitan populations, and the added up to the functioning of the museum relations between them. as a state-ordered ‘transactional zone’ whose I look first at how the relations between the role in the governance of the relations between processes of collecting, ordering and governing Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians informed the interactions between museums and their cultures differed sharply from that and Indigenous populations in Australia, New performed by the evolutionary principles of Zealand and the USA. I do so with a view, first, to display which — with some exceptions — identifying the sharply contrasting transactional remained the most influential frameworks for realities these produced, and second, by tracing presenting Indigenous materials in anthropology some of the interactions between them, to exhibits until the 1960s. throwing some light on the historical processes I’ll come back to this point shortly. But through which the current set of relations I need first to take a couple of detours in order between mapping cultures represented by the to provide both a theoretical and historical AIATSIS map and Australian museum practices setting for the above remarks, as well as an have come into being.
THE ROLE THE MAP PLAYS IN THESE CONTEXTS IS A COMPLEX ONE SHAPED BY THE WAYS IN WHICH IT NEGOTIATES THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT KNOWLEDGES THAT IT BRINGS TOGETHER.
acknowledgement of the collective research Our interests in Australia focused on the on which they draw. The concept of museums relations between the fieldwork practices of as ‘transactional zones’ is, in truth, something Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen, Spencer’s of a shotgun marriage between, on the one museum practices as director of the National hand, Michel Foucault’s conception of the role Museum of Victoria, and his role in shaping the played by what he calls transactional realities conceptual underpinnings for the new forms in processes of social goverance,5 and James of racial administration that characterised Clifford’s conception of museums as ‘contact the governance of Aborigines in early post- zones’ that have played shifting roles in colonial Federation Australia. Spencer is, of course, histories in mediating the relations between a complex and ambiguous figure whose Western and Indigenous knowledges.6 It’s the equivocations are those of a Mancunian liberal, first of these concepts that I want to foreground schooled in the traditions of John Stuart Mill, here by presenting some aspects of the role struggling to reconcile those traditions with the it played in the Australian Research Council realities of the colonial frontier which provided Discovery project Museum, Field, Metropolis, the conditions that supported his practice and Colony: Practices of Social Governance.7 into which, in turn, his work fed.8 Here, however, This project focused on the relationships apart from noting the dependency of Spencer’s between the processes of collecting associated and Gillen’s fieldwork on the (relative) shift from with early-to-mid twentieth-century practices the killings of the frontier wars to the more of anthropological fieldwork in Australia, Papua, regularised forms of biopolitical governance that New Zealand, France, the USA, and Britain; the characterised the post-Federation establishment processes of ordering to which the materials of a state-regulated ‘Aboriginal domain’,9 I shall gathered from fieldwork sites were subjected on leave these complexities to one side to hightlight their return to the centres of calculation from two aspects of his work that bear on my which the fieldwork expeditions originated current concerns. (the National Museum of Victoria, the Musée
22 Humanities Australia The first concerns the consequences of his the governmental mediation of the relations focus on the tribe as a major unit of analysis. between white and Aboriginal Australia was This displaced the significance that had earlier effected post-Federation. It is in this regard been accorded to the analysis of supra-tribal significant that Spencer’s influential guide nations, conceived not as sovereign political to the principles informing his exhibition of entities but rather in accordance with a biblical the National Museum of Victoria’s Aboriginal conception of nations as groups of common collections was first published in 1901,11 marking descent, united by language and custom.10 a key moment in the development of the links Whereas Alfred William Howitt and his between ethnography and the new nation state contemporaries had sought, well into the 1880s, through which policies designed to speed up to map the relations between different Aboriginal the movement of Aborigines either through or nations in this sense, the attention that Spencer out of development time became increasingly accorded to the tribe as his primary (though influential. This was most manifest in the not exclusive) unit of analysis formed part of development of new sets of spatial arrangements a new hierarchical distinction between societies which, deracinating Aborigines by severing accorded the status of nations and those that their links to country, also differentiated them were tribally organised. This distinction was, in terms of their racial constitution. Assigning in turn, mapped onto a racially organised what were described as ‘wild’, ‘full-blood’ natives demarcation of the boundaries between the to reserves, thereby disconnecting them from civilised and the uncivilised. In place of the wider the developmental time of civilisation and the self-identifications that Aborigines had often time of the nation state, also separated them testified to in earlier studies, it substituted the from the ‘half-castes’ whose genetic inheritance tribe as a unit of colonial ordering that served offered a foothold in developmental time which to nullify cultural identities operating at a could be cultivated via continued selective meta-tribal level, denying them any political or breeding and education in specially designed administrative significance. It also substituted training institutions.12 a racial conception of Aboriginality as the How, then, did the shift from this set of common factor which cohered the customs and relations between the processes of collecting, practices of different tribes into a single whole, ordering and governing and those associated thereby producing the race as such as the new with the AIATSIS map occur? We now know ‘transactional reality’ through which government well enough that these processes have always was to act on Aborigines. been affected by Indigenous agency which, Spencer’s museum displays played a exercised in varying degrees at different points significant role in the public circulation of the in the relations between fieldwork encounters conception of an unbridgeable racial divide — and the arrangement of museum displays, has or, more accurately, a divide that could be sought to influence what has been acquired bridged only by changing the racial constitution through such relations of (unequal) exchange of Aborigines. They did so by bringing together and what interpretations might be placed on Indigenous materials collected from different it.13 However, mapping techniques derived from tribes and arranging them as parts of self- the cultural area concept played a significant enclosed evolutionary sequences which, while role in reconfiguring the ground across which testifying to a capacity for development in the the relations between Indigenous populations past, were depicted as having come to a close and anthropologists took place. And not just in in the present. If this required a program of Australia. Indeed, it was in New Zealand that technological uplift, it also called for a program such relations were initially most strongly and of bio-cultural ‘up-lift’ or ‘whitening’ through distinctively developed. which subsequent generations of Aborigines The key figure here from the American side would acquire the capacities that would permit was Clark Wissler. Appointed as the Curator their absorption into the national population. of Anthropology at the American Museum of This racialised conception of time proved to Natural History (AMNH) in 1907, shortly after be the key transactional reality through which Franz Boas’s resignation from the museum,
Humanities Australia 23 (right) Fig. 2. Map of the Plains Indian culture Area: “The most typical tribes are underlined.”
IMAGE: REPRODUCED FROM CLARK WISSLER, THE AMERICAN INDIAN: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE NEW WORLD (NEW YORK: DOUGLAS C.McMURRIE, 1917).
24 Humanities Australia Wissler played a significant role in elaborating the anthropological concept of cultures as formally organised ways of life — the so-called ‘culture concept’ — beyond Boas’s initial, but somewhat parsimonious, formulations on the subject,14 and in developing the mapping techniques that gave cartographic expression to the related concept of cultural areas (fig. 2). Wissler was also instrumental, through his relations with the Rockefeller Foundation, in The political career of the concept of ‘the developing connections between American Maori as he was’ was different on the North (above) anthropology and anthropological museums Island where two different traditions were Fig. 3. An projects in Oceania. His influence on the work brought into contact with one another in the unidentified Māori speaker is recorded of Henry Devenish Skinner in New Zealand and adjoining Maori Ethnology Gallery and the at the Dominion his collaborations with Tindale in Australia were Maori Hall that were opened in Wellington’s Museum, Wellington particularly important in this regard. Dominion Museum in 1936. The first of these on a wax cylinder by (from left): Johannes As is always the case, however, when concepts sang mainly to the tune of Elsdon Best’s work. Andersen, Te and methods travel they change as they are A Pakeha anthropologist, Best had led fieldwork Raumoa Balneavis, adapted to the contexts in which they are expeditions from the Dominion Museum and Elsdon Best. transplanted. In the New Zealand context, the to sites — along the Whanganui River, for IMAGE: JAMES MACDONALD, O.011963, concept of the culture area was translated into example — selected in view of their limited WITH PERMISSION 15 FROM THE MUSEUM programs for recovering ‘the Maori as he was’, exposure to European culture and therefore OF NEW ZEALAND TE PAPA TONGAREWA, a concept which was, however, interpreted viewed as likely to provide the most authentic WELLINGTON. differently and put to different uses by Pakeha evidence of a pre-contact Māori culture. and Māori anthropologists. Although having Differing from Skinner in working closely a longer history, the concept of ‘the Maori as he with Māori informants, Best’s fieldwork and was’ was brought into contact with the cultural the influential study to which it gave rise,17 area tradition through the work of Skinner constructed the Māori past as an idealised who had contacts not just with Wissler but realm sealed off from the present. If the Maori with many members of the Boasian school of Ethnology gallery echoed this conception, the American anthropology: Alfred Kroeber, Edward Maori Hall — and a series of events which Sapir, and Margaret Mead for example. It had accompanied its opening — articulated a been a defining feature of the Boasian tradition different interpretation of ‘the Maori as he was’, to extend the remit of fieldwork beyond the one which reflected the input of the Māori collection of artefacts to gather myths, songs, anthropologist Peter Buck and of Sir Apirana and stories both for their own sakes and as clues Ngata, a Māori member of Parliament, head of to the meanings that artefacts had in the context the Department of Native Affairs, and a member of regionally specific ways of life. As a curator of the Board of Maori Ethnological Research. The at the Otago Museum, however, Skinner relied interpretation of the Hall and the performances mainly on the techniques of material culture that accompanied its opening prepared the studies to define the boundaries of culture areas way for subsequent presentations of ‘the Maori which he interpreted as geographical regions as he was’ that were annexed to programs for whose inhabitants showed a strong family the revival and creative development of Māori resemblance to one another in terms of their traditions. Recordings of Māori songs, for way of life.16 Strongly committed to a practical example, retrieved and preserved traditional function for anthropology, the regionally Māori art forms to serve as a platform for articulated evidence of ‘the Maori as he was’ social and cultural development programs in that was provided by the mute remnants of the present (fig. 3). In thus articulating a vision material culture was to provide the conceptual of ‘the Māori as he is’ — as a distinctive and grid — the transactional reality — through which dynamic strand of the national story — such the Pakeha governance of Māori lives was to presentations of Māori culture connected that take place. Humanities Australia 25 vision to claims for autonomous economic, social an aggregated set of traits rather than, as in the and cultural development that helped to shape Boasian conception, amounting to a formally post-war programs for Māori self determination. patterned whole expressive of a distinctive way There were not any equivalently developed of life.22 He was also as much concerned to map forms of Indigenous engagement with physiological characteristics alongside laws, Australian museums in the inter-war period. languages, and customs in accordance with the The extent to which Aboriginal activists racial underpinnings of the biomedical models subscribed to an understanding of Aboriginal of Indigenous governance that characterised the culture as a distinctively patterned way of life inter-war years.23 is less clear. While the Australian Aborigines For all that, Tindale’s map proved to be a League was committed to preserving aspects game changer, particularly when interpreted in of traditional art and ceremony, this did not, the light of post-war tendencies in anthropology in Russell McGregor’s estimation, amount to represented, for example, by Catherine a commitment to maintaining and fostering and Ronald Berndt, who registered a fuller a distinctive holistic integrity for Aboriginal appreciation of the significance of the formal culture understood as ‘a vital and viable way of aspects of the culture concept.24 In also accruing life’.18 However, Heather Goodall interprets this the more political inflections associated with differently, suggesting that Aboriginal activists Indigenous concepts of country, its significance hesitated to press public claims to the strength as a step along the road to the AIATSIS Map of and vitality of traditional culture lest this might Indigenous Australia is clear. seem to endorse the role that anthropological As such, the work performed by the map has expertise played in validating the special been governmental in the Foucaultian sense administrative controls whose power they that its ordering principle of a national framing were contesting.19 of the country/culture couplet — the site of However, the inter-war years did witness a provisional historical mutuality between the beginnings of a move away from the racial Indigenous knowledges and anthropology — paradigm that had followed in the wake of functions as the transactional reality through Spencer’s work and toward the territorial which key aspects of the relations between the differentiation of Aboriginal cultures. Norman state and Indigenous Australia are mediated. Tindale from the South Australia Museum was This is not without its contradictions, some a key figure here. Personally acquainted with of which surfaced during the Encounters Wissler through their collaboration in projects exhibition,25 which at root have to do with the funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Tindale, anthropology/Indigenous knowledge interface through his mapping projects, was influential which remains inescapably tangled with ongoing in translating the culture area concept into the colonial relations in the very process of seeking Australian context. Starting this work in the to break with them. early 1930s, Tindale published the first version I want now, however, to look at some of his Map Showing the Distribution of the other aspects of the governmental histories Aboriginal Tribes of Australia in 1940 (fig. 4).20 of the culture concept. For these were not This went through a number of iterations en restricted to the roles it played in producing route to the publication of its final version in new interfaces between settler and Indigenous 1974. Just as much as in New Zealand, however, populations in New Zealand and Australia. The the culture area concept and the broader concept also had a significant, albeit surprising Boasian culture concept underlying it were political career in the United States. Surprising given a distinctive inflection upon their arrival in in that, while the concept was developed in Australia.21 While Tindale’s first map connected anthropological fieldwork studies conducted differentiated Aboriginal groups to different among Native Americans — originally Boas’s regions, the language he used was still that of studies among the Kwakiutl but later extended tribes. And his conception of the cultures that to include the Plains Indians studied by Wissler might be ascribed to such groups drew more on as well as Alfred Kroeber’s work among the Edward Burnett Tylor’s conception of culture as Arapaho — it found its main fields of practical
26 Humanities Australia application in providing a set of coordinates for which they had migrated. Margaret Mead’s mediating the relations between white nativist conception of the ‘third generation’ through (above) Americans and America’s growing immigrant which, after initially clinging to their European Fig. 4. ‘Map populations in the mid-twentieth century. The ancestry, immigrants eventually jettison it piece- Showing the Distribution of the Boasian school’s conception of the relations by-piece so as to become, by the third generation, Aboriginal Tribes of between the formal properties of the culture thoroughly adapted to ‘an “American way of Australia’, Norman concept, cultural areas, and processes of cultural life”’ is an economical summary of this logic.27 Tindale, 1940. diffusion was particularly important in this This is especially so in the respects in which it IMAGE: WITH PERMISSION FROM THE NATIONAL respect. The understanding of a culture as left Native Americans and African Americans — LIBRARY OF AUSTRALIA, OBJ-230054338
Humanities Australia 27 of culture which, while sharing with Boas’s as in situ forms for the governance of regional culture concept the limitation of never entirely cultures and identities.32 pulling free from the assumptions of biological Albeit via different routes, these inter- race categories, nonetheless moved significantly war developments in American and French in the direction of the more relativist, non- anthropology also connected with the British hierarchical characteristics that were claimed project of Mass Observation (M-O) and, in doing for it by Claude Levi-Strauss and others in laying so, mingled with another set of connections the conceptual foundations for UNESCO’s between anthropological fieldwork and post war policies of cultural diversity. Rivet’s museums: those derived from M-O’s chief conception, however, differed from Boas’s in its founding figure, Tom Harrisson. Schooled in more environmentalist characteristics.29 For Boas the fieldwork tradition pioneered by Alfred Cort and his followers culture was not an expression Haddon’s Torres Strait Island Expedition of of an essential set of connections between a 1888–1889, and following the model of Haddon’s people, a place, and a way of life but rather a subsequent role in initiating the Ethnographic creative and pliable articulation of the relations Survey of the United Kingdom, Harrisson’s between diverse traits which, in being brought conception of M-O translated Haddon’s together from different origins, acquired a formal conception of an ‘anthropology at home’ unity and cohesion from the creative capacities into ‘an anthropology of ourselves’. This was, of the people occupying the particular territory however, envisaged on a larger and more where those traits congregated at a particular contemporary scale in that the selves at issue, historical moment.30 while including salvage conceptions of Britain’s While less flexible in this regard, Rivet’s rural folk that had informed the Ethnographic conception of territorial cultures marked by Survey, went beyond these to include the high levels of formal integrity and coordination, contemporary ways of life characteristic of played a key role in the organisation and modern industrial and urban Britain. circulation of regionalised systems for the While it was not a museum, M-O was governance of cultures and identities in Greater conceived as an enterprise of collecting, ordering France in the inter-war period and, indeed, and governing fashioned on a museum model. through into the Vichy period. The circulation Harrisson’s co-founder, Charles Madge, called it of ideas and practices between the Musée de a ‘collaborative museum’.33 Collecting the views l’Homme in Paris and two other institutions — and practices of ordinary Britons through a mix the Musée de L’Homme (Hanoi) and the Musée of fieldwork and survey methods and ordering des Arts et Traditions Populaires — contributed these via the work of analyses conducted on significantly to these developments.31 The them in the centres of collection where they conception of regional homelands (petites were brought together, M-O mobilised the patries) that the ethnographic projects and results through a variety of mechanisms with collections of the Musée de l’Homme (Hanoi) a view to intervening in and altering what they promoted as a means of managing differentiated viewed as the remote and out-dated forms of regional identities in French Indo-China owed gentrified rule that characterised the relations a good deal to the status of petits pays accorded between rulers and ruled in inter-war Britain.34 to France’s provincial regions. In its turn, the In the process, particularly during the wartime conception of petites patries fed back into the years when it was integrated into the Ministry programs of collecting, ordering, and governing of Information and when, in the persons of France’s regional cultures that distinguished the Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, there was practices of the Musée des Arts et Traditions considerable trans-Atlantic traffic regarding Populaires under the directorship of Georges the role that anthropology might play in the Henri Rivière. These practices contributed to the management of wartime populations,35 M-O development of the conceptual foundations for fashioned, in its conceptions of morale and the regional cultural ecologies associated with atmosphere, a distinctive set of transactional the later development of France’s eco museums realities through which governing authorities of various kinds sought to connect with, mould and
