Voices from the beach can be hard to hear. They can be snatched from the lips by the wind or drowned in the white noise of the waves. But there are beaches, too, on which voices are hard to hear because of the silence. 01/13

– Greg Denning, Beach Crossings: Voyaging across Times, Cultures, and Self

Beaches remain important places within Indigenous coastal peoples’ territories, though the silence about our ownership is deafening. Aileen Moreton-Robinson The coastline of the Australian continent was frequented for centuries by mariners and traders from Asia with whom some Indigenous groups Bodies That established trade and familial relations.1 The first verified contact by Dutch explorer Willem Matter on the Janszoon was in March 1606; he chartered the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in northern Beach . Over the next two centuries the charting of the Australian coastline was primarily undertaken by British explorers. Since 1788, the coastline of this continent has been colonized by British colonists and their descendants, who built the majority of Australia’s capital cities near the sea. In 2010, it is where the largest proportion of the Australian population resides on the most prized real estate in the country. Living near the sea ensures that the beach continues to be a place of multiple encounters for residents and visitors. The beach marks the border between land and sea, between one nation and another, a place that stands as the common ground upon which collective national ownership, memory, and identity are on public display; a place of pleasure, leisure, and pride. Michael Taussig argues that the beach is a site of fantasy production, a playground where transgressions and pleasure occur. It is “the ultimate fantasy where nature and carnival blend as prehistory in the dialectical image of modernity.”2 đđđđđđđđđđAs an island continent, beaches are the visible terra manifestation of Australian borders, which operate simultaneously to include and exclude. In the twenty-first century, these borders may seem to be more permeable because of economic and cultural processes of

e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 0 — p i 2 1 8 đ A M t R b s B o d i e s T h a t M r n c globalization, but territorial sovereignty reigns supreme in Australia and Europe, evidenced by border patrols that serve to exclude those who are uninvited. Within Australia we are constantly reminded of the central role of possession in civilizing “others” and the association between war and borders, which is reinscribed through our treatment of asylum seekers who travel by boat attempting to land on our beaches.

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT 02/13

Vernon Ah Kee, cantchant, 2007 (still). Three-channel video. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, .

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT Australian federal governments have built then discuss how Indigenous artist Vernon Ah mandatory detention centers fenced with razor Kee contests this performativity in his wire and patrolled by guards to accommodate installation entitled Cant Chant. the “illegal boat people” who have been successful in landing on our beaches after Performing the Colonial Subject escaping from war-torn countries such as Iraq Colonization is the historical process through and Afghanistan. In taking possession of their which the performativity of the white male body bodies and imprisoning them, the nation-state 03/13 and its relationship to the environment has been exercises its sovereignty in violation of several realized and defined, particularly in former human rights conventions that it has signed. This British colonies such as Australia, , performative sovereign act of violence and , and the .5 In staking disavowal has historical roots. Despite possession to Indigenous lands, white male international law, the British invasion, in the bodies were taking control and ownership of the form and arrival of the first naval boat people, environments they encountered by mapping land produced invisible borders left in the wake of and naming places, which is an integral part of colonization that continues to