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Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Are We Free to Roam?

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Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal, Vol. 1, 2005 SETTLED AND UNSETTLED SPACES: ARE W E FREE TO ROAM? IRENE WATSON I want the reader to engage with a number how much do I retain and ”own‘ of my of questions. They are questions to which I sovereign Aboriginal self outside the body provide no answers. For I see that it is not of my being? Am I free to roam across my up to me to provide the answers–the country and to sing and to live with the responses and the resolutions should come land of my ancestors outside the body of from the community. But how problematic my Aboriginal being/community? Or will I is that? What and where is the community, live the life of the sovereign self only within and which community? The Aboriginal1 the mind, body and spirit, and in isolation community. But we are diverse, with many from country and community? Left to the languages, different country and ways of illusionary spaces of recognition within the being. When Aboriginal peoples‘ lives are settled colony. The sovereignty of the destroyed, uprooted, and displaced, the Aboriginal being forever a challenge to the call to community is to the gathering of settled spaces of the colony. broken and shattered pieces. So what Aboriginal community can be pieced In returning to the opening questions I together in this colonising space?2 To take have posed: that is, in thinking of the point further, what kind of Australian Aboriginal community who are we? What community do we have in this same and where is the community, and which colonised space and to what extent does community? Community as constructed by the force of homogeneity determine the native title processes or in what way? Are evenness of the cultured landscape? those questions now settled and layered by conquest and colonisation? When we are speaking into a colonised space how are Aboriginal voices captured, Does Truth Have a Colour? echoed, ricocheted, distilled? Where does that voice of our old people go? Speaking or telling the black ”truth‘ of Australia‘s colonial history is to challenge In looking at the question of settled and white supremacist ”truths‘ of history. When unsettled spaces: who is it that is free to Aboriginal people speak in opposition to roam? What is the continuing Aboriginal white truths, we are accused of having a connection over roamed spaces and what blinkered or ”black armband‘ view of space do Aboriginal peoples occupy in this history. Accusations of telling ”black lies‘ one nation-Australia? To what extent is our flared up when Aboriginal women spoke of sovereign Aboriginal being accommodated the need to protect Aboriginal women‘s by the nation state‘s sanctioned native culture, law and country. Instead of the titled spaces? (see Watson 2002: 253).3 State of South Australia entering into Who am I when I stand outside native title negotiations towards a peaceful recognition, who am I–the untitled native? settlement, the Aboriginal women who Do I remain the unsettled native, left to were involved in the struggle to protect an unsettle the settled spaces of empire?4 important Aboriginal cultural site were When thinking of Aboriginal community, accused of fabrication for the purpose of who are we? Or in the suggestion of preventing development. The development Indigenous to Australia, what thought in question was to build a bridge from the predominates? Am I Aboriginal to myself; mainland at Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island. are we Aboriginal to ourselves? Or do we The State of South Australia held a Royal become part of the ”collective spirit‘ of the Commission inquiry into the truth or nation state, to become ”our‘ Australian otherwise of Aboriginal women‘s business Aborigine, then free to roam within the and the inquiry concluded there was no colonial spaces and identities as ”Australia‘s evidence to support the claim made Aborigines‘? But in that collection process, (Watson 1998 & 1997). When another way ISSN 1832-3898 © 2005 Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association IRENE WATSON: SETTLED & UNSETTLED SPACES of knowing the world (here black Aboriginal situates, and we know or should know women‘s knowing) threatened white where those unsettled spaces were for privilege and its intention to go forth and Aboriginal peoples, and where they remain build its bridge, the white ”truth‘ prevailed. today. Look into prisons, and juvenile In some small way I make an offering of detention centres–what are the Aboriginal the truths as known to myself. It is an statistics? What capacity do Aboriginal individual attempt to provide some of the peoples in custody even have to posit the pieces and to also untangle some of the question or speak of the answers? knots, in the