28 Humanities Australia transform the behaviours of both soldiers and describes before coming to its class partitioning. citizens at war.36 In the end, though, it is the combination of So much, then, by way of summarising the class and region, of working-classness and implications of the approaches developed in the Welshness, that Williams brings together in his Museums, Field, Colony, Metropolis project for mapping of culture to country. This is, then, our understanding of how, as sites organising one more moment in the history of the culture complex transactions between different concept, one which, similar in some ways to the knowledges, cultures and publics, museums have conception of ‘the Maori as he was’, inflected contributed to the formation and transformation its governmental logic in new directions by of the mediating systems of thought through attaching it to the aspirations of subordinate which processes of governance are enacted social movements. One episode, then, in a across the relations between varied populations. varied political career which owes a good deal to The research also had a more personal pay-off the extraordinary plasticity of the concept and for me in view of the light it has thrown on the the scope this has afforded for it be differently concept of culture as a way of life which, like deployed in different contexts.40 ¶ many working in the field of cultural studies, I first became acquainted with in the 1960s via TONY BENNETT faha is Research the work of Raymond Williams long before Professor in Social and Cultural I developed an interest in the histories of Theory in Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture museums and anthropology. Like most of my and Society, and a Fellow of the contemporaries, however, I paid little attention UK Academy of the Social to the genealogy of this concept. And Williams Sciences. His recent books didn’t help much. While acknowledging his include Making Culture, Changing debt to Ruth Benedict’s concept of the pattern Society (2013), and Museums, Power, Knowledge of a culture for his own concept of structures (2018). He is also co-author of Culture, Class, of feeling,37 and while it was clear that his Distinction (2009) and Collecting, Organising, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Liberal acquaintance with the Boasian tradition was Government (2017). He was Director of the dependent partly on T.S. Eliot whose Notes Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy, Toward the Definition of Culture drew heavily on and Co-Director of the UK’s ESRC Centre for the Boasian culture concept, and particularly Research on Socio-Cultural Change. He currently its territorial aspects,38 Williams tended to run convenes two Australian Research Council-funded Tylor’s and Boas’s definitions of culture together. projects: Australian Cultural Fields: National and And, of course, his work was best known for Transnational Dynamics, and Assembling and Governing Habits. the stress it placed on working-class ways of life and for his insistence that the complexity of the structures of feeling that these manifested 1. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain merited attention on a par with that normally Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven and London: Yale University reserved for canonised works of high culture. Press, 1998). It came, then, as something of a surprise 2. This theme was also a strong aspect of the when, after having immersed myself in the texts original organisation of the Bunjilaka gallery of the Boasians, I re-read one of the formative at Melbourne Museum. See Museum of texts of cultural studies, Williams’ essay ‘Culture Victoria, Bunjilaka: The Aboriginal Centre at Melbourne Museum (Melbourne: Museum of is Ordinary’. For, while Williams’ conception Victoria, 2000). of the ordinariness of culture was most usually 3. I draw here on a fuller discussion of this associated with his valorisation of working-class exhibition. See Tony Bennett, Museums, Power, culture, the scene that Williams first evokes is Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, defined territorially. ‘To grow up in that country,’ 2018), pp. 275–88. he says, ‘was to see the shape of a culture, and its 4. The exhibition catalogue offers a comprehensive summary of the principles informing the modes of change’.39 The country in question was arrangement of the exhibition. See National the Border Country between Wales and England, Museum of Australia, Encounters: Revealing and it is this culture as a whole that Williams Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Humanities Australia 29 Objects from the British Museum (Canberra: 10. I draw here on Kevin Blackburn, ‘Mapping National Museum of Australia Press, 2015). Aboriginal Nations: The “Nation” Concept of 5. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures Late–Nineteenth Century Anthropologists in at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. by Australia’, Aboriginal History, 26 (2002), 131–58, Michel Sennelart and trans. by Graham Burchell and on my earlier discussion of these questions (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), p. 297. in Tony Bennett, ‘Making and Mobilising Worlds: Assembling and Governing the Other’ 6. James Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, in in Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History Clifford Routes: Travel and Translation in the late and the Material Turn, ed. by Tony Bennett and Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Patrick Joyce (London and New York: Routledge, University Press, 1997), pp. 188–219. 2010), pp. 190–208. 7. Award Number DP110103776. The grant was 11. Baldwin Spencer, Guide to the Australian awarded to Tony Bennett (convenor) and Ethnographical Collection in the National Fiona Cameron at the Institute for Culture and Museum of Victoria (Melbourne: D.W. Paterson, Society, Western Sydney University, as Chief 1922). Investigators, and to Nélia Dias (University of Lisbon), Rodney Harrison (University College 12. The references are to the terms used by London), Ira Jacknis (University of California, Spencer in his proposals for the spatial zoning Berkeley), and Conal McCarthy (Victoria of the Aborigines of the Northern Territory. University of Wellington) as International See Baldwin Spencer, ‘Preliminary Report on Partner Investigators. Ben Dibley was the the Aboriginals of the Northern Territory’, Research Fellow appointed to the project. I have, Bulletin of the Northern Territory, 7 (Melbourne: with their agreement, drawn freely on both the Government Printer, 1913). collective contributions of these co-researchers 13. On the role of Indigenous agency in the as well as on their contributions to the issues processes through which museum collections focused on Australia (Dibley and Harrison), have been acquired, see Reassembling the New Zealand (Cameron and McCarthy), the US Collection: Ethnographic Museums and (Jacknis), France (Dias), and Mass Observation Indigenous Agency, ed. by Rodney Harrison, (Harrison). I am in addition especially grateful to Sarah Byrne and Anne Clarke (Sante Fe: SAR Conal McCarthy for his assistance in relation to Press, 2013). See also, with specific reference to the Figures included in this article. The findings Australia, Philip Jones, Ochre and Rust: Artefacts of this project are presented in Tony Bennett, and Encounters on Australian Frontiers (Kent Fiona Cameron, Nélia Dias, Ben Dibley, Rodney Town, S.A.: Wakefield Press, 2007). Harrison, Ira Jacknis, and Conal McCarthy, 14. See Clark Wissler, Man and Culture (New York: Collecting, Ordering Governing: Anthropology, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1923). Museums, and Liberal Government (Durham, N.C. 15. Here and elsewhere, the macron that is used in and London: Duke University Press, 2017). contemporary renderings of “Maori” is omitted 8. Differing assessments of Spencer in these as historically anachronistic. regards are most sharply posed by the 16. Henry D. Skinner, ‘Culture Areas in New contrast between Patrick Wolfe’s and Howard Zealand’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, 30.118 Morphy’s approaches. See Patrick Wolfe, (1921), 71–78. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an 17. Elsdon Best, The Maori As He Was: A Brief Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999) and Account of Maori Life As it Was in pre-European Howard Morphy ‘Empiricism to Metaphysics: Days, New Zealand Board of Science and Art: In Defence of the Concept of the Dreamtime’, Manual No. 4 (Wellington: Government Printer, in Prehistory to Politics: John Mulvaney, the 1924). Humanities and the Public Intellectual, ed. by 18. Russell McGregor, Indifferent Inclusion: Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (Melbourne: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation Melbourne University Press, 1999), pp. 163–189. (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011), p. 250. I have addressed the relations between these 19. Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in in Tony Bennett, Making Culture, Changing Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972. Society (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2008), pp. 185–86. pp. 280–81. 9. On the concept of the ‘Aboriginal domain’ see 20. This first version was produced in the context Tim Rowse, Remote Possibilities: The Aboriginal of Tindale’s involvement in the Harvard- Domain and the Administrative Imagination Adelaide Universities Expedition of 1938–39. (Casuarina: North Australian Research Unit, For an analysis of the broader relations between Australian National University, 1992). For the American and Australian anthropology in application of this concept to the role played by this period, see Geoffrey Gray,A Cautious Barrow Greek Station in Spencer and Gillen’s Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology fieldwork, see Bennett et al,Collecting, Ordering, (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), Governing, pp. 31–35. pp. 49–61.
30 Humanities Australia 21. See on this Paul Monoghan, Laying Down the 30. See Ira Bashkow, ‘A Neo-Boasian Conception of Country: Norman B. Tindale and the Linguistic Cultural Boundaries’, American Anthropologist, Construction of the North-West of South Australia. New Series, 106. 3 (2004), 443–58. Ph.D thesis, Discipline of Linguistics, School of 31. The Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts Humanities, University of Adelaide, 2003. et Traditions Populaires were both nurtured 22. For perhaps the sharpest differentiation of the within the Musée d’Éthnographie du Trocadéro two concepts, see Adam Kuper, Culture: The from the late 1920s prior to their establishment Anthropologists’ Account (Cambridge, Mass.: as independent institutions in 1937. The Musée Harvard University Press, 2000). George W. de l’Homme (Hanoi) was established in 1938. Stocking Jr’s more detailed accounts of the two 32. See Dominique Poulot, ‘Identity as Self- concepts are still canonical. These are collected Discovery: The Eco-Museum in France’, in in George W. Stocking Jr, Race, Culture, and Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacle, Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology ed. by Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 23. This aspect of Tindale’s work has constituted 1994), pp. 66–84. a significant subject for the critical practice of 33. Charles Madge ‘Mass Observation’, New Verse, Indigenous artist Vernon Ah Kee. 17, p. 16. 24. See, for example, Ronald M. Berndt, 34. For an assessment of M-O’s contribution to ‘Transformations of Objects, Persons and changing class relationships in inter-war Britain, Country: Some Comments’, Occasional Papers see Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Anthropology (1979), Anthropology Museum, in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method University of Queensland, pp. 143–52. (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 2010). 25. For an Indigenous critique of the orchestration 35. See Peter Mandler, Return From the Natives: How of the relations between Indigenous voices and Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and institutional scripts that Encounters effected, Lost the Cold War (London and New Haven: Yale see Julie Gough, Jonathan Jones, Kelli Cole, Shari University Press, 2013). Lett, Glenn Iseger-Pilkington, Billie Lythberg, 36. See Ben Dibley and Michelle Kelly, ‘Morale and Jennifer Walkate, Jeanine Nault, Jake Homiak, Mass-Observation: Governing the Affective Joshua A. Bell, and Natasha Barret, ‘Reflections Atmosphere on the Home-Front’, Museum and from a Panel of Indigenous Speakers at the New Society, 13.1 (2015), pp. 22–41. Encounters Conference, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, 16–18 March 2016’, Museum 37. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution Worlds, 4 (2016), 196–214. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965) p. 63. 26. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston and 38. Eliot wrote that he understood culture as New York: Mariner Books, 2005 [1934]). anthropologists did to refer to ‘the way of life of a particular people living together in one place’. 27. See Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry: See T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of An Anthropologist Looks at America (New York: Culture (London: Faber and Faber, 1962). William Morrow and Company, 1942), p. 29. 39. Raymond Williams, ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in 28. See Mark Anderson, ‘Ruth Benedict, Boasian Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism Anthropology and the Problem of the Colour (London: Verso, 1989 [1958]), p. 4. Line.’ History and Anthropology, 25. 3 (2014), 395–414. 40. Tony Bennett, ‘The Political Career of the Culture Concept’, in The Routledge Handbook 29. The relations between Rivet and Boas are of Global Cultural Policy, ed. by Victoria Durrer, discussed at various points in Christine Laurière, Toby Miller and Dave O’Brien (London and New Paul Rivet le savant et le politique (Paris: Muséum York: Routledge, 2018), pp. 607–20. national d’Histoire naturelle, 2008).
Humanities Australia 31 Same-Sex Marriage and the “No” Campaign
» LOUISE RICHARDSON-SELF
In September 2017, a non-compulsory postal to 62%.2 Overall, 79.5% of the population survey seeking Australians’ opinion on marriage voluntarily voted in the postal survey, and 61.6% equality was launched — a compromise after of respondents voted “Yes”. (above) the Government’s plan to hold a compulsory It is clear that public opinion on the Skies over Sydney on 17 September plebiscite on the issue was voted down by the legitimacy of same-sex relationships and 2017, during the Senate. There was only one question: Should marriage equality has shifted dramatically postal survey period. the law be changed to allow same-sex couples over the last thirteen years. This is no small IMAGE: GILLIAN to marry? (fig. 1). Same-sex marriage was first feat. Bringing about genuine shifts in public COSGROVE explicitly prohibited under Australian law with opinion requires more than intellectual adoption (below) the Howard Government’s amendments to the of a particular point of view. To be lasting, it also Fig. 1. Australian Marriage Act 1961 (cth) in 2004, and campaigners requires emotional and affective shifts. In short, Marriage Law have been working tirelessly to bolster public how we feel about an issue needs to change, not Postal Survey support for reform ever since. Back then, reports only what we think about an issue. I call this IMAGE: GILLIAN VANN, ID 719706406, held that as few as 38% of Australians supported broader task an exercise in effecting changes SHUTTERSTOCK.COM same-sex marriage; by 2007, the number had within the ‘dominant social imaginary.’ This risen to 57%.1 By 2016, the number rose again trend has been the focus of my research over the past eight years. My book — Justifying Same- Sex Marriage: A Philosophical Investigation — analyses and critiques a variety of justifications offered in support of same-sex marriage (fig. 2).3 In many ways, changes within Australia’s dominant social imaginary toward acceptance of same-sex marriage has been a conservative shift. Marriage equality advocates have long-traded on the “sameness” of different-sex and same- sex relationships in familial, intimate relations. Longevity, commitment, monogamy, and above all “love” have been the central themes in representations of same-sex relationships. Whilst conservative and largely apolitical in its message, the tactic has a high degree of resonance for the heterosexual community, who often value
32 Humanities Australia 4 deeply the ‘normative ideal of marriage.’ (left) However, what this postal survey revealed is Fig. 2. Cover of that while same-sex relationship recognition has Louise Richardson- Self, Justifying become normalised within the dominant social Same-Sex Marriage: imaginary, endorsement of same-sex marriage is A Philosophical still precarious.5 Investigation, (London & New What is interesting about the resounding York: Rowman success of grass-roots activism to shape and & Littlefield shift dominant public perceptions of same- International, 2015). sex relationships, and increasingly same-sex IMAGE: WITH PERMISSION FROM marriage, is the effect this has had on the ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD INTERNATIONAL. subsequent strategy undertaken by anti- equality campaigners. In this context the survey presented me with an opportunity to analyse the arguments against same-sex marriage as they crystallised in the “No” campaign. For example, the Coalition for Marriage,6 perhaps the most visible body behind the “No” campaign, adopted three argumentative strategies: the first, an argument regarding changes to sex- education and parents’ rights; the second, a free speech argument; and the third, an argument concerning freedom of religion.7 Some anti- equality activists do still make arguments by a dip in support for same-sex marriage particular to marriage itself — for instance, they during the campaign period.11 This matters argue that marriage is about recognising a union because arguments such as those produced by which is procreative8 — but these arguments the Coalition for Marriage nonetheless inhibit are no longer the predominant arguments in the equal regard that the queer community are the debate. Activists also rarely tend to argue owed, even if these arguments convince only a for the “wrongness” of homosexuality itself. minority of people. Recently, “No” campaigners actively distanced themselves from comments made by David CHANGING THE DOMINANT van Gend, a spokesman for the Coalition SOCIAL IMAGINARY for Marriage and president of the associated Australian Marriage Forum, after he aired As noted above, bringing about genuine his view that homosexuality is a ‘disordered shifts in public opinion requires more than form of behaviour.’ 9 That the “No” campaign intellectual adoption of a particular point of hardly focused its arguments on the union of view. To be lasting, it also requires emotional marriage, and instead focused on the (alleged) and affective shifts. That is, one must effect direct causal consequences of legal change, changes within the dominant social imaginary. marks a new trajectory in anti-queer advocacy. In previous research, I identified ‘five factors Whilst the slippery-slope tactic has been a for change;’12 I now believe that there are six. staple of fear-mongering for some time, what First, encounters with resistant imaginaries — sets these arguments apart is that the feared-for i.e. with alternative ways of understanding the consequences do not relate to marriage itself.10 worlds that we inhabit and the possibilities for This article provides an analysis of this new collectives of people within it — is required to tactic. I will illustrate the ways in which the “No” generate ‘epistemic friction.’ 13 This is the factor campaign tapped into six factors for change in of contradiction. Second, there must be desire an attempt to hinder social equality and reverse for change. Mere contradiction is not enough shifts in the dominant social imaginary. To some to spark cultural revolution, since humans are extent these tactics were successful, as reflected often surprisingly tolerant of inconsistencies
Humanities Australia 33 in belief sets and worldviews.14 The third factor believed, we are hurtling toward a society of is time. As I have pointed out elsewhere, no ‘gender-bending’ fluidity and confusion, as well change is immediate, it is always gradual. But as sexual experimentation, thanks to the ‘secrecy’ we should also consider the likelihood of change of such programs, which increasingly operate in relation to our “moment in time” — i.e. our without recourse to parents’ wishes and without historical context, as well as our imagined their consent.
BRINGING ABOUT GENUINE SHIFTS IN PUBLIC OPINION REQUIRES MORE THAN INTELLECTUAL ADOPTION OF A PARTICULAR POINT OF VIEW. TO BE LASTING IT ALSO REQUIRES EMOTIONAL AND AFFECTIVE SHIFTS.