deny Indigenous the colonizing process. One of the first people our sovereign rights. Many authors have possessive performances by the white male body argued that within Australian popular culture the occurred on the beach when Captain James Cook beach is a key site where racialized and landed at a place he named Botany Bay on April gendered transgressions, fantasies, and desires 28, 1770. For some time his boat had been under are played out, but none have elucidated that surveillance by the Kamegal clan of Cooks River these cultural practices reiteratively signify that and Botany areas and the Gwegal clan at Kundull the nation is a white possession.3 (Kurnell). At first the Kamegal and Gwegal clans đđđđđđđđđđIn this text I examine how white possession thought the large boat was a big bird entering the functions ontologically and performatively within bay, but as the boat approached they could see Australian beach culture through the white male that the people onboard were similar but body. I draw on Judith Butler’s idea of different to themselves.6 When Cook and his men performativity in that a culturally determined landed on the beach at Kundull, they were and historically contingent act, which is trespassing on Gwegal land and hence were internally discontinuous, is only real to the challenged by two Gwegal warriors who threw extent that it is repeated.4 Raced and gendered spears at them while shouting out in their norms of subjectivity are iterated in different language “Warra Warra Wai,” meaning “go away.” ways through performative repetition in specific Cook’s crew retaliated by firing muskets and historical and cultural contexts. National racial wounding one of the Gwegal warriors. The and sexual subjects are in this sense both doings warriors retreated, leaving their spears and and things done, but where I differ from Butler is shields behind on the ground. This encounter that I argue that they are existentially and was never interpreted as an act of Indigenous ontologically tied to patriarchal white sovereignty by Cook as he made his way up the sovereignty. Patriarchal white sovereignty is a eastern coast of Australia. Instead, he rescripted regime of power that derives from the illegal act us as living in a state of nature with no of possession and is most acutely manifested in knowledge of, or possession of, proprietary the form of the Crown and the judiciary, but it is rights.7 also evident in everyday cultural practices and đđđđđđđđđđCook took possession of the Gwegal spaces. As a means of controlling differently warriors’ weapons and transported them back to racialized populations enclosed within the Britain, where they are now on display in a borders of a given society, white subjects are museum housing the property of people from disciplined, though to different degrees, to invest different countries accumulated through in the nation as their possession. As a regime of purchase, plunder, and theft. After eight days in power, patriarchal white sovereignty capillaries Botany Bay, Cook and his crew sailed north up the performative reiteration of white possession the coastline of Australia. Cook made good use through white male bodies. In this way of his telescope, surveying the Indigenous people performativity functions as a disciplinary e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 0 — p i 2 1 8 đ A M t R b s B o d i e s T h a t M r n c on the beach as he sailed past their lands, noting technique that enables the white male subject to in his diaries that we ranged in color from be imbued with a sense of belonging and chocolate to soot. After several months of sailing ownership produced by a possessive logic that northward, he eventually took possession of the presupposes cultural familiarity and entire eastern coast from the 38 degree latitude commonality applied to social action. In this in the name of King George III after landing on context I will examine how the beach is the beach of an island he named “Possession,” appropriated as a white possession through the situated off the tip of Cape York Peninsula. The performative reiteration of the white male body. I assumption of sovereignty was ceremoniously