hope of providing some further openings or ways of looking beyond Ziauddin Sadar writes: the limited horizon many believe is all there is. Other horizons exist. Colonialism was about the physical occupation of non-western cultures. Legitimizing W hite Supremacy Modernity was about displacing the present and occupying the minds of non- western cultures. Postmodernism is about The belief in European supremacy appropriating the history and identity of legitimised the violent theft of all things non-western cultures as an integral facet Aboriginal–our lands, our lives, our laws of itself, colonising their future and and our culture it was a way of knowing occupying their being (Sadar 1998: 13). the world, a way which continues to underpin the continuing displacement of How is the Australian ”native‘ placed in Aboriginal peoples. Sadar‘s analysis? We can trace a history from the appropriation of our Aboriginal The legal foundation of the Australian state lands, our displacement and movement was based on the white supremacist onto reserve mission stations, and into doctrine of terra nullius,5 and the idea of prisons, to a displaced Aboriginal identity backward black savages roaming over vast resisting absorption. In the process of tracts of open wastelands. Until the High absorption we are to be consumed by the Court decision in Mabo,6 terra nullius state and its citizens and in their applied in Australian law. The doctrine consumption of us, they are to become us. applied even though Aboriginal people had They anticipate coming into their own state been here for many thousands of years; of lawfulness through the consuming of our our histories were long. Terra nullius made sovereign Aboriginality. In this colonising black invisible, the question of ”Aborigines‘ process of us becoming white and white being free to roam was irrelevant, for we becoming Indigenous, white settlement were in law non-existent. deems itself as coming into its own legitimacy, as whites come into the space Now that terra nullius is rejected in law of our freedom to roam as Aboriginal and no longer applies as the legal peoples over our Aboriginal places and foundation for Australia‘s settlement, how spaces. We become cannibalised. But can visible is the Aborigine and what is our we enter into a conversation on the capacity to roam the lands of our cannibalism of our self, with the cannibal ancestors? In the aftermath of terra nullius being, the cannibal who is yet to see and what changed and what continues to go on know itself in its eating of us? How does as before? Speaking of colonialism and the the cannibal recognise itself? Is there a possibility of its passing, Franz Fanon saw safe conversational space where we can ”the smoking ashes of a burnt-down house have a close encounter, without our own after the fire has been put out, [but] which appropriation?7 still threaten to burst into flames again‘ (Fanon 1971: 59). I ask the reader: in How is it that we are Being Eaten? relation to Australia, has there even been an attempt to put the fire out? Or have we There are many examples of appropriation, witnessed merely the illusion of change? since the advent of colonialism in 1492. The most recent appropriation is in the Is the land post-Mabo peacefully settled, form of biopiracy. Aboriginal knowledge is allowing the freedom for all to roam? The stolen and Aboriginal resources and answer depends on what space one knowledge marketed and profited upon. 41 IRENE WATSON: SETTLED & UNSETTLED SPACES Sadar makes reference to the occupation In speaking of the possibility of coming of our being. This can be seen along with together, what may be required of us (the the absorption of our Aboriginal being, and Aborigine)? To dissolve into whiteness? For raises the question: how white are we, the that is what is currently required. Has Aborigine, becoming? And, or, what is the anything altered that position? Have potential for the indigenisation of a white universal human rights found their way settled Australia? Germaine Greer, in her into our recognition? Has the purported essay ”Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest recognition given by native title rights Way to Nationhood‘ (Greer 2003), invites a advanced our struggle to walk the land? rethinking of Aboriginality and the How am I, the Aborigine, situated? What repositioning of the Australian state as an spaces do I, the unsettled native, have to Aboriginal one. I don‘t disagree, it is a roam? In settled native titled spaces? thought Aboriginal peoples have held for (Watson 2002: 253) Or, do we continue as some time. Greer invokes the idea of we have since the time of Cook to dodge Aboriginality coming into being through the from the belly of genocide, resisting sharing of traditions; this is a philosophical digestion and dilution? tradition that Aboriginal peoples have always lived by.
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