future. The extent to which we can expect new Key to making these arguments stick, has meanings to percolate into the dominant social been making “concerned parents,” and in imaginary also depends on some resonance particular, concerned mothers, the face of the between new meanings and the old, since new argument. This has been achieved primarily meaning-generating stories and normative through airing televised advertisements. In one practices must latch onto something that is advertisement, a mother states, ‘School told already endorsed in order to make it sensible. my son he could wear a dress next year if he Thus, resonance is the fourth factor. Fifth, there felt like it,’16 while another claims, ‘Kids in Year must be an element of critique, for without Seven are being asked to role play being in a critique, there would be no challenge to the same-sex relationship.’17 Interspersed by blocks dominant social imaginary. To this, we can add of text, the audience is told that ‘In countries “power” as the sixth factor. Some actors are with gay marriage, parents have lost their rights more capable of bringing about shifts in the to choose’ and that ‘We have a choice. You can dominant social imaginary because they are say no.’18 In a second advertisement, the same perceived as being particularly credible, and women assert that ‘School programs have no hence have more social identity power than place teaching my son radical gender ideas; that others.15 With this, we can analyse the strategy he might not be who he was born as,’ and ask, of the Coalition for Marriage in their campaign ‘How am I supposed to protect my kids in the against marriage equality. future from this stuff?’19 The on-screen text then urges viewers to ‘Say no to these radical sex and 20 ‘SAYING “YES” TO SAME-SEX gender programs.’ Whilst these advertisements MARRIAGE MEANS SAYING “NO” TO contained questionable claims (for instance, PARENTS’ RIGHTS’ schools denied claims that male students were told that they could choose to wear a dress, The first key argument that the Coalition for or that same-sex relationship “role play” was Marriage put forward during the “No” campaign occurring), I find it instructive to analyse how is that marriage equality consequently means these advertisements function when they are that ‘radical’ sex education and gender theory taken to be factual, for it is the interplay between will be taught in schools, and that parents will (presumed) fact and affect that interests me here. lose their right to decide what their children will The purpose of these advertisements is to be taught. In a series of television advertisements imply that support for same-sex marriage is and pamphlets, and throughout their official incompatible with retaining parental rights. website, the Coalition for Marriage targeted They also aim to show that marriage equality the Safe Schools and related programs, warning undermines the binary certainty of sex and of a slippery slope to a society where none of gender. This is the factor of contradiction at the usual ‘safeguards’ for children apply, and work: if marriage equality is permitted, then where parents are rendered powerless by the the natural gender order will be undermined Government and judiciary to stop the queer and parents will be powerless to stop it. The ‘agenda.’ If the Coalition for Marriage is to be implicit critique draws on a latent transphobia,
34 Humanities Australia trading on the affective responses of fear, Government has proposed changes to the Anti- anxiety, outrage, and (likely) disgust, to elicit a Discrimination Act 1998 (Tas), which would see risk-aversive response to the issue of marriage religious groups exempt from s17(1). This section equality — that is, to make uncertain voters provides that a person must not engage in any desire the comfort and certainty of retaining the conduct which offends, humiliates, intimidates, legal status quo. These advertisements are thus insults or ridicules another person on the basis of able to resonate with members of the Australian certain attributes, including sexual orientation. public by presenting the issue of marriage The move for reform was instigated following a equality as inextricably linked to sex education complaint by transgender rights activist Martine and parents’ rights, issues with which many folk Delaney to the Anti-Discrimination Commission are keenly concerned, triggering ‘people’s natural over the distribution of a pastoral letter titled sense of caution and suspicion.’21 The power Don’t Mess with Marriage (though this complaint of these advertisements to elicit a change of was eventually withdrawn after conciliation opinion seems to stem directly from the choice failed). This case and testimony from others who to place young mothers at the centre of the feel they are being forced to support same-sex argument. Women are rarely seen to have much marriage by their employers have prompted cultural authority except in their role as mothers. the assertion that the most far-reaching threat Simultaneously, the Coalition for Marriage are of marriage equality ‘is to the freedom of trying to push back against the assumption that individuals to voice their opinion in this debate, all “No” voters are ‘angry and narrow-minded and to associate with others who do the same.’24 bigots’22 — a mantle usually placed upon men. Once again, slippery-slope reasoning is The effect is that the concerns raised here employed to instil an affective response and appear to be legitimate, although they are in fact shift people’s position on same-sex marriage. predicated on transphobia (i.e. fear, anxiety, or Both fear and indignation play a role here. As even disgust toward the separating of “gender” Damian Wyld — CEO of the Marriage Alliance, from “sex”) and a tenuous causal connection whose handbook was listed as a resource on the between marriage equality and stable gender Coalition for Marriage website — points out, identity. When it was presented prominently Australians only have an implied right to free within a narrow time frame, the subsequent political speech, and he warned: dip in support for marriage equality indicates While the debate about the redefinition the strength of this tactic, and illustrates that the of marriage is occurring in Australia, perception of same-sex marriage as legitimate the ability of a person to voice an opinion within the dominant Australian social imaginary on the push to change the Marriage is precarious at best. Act 1961 should fall within “political communication” and thus be protected ‘SAYING “YES” TO SAME-SEX MARRIAGE by law. But it is arguable that this MEANS SAYING “NO” TO FREEDOM protection would disappear if the law OF SPEECH’ was changed because the debate — and thus the “political communication” — The second key argument that the Coalition for would cease.25 Marriage put forward during the “No” campaign is that marriage equality consequently means Thus, the Coalition for Marriage argued, less protection for free speech. This argument ‘If gender is removed from the marriage comes hot on the heels of a Parliamentary law, it will weaponise federal and state anti- Inquiry into Freedom of Speech in Australia and discrimination laws.’26 They warned that this heated debate as to whether the restrictions has already happened overseas, arguing that in the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (cth) on ‘People have been kicked out of university speech which offends, insults, humiliates or courses, fired, denied business or employment, intimidates a person on the basis of their race or forced to resign for saying what they really should be valued above people’s ‘right to be think.’27 Ultimately, “Yes” campaigners were a bigot.’23 On the local level, the Tasmanian positioned as ‘bullies’ who ‘intimidate people
Humanities Australia 35 into silence,’ who want to override the rights of a Government that ignores their “rights”, whilst “No” campaigners to express their right to free simultaneously having access to many cultural speech, while demanding that those who oppose resources to pursue this aim. same-sex marriage should be forced to offer their business services to those who do, or participate ‘SAYING “YES” TO SAME-SEX in pride events. MARRIAGE MEANS SAYING “NO” TO This is a shrewd argument to advance within RELIGIOUS FREEDOM’ Australia’s current political climate. Again, this argument aims to elicit a desire to maintain the Of all the arguments put forward by the status quo on marriage, but in an interesting Coalition for Marriage, the argument for way. Many Australians are dissatisfied with the religious freedom most clearly betrays a veiled scope of what constitutes racist hate speech fear — that parishes, schools, businesses, and under federal law. By highlighting the Delaney individuals will be reproached if they steadfastly case, brought in a state with similar laws applying retain and express their belief that queers to homophobic speech, the “No” campaign can ought not to be seen as equivalent to straights. capitalise on current dissatisfaction with the law However, opposing marriage equality on grounds and standards of political correctness. Because of religious freedom does not, to their mind, freedom of speech debates have played such mean “No” voters are ‘bad people,’ ‘haters,’ or a prominent role in recent public discourse, ‘bigots.’30 The issue is accordingly recast as a fight there is a high degree of resonance, and hence to prevent an intolerable future, one in which higher likelihood of changing public opinion if their rights and freedoms are trampled, which people can see a direct link between marriage certainly cannot be permitted. Apparently, equality and freedom of speech. The campaign The concerns about the freedom of was able to piggy-back off the critiques which religion extend far beyond whether an have already been levelled at the Australian individual minister of religion or celebrant Government for failing to adequately protect is required to solemnise a same-sex freedom of speech. This allowed campaigners wedding. It has to do with what faith to assert that they bear no ill-will towards the leaders will be able to preach, what schools queer community, and assert that they were and parents will be able to teach, and campaigning merely because they ‘don’t trust how every day Australians will be able to what a “Yes” vote will mean’ for the future.28 conduct their businesses in accordance More strongly, they may assert that ‘If we change with their beliefs.31 marriage, we change what we are free to say.’29 What the “No” campaign is trying to capitalise The Coalition for Marriage were also concerned on, is the idea that a society which permits as to whether faith-based charities will retain same-sex marriage cannot co-exist with a society their tax-exempt status, and whether religious that protects free speech (the contradiction organisations will be permitted to hire people component). Time also plays a role here, not only who support their ethos, as they have done in in the sense of duration — since appeals to some the past. uncertain, risky future are employed as a scare- Again, in this argument, the Coalition for tactic — but in the sense of timeliness. Ten years Marriage tries to present religious observers as ago, the free speech argument against same- the threatened underdogs. They suggest that sex marriage simply would not have as much the Government ‘has not made it clear what political resonance as it does today. Finally, the protections for freedom of religion, if any, role of power in this argument is also interesting: will be included in any legislation to change “No” campaigners position themselves as the Marriage Act,’32 whilst warning that any underdogs who need to fight back against the protections that are received may prove to be ‘elite’ — the powerful triad of parliamentarians, ultimately futile. They point to Opposition media conglomerates, and corporations. This Leader Bill Shorten’s commitment to ‘repealing allows campaigners to feel as though they are protections for religious freedom if they were fighting for their own empowerment and against contained in legislation to change the Marriage
36 Humanities Australia MARRIAGE EQUALITY: (far left) BECOMING ‘NORMAL’ Fig. 3. Australian and Rainbow flags The Coalition for Marriage utilised some IMAGE: NITO, shrewd tactics to garner support for their ID 756241684, SHUTTERSTOCK.COM cause. They provided new meaning-generating stories, charged with affect, that attach to the issue of marriage equality. The affective charge was strengthened by the fact that changes to the norms of one institution (marriage) do seem — indirectly, at least — to pave the way for further normative shifts around gender, sex, and sexuality which some may not be ready for. By presenting threats to children and parents’ rights, free speech, and religious freedom as direct causal consequences of same-sex marriage, voters were led to believe that changes to the status quo would bring about an intolerable dystopian future. This elicits fear and resistance to change — and it is by playing up to these fears that the Coalition for Marriage managed some success in their campaign. The Coalition for Marriage were keenly Act’33 as evidence to support The Australian aware that ‘people need motivation more Editor-at-Large Paul Kelly’s comment that than information to vote;’ consequently, ‘there would eventually be no “halfway house” neighbourhood campaign training material permitted when it comes to acceptance of encourages ‘Brief dialogue and not a lengthy same-sex marriage.’34 The freedom of religion debate.’36 Minimising their arguments against argument is presented as a zero-sum game: same-sex marriage down to a few anxiety- either we protect religious groups, or we permit inducing sound bites, engaging ‘people’s same-sex marriage and ‘give a free pass to natural sense of caution and suspicion,’ is a the government to make legislation without clever strategy to elicit their preferred response important protections.’35 The implicit critique in voters.37 By appealing to contemporary is that we can have one or the other, but we political concerns in Australia, campaigners were cannot have both (contradiction), and we should able to tap into voters’ sense of fear, disgust, and privilege freedom of religion. The aim is to even indignation. achieve resonance with “soft” religious voters (left) who are intending to vote “Yes.” If the value Fig. 4. Louise of freedom of religion resonates with them, Richardson-Self and they see this value as more desirable and accepts the 2016 simultaneously contradictory with marriage Max Crawford Medal at the equality, they should be driven to vote “No,” Fellows’ Dinner, instead. The intention with this argument is to Melbourne capitalise on people’s conservative tendencies, IMAGE: MICHELLE assuring them that it really is okay to say “No,” McFARLANE all while instilling fear that they will lose certain forms of control (or power) over their own lives if “anti-discrimination” is to trump “freedom of religion”.
Humanities Australia 37 But, of course, the success of this tactic 1. Misha Schubert, ‘Public backs gay unions, ultimately rested with how plausible the causal equality’, The Age, 21 June 2007
38 Humanities Australia 10. Comparatively, consider the arguments put coalitionformarriage/pages/361/attachments/ forward in Bill Muehlenberg, ‘No’, Why vs original/1505535929/C4M_Field_-_NVC_ Why: Gay Marriage (Seaforth, N.S.W.: Pantera Training_Script.pdf?1505535929> [Accessed Press, 2010), pp. 1–48 — each relates directly 31 October 2017]. to marriage or the wrongness of the queer 22. Shelton, ‘Neighbourhood Visitation Campaign,’ lifestyles. p. 5. 11. David Crowe, ‘Newspoll: “Yes” vote losing 23. George Brandis, in Emma Griffiths, ‘George ground’, The Australian, 25 September 2017 Brandis defends “right to be a bigot” Humanities Australia 39 Shakespeare and Lost Plays » DAVID McINNIS In 1623, when a consortium of stationers and aberration, but rather is completely typical of the members of London’s premier acting company, fate of playtexts from the early modern period. the King’s men, assembled the First Folio of My work over the last ten years has focused William Shakespeare’s plays, they ensured that on lost plays from Shakespeare’s England: from at least 18 of his previously unpublished works assessing the extent of the loss to compiling would survive to the present day. Such plays the historical records pertaining to lost plays as Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night and and theorising how early modernists might Antony and Cleopatra had not appeared in print acknowledge and work productively with such by 1623. Possibly they would have been printed lacunae in the canon. The late-sixteenth and (above) individually at a later date; Othello, after all, early-seventeenth-century London playhouses Fig. 1. Lost Plays Database logo had only been printed for the first time in 1622, were hosts to repertory companies: companies designed by Brett despite having been written c.1601 to 1604, and whose commercial survival depended on offering Greatley-Hirsch. The Two Noble Kinsmen, written around 1613 a variety of plays, up to six days a week, and who IMAGE: COURTESY to 1614 with John Fletcher, was printed for the competed with rival companies for playgoer DAVID McINNIS, IMAGE: FOLGER co-authorship is assured, yet which has been of these figures, I’ve argued that a fundamental SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY 2 COLLECTION, CC BY- lost. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the paradigm shift is needed: whatever we think we SA 4.0. ‘Cardenio’ example is the fact that it is not a freak know about the drama of Shakespeare’s day is 40 Humanities Australia Humanities Australia 40 based on one-sixth of the theatrical output, yet Stationers’ Register entries asserting someone’s we continue to extrapolate trends and features right to print the manuscript, and in the diary of from this minority as if they were typical or Rose playhouse manager Philip Henslowe. A title representative. The reality is that the very fact of can provide information about genre (‘The New their survival makes them atypical. World’s Tragedy’), about subject matter (‘Saul At first glance, the prospect of studying and David’), about form (‘The Second Part of something that does not exist — almost 2,500 Fortune’s Tennis’), about the topicality of drama somethings that do not exist, to be precise — (‘Amboyna’), or about the industry’s appetite for seems unpromising. In a field where a play duplication of topics (‘Hamlet’; ‘Richard III, or unlucky enough to lack the name ‘Shakespeare’ The English Prophet’). Such information can be on its title page is often neglected by critics, sufficient to complicate our sense of the kinds a play whose script has perished rarely rates of plays an author was writing, providing a more a mention in scholarship. The conventional holistic account of their career: Robert Wilson, wisdom has always been that some things are for example, is known chiefly for his comic, lost for a reason, and only the best plays survive.4 late-morality plays The Three Ladies of London The effect of such Bardolatrous and pseudo- (1581) and its sequel The Three Lords and Three Darwinian value judgements is the rendering Ladies of London (1588), but wrote at least sixteen of lost plays as virtually invisible. In many cases, now lost plays ranging from domestic tragedy to where the title of a lost play is unknown, the play Chaucerian romance and English, Danish, and cannot even be indexed, further impeding critical Classical history.5 Alternatively, knowledge of work on the topic. titles can stand to affect how we perceive entire But all is not lost. Of the thousands of lost categories of play: in my doctoral work on voyage plays, at least 744 are ‘identifiably’ lost in the drama I noticed that the surviving plays about sense that we know something concrete about travel were either romances (The Tempest) or them: their title perhaps; a fragment of dialogue satires (Eastward Ho) but only very rarely steeped from them or an eyewitness account of a scene; in recent history. Adding the lost travel plays to maybe even a document of performance such as the mix changes the picture significantly: ‘The a backstage plot or an actor’s part. A title alone Conquest of the West Indies’ (1601), ‘The New is invaluable, and hundreds of these survive in World’s Tragedy’ (1595), and ‘The Plantation of licencing records of the Master of the Revels, in Virginia’ (1623), to name a few.6 (left) Fig. 2. Scenario of a play set in Thrace and Macedon, X.d.206, 1v-2r. IMAGE: FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY (CC BY-SA 4.0 LICENCE) Humanities Australia 41 (right) Figs. 3 and 3a. List of theatrical costumes for ‘Saul and David’ (1588), f MS Thr 276 recto, f MS Thr 276 verso. IMAGE: REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION FROM HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY. A fuller picture of theatrical activity in mixed up with documentary evidence). Being a London, 1567 to 1642, helps us understand wiki, the site is always updatable by the editors what is arguably the single most important and contributors as new information or insights context for Shakespeare’s work: the plays he was come to hand, and the MediaWiki software responding to and influencing, in the repertories facilitates easy linking of entries to other titles of his own company and of the rival companies. via shared category tags (e.g. ‘travel’; ‘classical’; The first step towards such a recovery was the ‘magic’). Unlike Wikipedia, contributors must creation of an open-access website for theatre apply for editing privileges, and we editors review historians to contribute whatever snippets of changes to the database’s entries on a daily basis. knowledge they possessed about individual lost Typically, new users require some mentoring plays. The Lost Plays Database (www.lostplays. as they craft their first few entries, particularly folger.edu), which I created and co-edit with around the question of the subheading under Professor Emerita Roslyn L. Knutson (University which a given snippet of information should fall: of Arkansas, Little Rock) and Professor Matthew academics tend to prefer confident narratives Steggle (University of Bristol), serves this to admission of ignorance, yet something purpose. Its primary function is to elevate as seemingly neutral as ascribing a play to a the profile of lost plays as a valid subject of particular company or theatre can in fact turn scholarly discussion. It does so by assembling all out to be nothing but supposition. In that case, the scattered references to a lost play within a the information more properly belongs under the single convenient entry, where users can access ‘Critical Commentary’ section not the ‘Theatrical digitisations or transcriptions of the relevant Provenance’ section, because it cannot yet be historical records; editorial summaries of the