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT 04/13

Vernon Ah Kee,đacceptance, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT marked by firing guns and raising the British flag because the Police Act 1838 restricted swimming as the male crew bore witness. The performative to the early hours of the morning and preferably act of possession enabled by patriarchal white on nonpopular beaches. The public display of the sovereignty is constituted by violence and white male body was perceived to offend moral transgression, voyeurism, pleasure, and pride. sensibilities current at the time. It was not until These originary performative acts by the white the early twentieth century that surf bathing male body would eventually become an integral became a part of modern beach culture, due in part of Australian beach culture. 05/13 part to the shifting codes of Victorian morality đđđđđđđđđđSome eight years after Cook, eleven British and increased control of the sea and the surf.11 naval ships arrived in Botany Bay. Governor Eugenics also played a part in the shift. Phillip, as the embodiment of colonial power, “Whereas picnicking and promenading defined planted a British flag in the sand, staking a masculinity in terms of an emphasis on the possessive claim to lands that belonged to the respectability and moral authority of colonialism, Eora and Gadigal nations. The invasion had surf bathing and lifesaving defined masculinity in begun and the lives of the people from the terms of a strong, fit, well muscled and racially Kamegal and Gwegal clans were never the same pure white body.”12 This representation of the as violence and smallpox took its toll. Over the white male body was in contrast to the next century, through containment, disease, and perception of policymakers at the turn of the death, Indigenous people were displaced by century, who facilitated the displacement of the colonists. In the white colonial imagination, we Indigenous body from the beaches and lands had become abject subjects; our lives and our onto reserves and missions. The Indigenous body bodies were physically erased from the beach.8 was represented as being terminal. The common Over the next century the only subjects who phrase at the time to describe the containment determined which bodies mattered on the beach and removal was as a benevolent act of were almost exclusively white males, embodying “smoothing the dying pillow.”13 the possessive prerogative of patriarchal white sovereignty as a colonial norm.9 Beach Lifesavers: Performing White đđđđđđđđđđDespite the apparent promise of open Masculinity access and use, public spaces are predicated By 1907, white middle-class men had formed the upon an assumption of objectivity and Surf Life Saving Association of Australia in rationality, which values but no longer explicitly response to the public representation of their marks or names whiteness or maleness. The surf bathing as being an “affront to decency.”14 beach, as a public space, continues to be They soon gained public approval by rationalizing controlled by white men, the embodiment of their objectives as humanitarian and arguing that universal humanness and national identity. In the surf bathing was a disciplined organized sport nineteenth century, the beach and its natural involving military drills. Unlike lifeguards, who features were mostly of interest to white male were paid for their services, surf lifesavers were visitors who were influenced by European volunteers who undertook training to protect Romanticism. The beauty of the beach appealed people on the beach and were responsible for the to observers, along with “its sublime features: safety and rescue of swimmers, surfers, and those characteristics which stimulated an other water-sports participants. Regimentation, intensity of emotion and sensation [valuing] rigor, and dedication to the service of the nation poetic mystery above intellectual clarity.”10 produced fit and disciplined white male bodies. Perceived as such, the beach enabled the The media reported favorably on the suntanned performance of a gendered white ontological white male bodies, representing them as the experience where nature fed the soul and culture epitome of Australian manhood. Suntanning nurtured white men’s sensibilities. The beach enhanced the aesthetic modalities of the white was also an intersubjective place where a man male body appropriating and domesticating the could socialize with family and friends or watch hypersexuality signified by black skin. Tanning other beachgoers and indulge in the British simultaneously renders the presence of color as custom of promenading along the shore. The a temporary alteration that works to affirm the beach was and remains a heteronormative white e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 0 — p i 2 1 8 đ A M t R b s B o d i e s T h a t M r n c dominance of white masculinity and its masculine space entailing performances of ownership of the beach. The brownness of the sexuality, wealth, voyeurism, class, and white male body becomes “a detachable possession. However, these different attributes signifier, inessential to the subject, and hence of white male performativity underwent a acceptable” because it is not permanent.15 As a transformation with the introduction of surf detached signifier, it does not disrupt the bathing. In the nineteenth century, surf bathing “somatic luxury of white [male] subjects to roam was performed exclusively by white males, but it and return to the tabula rasa of ideal whiteness was not a predominant part of beach culture where it is conveniently restored to its apex of

