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Mediating Aboriginality: the Politics and Aesthetics of Australian Reconciliation

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Mediating Aboriginality: the Politics and Aesthetics of Australian Reconciliation Mediating Aboriginality: The Politics and Aesthetics of Australian Reconciliation Submitted by: Kelsey Brannan November 22, 2011 Georgetown University This is a revised version of the paper to be read at the 2011 CSAA: Cultural ReOrientations and Comparative Colonialities Conference on November 22 at the University of South Australia in Adelaide. Keywords: Reconciliation, aboriginality, art, identity politics, tourism, media literacy, colonialism 1 “As a foreigner, it has been hard to locate Aborigines on any level, least of all in person. Yet, when one becomes aware of their absence, suddenly in a way they are present.”1 - Marcia Langton Foundation Chair in Australian Indigenous Studies at Melbourne University At Reconciliation Place in Canberra, Australia, voices sing and Aboriginal songs play when people walk past motion-sensor sandstone monuments (Figure 1). As a visitor from the United States, I find that other tourists like myself visit these sites of commemoration and leave with the impression that indigenous reconciliation is set in stone. Up the road from these commemorative sites, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy remains a site of protest for indigenous communities (Figure 2). The visual and ideological disparity between the celebration of a shared journey at Reconciliation Place and the anger that remains at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy reveals the gaps in Australia’s recuperative official rhetoric. There is a need for a reexamination of the relationship between these cultural sites to the social inequalities that still exist in Australia today.2 Rethinking contemporary Indigenous identity means critically analyzing the way in which the definition of “Aboriginality” is reoriented through reconciliation media and discourse. According to Marcia Langton, the Foundation Chair in Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, the definition of Aboriginality has been negotiated by: (i) local indigenous Australians, (ii) the textual and fictional constructions 1 Marcia Langton, “Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of Representation,” in Blacklines: Contemporary critical writing by indigenous Australians, ed. Michel Grossman (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 114. 2 David O. Sears and P.J. Henry, “Definition: Symbolic Racism,” in Handbook of Political Psychology (Japan: Matsusaka University Press, 2002), accessed May 5, 2011, http://www.issr.ucla.edu/sears/pubs/A165.pdf 2 created by mainstream media, and (iii) the dialogue between indigenous and non- indigenous populations.3 Reconciliation art projects, such as Reconciliation Place, follow the third definition of Aboriginality proposed by Langton. In the effort to reconcile the relationship, however, the definition of Aboriginality inscribed in art sites like Reconciliation Place monumentalize and redeem indigenous culture for the tourist gaze and further distance indigenous communities from their right to self-determination. In this way, reconciliation media stems from an academic and non-indigenous point of view.4 Peter Rigby writes, “anthropologists rightly pride themselves on their ability to analyze, understand, and explain mythological symbolic systems, yet they seldom address those associated with the provenance of their own discipline.”5 Rigby underscores a need to question how privilege actors – in this case the people in charge of funding reconciliation projects – subtly, yet violently erase indigenous sovereignty through language and art. The examples of reconciliation media I describe in this paper, utilize a rhetoric of sameness, popularly known as “closing the gap,” to forgive and forget the past in order to build and promote equality between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. This rhetoric gives the Australian population a preferential meaning of reconciliation, that is, the utopian ideal that forgiveness and equality will heal past violence. This preferential visualization of reconciliation in urban areas, however, is only a fragment of the larger issues at hand.6 Reconciliation rhetoric represses past and present contemporary human 3 Marcia Langton, “Aboriginal Art & Film: The Politics of Representation,” in Blacklines: Contemporary critical writing by Indigenous Australians. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 120. 4 Michael Dodson, 34. 5 Peter Rigby, African Images, (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 3. 6 Sigmund Freud. Civilization and its discontents. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962). 