confirmed. A user’s contribution to an entry will known facts pertaining to authorship, company be logged in the metadata associated with that and venue auspices; and scholarly conjecture page, even if their contribution is subsequently about possible narrative and dramatic sources or altered, emended, or dispensed with altogether. analogues. Each entry conforms to a templated As an Australian scholar, making the database hierarchy of evidence, commencing with primary open-access and providing users with high documents, progressing to interpretation, and quality digitisations of archival documents ending with speculation that might one day was of paramount importance to me. Between bear fruit (but which, for the present time, is 2014 and 2016, when I held an ARC Discovery cordoned off in a separate category, not to be Project grant for work on lost plays, I was able 42 Humanities Australia to significantly improve the multimedia content a costume list once associated with leading of the site with a view to making remote access Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn and his brother (above) to primary documents available to scholars (figs. 3 and 3a); a plot ‘argument’ summarising the Figs. 4 and 4a. and the general public around the world. action of a lost Children of Paul’s play, ‘Meleager’ A plot ‘argument’ To the majority of Antipodean students, the (1580) (figs. 4 and 4a); and the entire actor’s ‘part’ summarising the historical documents pertaining to Shakespeare’s for the role of ‘Poore’ in a play which is otherwise action of a lost 8 Children of Paul’s lifetime are shrouded in mystery and reserved lost altogether. Although it is often noted that play, ‘Meleager’ for inspection only by those with greater actors in Shakespeare’s time did not receive (1580), MS Eng proximity to the holding libraries. Transcriptions copies of the full script, only of their individual 1285. are sometimes available but transcriptions lines, access to such parts has been severely IMAGE: REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION FROM almost inevitably introduce errors or require limited until now. HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY. compromise in formatting and presentation. Besides these documents of performance, we One of the rarest of playhouse documents is have now digitised theatrical ephemera including the backstage ‘plot’ or ‘platt’: a scene-by-scene the entirety of Jacob Henry Burn’s transcripts of roadmap of the play’s action, including entrances Sir Henry Herbert’s licensing records from the and sometimes props or special effects. These Beinecke Library at Yale, and the snippets of J. single sheets of paper were apparently hung O. Halliwell-Phillips’s transcriptions of Herbert’s backstage to facilitate the performance. Of the records from the Folger; between them, these six that survive, one is for an extant play (George cover most of the known copies of the Master Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar) and the others are of the Revels’ licensing documents for the for lost plays. We have digitised all the extant period.9 Other digitisations include various backstage plots pertaining to lost plays: ‘The manuscript accounts of lost plays in diaries and Second Part of the Seven Deadly Sins’, ‘The Dead letters; court records and other correspondence Man’s Fortune’, ‘The Second Part of Fortune’s from the National Archives; and a number of Tennis’, ‘Frederick and Basilea’ and ‘Troilus manuscript and printed accounts of plays once and Cressida’ (as well as George Steevens’ in a collector or publisher’s possession. We transcription of the now lost plot of ‘Tamar have even been fortunate enough to digitise Cham, part 1’, printed in 1803 but not previously musical manuscripts containing songs from available in digital form).7 The Houghton Library plays which have otherwise perished, and at Harvard has assisted with the digitisation of a had these fragments recorded by professional number of unique documents of performance: musicians using modern replicas of historical Humanities Australia 43 instruments. Anyone using our site can now ascertain precisely when Hamlet premiered listen (for example) to a recording of a song that or what its repertorial partners were. By my seems to have originated in the lost Shakespeare- count, a mere 34 plays can be associated with Fletcher ‘Cardenio’ play, performed by mezzo- the Lord Chamberlain’s men (Shakespeare’s soprano Sally-Anne Russell and accompanied company) between 1594 and 1603; yet to remain by triple harp, baroque violin, theorbo and viola competitive with their chief rivals, the Lord da gamba.10 Admiral’s men, the Chamberlain’s would have Significantly more work needs to be done on required over 300 plays in their repertory. creating and continuing entries for the database, How Hamlet originally fitted into that context but we have demonstrably raised the profile of remains unclear. the subject area now. In 2016, the New Oxford Whilst the significance of attending to Shakespeare cited the Lost Plays Database as the lost plays is no longer doubted, the challenge authoritative source of information about lost remains as to how scholars who are not working plays of the period,11 and in late 2017 the Folger exclusively on the topic might nevertheless Shakespeare Library offered to host the LPD incorporate discussion of lost plays into their as a Folger Resource (an offer we’ve gratefully own work. Perhaps Shakespeareans are late accepted). The database was featured as the to the party: students of Classical literature MLA International Bibliography’s ‘Website of have been coping with loss for centuries, after the Week’ in 2017, has provided the impetus for all. The example of the preserved fragments a performance-based research symposium on of Sappho is instructive in this regard. Recent lost plays at King’s College London in 2016 and estimates suggest that Greek scholars in is taught as part of a graduate course syllabus Alexandria in the third and second centuries (‘Digitizing the Early Modern’) at University BC edited nine or ten papyrus scrolls of of California, Davis. The British Government’s Sappho’s poetry, amounting to approximately Intute site cites the LPD as a state of the art 10,000 lines, of which only 650 have survived.12 resource making Web 2.0 serve scholarly Traditional textual scholarship changes in the purposes. More importantly, scholars now use it context of such fragments, where emendation in their work, and analyses of the early modern gives way to more elaborate conjecture, and theatrical marketplace no longer gloss over the close-reading is de-emphasised. Learning from inconvenient fact that the vast majority of plays this example, English literary scholars might from the period have perished. adjust their approach to playtexts to allow more A pleasing corollary is the changing attitude explicitly for the fact that scripts do not capture to what constitutes a ‘play’ and a heightened live events perfectly, let alone live events that recognition that a playtext is merely one have been collaboratively produced by a team document of performance; it is not the live of actors using texts of uncertain authority event itself, and nor does it fully encapsulate the which, if they survived at all, were subjected to history and dimensions of a play. We have three further mediation by typesetters, printers and significantly different early editions ofHamlet , publishers, and modern editors, before reaching for example, but significantly less information us. The parallel case in the Classics saw the rise about its early stage history than we have for of such specialised scholars as fragmentologists many lost plays (dates and box office takings for and reconstructionists; it fostered increases in which have been preserved in Henslowe’s diary collaborative scholarship, and the provision of accounts of the Rose playhouse throughout expertly edited transcriptions of the primary the entire 1590s). We do not have a backstage sources has been key, as has a willingness to plot for Hamlet, an authorial manuscript, a revise received narratives on the basis of new promptbook, related ballads or chapbooks, any archival discoveries. Fragments may require of the actors’ parts, a playbill, or an eyewitness a context in order to elucidate their meaning, account of a live performance (except for an but as Classicists have known for a long ambiguous report of a possible rendition aboard time, fragments also provide a context for a ship anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone in extant drama. 1607). Unlike numerous lost plays, we cannot 44 Humanities Australia (left) Figs. 5 and 5a. ‘Eine schone luftige triumphirende Comoedia von eines Koniges Sohn aufs Engellandt vnd des Koniges Tochter aufs Schottlandt’, a German redaction of a lost English play ‘King of England's Son and the King of Scotland's Daughter’ published in 1620 in an octavo volume edited by Friedrich Menius (1593–1659) entitled Engelische Comedien und Tragedien, sig R6v and sig.R7r (pictured). IMAGE: FOLGER SHAKESPEARE LIBRARY (CC BY-SA 4.0 LICENCE). Like the crumbling ruins of castles valued by prior to the alterations made for performance the Romantic poets, fragments of lost plays can before Elizabeth I. Another play, Comoedia von provide fascinating insights into the construction eines Koniges Sohn aufs Engellandt vnd des Koniges and purpose of surviving drama. Unsurprisingly, Tochter aufs Schottlandt — which in English is most of the manuscript fragments of lost plays roughly ‘The King of England’s Son and The King are drafts, plot outlines, or works-in-progress of Scotland’s Daughter’ — is apparently a witness by amateur playwrights: many of the writers are to a play of the 1590s that no longer survives unknown, but others include famed antiquary in English but is fully preserved in the German and politician Sir Edward Dering and the version published in 1620 (figs. 5 and 5a).13 The philosopher John Locke (both of whom tried play is premised on the King of England sending their hands at writing travel drama), and East his son (Serule) to fight the King of Scotland India Company factor Benjamin Greene. Their but with him instead falling in love with the attempts at writing provide insights into amateur Scottish king’s daughter (Astrea). The lovers perceptions of the play-writing process. On negotiate a year’s truce, during which time they the other hand, plays that were translated into hope to engineer a more lasting peace. Serule, new languages and cultures provide interesting however, is barred from engaging with the Scots. perspectives on dramaturgy and adaptation. To overcome this injunction, he places a spy in The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries the household of the Scottish king’s advisor, the were performed on the Continent throughout his magician Runcifax (subsequently referred to as lifetime. In the 1580s and 90s, travelling English ‘Barabas’), and manages to enter the Scottish players tended to perform redactions of London court himself by adopting the disguise of a plays in English as they toured Germany, Austria, fool. The magician’s magic mirror reveals that the low countries and Scandinavia; by the early the princess will marry the fool, news of which seventeenth century, they were performing in enrages the Scottish king, but Serule escapes — German and other languages. Surviving examples only to return disguised this time as a Moor. of these German language versions of English This plan, too, is thwarted and Serule flees with plays have received little attention since the the now disguised Astrea. He is captured by the early twentieth century and the World Wars. Scots, and she by the English; a battle ensues The German version of Thomas Dekker’s Old and tragedy is narrowly avoided when Serule is Fortunatus (1599) apparently corresponds to the poisoned (but only with a sleeping potion). A kiss English author’s pre-publication draft of the play, from Astrea revives him and a royal wedding is Humanities Australia 45 the study of lost plays. The second metaphor comes from art history, and elucidates the one-to-many or many-to-many relationship between the surviving and lost drama of the period. I’m thinking here of ‘Rubin’s vase’, the black and white illustration of the silhouette of a vase — or is it two faces looking at each other? — developed by the Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in 1915 as part of his dissertation on visually experienced figures. Art historians sometimes refer to this interplay of the figure and ground in terms of ‘negative space’; the space around a focal object in an artwork that is itself particularly significant in its own way. In this metaphor, I suggest that rather than thinking of lost plays as gaps in the corpus that resist scrutiny, we should revalue them more productively in terms of how they have planned. We’ve recently digitised the German contributed to the structure of the extant corpus. (above) text printed in 1620 and I am collaborating with Lost plays are now part of the critical Fig. 6. David a native German playwright, Dr André Bastian, landscape for early modernists as a discrete McInnis being to translate the German back into English and subject of inquiry. The task ahead is to ensure presented with the 2016 Max Crawford prepare a critical edition of the retranslated play. appropriate integration with wider discourses Medal at the Annual There is, then, a great deal we can do with and hopefully to bring about, in the process, Fellows’ Dinner, lost plays; the challenge is to convince even a fundamental shift in the way we regard the Melbourne. textual scholars that absent playtexts deserve theatrical activity of Shakespeare’s London. ¶ IMAGE: MICHELLE McFARLANE more than mere footnotes or lip-service. The strategy I propose in the monograph I’m DAVID McINNIS is the Gerry currently drafting is that we avail ourselves of Higgins Senior Lecturer in some instructive interdisciplinary metaphors Shakespeare Studies at the University of Melbourne. In 2016 for working with perceptions of absence. The he was jointly awarded the first bears upon the relationship between Australian Academy of the a single extant play and a single lost play: a Humanities’ Max Crawford Medal one-to-one relationship. The metaphor comes along with Dr Louise Richardson- from astrophysics, and the historically unique Self. He is author of Mind-Travelling and Voyage circumstances in which the existence and Drama in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2013) and characteristics of the planet Neptune were co-editor (with Claire Jowitt) of Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play predicted before it was first sighted through (Cambridge UP, 2018). With Matthew Steggle, he a telescope. Observation of irregularities in edited Lost Plays in Shakespeare’s England (Palgrave, the elliptic orbit of Uranus led the French 2014), and he is currently preparing a second mathematician Urbain Le Verrier to realise co-edited collection and a monograph on lost plays. that something significant must be disrupting He is editing Dekker’s Old Fortunatus for the Revels Newton’s universal law of gravitation. He Plays series (Manchester UP) and his If This Be Not A was able to calculate the precise location and Good Play, The Devil Is In It for Jeremy Lopez’s new Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama. His size of the cause of these disruptions, leading essays have been published in Review of English to the discovery of Neptune within half an Studies; Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England; hour of notifying the Berlin Observatory of Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900; Notes & his theory. Plays, too, exert influence on their Queries, and elsewhere. With Roslyn L. Knutson and repertorial neighbours in the early modern Matthew Steggle, he is founder and co-editor of the theatrical ecology, and anomalies in extant Lost Plays Database. plays can potentially be accounted for via 46 Humanities Australia 1. The established convention is to use italics for 7. See the LPD entries tagged with the ‘plots and titles of extant plays and quotation marks to arguments’ label, Humanities Australia 47 THE BATTLEGROUND OF TROY IN THE MIND’S EYE: HOMER’S LANDSCAPE OF WAR » ELIZABETH MINCHIN This discussion begins in the Australian away, inevitably, to the figures of fighting men, War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra. Here in the arrested, as it were, in the midst of action: we galleries devoted to the First World War we find see them, picked out by subtle lighting effects, a series of dioramas representing significant moving around below ground level in the battles in which Australian forces have been trenches (those trenches that characterise World involved, on the Western Front and on the War I operations) and, on the surface, hurling Gallipoli Peninsula, not so distant from the plain grenades, attending to their guns, striking out of Troy across the strait.1 As we study these across no man’s land, or being overwhelmed by sculpted landscapes of war our attention is held enemy fire (fig. 1).2 by two aspects of these representations: by the When they were first displayed, in Melbourne topography itself and by the evidence of human and then Sydney in the 1920s, and eventually, in presence, of life experienced. The battlefields 1941, in the newly built Australian War Memorial represented here are, as we would expect, in Canberra, these dioramas were on view in the uniformly bleak and desolate: the terrain is hush of a museum gallery.3 Intended for silent irregular, eaten away by shelling; buildings have contemplation they were devised to give the been reduced to rubble; instead of the trees viewer a sense of what had actually occurred (this and grasses that had once covered the land we was the reality of war) and to have an emotional (above) see nothing but mud; and here in the mud our impact. More recently, however, in a rejection Montage using article figures eyes linger for a moment on the bodies of the of stillness and silence, the experience has and text. wounded and the dead. Our attention is drawn been extended beyond the visual. The galleries (right) Fig. 1. Lone Pine diorama at the Australian War Memorial IMAGE: AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL, PUBLIC DOMAIN (CC BY-NC 3.0 AU) 48 Humanities Australia in which these models are displayed were narratives that describe spatial environments: refurbished in 2015; they are now filled with I am interested in what it is that we construct in recorded sound: the sharp shock of gunfire, the our mind’s eye and how we transmit this image resonance of exploding shells.4 Each diorama is to others. now accompanied too by interactive electronic displays, which contextualise the battle, evaluate THE TOPOGRAPHY OF THE TROJAN its significance, and list casualty numbers. The PLAIN: HOMER’S LOCATIVE INFORMATION experience of the diorama — the scene before one’s eyes, the sounds playing in one’s ears, and Despite the fact that most of the action of the the signage — is now more than instructive; it is Iliad takes place on the battlefield, the epic itself immersive, absorbing. This is as close as many of is by no means a ‘one-scene’ tale, to use David us will come to a landscape of war. Rubin’s phrase.7 The principal events in Homer’s The first literary work that has survived to us battle-narrative occur in different locations in the Western tradition was also preoccupied within the confines of the plain — between with warfare, with its glory and its pathos, strong-founded Ilion with its high walls and and with its consequences for the lives of the beach, where we find the ships and the those caught up in its wake. Like the creators shelters. The plain itself, like the battlefields of the AWM dioramas, the poet of the Iliad of World War I as they are represented in the creates a grim and desolate terrain; unlike the AWM, is almost, but not entirely — and this is creators of the dioramas, his principal tools are significant — not entirely, devoid of landmarks: words. My aim in this essay is to analyse how in the expanse between the walls of Troy and a traditional poet succeeds in creating, in the the Achaean ditch there is, apart from the minds of his audience members, a landscape Scamander and its ford, a fig tree, an oak tree, a as grim and as desolate as the small-scale watching-post, and the grave of Troy’s founder, (below) representations we can see in a war museum — Ilos. This near-desolation is plausible, in the light Fig. 2. Jean- and how, using the poetic strategies at his of years of hand-to-hand fighting; and, by virtue Baptiste Lechevalier, disposal, he can evoke in his audiences powerful of its economy, it is eminently functional. ‘Mr Pope’s Map of emotional responses to those representations An economical representation of landscape is the Plain of Troy’ (1792) of a landscape in which nature is denatured and what we should expect of a practising oral poet, 5 IMAGE: INTERNET men suffer and die. who makes it his task to hold in memory all the ARCHIVE BOOK IMAGES For Homer, landscape is not simply a locations that he identifies in his song. He should Humanities Australia 49 to describe it, a ‘spatial mental model’.8 Each of away behind Achilles’ chariot and out towards these locations serves a double purpose: each the ships (463–65). one in some way represents a narrative ‘staging The long-range, even telescopic, perspective post’, the appropriate setting in which some of the gods completes the mental model. They element of the action unfolds; and each one view the contest from the lofty vantage point operates as a retrieval cue for the material of his on Olympus (XXIV. 23), or come down to earth tale, in the same way that Cicero used loci and to watch from Mount Ida, behind Troy (Zeus, imagines as a mnemonic system.9 I shall address at VIII. 47–52, XI. 181–84), or from the island of these points separately. Samothrace (Poseidon, at XIII. 10–14): Although exact spatial references, so critical Neither did the powerful earthshaker keep to the fabricant of a diorama, are not important a blind watch; to the poet, or to his audience, it is clear that the for he sat and admired the fighting and the poet knows the Trojan plain well. He knows it run of battle, so well that he can lead his audience in a linear aloft on top of the highest summit of fashion along a variety of routes, crossing it timbered Samos, back and forth from Troy to the ships of the the Thracian place; and from there all Ida Achaeans, and from side to side: we can follow appeared before him, the short route taken by the Embassy, as they and the city of Priam was plain to see, and walk along the shore from Agamemnon’s hut to the ships of the Achaeans.13 Achilles’ ships and his shelter (IX. 177–85), Priam and Idaeus’s longer journey from the city to that And, indeed, we must include in our model same shelter (XXIV. 322–447), or the movement the depths of the sea, Poseidon’s