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT 06/13

Vernon Ah Kee,đacceptance, 2005. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT 07/13

Vernon Ah Kee,​ cantchant, 2007 (still). Three-channel video. Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane.

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT privileges” as the embodiment of nation.16 The traumatized and disfigured white male bodies surf lifesaver’s discipline, strength, bravery, returning home. mateship, loyalty, and rigor embodied the đđđđđđđđđđFollowing the carnage of the Great War, the attributes of white national identity, which were lifesaver was used as a signifier of national later ascribed to the body of the digger at identity to endow the broken body of the digger ANZAC. The term “digger” is an appellation with new life and new masculine virility. During applied to Australian and New Zealand soldiers the interwar period and up to the 1950s, media because of their trench-digging activities during 08/13 represented the white male body of the surf the Gallipoli campaign, which required strong lifesaver as the embodiment of the ANZAC spirit and fit bodies to undertake the hard work. The and the nation. In 1923, the president of the Surf transference of the attributes of the surf Life Saving Association stated in the Daily lifesaver to the digger was not a coincidence. Guardian that “we shall rear a race of men finer Many surf lifesavers volunteered for both world than the Anzacs, whom the whole world wars, and in some cases lifesaving clubs were admire[s].”19 And in 1941, the commentary in a closed because of the declining numbers of newsreel item shot at a Bondi Beach carnival young men.17 stated that “mighty deeds spawn men of might. đđđđđđđđđđThe suntanned and hypermasculinized This is the crucible from which fighting material white body of the digger became inextricably tied emerges volunteer lifesavers, volunteer fighters. to the birth of Australian nationalism within the The amateur surf clubs have an enlistment white imaginary in the late twentieth century. record second to none.”20 The embodied This national identification with the signification of the white surf lifesavers as nation performativity of invasion and taking possession is also demonstrated by their inclusion and of other peoples’ lands embraces and legitimizes performance in national events such as the a tradition of patriarchal white sovereign opening of the Harbour Bridge in in 1932, violence embodied in the white male body on the the Australian sesquicentenary in 1938, Queen beach in Australia and abroad. More than fifty Elizabeth’s visit in 1954, and the thousand Australian soldiers volunteered to go to Olympics in 1956. During the 1940s, war in Europe to defend the sovereignty of the photographer Max Dupain captured Australian British Empire, an empire that was founded on beach culture in his representations of white the invasion and theft of Indigenous peoples male bodies in photographs that include the lands. The first convoy of predominantly white infamous Sunbaker (1937), Surf Race Start male volunteers left Western Australia in (1940), and Surfs Up (1940). Dupain’s portraits of November 1914, arriving on the beach at Gallipoli white male bodies performing in the service of on April 25. Staking a possessive claim to the the nation represented the beach as a white beach, Lieutenant General Sir William Birdwood, possession, a space of leisure, pleasure, and on April 29, 1915, decided to name the area pride. ANZAC Cove in honor of the Australian and New đđđđđđđđđđIn the 1930s, surf lifesaving clubs were Zealand Army Corps who served at Gallipoli. conferred with a legal proprietary right to the Despite this possessive claim, the Turkish beaches by local councils, which officially gave government did not agree to officially name the them the power to control, police, and rescue site ANZAC Cove for another seventy years, due beachgoers. Despite the official sanction of surf in part as a gesture of goodwill and respect tied lifesavers’ ownership of the beach, their to the Australian government’s funding package proprietorship was challenged after World War II to maintain the site. At that fateful site, the through the emergence of a new white Turkish army decimated the Australian and New masculinity in the form of the surfer. In public Zealand armies and thousands of soldiers lost discourse, surfing was represented as a form of their lives. Though Gallipoli was a spectacular hedonistic leisure, evoking anxiety about the strategic blunder, Fiona Nicoll, in her excellent moral decay of young men and women. Surfing book From Diggers to Drag Queens: Reconfiguring produced a competitive, individualized white National Identity,18 explores how the body of the form of masculinity that attracted more women white male soldier was constructed as a onto the beach. This hedonistic form of leisure metonym for the ANZAC spirit, which has e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 0 — p i 2 1 8 đ A M t R b s B o d i e s T h a t M r n c was in contrast to the volunteer surf lifesavers increasingly divested the digger of its origins in who patrolled the beach and saved lives in the values of militarism and racial supremacy. The service of the nation. In the 1960s, surf lifesaving digger’s white male body signified clubs attempted to restrict surfers’ use of the egalitarianism, discipline, irreverence, bravery, beach by imposing taxes and restricting the use endurance, and constitutional opposition to of surfboards to certain areas. Surfers authority. As Nicoll argues, the diggers’ responded by establishing “administrative hypermasculinized and idealized body in cultural associations to regulate, codify and legitimize representations was in contrast to the actual what they now defined as a sport” in order to