3 rights conflicts and ignores the diversity and clashes between urban and remote indigenous Australians, such as the opposing perspectives between Bess Price and Larissa Bernhardt regarding the politics of the Northern Territory Intervention.7 How come tourists do not hear about these events when visiting indigenous commemorative sites? I do not intend to say that reconciliation, as a concept, is harmful or ill informed, as the campaign for reconciliation in Australia has helped educate and produce cultural awareness about the relationship between indigenous and nonindigenous people. Instead, I hope to call attention to an “outsiders” relationship to reconciliation media and how media (re)orient and displace past injustices, rather than solve them in a practical matter. How can or will the rhetoric of reconciliation be re-orientated to translate cultural practices into positive practical outcomes for indigenous communities? How can indigenous people gain control of their own image? These questions underscore the need for reconciliation literacy, the ability to critically question how and who is representing indigenous people and what makes their representations legitimate. Moreover, these questions (re)examine what group of people reconciliation discourse is targeting and representing: indigenous or non-indigenous Australians? In the first part of this essay, I briefly trace the historical development of reconciliation rhetoric in Australian landscape paintings between 1790 and 1900, paintings that fictionalize indigenous identity and repress the violent history between indigenous and non-indigenous communities. I then show how these colonial mediations of Aboriginality resurface in contemporary visualizations of reconciliation. The next step 7 Bess Price, “Bess Price: Welcome to My World,” ABC Background Briefing, May 1, 2011, accessed May 8, 2011, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbriefing/stories/2011/3201609.htm. 4 for Reconciliation Australia will be the most difficult; to break away from the confining non-indigenous framework that perpetuates textual and symbolic conceptions of Aboriginality. i. The Beginnings of Reconciliation: Black Land, White Pictures Paintings, art, and poetry are ways of interpreting and displacing guilt. Sigmund Freud referred to art as producing direct dialogue with the desires of the unconscious.8 He notes that the artist has the incredible ability to reveal “deeply dark wishes in the work” in a disguised form, from which the viewer can take pleasure in “personal daydreams” without shame.9 New to the land and ashamed of the deteriorated existence of indigenous Australians, I argue that early Australian landscape painters, painted “harmonious” and mythological renditions of the bush land to relieve their alienation and to cope with their guilt.10 In 1790, the Port Jackson Painters were shipped from England to Sydney to paint cartographic records of the land in order to spur European migration.11 A View of Sydney Cove, 1792, documents the Sydney Harbour as a rather prosperous town into various cartographic grid-like settlements (Figure 3). The painting places the indigenous person outside the European settlement in a canoe. With the non-indigenous figures on the land and the natives outside it, the settler was able to claim the position as local inhabitant. 8 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its discontents. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962). 9 Sunnie D. Kidd, “On Poetic Imagination: Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger,” accessed October 20, 2011, http://www.inbetweenness.com/Sunnie's%20Publications/ON%20POETIC%20IMAGINATION%20SIGM UND%20FREUD%20AND%20MARTIN%20HEIDEGGER.pdf. 10 Caroline Jordan, “The Bush.” Lecture at La Trobe University, March 26, 2010. Melbourne, Australia March 26, 2010. 11 Nat Williams and Margaret Dent, “National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries,” (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2005), 24. 5 In the mid 1880s, European artists, such as John Glover, painted Aboriginal Arcadias in Tasmania in order to archive indigenous harmony and feel connected to the landscape.12 For example, in A Corroboree of Natives, Van Diemen’s Land 1840, Glover documents Aboriginal tribes performing a corroboree, a ceremonial meeting where Aborigines interact with the dreamtime through dance, music and costume, in an untouched and Eden-like landscape 13 (Figure 4). Glover’s rendition of the indigenous corroboree, however, is superficial and inaccurate; it imagines a nostalgic version of the indigenous person prior to the Black Wars (1830-1837).14 Thus, Glover’s European perspective ignores the deteriorated existence of Aborigines in Tasmania in 1837.15 This representation of Aboriginality in John Glover’s painting follows Marcia Langton’s second definition of Aboriginality, a fictional interpretation that not only situates indigenous culture as “unchanging,” but (re)imagines it for a non-indigenous audience.”16 Glover’s nostalgic depiction of Aboriginality was a form of reconciliation; a mnemonic painting process used by Europeans to cope with their guilt. In Tranquil Waters, 1894, Sydney Long solidified
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