realm, of the opposing forces, and even of individual where Achilles’ mother Thetis also dwells heroes, back and forth across the battlefield at (I. 357–8). Thus, through both route and survey any one point in time.10 information, the poet enables us to do more than A route description, as outlined above, develop a two-dimensional ‘map’ of the Trojan offers one perspective on landscape.11 But the plain; we slowly build something like the poet’s poet asks us to adopt as well a bird’s eye, or own three-dimensional spatial mental model, survey, perspective, as he does when Priam which enables us to follow with relative ease the and the Trojan elders sit on the tower at the story he tells. Scaean gates, overlooking the Trojan plain, As for the features of the landscape identified and ask Helen to identify individual Achaean by the poet, they serve as the bases for the heroes assembled there (III. 146–244); or when organisation of his narrative.14 Unlike many Menelaus, responding to Ajax’s suggestion, goes storytellers who compose in writing, the oral in search of Antilochus, who will bear the news poet takes pains to establish a setting, minimal of Patroclus’ death to Achilles (XVII. 651–81).12 as it may be, for each episode; he notes each The poet compares Menelaus to an eagle, who change of scene.15 It is by these means that he hovers in the air, seeking his prey: indeed a bird’s counters the potential for confusion, for himself, eye view. Later in the poem, Priam takes his place as he tells his tale, and for his audience, as they again on the walls (XXII. 25) and watches as the follow him. Trojans retreat in flight to the safety of the city, Thus, for example, the tomb of Ilos serves as with Achilles behind them, sweeping across the a focus for action: the Trojan elders, according plain. Priam is joined by Hecuba, and together to Dolon, hold council here on the battlefield they beseech their son from above to leave his by night (X. 414–16); the tomb serves as the position outside the walls in front of the gates waymark as the Trojans flee in panic back to (38–91); and from here they watch as Hector the safety of the city walls (XI. 166–68), and, meets his death. Later still Andromache hurries in the other direction, as Priam sets out on his to the wall, full of foreboding (447–61). She too night-time journey to Achilles (XXIV. 349). The stands and gazes out over the plain, only to see ford on the Scamander is another such site: the body of her husband now being dragged when Hector is struck by the rock Ajax hurls he collapses (XIV. 409–13). He is carried from the 50 Humanities Australia (left) Fig. 3. Looking towards Samothrace across the plain of Troy and the Hellespont, and beyond the island of Imbros. PHOTO: JONATHAN BROWN fighting in his chariot. Only when the horses are So, as the Achaeans rush to the ships in response stopped at the ford on the Scamander does the to Agamemnon’s test of their will (II. 149–51), hero regain consciousness (433–39). It is here that they raise the dust (150); they are white with Apollo later finds him and restores his strength dust (V. 503) as their horses wheel about on the (XV. 239–42); it is here too that Priam and Idaeus plain; Asios in death claws at the bloody dust encounter Hermes (XXIV. 350–53) and where (XIII. 393); Sarpedon falls and claws the bloody Hermes, next morning, leaves them (692–94). dust (XVI. 486); and, finally, Hector drops in the In each case, the landmark not only serves to dust (XXII. 330); and, as he is dragged behind keep the story in good order; it also prompts the the hero’s chariot, his whole head is covered poet’s memory for the episode itself. in dust (405). During the days of fighting this dusty surface at times runs with the blood of the LANDSCAPE AS A REALM OF EXPERIENCE: wounded (IV. 451). The only natural feature here, HOMER’S NONLOCATIVE INFORMATION apart from the landmark trees I noted above, are the stones that serve as useful missiles: see, for George Miller, the cognitive psychologist, tells example, III. 79–80; IV. 518–19; XII. 154–55. us that, as he reads a detailed description of All descriptive material is presented a landscape, the ‘image’ (as he calls it) that he incidentally; each descriptor is built into the conjures up in his mind’s eye cannot correspond narrative: a dying hero claws at the bloody dust; in all its details to what is set out in the text; another is felled by a stone casually taken up according to Miller, what he ‘sees’ is in many from the ground; as Hector’s body is dragged respects a generic representation of landscape; to the ships it stirs up the dust. As is the case he doesn’t fill in all the details.16 We all recognise with the dioramas of the AWM, however, the Miller’s impatience with prolonged description. landscape assumes a more complex — and It seems to me that the poet of the Iliad also grimmer — character when the poet includes recognised this, although intuitively. He has not the presence of the Achaean and Trojan heroes.19 invested poetic energy in locating and generating As the army of the Achaeans hastens to assemble, detailed material of a purely descriptive kind. the bronze of their armour gleams (II. 457–58; His landscape is, we conclude, bleak and bare. IV. 431–2; XX. 156). In the press of fighting we see He gives us only a little explicit nonlocative in our mind’s eye the tangled knot of men (XVII. information about the Trojan plain.17 At several 679–80); we see weapons hurled (for example, points the poet tells us that the plain is dusty IV. 459–62), horses brought down (16.467–9), (no rain, we notice, falls during the fighting).18 men falling (for example, IV. 462); we see Humanities Australia 51 shocking wounds (for example, XI. 97–8), and audience’s unwillingness to process and to work contests over the dead (IV. 463–72), whose bodies with detailed description. These multimedia are pulled and tugged in all directions (XVII. overlays in their variety invite us to create our 389–95). And, at some points of the narrative, own mental representation of this landscape we see the terrain strewn (XXI. 344) with the of war. corpses of the fallen. But the poet does not rely on visual effects These images of action in the landscape are alone. He presents us also with a soundscape. intensified by the poet’s similes that compare We hear the thunder (XIX. 363–4) of an army the gathering of the fighting men to swarms of on the move; the thunder of horses on the run bees (II. 87–90), or of wasps by the roadside (XVI. (XVI. 393; XVII. 740–41); the ‘unearthly clamour’ 259–62), or that compare the force of the attack of men (VIII. 159=XII. 252=XIII. 834=XV. 590); of one or the other side to a blazing fire (XI. 596; the calling of man to man in the thick of battle XVII. 736–39). At some moments Achaeans and (8.346–7; 15.424, 658), their appeals to the gods Trojans are evenly matched: a comparison with (VIII. 346–347); shouts and threats and vaunts in the battle between the east and south wind (XVI. the thick of the contest (IV. 450; XVI. 565–66); 765–69) allows us to envisage the closeness of the notes of terror in their voices (XVI. 373–74; the contests. At other moments it is one side XVII. 756, 759); the battering and clashing of that carries the day: Hector comes on against shields by spears, swords, arrows, and stones (IV. the Achaeans like a rolling stone on a rock face 447; XII. 338; XVI. 774); the screams of horses — (XIII. 137–42). As battle rages, we observe the and men — as they are killed (IV. 450; XVI. lust for slaughter, as a hero moves through the 468–69); and the crash of armour as a great hero throng like a wolf amongst lambs (XVI. 352–55) falls (IV. 504=V. 42=XIII. 187). A certain amount or a lion amongst cattle (XI. 172–76; XV. 630–36). of onomatopoeia — in expressions that capture These similes, by virtue of their readily picturable the battering and clattering, the shrieking images of the destructive force of nature, and by and shouting (οἰμωγή, IV. 450; σμερδνὸν virtue of repetition (the essential repetition of βοόων, XV. 732), the whistling of arrows and 20 the central narrative idea), assist us in building the thump of spears (ὀϊστῶν τε ῥοῖζον καὶ up a more complex mental representation of the δοῦπον ἀκόντων, XVI. 361), and the impact Trojan plain under siege. of battle action on the earth beneath — ensures THESE MULTIMEDIA OVERLAYS IN THEIR VARIETY INVITE US TO CREATE OUR OWN MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF THIS LANDSCAPE OF WAR. In discussing how an individual builds a that the din of battle resonates, automatically, scene in his or her mind’s eye using nonlocative in our senses. The soundtrack of the Iliad is information, Tversky proposes the metaphor as important to our engagement with this of a ‘cognitive collage’; she describes such a landscape of war as are the poet’s visual effects.22 collage as a sequence of ‘thematic overlays of This was brought home to me quite emphatically multimedia from different points of view’.21 after I had viewed the dioramas of the AWM — Like the elements of a collage, this information allowing the recorded sounds of combat to may be multiform and partial, representing the play in my ear—and then re-read Homer’s focalisation now of the narrator, now of one descriptions of battle. of his characters; it is unlikely, Tversky notes, Was the landscape of the Trojan plain always that it could be organised into a single coherent like this? What was it like before the Achaeans maplike cognitive structure. I propose that came? Although the poet on one occasion refers Homer’s accounts of action in the landscape of to the plain of Troy as ‘bountiful earth’ (III. 89), the Trojan plain (such as we have seen above) it is hard to reconcile this descriptor with that and the similes that describe them could be trampled terrain. The Trojan plain, rather than viewed as separate overlays of just such a a source of life, is now in its tenth year a witness cognitive collage. Thus the poet counters his to death. And the poet plays with this idea. Just 52 Humanities Australia (left) Fig. 4. ‘Cold spring of the Scamander’. Coloured etching by T. Medland, 1804, after W. Gell. IMAGE: WELLCOME COLLECTION, V0020097 (CC BY 4.0)HH as he builds pathos into the lives and fates of The narrator, remarkably, lingers first over a the heroes, so, through a range of strategies, he description of these springs, and, then, over builds pathos into the landscape itself.23 a description of the pools, insisting on their Let me take you to a critical moment late in proximity to the marvellous springs. Now the poem. When Achilles pursues Hector around introducing human action into the scene, to fix the city, the two men run a little way out from it in our minds, he goes on to tell us that the the wall, past the watch-post, past the fig tree wives and daughters of the Trojans used to come (XXII. 145–46), and, now away from the plain, here to wash their garments. But that was in the past the two springs— one hot, one cold — that past, when there was peace, before the Achaeans feed the city’s washing pools (147–56): came. This is the pathos of contrasts: the natural wonder of the setting and the memory There there are double of the orderly and companionable activities springs of water that jet up, the springs of once carried out here in carefree security whirling Skamandros. are overlaid on the scene before our eyes, One of these runs hot water and the steam a vision of desperation in what is now a hostile on all sides environment. And, soon in the telling, the poet of it rises as if from a fire that was burning will bring Hector once more to this very spot, for inside it. the last time (208), to meet his death. But the other in the summer-time runs But, even in a time of war, there are moments water that is like hail when the landscape of the Trojan plain takes or chill snow or ice that forms from water. on a kinder guise. On an earlier day of fighting, Besides these when the Trojans have pursued the Achaeans is this place, and close to them, are the back to their ships at nightfall, Hector pauses washing-hollows by the river and calls an assembly in a place of stone, and magnificent, where the wives relatively clear of the fallen (VIII. 491). He of the Trojans and their lovely proposes to his men that they make camp right daughters washed the clothes to shining, there, on the open ground. The Trojans free their in the old days horses from their harness, tethering each one to when there was peace, before the coming his chariot, and throw down fodder (543–44). For of the Achaians. themselves, they bring out from the city oxen and fat sheep, and, from their houses, they bring Humanities Australia 53 wine and provisions (545–47). They light their aspects of nature and of the men and women fires, make sacrifice, and prepare their meal. And, who harness it. Through their pointed contrast (above) comparing the blaze of their many watch-fires with warfare these glimpses of what is not allow Fig. 5. Heinrich Schliemann, ‘Troy to the numberless stars in the night sky, when us to see what once was or what might have as seen from the ‘endless bright air spills from the heavens and been; they highlight the tragic consequences Hellenic theatre’ all the stars are seen’ (558–59), the poet creates of making war. In the sheep pens in spring, as (1881) a scene poignant in its serenity. We imagine the the pails froth with milk, thousands of insects IMAGE: INTERNET ARCHIVE BOOK IMAGES crackling of flames, the sound of flutes and pipes, swarm around them (so the Achaeans gather in 54 Humanities Australia These images of nature’s bountiful landscapes ELIZABETH MINCHIN faha is are drawn together and recapitulated with a Emeritus Professor of Classics at certain unique intensity in the tightly focussed the Australian National series of images the god Hephaestus works on University. Her principal research the shield of Achilles (XVIII. 541–89): the image focus is oral poetry (the Homeric of the triple-ploughed field, where teams of epics) and the structures of ploughmen work, of men reaping, and of the memory, including spatial memory: hence her present binding of sheaves; of the vineyard with its interest in the landscapes of the Troad and the cluster of grapes ready for the harvest; of cattle stories associated with them. Elizabeth is the author at pasture by the river and of sheep flocks in of Homer and the Resources of Memory (OUP, 2001) their meadow. and Homeric Voices (OUP, 2007) and numerous articles and book chapters. CONCLUSIONS: LANGUAGE AS A SURROGATE FOR EXPERIENCE 1. These dioramas of distant fields of war represent the vision of Charles Bean, the Australian official war correspondent for World War I and What has interested me as I have compared my subsequently the founder of the Australian immersive experience of landscapes of war as War Memorial: Laura Back and Laura Webster, represented at the AWM and as represented in Moments in Time: Dioramas at the Australian the text of the Iliad is the remarkable capacity War Memorial (Sydney: New Holland Publishers, 2008), pp. 7–8. of the poet to generate information that allows 2. This is not surprising. Psychology tells us that listeners or readers to recreate in their own human figures (and their faces) are given special mind’s eye a three-dimensional topographical and sustained perceptual attention by viewers model. If we audience members are to follow the of scenes of all kinds: Sue Fletcher-Watson, narrative in all its detail, it is essential that we John M. Findlay, Susan R. Leekam and Valerie Benson, ‘Rapid Detection of Person Information have such a model in mind. As for the terrain, in a Naturalistic Scene’, Perception, 37 (2008), the poet remarks on it only too briefly. And 580–82. yet he leaves us with a vivid impression. Just 3. Back and Webster, pp. 29, 34–35, 74–75. as the fabricant of a diorama brings his scenes 4. I thank Ryan Johnston, then Head of Art at the to life through the depiction of human action, AWM, for giving up time to talk to me about so the poet offers an account of action in the the World War I dioramas from a curatorial perspective. landscape. And he intensifies his scene through 5. The poet, in performance, would have used a strategic use of vivid comparisons, especially gesture and facial expression to add weight to with phenomena of the natural world. Like the his words. curators in the diorama galleries at the AWM, 6. For the terms ‘locative’ and ‘nonlocative’, see the poet of the Iliad ensures that the soundscape Holly A. Taylor and Barbara Tversky, ‘Spatial of warfare rings in our ears. But he can offer Mental Models Derived from Survey and Route Descriptions’, Journal of Memory and Language, more. He has devised strategies for conveying 31 (1992), 263: locative information refers to affect: through the comparisons, the images spatial relationships; elaborative details about and the memories that he evokes he encourages the environment are classified as nonlocative us to observe for ourselves what happens to a information. landscape subjected to the destructive power 7. David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions: The Cognitive Psychology of Epic, Ballads, and of war; he invites us to register the pathos, the Counting-out Rhymes (New York: Oxford poignancy, and the pain of loss. Responding to University Press, 1995), p. 62. the multiform cues that the poet has offered 8. Taylor and Tversky, ‘Spatial Mental Models’, us, we create our own ‘cognitive collage’, which p. 289: this more nuanced term captures spatial represents that Iliadic landscape of war in all its relations and allows for different perspectives. complexity. Herein lies the special power of this 9. For discussion see Jocelyn Penny Small, Wax Tablets of the Mind: Cognitive Studies of Memory immersive experience. ¶ and Literacy in Classical Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 95–105: Cicero used a mnemonic spatial system to prompt his memory for sections of his long speeches. Humanities Australia 55 10. Jenny Strauss Clay, Homer’s Trojan Theatre: Viewers: Space in the Iliad (Washington: Center Space, Vision, and Memory in the Iliad for Hellenic Studies, 2012), p. 460. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 18. Cf. Hermann Fränkel, Die homerischen pp. 56–95. Gleichnisse (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & 11. Taylor and Tversky, ‘Spatial Mental Models’, Ruprecht, 1977), p. 102 on Troy’s ‘weatherless’ p. 261. space: ‘[i]n der Ilias gibt es keine Jahreszeit und 12. On survey descriptions: Taylor and Tversky, fast kein Wetter’. ‘Spatial Mental Models’, p. 261. 19. Cf. Brigitte Hellwig, Raum und Zeit im 13. Translations are from Richmond Lattimore, homerischen Epos (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, The Iliad of Homer (Chicago and London: 1964), p. 32. University of Chicago Press, 1951). 20. Elizabeth Minchin, ‘Repetition in Homeric Epic: 14. Holly A. Taylor and Barbara Tversky, Cognitive and Linguistic Perspectives’, in Oral ‘Descriptions and Depictions of Environments’, Poetics and Cognitive Science, ed. by Mihailo Memory and Cognition, 20 (1992), 484; Rubin, Antović and Cristóbal Pagán Cánovas (Berlin: de p. 46. Gruyter, 2016), pp. 24–26. 15. Jane Austen, for example, feels no need to be 21. Barbara Tversky, ‘Cognitive Maps, Cognitive precise about location (cf. the first memorable — Collages, and Spatial Mental Models’, in Spatial but unlocated — conversation in Pride and Information Theory: A Theoretical Basis for GIS, Prejudice, between Mr and Mrs Bennet). ed. by Andrew U. Frank and Irene Campari (Berlin: Springer, 1993), p. 15. 16. George A. Miller, ‘Images and Models, Similes and Metaphors’, in Metaphor and Thought, 22. Cf. Andersson, p. 25. 2nd edn, ed. by Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: 23. Jasper Griffin,Homer on Life and Death (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 357–63. Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 21–22. Miller notes (at 360) that it is the ‘vagueness’ of 24. James M. Redfield,Nature and Culture in the the representation that is critical to its utility. Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University 17. Cf. Theodore M. Andersson, Early Epic Scenery: of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 186–88. Homer, Virgil, and the Mediaeval Legacy (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 16, 36; Christos Tsagalis, From Listeners to 56 Humanities Australia Romadur and Kümmel » PHILIP MEAD Somehow the story survives, from a mostly lost Occitan tradition that was trashed by a bunch of spiteful Cathars. They’re on record as saying the whole nest of texts it belonged to was ünter-complex and not living their values, especially the giants. Too much underground, too old, and fake news about hell. Only a few fragments of a unique manuscript survive, in a dialect that is way out of area, and that code-switches mordantly from high to low. What would you expect. At the same time every line seems to emit ions of anxiety as if the author was under some kind of threat, or personally involved in some way, a hand under the table. The Geist is totally pre-bourgeois, but it’s difficult to say exactly how far he or she was looking back. Scholars have been shamefully self-regarding in their readings, as if lives — and language — aren’t beyond imagining. It’s kind of diglossic, but there’s no way it’s mainstream. And like all art it’s unbelieving about the present, seriously slanted. >> Humanities Australia 57 Probably near the beginning a tattered knight returns one day from the Holy Land with his Persian bride. That much is certainly legend. It’s been decades since the battles, since the pen on the map. There’s a hint that something has turned him vegetarian. She was bitten by an adder while pregnant, but survived. It seems a pipe-playing deity, a god she brought with her, was her guardian. But the child is a worry. Why does the author spend so many lines on the way her hair is braided on the back of her neck? As a couple they seem defeated, bad hosts, forever haunted by the trauma of their flight, the time they plunged into the sea. It feels like a blighted world, although there’s no mention of pestilence. Romadur’s brother, one of those damaged by his fantasies, was thrown into the dexter prison at Montalban five years previously, a matrix of loss, living on bread and marrow. But he’s been allowed to write his narrative, some fragments of which are embedded. Something allegorical going on here, something alien. Ironically his story is a kind of treatise on how everyone in the world is on the move, from Roman times on, companions leaning over the ship’s rails, peering into the Tyrrhenean, oblivious to the Saracens watching them, barges sliding down the cloudy Rhine, a Cretan in exile remembering the fires of August and setting off for home, the winter treks of vagabond clerks, the smoky horse stages on the trade route to Lübeck. Here he has a long excursus on amber, pine needles and casks of herrings, which seems a bit folksy. But it’s definitely a different voice, with some interesting details about commerce. We don’t have the ending, if there was one, so it’s impossible to tell where the tale was heading, which fork it was going to take, but nothing would seem to suggest a simple romance, or anything foreseeable. Like the young couple going outside for a cigarette, or suddenly the girl with a dog in Rudolfplatz, who can tell? Zanzibar Light (Sydney and Tokyo: Vagabond, 2018) 58 Humanities Australia » PHILIP MEAD (above) The Tiber at Fiumicino, Josephus Augustus Knip, c. 1809 — c. 1812 IMAGE: RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM. CC0 1.0 UNIVERSAL (CC0 1.0) PHILIP MEAD faha was inaugural Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia, and Director of the Westerly Centre. He is currently Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. He has taught at universities in the UK, Germany, India, China and the US. In 2015–16 he was Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of books on literary and cultural history and has published on literature and human rights, literary cultures of the Global South, and education. In 1991 he edited (with John Tranter) The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry. Humanities Australia 59 Myth-Making for the Empire GERMANY’S COLONY IN CHINA 1897–1914 » YIXU LU My topic is the role of China in the German Germany as a senile state, sunk in decadence. popular imagination in the decades around the A shift in this perspective was largely brought turn of the twentieth century. The focus will about by the efforts of the pioneering geographer be on Qingdao (Tsingtau), Germany’s ‘model Ferdinand von Richthofen, whose writings colony’, as it was widely celebrated in political stressed the enormous economic potential to be discourses and popular literature at the time. It unlocked in China by Western intervention. Von existed from 1897 till 1914, was lavishly supported Richthofen saw China as a pre-industrial nation, by the German Naval Office, and sustained an needing only to profit from Western know-how emotional charge that was out of proportion to to make the transition to modernity.1 In the its very modest size and economic performance. wake of the Sino-Japanese war of 1895, there was I shall illustrate in what way the discourses on acute rivalry among Western powers to acquire Qingdao can be seen as part of a myth-making a colonial outpost in China. The German Naval process for the German Empire under Emperor Office had been on the lookout for a base in East Wilhelm II (fig. 1). Asia since the middle of the 1890s, and Admiral On 14 November 1897 marines of the East Alfred von Tirpitz, the relevant secretary of state, Asian cruiser squadron under the command had personally intervened to have the choice fall of Rear Admiral Otto von Diderichs occupied on the site of Qingdao. Kiautschou Bay on the northern coast of Thus, Qingdao was from the outset a focal China. On 14 November 1914, the seventeenth point of various ambitions. Although the colony anniversary of the occupation, Alfred Meyer- was never to achieve the exalted goals its Waldeck, Governor of the German protectorate, founders cherished, the city remained an icon left the city of Qingdao with his staff as Japanese of German culture in the midst of Asia. In the prisoners of war. In these 17 years, Qingdao following, I shall analyse the image of Qingdao in had embodied lofty symbolic values in German German popular discourses during the seventeen public discourse, and these became more intense years of its existence and — above all — in the through the colony’s downfall. drama of its downfall. I shall show how the The foundation of Qingdao was the fulfilment unique status of Qingdao derived from the fact of a long-cherished wish on the part of German that it was a convenient instrument for the explorers and bureaucrats. The dream of an staging of Kaiser Wilhelm’s ‘Weltpolitik’. For this (above) industrialised China, one created by the German made possible the transfiguration of the city after Detail, fig. 4, p. 65, Map of spirit, had been current since the 1860s. Earlier its inevitable capitulation in November 1914. Qingdao circa 1906. in the century, China had been perceived within 60 Humanities Australia The unique status of Qingdao had its (left) origin in a coincidence of images of Germany Fig. 1. Head and as a ‘world power’, committed to realising shoulders portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm II by ‘world politics’, and of the demands for the Court Photographer creation of a German battle fleet. The murder T. H. Voigt of of two German missionaries in Shandong on Frankfurt, 1902. 1 November 1897 provided the longed-for pretext IMAGE: IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM, IWM NON- for action. On 14 November, the Kaiser ordered COMMERCIAL LICENSE HTTPS://WWW.IWM.ORG. German troops to occupy Kiautschou Bay. From UK/COLLECTIONS/ITEM/ the outset, the creation of Qingdao had its OBJECT/205124138 theatrical aspects. A letter from Wilhelm to the Foreign Secretary von Bülow on 7 November testifies to the Kaiser’s hectic frame of mind at the occupation of Chinese territory: Hundreds of German merchants will rejoice in their awareness that at long last the German Empire has gained a firm foothold in Asia. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese will tremble when they feel the iron fist of the German Empire upon their necks, and the entire German people will be happy that its government has done a virile deed.2 Those times are past when Germans left to The vision of the Chinese masses trembling one neighbour the earth, another the sea beneath the iron fist of Germany is indicative and kept the heavens, where pure doctrine of Wilhelm’s propensity for mythical thought reigns, for themselves. […] In short, we and bombastic utterances, and I shall address wish to put no other nation in the shade, this issue shortly. The Kaiser issued a personal but we also demand our place in the sun.4 decree that ‘atonement’ for the murder of the On the basis of this cliché — ‘our place in the missionaries should be demanded in the form sun’ — Qingdao henceforth becomes the symbol of the ceding of Chinese territory: ‘Go with all of Wilhelmenian ‘world politics’. Ironically, it was speed to Kiautschou with the whole squadron, not to survive the events of 1914. occupy suitable positions and localities and The founding of the first and only German compel the Chinese in whatever way you will colony in China did, in fact, represent something to make atonement’.3 new, namely the only tangible result of Wilhelm But in the Reichstag there was no longer any II’s ‘Weltpolitik’ — a most ambitious if very talk of atonement when von Bülow informed diffuse set of doctrines.5 One of Wilhelm’s senior the members of the occupation of Kiautschou. officers, Alfred Graf von Waldersee — later to Rather, it was seen as the triumphant entry command the Western allied troops in China of Germany as a colonial power onto the in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising — was world stage: sceptical of the worth of the Chinese colony, Germany now stands at the inception and, indeed, of what ‘world politics’ might mean, of its development into an international confiding in his diary of 13 July 1900: ‘We are world power. Taking possession of supposed to be engaging in “world politics”. If I Kiautschou Bay represents the first only knew what they were meant to be.’6 In fact, initiative in securing a firm basis for our they meant a good deal more than protecting trade and industry to exploit China, and I German trade with China, as becomes clear if we hope this will bring us rich rewards from look at other speeches of the Kaiser regarding the those lands where our goods are sold. […] occupation of Qingdao, for example: Humanities Australia 61 Let it be clear to any European out there, of strategic ports, so that the outbreak of the that the good German has planted his First World War saw it hopelessly isolated. In shield — with its emblem of the Imperial the year 1907 there was even a public debate in eagle — firmly on the ground so as to Germany on the question of whether it would protect anyone who seeks his protection. not be better — given what the colony was […] But should anyone make so bold as costing — to return it to China. So what was to infringe upon our rights or seek to Qingdao good for? It was good for morale — in diminish them, then we shall defend them other words: it could represent. with a mailed fist!7 This brings us to the issue of just what constitutes political myth. I cannot begin to sift The warlike tone that Wilhelm here adopts the enormous literature on the topic, so offer reveals a somewhat paranoid attitude towards here a minimalist approach. In the words of the other colonial powers, especially England. For anthropologist Pierre Maranda, myths — at their these powers were busy trying to carve up China most fundamental — ‘display the structured, to their own advantage. Thus, the celebrated predominantly culture-specific, and shared, ‘model colony’ of Qingdao was from the outset semantic systems which enable the members embedded in a power play in the service of the of a culture area to understand each other […] ambitions of the German Empire. It bore a heavy More strictly, myths are stylistically definable symbolic burden which did not cease to exist discourses that express the strong components when Japanese and British troops conquered the of semantic systems.’8 It is important here to colony in November 1914. Qingdao always had note that the emphasis is on ‘semantic systems’, a function in a discourse of power, whether real rather than the more conventional one on or imaginary. THE OFFICIAL RHETORIC SURROUNDING THE FOUNDATION OF THE COLONY PROCLAIMED THAT THIS WAS THE INCEPTION OF A GRANDIOSE EXPANSION OF THE EMPIRE. The official rhetoric surrounding the ‘narratives’. The semantic system in question foundation of the colony proclaimed that this here is that of German nationalism in the wake was the inception of a grandiose expansion of of the foundation of the Reich in 1870. Such the Empire. Qingdao was seen as the beginning semantic systems produce ‘discourses’ which of a fresh push towards imperial equality often take the form of past-tense narratives, but with France and Britain. The acquisition of this is not essential. The same semantic system Qingdao was thus part of a wider discourse can produce discourses that are in conflict with in which Germany sought to catch up with one another. The consistency required of a single the other European powers by becoming a coherent narrative need not be present in a major colonial nation and world power in its nexus of mythical elements. A contrasting myth own right. However, the enormous rhetorical to that of the ‘model colony’ was to emerge in and financial expenditure attending the 1900. For the great assertion of German military foundation of Qingdao simply dwarfed its power in China came with the suppression of the concrete achievements. It never realised the Boxer Uprising and the appointment of Alfred expectations that it would become a flourishing Graf von Waldersee as supreme commander of trade centre. It was designated a ‘free port’, but the allied troops. The following quotation from a the Chinese customs still collected tax on all prestigious German paper, the Kölnische Zeitung, goods leaving the protectorate. This dampened anticipating Waldersee’s appointment, throws trade considerably and forced the colonial some ‘strong components’ of the semantic administration to integrate it into the Chinese system of German nationalism into stark relief: imperial custom system a couple of years later. So if the decision has in fact been made It was developed as a naval harbour, but no in favour of General Field-Marshal Count attempt was made to integrate it into a network Waldersee, this would alone guarantee […] 62 Humanities Australia final victory since the powers representing (left) the civilisation of the West must triumph Fig. 2. Hermann in this campaign against the culture of the Knackfuß, Völker Europas, wahrt eure East which has sunk into barbarism […] heiligsten Güter If a German leader is considered worthy (“Peoples of Europe, of leading the forces of civilisation to this guard your dearest goods”) 1895. inevitable victory, so is this an honour that 9 IMAGE: PUBLIC DOMAIN the German nation will be sure to value. VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, CC PUBLIC DOMAIN Some very strong components of the semantics MARK 1.0. of German nationalism are here on display, but the discourse has not taken on the form of a consternation in Germany when they made conventional mythical narrative. I have argued such a poor showing against the Japanese. But elsewhere that there is a strong tendency in the the elements of mythical systems need not be German press at the time of the Boxer Uprising invariable in their semantics. By 1900, following to make the German mission in China into a the murder of the German envoy, von Ketteler, replay of the German military successes of 1870 in Beijing by a Manchu soldier, the ‘Yellow Peril’ against France, thus grafting the hoped-for assumes a Chinese guise. Thus, Wilhelm exhorts triumphs in China onto the foundation-myth of troops embarking for China on 27 July 1900 with the Reich.10 The Kölnische Zeitung then supplies, a speech that was to become justly notorious. It a few days later, a more conventional piece of reads in one version: mythical narrative: ‘The armed White Man has Across the seas, great tasks await the marched into China and has forced the Yellow newly arisen German Empire […] Tasks Man to his knees’.11 The stark simplifications here to which the old [Holy] Roman Empire leave out of account that the vast majority of the of the German Nation was not equal population of China was quite unaware of the can now be successfully completed by presence of Western troops on a small segment the new German Empire. […] You well of one province. Moreover, the victory celebrated know that you will be fighting a cunning, here was more in the nature of a skirmish than courageous, well-armed, cruel foe. When a decisive, pitched battle in European terms. But you encounter him, so be aware: Quarter to set the seal on this largely imaginary triumph, is not to be given. No prisoners are to be the paper takes over from Waldersee’s telegram taken. […] Just as a thousand years ago of 5 November this happy formula: ‘The German the Huns under King Attila made a name flag is flying on the Great Wall of China’12 — a for themselves which resonates mightily mythical emblem of a sweeping and decisive even today in history and legend, so may victory that — in mundane reality — had simply the name of Germans in China by your failed to occur. deeds gain such fame that never again In the examples I have given here, we may shall a Chinese dare to look sideways at discern a triangle of communication. The myth- a German.13 making process circulates between the German leadership, the print media and the popular There is more than one version of the speech, imagination. In 1895, the Kaiser drafted a graphic but all versions conclude with the slogan: which was transformed into a lithograph by the ‘Clear the way for Culture — once and for all!’14 artist Hermann Knackfuß (fig. 2) and presented The ‘Yellow Peril’ may have changed its guise, as a gift to a number of royal families in Europe but the German civilising mission — here in including the Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. its most bloodthirsty terms — is a constant The threat embodied by the Buddha in this in the nationalist discourse. Notice also the picture was aroused by the triumph of Japanese tendency for one myth to overlay another. military in the Sino-Japanese war. Chinese forces Just as Waldersee’s suppression of the Boxer had been equipped with German armaments, remnants could be seen as a re-enactment of the notably Krupp gunboats, and there was some German triumphs of 1870, so here the imminent Humanities Australia 63 destruction of the Chinese is to recapitulate the the political myth of German heroism in the face conquests of the Huns, who are transformed by of a demonised enemy produced its own factual Wilhelm’s overwrought rhetoric into honorary refutation. But this did little to dampen popular proto-Germans. Such imaginative distortions fervour which demanded signal victories against of history are the common currency of political ferocious odds. Wilhelm may have appalled myth. That the Huns had, in fact, devastated his inner circle and foreign observers with his large tracts of German lands had apparently bombastic rants and unpredictability, but by and slipped the Kaiser’s mind. large he was on a popular wavelength. Germany At this point it is as well to remind ourselves wanted its ‘place in the sun’ and in this lay the of the triangle of communication I spoke of Kaiser’s main strength. earlier. To quote from Christopher G. Flood, a (far right) prominent writer on political myth: Fig. 3. Main gate of former Chinese Mythmaking is a communication process munitions depot, which involves reception as well as (re) taken over by the production. To state that a narrative Imperial German Navy, Kiautschou is mythopoeic is merely to judge the Bay, Shandong properties of the discourse itself without peninsula, 1898. reference to how that discourse is received IMAGE: ATTRIBUTION by an audience. But to be the expression SHAREALIKE 3.0 GERMANY, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE of a myth the telling of a given narrative […] needs to be perceived as being faithful to […] the correct interpretation of a story The German forces in Qingdao played a which a social group already accepts or very minor role in the suppression of the Boxer subsequently comes to accept as true. […] Uprising. These hostilities mainly took place Conversely, the narrative will be described in the Imperial province of Chili, whereas the as myth […] in the pejorative sense by province of Shandong, surrounding the German those who consider the account to be colony, saw some armed combat around the factually untrue or significantly distorted construction of the Shandong railway. Moreover, in its selection and/or interpretation of Qingdao’s representative role was a long way relevant true facts.15 from the blood and thunder of the Boxer Wilhelm’s mythicising tirades did not stand skirmishes. For the mythical function of Qingdao alone, as they do today on the pages of history was to transform a piece of China into ‘German textbooks. Rather, they resonated with most of mother earth’. This it did with great success. the German print media, the landed aristocracy Although Qingdao had become the most and the populace at large. There were, of expensive project of German colonialism course, some dissenting voices. In the historical and was, indeed, a financial disaster, within context we are addressing, the disbelievers the symbolic world of German writing the were the Social Democrats. They annoyed the city remained a shining example of German government in the Parliament to the extent progressiveness and efficiency. Critical remarks that Wilhelm dreamed of dissolving it and to the effect that, with the 110 million marks in ruling autocratically. In an aggressive attempt subsidies that had been expended up till 1908 to subvert the nationalist myth-making that on Qingdao even the Mark Brandenburg could was instigated by the leadership, reinforced by have been turned into the most beautiful garden the patriotic press and accepted uncritically by on earth, did nothing to weaken the myth of the popular imagination, the Social Democrats the exemplary colony. This is shown by the used their paper Vorwärts to print the following obituary for Qingdao after it had fallen ‘Hunnenbriefe’ — ‘letters from the Huns’. These in November 1914: were letters home from common soldiers setting Tsingtau was the defiant and impressive forth German atrocities against the Chinese in exemplary achievement of the genuine the course of the mopping-up campaign. Thus, German spirit, particularly imposing in the 64 Humanities Australia (left) Fig. 4. Map of Qingdao circa 1906 IMAGE: PUBLIC DOMAIN VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, CC PUBLIC DOMAIN MARK 1.0 (below) Fig. 5. Present day Qingdao IMAGE: PIXABAY, CC0 CREATIVE COMMONS drab environs of Chinese backwardness was the entry port for the German spirit, and causing especial offence to foreign for German education, for the German idea powers. […] Tsingtau became an in the world.16 exemplary exhibition of ‘Germanness’ From today’s perspective, we may term the [Deutschtum] in the Far East, a place of consciously crafted and widely disseminated pilgrimage for admiring Chinese, Japanese, image of Qingdao as the triumph of the domestic English and Americans. A spotlessly clean over the exotic. Under the political and financial city with that German order[…], Tsingtau protection of the Imperial Naval Office there remains a crowning achievement of the arose a miniature Germany on the coast of German naval administration […] and it Humanities Australia 65 Shandong. The favourable climatic conditions rickshaw-depot was established offering clean and the opportunity of creating both the city lodgings, laundries, baths and even a canteen for and the landscape anew favoured the creation the rickshaw pullers to provide them with garlic- of a ‘paradise’ that was made to reflect ‘genuine free meals so as not to offend the noses of their Germanness’ [echtes Deutschtum]. This was European passengers. For Qingdao, still a naval taken so far that the Chinese surroundings base, had also become a health resort for tourists were largely lost to sight. Here German and Europeans stationed in China. ‘mother earth’ was cultivated. The capacity of A lecture delivered in January 1915 by Otto the Chinese workforce to adapt to German Franke, who was first a diplomat in China and orderliness guaranteed that there were scarcely then a professor of sinology at the Colonial any concessions required to the Asian context. Institute in Hamburg, is typical of many The following text may be seen as emblematic retrospective evocations of Qingdao that portray of the theatrical production of Qingdao in the it as a monument to benevolent colonialism: service of German nationalist expansion: Thus, Kiautschou became what it was In this milieu, supported by the prestige always meant to be: a base for German of concentrated military power on land trade, an entry-portal for German culture, and sea, the German entrepreneur in East not destined for conquest and subjugation Asia finds native German soil deutsche[ but for an amicable approach to the Muttererde]. Here he can soak up new Chinese people. […] this honest German national strength and by this means cultural labour, with Tsingtau as its centre, preserve his Germanness [Deutschtum] serving the interests of both lands — and become bound more closely to it.17 Tsingtau had a rosy future ahead of it.19 In Germany’s interactions with China in these The wealthy Chinese, mainly Mandarins, years we may see the contrasting faces of who had taken up residence there as a refuge colonialism. The aftermath of the Boxer Uprising from turbulent times in the new Republic of saw many innocent civilians die in the course China since 1911, would have had no grounds of Count Waldersee’s campaign of vengeance. for disputing this. That the German cultural In Qingdao, a more benevolent aspect of and educational mission was competing with colonialism could be seen. In a submission from those of other European nations was typical of the Naval Office to the Parliament in 1907 we changing Western attitudes to China. read: ‘The new city boasts a network of broad The immediate cause of the downfall of roads, has drainage for storm water and sewage, Qingdao so early in World War I was a treaty fresh running water and electric lighting, between Britain and Japan that was chiefly churches, hospitals and schools for Europeans directed against Russian expansion in the Far and Chinese’.18 The Naval Office also discovered East. German relations with the British navy in a gentler German cultural mission than Wilhelm Chinese waters had been cordial, but, once war had preached at the height of the Boxer crisis. broke out, Japan chose to honour the treaty as The idea of a peaceful ‘cultural mission’ was a means of getting at the rich coal reserves in floated first in 1907 in the course of a debate the province of Shandong and thus the story of in the Parliament on the prospect of handing Qingdao devolved into tragedy. The persistence Qingdao back to China. The ‘remainers’ argued of Qingdao in German war propaganda and in that German language and culture will pave other patriotic writings in the years that followed the way for German products and ‘economic its fall allows us to see how the discourse of penetration’ of China. Whilst schools and cultural and economic progress was interwoven hospitals for the Chinese were left to the with a discourse of sacrifice. In what follows missionaries, the colonial administration did I shall concentrate on the mythicising of the fall establish in 1908, in cooperation with the of the colony. Chinese government, an educational institute Although it was obvious to the German to prepare graduates for entry into Peking government that the alliance between Britain University. On a more mundane level, a and Japan made the situation of the colony 66 Humanities Australia untenable once hostilities commenced, there was At this moment came a greeting from no question of a peaceful surrender. The East our Emperor: ‘May God protect you in Asian squadron under the command of the your fierce struggle. My thoughts are Graf von Spee was in the South Pacific when with you. Wilhelm.’ These words in such war broke out and was obliged to flee to South a dark hour called forth a profound joy in America — only to be defeated there by a British all our hearts: Although at home battles fleet. In spite of Qingdao’s hopeless plight, Berlin were raging on three fronts, we were still rejected Japan’s ultimatum requiring Germany present in their thoughts.22 to vacate the colony. On 22 August, one day In the fictionalised reportFrom Qingdao to the before the expiry of the Japanese ultimatum, Falkland Islands that appeared in 1917 the author the governor of Qingdao Alfred Meyer-Waldeck sets out to reproduce the thoughts and feelings received the following telegram from the Kaiser: of the Germans in Qingdao at the beginning of ‘May God protect you in the fierce struggle that the war: awaits you. My thoughts are with you. Wilhelm.’ The governor answered: ‘I pledge we shall fulfil When the World War broke out, a our duty to the last man.’20 depressive mood took hold in Tsingtau We do not know how Berlin understood […] We were condemned to inactivity! Meyer-Waldeck’s promise. Reason would have And when in future years stories would urged a rapid surrender so that none of the be told of what those on the home front around 4000 Germans in Qingdao was obliged had fought for and how they had suffered, to die a hero’s death. But heroism was the then we would have to sit silently and watchword of the time, and so the besieged listen, and we could only confess: I was troops were obliged to pursue a scorched earth not part of the great conflict of nations. tactic. On 27 October, two months after Japan My heart’s blood may have glowed for the had blockaded Qingdao, cutting it off from the holy cause, but I was forbidden to sacrifice world, the Germans confined there received the it. But then rumours began to circulate last telegram from the Emperor: ‘With me, the that something was not quite right with whole German fatherland gazes proudly on the Japan. […] In the middle of the month heroes of Qingdao, who are fulfilling their duty there came the confirmation: Japan had in accord with the promise of their governor.’21 delivered an ultimatum to the German In view of the fact that Berlin could send nothing Empire […] In an instant all our cares were in the way of reinforcements to relieve the banished! No one could now doubt that situation in Qingdao, the question arises as to there would be a fight to the death. But the sense of Wilhelm’s telegram: What did the our hearts were uplifted in the knowledge Kaiser expect of his soldiers there? One thing is that the conflict would also rage about clear: the Kaiser’s choice of words is once more Tsingtau — the struggle of the German tinged with theatricality: the fall of Qingdao spirit against a world of envious, vile foes was to be placed in the service of mobilising who had taken up the sword purely for the emotions on the home front. The colony was sake of their purse.23 to die a hero’s death. This was to be its final There is no mention of the fact that Qingdao was representation, its last contribution to German completely isolated and in an untenable position. imperial myth-making. The skilful portrayal of the Japanese ultimatum One of the first obituaries for the lost colony as an unavoidable natural phenomenon serves appeared in December 1914. It was the printed the purpose of enabling the discourse of sacrifice, version of a lecture delivered in the Concordia which is the point of this piece of propaganda. Club in Shanghai by a man who claimed to It has the obvious function of installing the have fought there. In this text, the complete German capitulation as its complete opposite surrender of the colony is played down and the in the pantheon of German heroism. It reaches theatrical effect of the first telegram from the its culmination in a lament on the scorched Kaiser is magnified: earth policy: Humanities Australia 67 With the expense of their last energy, the for a strategy of defence that did not involve heroic garrison fought for the fame and the garrison in a fight from house to house, honour of German arms. That the position from street to street. Nor did he implement of Tsingtau was not tenable had been clear the ‘scorched earth’ policy rigorously. Bridges, since the day on which Japan had begun its batteries and railway installations were indeed siege with the expenditure of vast means. destroyed, but important structures, such as […] But worse was to come! The Germans the Governor’s Residence and the Imperial were compelled to destroy their own Courthouse, remained intact, so did the villas creation. The watchword was: let nothing and shops, as witnessed by the first British usable fall into the hands of the aggressor! correspondent to be allowed to enter Qingdao With a cruel sense of satisfaction, the after the surrender: ‘The city appeared as if a besieged garrison set about supporting typhoon had passed through it. Its wide asphalt and completing the work of the Japanese streets, fronted by beautiful four and five-storey artillery.24 buildings of German architecture, were vacant.’26 So the Germans had destroyed everything that The author of this book was far from being could be used for the purposes of war, but they the inventor of such discourses of sacrifice. had stopped short of destroying the architecture Emotional expressions of heroic sacrifice can that was the ‘model colony’s’ real pride. already be found in the telegram that Wilhelm II But enough blood had been spilt to justify sent to the Reichstag on 14 November 1914: the discourse of sacrifice in the obituaries The heroic defence of this model creation for Qingdao. The echo in the German press of German culture, the result of several left nothing to be desired. While the liberal- years of devoted exertions, gives us a new conservative Kölnische Zeitung lamented the and honourable proof of that faithfulness destruction of a ‘green island’ in the perilous unto death that the German people has waves of violence and revolution,27 the centrist demonstrated so many times already in Frankfurter Zeitung mourned the loss of the this titanic struggle against a world of ‘beautiful, flourishing, expanding centre of trade hatred, envy and pillage. May God grant that German industriousness had conjured that your struggle has not been in vain! forth from the yellow sand’ and of the ‘model Wilhelm Imperator Rex.25 exhibition of the adventurous spirit of our Imperial Navy’.28 Indeed, the fallen Qingdao is In fact, ‘faithfulness unto death’ was not now being praised as the ‘real’ Qingdao — the demanded of most of the defenders of Qingdao. perfect symbol of the German national spirit: The governor, Meyer-Waldeck, had opted ‘The colony that had been shot to pieces and (right) hunted to death became a torch that glowed Fig. 6. Men of the more brightly, was more an incarnation of the German Garrison German spirit than Qingdao at peace could ever at Tsing-tau, from 29 The Illustrated have been.’ War News, No. 15, Since Qingdao had held out for 73 days of Nov. 18, 1914—II siege against an enemy that was vastly superior IMAGE: PUBLIC in numbers and equipment, expectations on DOMAIN VIA PROJECT GUTENBERG 68 Humanities Australia Qingdao fades out of history until its rediscovery the wealthy Mandarins — tolerated as ‘honorary by the scholars. Europeans’, but still alien and despised. All In conclusion, we may say that the various of these ‘others’ were generated within the discourses that focus on Qingdao are exemplary overarching myth that Qingdao was but the for the theatricality of German politics in the first fruit of a massive expansion of the German epoch of Wilhelm II and their dependence on Empire. It was not — and so it transformed into political myth. They are clearly influenced by the one of the first sacrifices to German militarism bombastic style of government that the Kaiser in the mighty conflicts of World War I. Myths affected. In a sense, everything about Qingdao of empire were by no means confined to had, from the outset, been theatre. It was the Germany’s brief colonisation of a very small part standard bearer of a nebulous kind of ‘world of China. But I suggest that Qingdao offers us politics’ that left the world outside Germany a microcosm of Western colonial attitudes. It is quite unmoved and, in Germany’s internal tempting to ask how many of them still persist politics, was chiefly responsible for a better today, when colonialism has become such a financing of the war fleet. In addition, Qingdao pejorative word. ¶ provided an emotional point of intersection for the Kaiser and the German nation. In this way, YIXU LU faha is Head of the Qingdao became a looking glass for ‘genuine School of Languages and Cultures Germanness’ in East Asia.30 As Qingdao, from and member of the China Studies Centre at the University of the outset, was chiefly there torepresent , it Sydney. After obtaining her BA is understandable that this aspect was only from Peking University, Lu spent enhanced by its fall for the duration of the war. seven years as a postgraduate at While the outcome of the siege was inevitable, the Universität Regensburg, it nonetheless lasted for more than two months. Germany, specialising in German Literature and This was a positive factor in creating the legend Modern European history. She came to Australia as a of the martyrdom of the colony. The famous Postdoctoral Fellow, and has taught at the Universities of Adelaide and Melbourne and at UTS. ‘place in the sun’ was a shining example to the She has been a research fellow of the Alexander von German people, even as it was overcome by Humboldt-Foundation (2002, 2008, 2012) and held superior forces. a guest professorship at the Chinese Ocean Empires need myths — as do democracies University, Qingdao (2007–09). She was awarded and dictatorships. Myths reinforce the selfhood the Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm-Preis for her of communities, and national myths thrive on distinguished contribution to research, teaching and creating, and then rejecting as inferior, versions international collaboration in German Studies by the German Academic Exchange Services (DAAD) in of the alien ‘other’. Germany’s interaction with 2014. Her main research interests are modern China over these few decades brought forth, German literature and history, 18th–20th century under the pressure of political forces that far German literature, German colonialism and exceeded these two countries, contrasting nationalism, Greek myth in German literature and colonialist discourses. Let us consider some of contemporary German culture and society. the guises in which these created the Chinese ‘other’. In the early years of the colony, there 1. Cf. Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Forschungsreise were the Chinese workers, an alien underclass und Kolonialprogramm. Ferdinand von paid starvation wages, having no rights and Richthofen und die Erschließung Chinas im forbidden to mix with Europeans. The Boxer 19. Jahrhundert’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 69 Uprising then called forth the demonised (1987), 150–95 (p. 183). Chinese: fanatical, savage, a threat to all Western 2. Quoted by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, War der Kaiser an allem schuld? Wilhelm II. und die order and stability. These, in turn, produced preußisch-deutschen Machteliten (Berlin: Ullstein, the innocent victims of Waldersee’s campaign, 2005), p. 95. commemorated by the Social Democrats. Later 3. Cf. Volker Schult, ‘Auf dem Weg zur Weltmacht? came the eager recipients of German culture, Des Kaisers Admiral: Otto von Diederichs learning Western attitudes and know-how in zwischen Pazifik und Atlantik’,International Quarterly for Asian Studies 36 (2005), 125–58 Qingdao’s preparatory college. Then there were (p. 126). Humanities Australia 69 4. Kaiserreich und Erster Weltkrieg 1871/1918, ed. 17. K. Romberg, ‘Die politische und kulturelle by Rüdiger vom Bruch and Björn Hofmeister Bedeutung des deutschen Kiautschougebietes: (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), p. 268. Ein erlebtes Kapitel politischer Theorie’, 5. Cf. Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers. How Koloniale Monatsblätter 2 (February 1914), p. 59. Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Penguin, 18. Klaus Mühlhahn, Herrschaft und Widerstand 2013), p. 151. in der Musterkolonie’ Kiautschou. Interaktionen 6. Denkwürdigkeiten des General-Feldmarschalls zwischen China und Deutschland 1897-1914 Alfred Grafen von Waldersee. Vol 2: 1888–1900, (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2000), p. 229. ed. by Heinrich Otto Meisner (Stuttgart and 19. Otto Franke, ‘Deutschland und China vor, in Berlin: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1922), p. 449. und nach dem Kriege’ (Lecture delivered on 7. Cf. Reden des Kaisers: Ansprachen, Predigten und 29 January 1915 in Bonn am Rhein) (Hamburg: Trinksprüche Wilhelms II, ed. by Ernst Johann L. Friederichsen & Co., 1915), pp. 16–17. (Munich: dtv, 1966) pp. 74–5. 20. Kurt Schultze-Jena, Der Kampf um Tsingtau. 8. Mythology. Selected Readings, ed. by Pierre Vortrag gehalten im Club Concordia zu Schanghai Maranda (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), am 28. Dezember 1914, (Shanghai: Verlag von pp. 12–13. Max Nössler und Co., 1915), p. 12. 9. Kölnische Zeitung, 9 August 1900. 21. Schultze-Jena, p. 12. 10. Yixu Lu, ‘German Colonial Fiction on China: 22. Schultze-Jena, pp. 4–5. The Boxer Uprising of 1900’, German Life and 23. Hugo Waldeyer, Von Tsingtau zu den Letters, 59 (2006), 98–99. Falklandinseln. Eine Erzählung von den 11. Kölnische Zeitung, 3 November 1900. Heldenkämpfen um Tsingtau und der ruhmreichen Fahrt des deutschen Kreuzergeschwaders im 12. Kölnische Zeitung, 5 November 1900. Weltkriege 1914 (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler 13. Quoted by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, War der und Sohn, 1917), pp. 47–48. Kaiser an allem schuld? Wilhelm II. und die 24. Waldeyer, p. 129. preußisch-deutschen Machteliten (Berlin: Ullstein, 2005), p. 95. 25. Quoted from Kriegstagebuch der Belagerung von Tsingtau vom 23. Juli bis 29. November, published 14. The Kaiser’s speech exists in more than one anonymously (Tientsin: Tageblatt für Nord- version. The official version is much less China A.G., 1915), pp. 36–37. inflammatory than those noted down by reporters on the occasion. Cf. Reden des Kaisers, 26. Edwin Hoyt, The Fall of Tsingtao (London: pp. 90–91 and War der Kaiser an allem schuld?, Arthur Baker Limited, 1975), p. 141. p. 104. 27. Kölnische Zeitung, 8 November 1914. 15. Christopher G. Flood, Political Myth. 28. Frankfurter Zeitung, 17 November 1914. A Theoretical Introduction (New York and 29. Wertheimer, pp. 24–25. London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 43–4. 30. Wertheimer, pp. 24–25. 16. Fritz Wertheimer, Deutschland und Ostasien (Stuttgart und Berlin, 1914), pp. 22–23. 70 Humanities Australia Moving Objects: READING THE EMOTIONS OF JAPANESE CHRISTIAN EXILES IN BATAVIA » SUSAN BROOMHALL In 1639 the Tokugawa Shogunate government issued an edict to exile the partners and children of Dutch and English traders. It followed earlier orders to exclude first the Spanish and then the Portuguese from the country, to ban the promulgation and practice of the Christian faith in Japan, and to forbid the exit of Japanese individuals and vessels from the country. By 1641, the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost- Indische Compagnie, or VOC) would be limited to trade only from Deshima, a constructed island offshore Nagasaki. As with trade, communication between exiles and their Japanese friends and families would be heavily restricted for many years. In October 1639, the VOC vessel Breda left Hirado carrying a number of individuals of mainly English or Dutch ancestry, Company and free burghers, their wives, children and in some cases, grandchildren.1 When the ship stopped at Casteel Zeelandia in present-day Taiwan, some of the youngest aboard disembarked to be cared for there, but the majority remained, arriving in the VOC settlement of Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia) on 1 January 1640. Among those aboard the Breda was fifteen-year-old Haru/Jeronima Marino from Nagasaki, accompanied by her nineteen-year-old (background) Montage using Fig. 3, p. 73 and Fig. 4, p. 74. Humanities Australia 71 sister, Man/Magdalena, and her mother Maria, these individuals operating between cultures, the widow of an Italian pilot, Niccolò Marino. and to understand how a range of different Sometime after her arrival, Haru/Jeronima contexts both mediated and produced emotional employed the checkered pieces of silk of a fukusa performances for this conceptually marginal to enclose a caddy of tea and inscribe a furtive community in Batavia. In the case of this exile missive, written mainly in the hiragana syllabary community, a range of textual and material employed by women of the era, to her loved ones artefacts can be interpreted as emotional in Japan (fig. 1). performances, including those of women. Interpreting emotional display and behaviour Dear Auntie, across cultures, however, has been a noted Oh how I long, how I long for Japan! challenge for scholars of emotions, and touches Just like that, I had to leave Japan. Never upon wider debates about the universal or again can I return to my dear homeland. culturally-specific nature of emotions.5 Here I cannot live nor set foot on my land I am already employing an English word for anymore. My eyes are swollen from my an English-language essay as a catch-all term tears. I cannot tell whether this is real or for a whole range of states, feelings, moods, a bad dream. With my yearning for my and behaviours that were complex, context- homeland, I send you one box of tea. Oh specific, and rarely singular or precise. Their how I long, how I long for Japan! performances in these forms were articulations of identity, producing forms of connection and Koshoro2 belonging. They were emotional expressions (right) shaped not only by perceptions of their social Fig. 1. The Jagatara [Jakarta] letter, identity but were also active components in Hirado Dutch the enactments of particular presentations of Trading Post. self, designed for specific contexts.6 For these IMAGE: REPRODUCED exiles from Japan, expression of their emotions BY KIND PERMISSION OF MR KIDA. was mediated by their status as marginal, gendered individuals of certain social status, age, faith and ethnic identity. It was dependent upon the rhetorical and social mechanisms that particular kinds of texts provided for emotional expression, and the contexts of the particular moments in which these expressions or performances occurred. In theory, VOC policy conferred legitimacy on children of European employees who had received Christian baptism and thereby had an The Japanese community formed a numerically- equivalent status to Europeans.7 This view was marginal presence in the European-governed, reflected in the January 1640 general missive cosmopolitan entrepôt of Batavia.3 Just 83 sent from the Governor-General and Council individuals had been identified as Japanese in at Batavia that announced the emigration of a population of just over eight thousand in the Japanese wives and children of the VOC on the 1632 census of the city.4 I’ve been interested Breda and noted that they would ‘endeavour to to think about how we can understand the raise the children in fear of God and heartfelt emotional experiences of this small community. Christian religion.’8 Many exiled Japanese More particularly, I’ve been exploring how an Christian women married men within the individual such as Haru/Jeronima expressed VOC network at Batavia. Among the marriages herself in cultural terms that made sense within records of the city is that of Haru/Jeronima in Japanese and Batavian communities. November 1646: ‘Simon Simonsen of Hirado, This essay explores some possible sources assistant in the Company, with Hieronima that help to construct the emotional lives of Marinus, young girl, born in Nagasaki’.9 Between 72 Humanities Australia 1620 and 1675, some 40 women of Japanese origin were listed in such records; 26 married (above) to European men (23 Dutchmen, three other Fig. 2. Andries Europeans), 12 to Japanese men and two to other Beeckman, The 10 Castle of Batavia, Asian men. In fact, marriages between partners c. 1661, oil on both of Japanese origins, such as ‘Michael van canvas, h 108cm × Langesackij Christen Japonder,’ free burgher, w 151.5cm. who married ‘Magdalena van Langesackij, IMAGE: RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM. CC0 1.0 Christene, Japonsche jonge dochter’ in January UNIVERSAL (CC0 1.0) 1642, were relatively rare.11 In the years directly following the edict of exclusion, especially (left) between 1640 and 1642, the faith of Japanese Fig. 3. Andries partners was often specified.12 This may have Beeckman, A Japanese reflected a particular concern among those in Christian, the Dutch Church and Company to locate these XVIIth century. new arrivals within recognisable frameworks Bibliothèque nationale de France, that existed in Batavia. The need for local Arsenal, EST_389, administrators, notaries and Church officials to planche 4. categorise these emigrants and children of the IMAGE: COURTESY European consumption. VOC draughtsman Company as both Japanese and Christian may OF BIBLIOTHÈQUE Andries Beeckman produced at least two oil NATIONALE DE FRANCE. well have been part of an emotional performance paintings from his time in Batavia in which of their own, tied to anxieties to situate a Japanese Christian, dressed in a distinctive themselves at the top of the Batavian hierarchy black hat and blue full-length robe appears in as this new cohort arrived. This generation of the bottom right of the composition (The Castle Japanese Christian exiles remained conceptually of Batavia, c. 1661 (fig. 2) andFort Batavia and marginal — they could be aligned with the Market, c. 1662).13 This image is similar to European emotional community but never another colourful image of a Japanese Christian integrated entirely. man in a blue robe and black hat with a sword Such reflections on states of alterity through his red belt, which Beeckman produced also animated visual records produced by in a manuscript book of drawings made from contemporary European artists keen to his voyage to the Indies (fig. 3).14 In this text, the emphasise and categorise the melting pot of Japanese Christian was one of 38 ‘others’ which cultures that thronged the streets of the VOC included Eurasian, Chinese, Javanese, Malay, city. Representatives of the Japanese community and Africans at the Cape, among others, in a were visually catalogued in images created for Humanities Australia 73 (right) Fig. 4. The first page of the letter of Haru, Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture, 県書 ヘ 13 62. IMAGE: COURTESY OF NAGASAKI MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND CULTURE. mix of postures and dress that was perceived born in Hirado.16 Simonsen was a VOC Junior to be local, military or European. Here, the Merchant who would rise to become Harbour Japanese Christian was not a member of a shared Master in Batavia in 1663. The couple had at Christian community within the VOC but least seven children together.17 Letters remain numbered among exotic ‘others.’ European artists from a number of exiled women, which share and viewers drew understandings, and perhaps both stylistic features and matters of content.18 also emotional responses from fears and wonder, Perhaps most striking are the explicit expressions to curiosity and concern, about these people of longing within them. Haru/Jeronima’s from the associations they made about the styles, depiction of her eyes swollen with tears was colours, fit and suitability of these material written soon after her arrival in Batavia, but accoutrements and the bodily gestures made by women writing many years later articulated those sporting them. Numerically-dominated similar sentiments. One was Cornelia, who in by such ‘others’ in Batavia, Beeckman’s artwork a letter from April 1671, wrote: perhaps provided an aesthetic outlet for anxieties From the contents of the letter you have about Europeans’ own numerical marginality and sent me from Japan I have understood desires to maintain control. your situation and this gives me the The secret silk letter of Haru/Jeronima feeling that I have seen you. I sadly wipe would not be her only communication with away the tears with my sleeve.19 her Japanese relatives. Over time, authorities in Japan relaxed some restrictions that allowed Cornelia was the daughter of Cornelis van an older, widowed Haru/Jeronima, in 1681, to Nijenroode, VOC chief merchant in Japan from send a further letter to Japan along with many 1623 to 1632. With her elder sister Hester, she gifts to family and friends (fig. 4).15 In November had been removed from Hirado on the Galjas 1646, she had married Simon Simonsen, the in November 1637, following a resolution by son of a Japanese woman and European father the VOC Council of Hirado in September the 74 Humanities Australia (left) Fig. 5. Jacob J. Coemans, Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nijenroode and their Daughters, 1665, oil on canvas, h 130 cm × w 190.5 cm IMAGE: RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM. CC0 1.0 UNIVERSAL (CC0 1.0) previous year. Cornelia had married Pieter the beauties of nature, refine their feelings, Cnoll in 1652, and by 1663, the year of her first sharpen their intuitions and given them the skill known letter to Japan, Cnoll had reached the in literary expression in Japanese necessary for position of VOC opperkoopman (first head social intercourse.’22 Tears, sorrow and longing merchant) at Batavia.20 The prosperous family were widely expressed throughout women’s were depicted in a 1665 portrait by Jacob Jansz. verse.23 Letters too were a codified genre with Coeman, showing Pieter and Cornelia with their numerous epistolary handbooks, shōsokyu ōrai, two eldest daughters, Catharina and Hester in developed in the early seventeenth century for European dress, accompanied by two servants women and men who could not afford private (fig. 5).21 tuition.24 These women’s particular forms of Of course, caution is needed in interpreting emotional expression, notably articulations of the precise phrasing of these emotive longing, participated therefore in a construction expressions, not least because they have of their Japanese heritage and identity, one been translated into English here. Letters by which was culturally resonant to their missives’ women may have been transcribed by men recipients. within their community, and some are extant Their letters also enhanced the exiled only in later copies. However, contemporary women’s ongoing engagement with their writers expected women to be aware of, and relatives and friends in Japan through repeated express, their emotions in specific ways that enquiries about the health of their recipients, are consistent with these letters. Women of a discussions of the birth of children and their wide range of social status were well educated concern to situate these children among their in Tokugawa Japan, not simply those of the Japanese relatives in conceptual and material samurai class. Their education, the wafū no ways. Cornelia’s 1663 letter addressed to her narai, focused on the study of kana syllabaries mother and her husband, Handa Goeimon, and Japanese classical literature such as the demonstrated her filial affections and duties works of female poets of the Heian era that to look to the health of her family members would provide women with ‘a knowledge of and anticipated the concerns of her mother by ninjō, of the workings of the human heart; it insisting upon her own wellbeing and that of her would encourage in them an appreciation of family. Cornelia noted that her mother and step- Humanities Australia 75 father were in good health and insisted that they such as having white cloth dyed in Japan or should not be worried about her.25 In April 1671, sending barrels of Japanese sake with monies she elaborated further: provided.29 Such requests assumed bonds of duties and obligations between support networks We are especially in good health, and of kin and friends. These gifts and requests last year [1670] in the fourth month I represented emotions for, and generated gave birth to a baby girl. Now we have emotions in, recipients, forging affiliations across four children; they are all in good health, the communities of Japan and Batavia. please do not worry. … Over the last two At their death, Japanese Christians not only years nothing has been sent by me; you attested to their faith through testaments but may be worried about me. But nothing asserted narratives of the past and identities for special has occurred. I am in good health present and future purposes. Death represented so you do not have to worry about me. I a moment at which profound acts of socialisation have become a mother of ten children; six occurred, both for the dying and for those have been lost, four are in good health. who surrounded them in which identities and Elder brother is fourteen, his sister twelve, communities were enacted and performed followed by a little sister of six and the through often ritualised emotional and affective little baby who is eight months old. All are display. The distribution of these women’s goods in good health. Especially the eldest son and people located subjects within Christian, and the second daughter send grandfather European, Japanese and exile communities. and grandmother their warmest greetings. Isabella ‘van Nangasacki’/van Sandtvoort had That you are still in good health makes me arrived in Batavia on the Breda with Haru/ happy time and time again.26 Jeronima. The daughter of a Japanese woman Cornelia’s repeated injunction to her mother and a freeburgher, Melchior van Sandtvoort, not to worry about her displayed her willingness Isabella was the widow of Vincent Romeijn, and capacity to anticipate her mother’s feelings. also an exile from Japan (although from Manila These emotional bonds were also reinforced originally) and later a Sherriff of Batavia.30 through the very practice of communicating as When in September 1648 she wrote her will, she much as the words that appeared on the physical designated a number of gifts, money and textiles, form. In doing so, women’s letters to friends to be sent to her relatives in Japan. Additionally, and family in Japan perpetuated their memory, Isabella left both properties and goods to a range networks and emotional affiliations. of individuals in the exile community, including Additionally, these letters were also a stone pedack on the Tijgersgracht to Maria, accompanied by gifts — tea, wooden screens, mother of Haru/Jeronima, 200 reals to Haru/ and especially textiles. Haru/Jeronima’s 1681 Jeronima, two silver knives, spoons and forks letter enclosed such items as white cotton cloth, to Haru/Jeronima’s husband Simon Simonsen, calico, and figured satin, sent to a large number 100 reals to Cornelia, Haru/Jeronima’s niece, of friends and family in Japan. In these letters, the daughter of Man/Magdalena Marino and fabrics from across the reach of the VOC were Michiel Buzaemon/Boesaijmon. Isabella’s will included, as well as locally-produced batik also designated a number of gifts intended to be and ikat.27 Cornelia sent back many pieces of sent to other Japanese exiles living in Macau.31 Salempouri, calico and Palcalle cottons, and In an August 1649 codicil, she placed one of batik for her mother, step-father, and wet several slaves whom she owned in a five-year nurse. She also incorporated her children into term of service to Willem Verstegen who was the ritual emotional practices of gift-giving: also known to her from their time together on ‘To grandmother and grandfather I send 2 tan the Breda.32 Haru/Jeronima’s testament, made of Dutch linen presented by elder brother and in May 1692, showed her like Isabella to be in his little sister. It is a small sign of kindness.’28 financially-comfortable circumstances, liberating Women sometimes included requests that twelve slaves and leaving five other individuals obliged their recipients to procure small items to her daughter Maria, by then the widow of a for them, or to conduct errands on their behalf, Batavian judge.33 76 Humanities Australia Beyond their distribution of gifts, these the land of her birth had produced an ongoing women’s wills bore witness to the balancing sense of pride for those who remained there, of multiple identities in other ways. Isabella’s a testament to Japanese values that she was testament, made in the presence of the Secretary perceived by them to have practised. of Batavia, Pieter Hackius, identified some of During the seventeenth century, exiles from her male recipients as ‘Japanese Christians’ Japan living in the VOC settlement at Batavia but none of the women by this designation.34 forged for themselves multiple identities Isabella herself was defined in the text by her and communities through varied emotional place of birth, ‘van Nangasacki,’ rather than performances. Their sense of self, and the by the Dutch surname, van Sandtvoort, of her emotional display and the forms in which father, Melchior. The beneficiaries of Isabella’s they could be performed, were fundamentally testamentary gifts signed their receipt of these shaped by the feelings of others, where the items in a document that again identified her communicative and communal nature of such as ‘van Nangesacki’. Yet her Japanese recipients expressions engendered not only affiliations and chose a range of means to bear witness to this attachments but also difference, even rejection, act, in Japanese kana and kanji characters, using anxieties and suspicions. These highly-situated a traditional kao (family seal), the Dutch alphabet emotional displays, in acts of correspondence, or with a simple mark. For example, Haru/ gift-giving and sociabilities or in documentary Jeronima placed her kao upon the document, forms of letters, notarial acts, church registers while her brother-in-law Buzaemon/Boesaijmon and testaments, both reflected and enacted provided a signature of his name in its Dutch expressions of multiple identities, forging variation, ‘Michiel Bouzayemon’.35 Haru/ connections and articulating exclusion far across Jeronima’s own will was signed in kana.36 The the globe. ¶ choices that these individuals made to identify themselves in varied Japanese or European styles SUSAN BROOMHALL faha in documentary forms shaped by European is Professor of History at administrative needs and perceptions of their the University of Western Australia and currently holds status, suggests their resistance to the definitions an Australian Research Council of their identity by others. Future Fellowship. Her research Finally, these multiple identities and explores gender, emotions, emotional connections to communities of faith science, technologies and and blood were also made in material forms. knowledge practices, material culture, cultural The tombstone of only one Japanese exile in contact and the heritage of the early modern Batavia, Michiel Dias Sobe, is known to us. world. She is Series Editor of ‘Gender and Power in the Premodern World’, published by ARC Inscribed in both kanji and Dutch, it reads Humanities Press. ‘Michiel T. Sobe, born in Nagasaki in 1605 and died here in 1663.’37 It was a visible and material This research was supported by the Australian representation of what it meant to be a Japanese Research Council Centre of Excellence for Christian in Batavia for others who survived him, the History of Emotions, CE110001011, and is and who secured its creation, to draw upon to analysed more fully in ‘Tears on Silk: Cross- make meanings in their own lives. But it was not Cultural Emotional Performances Among the only physical memorial to the Japanese exiles. Japanese-born Christians in Seventeenth- In 1682, the relatives of Cornelia van Nijenroode Century Batavia,’ Pakistan Journal of Historical in Hirado erected a miniature stone pagoda at Studies, 1.1 (Special Opening Issue: Emotions and a temple there, honouring the ties that she had Marginalized Communities) (2016), 18–42. maintained to her ancestors and kin in Japan * * * and in appreciation of her demonstration of filial piety in sending letters and gifts to her family.38 Cornelia’s attempts to maintain connections in Humanities Australia 77 1. The ship’s register of passengers is reproduced 10. Murakami, ‘The Japanese at Batavia’, p. 359. See in W.Z. Mulder, Hollanders in Hirado, 1597– also Iwao, ‘Japanese Emigrants in Batavia,’ p. 2, 1641 (Haarlem: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1985), who lists 33 marriages involving Japanese women Appendix X, pp. 258–59. between 1618 and 1659. 2. “うば 様 へ 11. Murakami, ‘The Japanese at Batavia,’ p. 369, 日本こいしやこいしや、ふとしたことで日本を離 れたと Appendix II, no. 58. ころ、 12. Murakami, ‘The Japanese at Batavia,’ 二度と帰ることの出来ないふるさととなってしまい、いて Appendix II. もたってもいられませ。 13. The latter painting is discussed in Jean Gelman 目がはれてしまうくらい泣いて、夢か現実かわかりませ Taylor, ‘Painted Ladies of the VOC’, South ん。 African Historical Journal, 59 (2007), 47–78. ふるさとを慕う気持ちをもって茶包みを一つ贈ります。 日本こいしやこいしや 14. Marie-Odette Scalliet, ‘Une curiosité oubliée: こしょろ ” Le Livre de dessins faits dans un voyage aux I am grateful for the kind assistance of Mr Indes par un voyageur hollandais du marquis de Remco Vrolijk, Ms Kumiko Sakamoto and Paulmy’, Archipel, 54 (1998), 35–62 (p. 42). her colleagues at the Hirado Dutch Trading 15. Letter of Haru, widow of Simonsen, held at Post in obtaining these texts and images for the Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture, reproduction. A highly embellished version Reference Number 県書 ヘ13 62. My thanks to of this letter appeared in Nishikawa Joken’s Mr Kazunori Ono at the Nagasaki Museum Nagasaki Yobanashigusa (Nagasaki Night Tales) of History and Culture for his assistance in in 1720. securing permission to publish this image, and 3. On the social experience of Batavia during this to Mr Kazuo Miyata for his research assistance. period see Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World 16. Mulder, Hollanders in Hirado, p. 63. of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia 17. Citing Iwao, A Sequel To: The Study on the (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983). Nangyang Japanese Town (Iwanami-shoten, 4. Seiichi Iwao, ‘Japanese Emigrants in Batavia 1987), in Masotoshi Iguchi, Java Story: The during the 17th Century’, Acta Asiatica, 18 (1970), History and Culture of a Southern Country 1–24 (p. 6). (Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador, 2015), p. 36. 5. Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An 18. Leonard Blussé, ‘Butterfly or Mantis? The Introduction, trans. by Keith Tribe (Oxford: Life and Times of Cornelia van Nijenroode’, Oxford University Press, 2015); Barbara H. in Blussé, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What is the Mestizo Women and Dutch in VOC Batavia History of Emotions? (Cambridge: Polity, 2018). (Dordrecht-Holland: Foris Publications, 1986), 6. I am following from Judith Butler’s notion p. 187. See letters by Cornelia van Nijenroode, of performativity here: see Gender Trouble: and two by Fuku/Catharina, a servant born into Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: the family of Gorosaku and Sanzō, who married Routledge, 1999). Louwijs Rokube/Locqbe/de Nangesackje: Murakami, ‘The Japanese at Batavia’, pp. 356, 7. Jean Gelman Taylor, ‘Meditations on a Portrait 362, 369. from Seventeenth-Century Batavia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 37 (2006), 23–41 (p. 33). 19. Blussé, ‘Butterfly or Mantis?’ p. 191; the Japanese text is reproduced in Murakami, ‘The Japanese 8. 8 January 1640, Antonie van Diemen, Anthonio at Batavia’, pp. 364–5. See also Dokusho Sato, Caen and Cornelis van der Lijn, ‘Sullen ‘Jagatara bun no shin hakken’, Rekishi chiri, 16 trachten deselve kinderen in Godes vreese (1910), 75–81, 164–75, 472–85. Cornelia is perhaps ende d’oprechte Christelijcke religie op te the best known Japanese exile, discussed trecken ende de handt daeren houden met at length by Leonard Blussé in ‘Butterfly or de minste costen tot laste van de Comp.e, Mantis?’ and Bitter Bonds: A Colonial Divorce sooveel mogelijck sij, dat vetrouwen, U Ed. wel Drama of the Seventeenth Century, trans. by gevallen sal’, Generale missiven van gouverneurs- Diane Webb (Princeton: Markus Wiener generaal en raden aan heren XVII der Verenigde Publications, 2002). Oostindische Compagnie, Volume 2: 1639–55, ed. by W. Ph. Coolhaas, (’S Gravenhage: Martinus 20. Blussé, ‘Butterfly or Mantis?’ p. 187. Nijhoff, 1964), p. 98. 21. This work is discussed in Gelman Taylor, 9. ‘Simon Simonssen van Firande, assitent in dienst ‘Meditations’, and ‘Painted Ladies of the VOC’ as van d’E. Compagnie, met Hieronima Marinus well as Blussé, ‘Butterfly or Mantis?’ p. 179. jonge dochter, geboortich van Nangesackie’. 22. R. P. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan (1965) Naojiro Murakami, ‘The Japanese at Batavia in (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 66. the XVIIth Century,’ Monumenta Nipponica, 2 23. See Japanese Women Poets: An Anthology, (1939), 353–73 (p. 370, Appendix II, no. 76). trans. and ed. by Hiroaki Sato (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008); Court Ladies of Old Japan, 78 Humanities Australia trans. by Annie Omori and Kochi Doi (Boston: 31. Murakami, ‘The Japanese at Batavia’, p. 371, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920); Peter Nosco, Appendix III, no 1. Remembering Paradise: Nativism and Nostalgia 32. Iwao, ‘Japanese Emigrants in Batavia’, p. 9. in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Cambridge, 33. Iwao, ‘Japanese Emigrants in Batavia’, p. 9. Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1990), p. 7; Eiko Ikegami, ‘Emotions,’ 34. Murakami, ‘The Japanese at Batavia’, p. 371, A Concise Companion to History, ed. by Ulinka Appendix III, no 1. Rublack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 35. Murakami, ‘The Japanese at Batavia’, pp. 372–3, 233–53 (p. 334). Appendix III, no 3 and Figure 2. On the use of 24. Dore, Education in Tokugawa Japan, p. 283. Japanese seals, see Iwao, ‘Japanese Emigrants in Batavia’, p. 7. 25. Blussé, ‘Butterfly or Mantis?’, p. 190. 36. Iwao, ‘Japanese Emigrants in Batavia’, p. 18. 26. Blussé, ‘Butterfly or Mantis?’, p. 191. 37. ‘hier rust d’eersame michiel t’sobe 27. Iguchi, Java Story, pp. 105–6. Letter of Haru, christen japander gebooren tot Nagasaki Museum of History and Culture, 県書 nangasacki den xv augusto a 1605 obyt den ヘ13 62. xix april a 1663’: A.F. King, ‘A gravestone in 28. Blussé, ‘Butterfly or Mantis?’ p. 192. Batavia to the memory of a Japanese Christian 29. Iguchi, Java Story, p. 44. Letter of Haru, Nagasaki of the Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Museum of History and Culture, 県書 ヘ13 62. Asiatic Society of Japan, 17 (1889), 97–101 (p. 99). 30. Murakami, ‘The Japanese at Batavia’, p. 358. 38. Blussé, ‘Butterfly or Mantis?’, pp. 17–78. Humanities Australia 79