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT stake a possessive claim to the beach.21 During the waves and the beaches, white Australian and the 1960s and 1970s, tension existed and South African surfers staked a possessive claim, violence occurred between these two forms of colonizing surfing by riding the waves, embodied white masculinity on the beach, “conquering,” “attacking,” and reducing them to usually over territory and sexual access to stages on which to perform aggressive acts. This women as well as prowess in the water. Verbal became the dominant form of professional abuse on the beach was common: surfers surfing, whereby surfers represented their taunted lifesavers by calling them “seals” 09/13 respective nations, embodying the violent because of their regimented training, attributes of patriarchal white sovereignty. “dickheads” because their caps looked like the đđđđđđđđđđBy the 1980s, the blonde-haired, barrel- heads of condoms, and “budgie smugglers” chested, suntanned white male body sauntering because their swimming attire exhibited the in board shorts and thongs had become a new outline of small male genitalia, particularly on icon of beach culture, reflecting the hedonism of cold days. Surf lifesavers responded to surfers youth in the 1960s and 1970s in Australia. The by calling them “seaweed” because of their long, hedonism of surfing carried with it sex, sun, and bleached, matted hair and their supposed surf. This was captured in by artists inability to master the waves. These white such as Brett Whiteley, whose reclining nudes heterosexual territorial wars abated to some and bikini-clad beauties on the beach reflected a degree when surfing was recognized nationally theater of indolence. In the catalogue for the Art as a professional sport through organized Gallery of New South exhibition entitled professional tournaments that were covered by “On the Beach: With Brett Whiteley and Fellow media and sponsored by corporations. Similarly, Australian Artists,” it states that “it was not only surf lifesaving became recognized as a the allure of these inherently erotic bodies [in] professional sport predominantly through the languid stupor that compelled Whiteley’s “Iron Man” tournaments sponsored by fascination for this iconic aspect of Australian corporations. The sexualized white male body of landscape; it was also the beautiful vistas of the suntanned surfer and the lifesaver was beach and seascapes which provided such fertile commodified to sell everything from Coca Cola to ground for his inspirational paintings and fashion and spawned a new genre of drawings.”24 As the embodiment of patriarchal documentary surfing films and televised sport. white sovereignty, Whiteley, like the surfers and đđđđđđđđđđWhite male participation in surfing had lifesavers, performatively exhibits the begun in the 1930s, but but it did not begin to possession of white women’s bodies on “their” dominate the surfing scene until the 1960s. beach. While white women are subject to the Booth argues that after the World War II mass possessive white male gaze, their presence on consumer capitalism created the conditions by the beach is tied to the heteronormativity of which leisure as a social practice became tied to patriarchal white sovereignty. They can stake a individual lifestyles.22 Surfing was and continues possessive claim to the beach in ways in which to be a native Hawaiian cultural practice Indigenous women cannot. As I have argued introduced to the West by Duke Kahanamoku. elsewhere, white women have access to power Native Hawaiians’ form of surfing was to flow and privilege on the basis of their race through with the waves, adhering to an ideal of soul unequal gendered relations.25 surfing, which was part of their culture for more đđđđđđđđđđAfter the economic downturn of the 1980s than fifteen hundred years.23 Surfing was not and a decade of multiculturalism and Indigenous considered to be a competitive practice, and rights claims, the militarized white male body of when white Australian and South African surfers the digger as the embodiment of nation was decided to invade the Native Hawaiian surfing returned to the beach within the national beach of the North Shore of Oahu in the late imaginary. Former prime minister John Howard 1970s, they were confronted by members of Hui strategically deployed the memory of Edward ‘O He’e Nalu, who asserted their sovereignty over “Weary” Dunlop as the quintessential digger, who the beach. For the Native Hawaiian surfers, the represented the core national values of mateship invasion of their beach by white surfers was a and egalitarianism.26 Dunlop was a fearless and performative reiteration of the invasion by white e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 0 — p i 2 1 8 đ A M t R b s B o d i e s T h a t M r n c strong leader, a qualified surgeon who achieved American Marines supporting the white sporting and military success.27 Taken as a patriarchy that overthrew the Hawaiian prisoner of war during World War II, he attended monarchy in 1890. Native Hawaiian surfer to his comrades, risking his own life by resistance eventually earned the respect of the challenging his Japanese captors to provide International Professional Surfing Organization, medical provisions for the sick and wounded. He which conceded to a reduction in annual continued to campaign for the rights of soldiers competitions at North Shore. Despite the after the war and was a committed assertion of Native Hawaiian sovereignty over humanitarian. Like Howard, former Labor Prime

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT Minister Paul Keating also used the digger in internal and external threat to the nation after nationalist rhetoric, but he did so in a different the 9/11 attacks and the bombings in Bali way. As Nicoll argues, Keating’s eulogy to the provides a context within which to understand “unknown” soldier “presented … a figure capable the Cronulla protesters’ rearticulation of white of drawing the diverse threads comprising Australians’ possessive claims on the beach as contemporary Australian society together in their sovereign ground.31 This is most clearly tolerance.”28 In his attempt to reorient Australia’s signified by the pervasiveness of wearing and core values toward a postcolonial future, Keating 10/13 waving the Australian flag, explicit claims to performed the digger by walking the Kokoda Trail white possession on T-shirts, inscribed on torsos in the ex-colony of Papua New Guinea, relocating with body paint, and written on placards waved the white male body in the Pacific and away from before media cameras during the protest, such Europe. As the embodied representation of as “We Grew Here: You Flew Here,” “We’re full, patriarchal white sovereignty, Keating was also fuck off,” “Respect locals or piss off,” and the signifying Australia’s role as a former colonizing sign written on the beach for the overhead nation that served to displace and negate the cameras, “100% Aussie Pride.” The white male ongoing colonization within the nation. body became the signifier of protest, embedding đđđđđđđđđđFollowing Keating’s performance, John itself within the material body of the sand Howard visited the majority of overseas through the inscription of the slogan “100% Australian war memorials, where his conveyance Aussie Pride.” These embodied significations of respect was televised to the nation. In construct whiteness as an inalienable property, particular, he carried a diary belonging to a the purity of which is always potentially at threat family member when he visited French from racialized others through contamination battlefields, signifying to the nation that he too and dispossession.32 At Cronulla, the white male had been touched by war. Howard legitimated his body performatively repossessed the beach authority as an Australian leader of the nation by through anti-Arabic resentment, thus vicariously linking himself to the digger tradition mimetically reproducing the racialized colonial through his family’s wartime contribution. He violence enacted to dispossess Indigenous strategically deployed the digger nationalism people. connecting World War I to Timor and then Iraq to đđđđđđđđđđIn response to the events of 2005, one of substantiate our involvement in war by Australia’s leading Indigenous artists, Vernon Ah frequently using the term “digger” in his Kee of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji, and speeches.29 Howard was at ANZAC Cove, Gugu Yimithirr peoples, challenged Australian Gallipoli, when a contingent of Australian troops popular culture, racism, and representations of arrived in Muthanna Province, in southern Iraq, Indigeneity in his exhibit at the Biennale on April 25, 2005.30 Howard’s performative in 2009. The Cronulla riots provided a context for reiterations of digger nationalist subjectivity to Ah Kee’s art installation entitled Cant Chant, justify Australia’s deployment in Iraq, in the which offers its audience an Aboriginal man’s name of patriarchal white sovereignty, rendering of the beach, drawing on, but in perpetuates the historical connection of the opposition to, its signification within popular white male body to possession and war. culture as a site of everyday white male Howard’s militarization of Australian history performativity and representations of through the digger rescripted nationalism and “Australian-ness.” Common ownership of the resulted in an unprecedented rise in attendance beach looms large in the Australian imagination, by predominately white youth at memorial but as violent attacks on Cronulla Beach services above the beach at ANZAC Cove during demonstrate, not everyone shares the same his time in office. The somber respect shown at proprietary rights within that space. His work the memorial service at ANZAC Cove frames the beach as an important site for the performatively reiterates the relationship defense and assumption of territorial between the white male body, possession, and sovereignty. It is the place where invaders have war in the defense of patriarchal white landed, and on Australia Day it is reenacted as sovereignty signified by the place of encounter: the place where in 1788 Captain Arthur Phillip the beach. e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 0 — p i 2 1 8 đ A M t R b s B o d i e s T h a t M r n c planted a flag in the name of some faraway đđđđđđđđđđIn Australia, on December 11, 2005, the sovereign to signify white possession. beach once again became a place where đđđđđđđđđđAh Kee plays with the idea that iconic transgression, violence, and white possession beaches such as Bondi and Cronulla are white were on display. On that day at Cronulla Beach, possessions, public spaces perceived within the approximately five thousand predominately white Australian imaginary as being urban and white men rioted over the alleged bashing of a natural, civilized and primitive, spiritual and surf lifesaver by an Arabic-speaking youth. The physical. He is acutely aware that the beach is a racialized production of the “terrorist” as an place where nature and culture become

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT reconciled through the performativity of white dance for the land and the white performative male bodies such as lifesavers and surfers. Ah dancing on the land reiterates Indigenous Kee undoes this reconciliation by disrupting the Australia’s challenge to white possessive beach as a site of fantasy production where performances and their grounding in patriarchal carnival and nature synergize as prehistory in the white sovereignty. dialectical image of modernity. He challenges đđđđđđđđđđAt the entrance to the second room, Ah Kee white possession of the beach by making visible invites his audience to bear witness to a seeming the omnipresence of Indigenous sovereignty 11/13 anomaly: Aboriginal surfers at the beach. The through the performativity of the Indigenous video shows the Aboriginal surfers walking male body. In this way he brings forth the around the Gold Coast, surveying the beach sovereign body of the Indigenous male into before entering it with their shield surfboards. modernity, displacing the white male body on the The surprised look of a white male gaze is beach. captured on film. This surprise suggests that to đđđđđđđđđđThe beach is Indigenous land and evokes the white male beachgoer, Aboriginal surfers are different memories. As the viewer enters Ah out of place; they are not white in need of a tan, Kee’s installation, surfboards hang in the middle they belong in the landscape in the middle of of the room, and painted Yadinji shields with Australia, not on the beach. Ah Kee plays on this markings on one side in red, yellow, and black, anomaly by taking his audience to the landscape the colors of the Indigenous flag, signify our away from the beach, where death is signified by sovereignty and resistance. On the other side of two cemeteries. Suddenly guns are fired the surfboards, the eyes of Aboriginal male repeatedly at two white surfboards encased with warriors gaze silently at their audience, bearing barbed wire, one hanging from a tree, the other witness to their uninvited presence. The gaze of tied to a rock. The barbed wire evokes the Ah Kee’s grandfather looks to the east, surveying fencing off of the land against Indigenous the coastline in anticipation of invaders. The sovereignty and the wire that was used in the silent gaze is broken by the text on the walls: trenches at Gallipoli, both signifying death and destruction. Here Ah Kee brings forth repressed Ah Kee the sovereign warrior speaks his memories of the violence of massacres, truth. We grew here you flew here, we are incarceration, and dispossession hidden in the first people, we have to tolerate you, we landscape that is far away from the beach. There are not your other, you are dangerous is silence as the clip moves back to the beach, people and your duty is to accept the truth where memories of the violence inflicted on for you will be constantly reminded of your Aboriginal people are repressed by its iconic wrong doing by our presence. Aboriginal status within the Australian imagination. people are not hybrids and will not comply Suddenly a lone Indigenous surfer appears on his with what you think you have made us shield surfboard gracefully moving through the become. water, displaying his skill as he takes command of the waves. He is not out of place. He embodies Moving out of the first room, the viewer enters the resilience of Indigenous sovereignty another, where a video clip intermittently echoes disrupting the iconography of the beach that the sounds of the land and water with the song represents all that is Australian within white “Stompin’ Ground,” sung by Warumpi, an popular culture. Like a stingray barb piercing the Indigenous band. The song’s message to its heart of white Australia, Ah Kee’s masterful use audience: if you want to know this country and if of irony and anomaly reinserts the Indigenous you want to change your ways, you need to go to male body at the beach, displacing the white the stomping ground for ceremonial business. Ah male body as the embodiment of possession 239 Kee performatively reiterates Indigenous years after Captain Cook’s originary possessive sovereignty through the use of this song, which performance. offers its white audience a way to belong to this country that is outside the logic of capital and Conclusion patriarchal white sovereignty. Here Ah Kee also The production of the beach as a white plays with irony because the “Stomp” was the e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 0 — p i 2 1 8 đ A M t R b s B o d i e s T h a t M r n c possession is both fantasy and reality within the surfers’ dance made famous by Little Pattie, one Australian imagination and is tied to a beach of Australia’s original surfie-chick icons. And culture encompassing pleasure, leisure, and white Australian youths have continued to stomp national pride that developed during modernity all over the beach as shown in video clips for through the embodied performance of white Australian rock bands such as INXS and Midnight masculinity. As a border, the beach is constituted Oil, in soap operas such as Home and Away, and by epistemological, ontological, and axiological in the movie Puberty Blues.33 Ah Kee’s violence, whereby the nation’s past and present juxtaposition of the Warumpi band’s call to treatment of Indigenous people becomes

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT invisible and negated through performative acts đđđđđđ1 Surfing,” Journal of Sport History Regina Ganter, Mixed Relations: 22, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 189–206; of possession that ontologically and socially Asian-Aboriginal Contact in 190. ground white male bodies. White possession North Australia (University of Western Australia Press, 2006). đđđđđđ15 becomes normalized and regulated within Sara Ahmed, Differences That society through socially sanctioned embodied đđđđđđ2 Matter: Feminist Theory and Michael Taussig, “The Beach (A Postmodernism (Cambridge performative acts of Australian beach culture. Fantasy),” Critical Inquiry 26 University Press, 1998), 116. (Winter 2000): 249–77; 258. The reiterative nature of these performances is đđđđđđ16 required because within this borderland the 12/13 đđđđđđ3 Farid Farid, “Terror at the Beach: Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Arab Bodies and the Somatic omnipresence of Indigenous sovereignty Fiona Nicoll, “We Shall Fight Violence of White Cartographic ontologically disturbs patriarchal white Them on the Beaches: Anxiety in Australia and Protesting Cultures of White Palestine/Israel,” Social sovereignty’s possession and its originary Possession,” Journal of Semiotics 19, no. 1 (2009): violence. Ah Kee’s work powerfully demonstrates Australian Studies 30, no. 89 59–78; 66. (December 2007): 151–62. the resilience of Indigenous sovereignty and its đđđđđđ17 ability to disturb ontologically the performativity đđđđđđ4 “Yamba Call to Oars,” Daily Judith Butler, Bodies That Examiner, January 16, 2010. of white possession. Continuing the tradition of Matter: On the Discursive Limits his ancestors, it is appropriate in the twenty-first of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993). đđđđđđ18 Fiona Nicoll, From Diggers to century that the silence of the beach becomes đđđđđđ5 Drag Queens: Reconfigurations the object of Vernon Ah Kee’s sovereign artistic Richard Dyer, White (Routledge, of National Identity (Pluto Press, 1997). 2001). warrior-ship. đđđđđđđđđđ× đđđđđđ6 đđđđđđ19 Keith Vincent Smith, “Voices on White, “Representing the Reprinted with permission from Aileen Moreton-Robinson, the Beach,” in Lines in the Sand: Nation,” 5. The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Botany Bay Stories from 1770, Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). ed. Ace Bourke (Hazelhurst đđđđđđ20 Regional Gallery and Arts Ibid., 6. Centre, 2008), 13–22; 13. đđđđđđ21 đđđđđđ7 Booth, “Ambiguities in Pleasure Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and Discipline,” 190. “White Possession: The Legacy of Cook’s Choice,” in Imagined đđđđđđ22 Australia: Reflections Around the Ibid. Reciprocal Construction of Identity Between Australia and đđđđđđ23 Europe (Peter Lang, 2009). I. Helekunihi Walker, “Terrorism or Native Protest? The Hui ‘O đđđđđđ8 He’e Nalu and Hawaiian Butler, Bodies That Matter. Resistance to Colonialism,” Pacific Historical Review 74, no. đđđđđđ9 4 (2005): 575–601; 576. Damien Riggs and Martha Augoustinos, “The Psychic Life đđđđđđ24 of Colonial Power: Racialised See Subjectivities, Bodies, and http://www.absolutearts.com/ Methods,” Journal of Community artsnews/2003/03/03/30797.ht and Applied Social Psychology ml. 15, no. 6 (2005): 461–77; 471. đđđđđđ25 đđđđđđ10 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Caroline Ford, “Gazing, Strolling, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Falling in Love: Culture and Indigenous Women and Nature on the Beach in Feminism (University of Nineteenth Century Sydney,” Queensland Press, 2000). History Australia 3, no. 1 (2006): 8.1–8.14; 8.3. đđđđđđ26 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “The đđđđđđ11 House That Jack Built: Ibid., 8.2. Britishness and White Possession,” ACRAWSA e-journal đđđđđđ12 1 (2005). Cameron White, “Representing the Nation: Australian đđđđđđ27 Masculinity on the Beach at Sue Ebury, Weary: The Life of Sir Cronulla,” in Everyday Edward Dunlop (Penguin Books, Multiculturalism, Conference 1994). Proceedings, Macquarie University, September 28–29, đđđđđđ28 2006 (Centre for Research on Nicoll, From Diggers to Drag

e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 0 — p i 2 1 8 đ A M t R b s B o d i e s T h a t M r n c Social Inclusion, Macquarie Queens, 29. University, 2007), 2. đđđđđđ29 đđđđđđ13 Moreton-Robinson, “The House H. C. Coombs, Aboriginal That Jack Built.” Autonomy: Issues and Strategies (Cambridge University Press, đđđđđđ30 1994), 71. The Weekend Australian, February 26–27, 2005, 19. đđđđđđ14 Douglas Booth, “Ambiguities in đđđđđđ31 Pleasure and Discipline: The Moreton-Robinson and Nicoll, Development of Competitive “We Shall Fight Them on the

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT Beaches.”

đđđđđđ32 Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property (1993),” in Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White, ed. David Roediger (Shocken Books, 1998).

đđđđđđ33 Moreton-Robinson and Nicoll,

“We Shall Fight Them on the 13/13 Beaches.” e - f l u x j o r n a # 9 0 — p i 2 1 8 đ A M t R b s B o d i e s T h a t M r n c

04.03.18 / 19:50:18 EDT