Faculty of Education and Society Department of Society, Culture and Identity Honours Thesis (History), 15 credits

Real & Imagined Foundational Narratives in the Context of Colonialism

Resurfacing Through A Phenomenological Separation of Body & Skin

by

Carin Lindberg

2020

Abstract: This paper is attempting to develop Sara Ahmed’s research on phenomenology to include a phenomenological separation of body and skin in order to understand ongoing colonialism in Australia/Country. It is argued that coloniser rejection of colonisee knowledge production has led to a coloniser imaginary foundational narrative. Further, it is argued, colonialism cannot come to an end until the coloniser can create a real foundational narrative and, in turn, this cannot occur until colonisee knowledge production is acknowledged.

Keywords: academia, colonialism, grafting, imaginary, indigenous, knowledge, nation-building, overing, phenomenology, skin

Date: June 15, 2020 Supervisor: Emma Lundin Final seminar: June 18, 2020 Examiner: Johan Lundin 2

Interestingly, when a speaker wants to stress the validity, and perhaps the in- contestability of his/her knowledge they do not simply say 'I know, I've seen it' or `I've been there'. They point out that they know because `my footprint is over there' (ngarra luku ngunhidhi). in Body, Vision and Movement: in the Footprints of the Ancestors by Franca Tamisari

We have hope because what is behind us is also what allows other ways of gathering in time and space, of making lines that do not reproduce what we follow but instead create wrinkles in the earth. in Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others by Sarah Ahmed

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Contents

1 Introduction 4

2 Methodology & Material 7

3 Theory: Phenomenology 9

4 Background: Terra Nullius & The Dreaming 12

5 Discussion 16

5.1 Establishing difference in strange encounters 16 5.2 Establishing difference and surface of the skin 18 5.3 Phenomenological separation of skin and body in relation to foundational narratives 20 5.4 Foundational narrative grounded in establishment of difference 23 5.5 Establishment of difference and imagined foundational narrative 25 5.6. Establishing difference in knowledge production 27 5.6.1 Feminism 27 5.6.2 Mining and land rights 31 5.6.3 Overing and grafting 33

5.7 Acknowledging knowledge production 41

6 Conclusion 43

Literature & References 45

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1. Introduction

This paper will explore concepts and connections between nation-building, colonialism, and phenomenology in Australia/Country through an examination and investigation of collective and individual stories and narratives within academia from the early days of the colonising era in 1788 until today. The question posed in this paper is: how can the theory of phenomenology contribute to understanding the ongoing colonisation in Australia/Country? The overarching purpose will be to create and explore the connections between nation-building, colonialism and phenomenology. Indigenous Australians has a sense of belonging to land and a sense of entitlement to inhabit space. The coloniser does not in equal measure have this grounded sense of connection to land. How does this sense of a grounded body and a non-grounded body affect construction of foundational narratives in relation to colonisation and subjects who inhabit the same space?

Indigenous Australians often refer to Country1 when speaking of their land and colonial Australians refer to Australia. Therefore, both terms will be used throughout this paper. Another concept that will be mentioned throughout this paper is The Dreaming. This will be elaborated on in more detail, but as a basic understanding The Dreaming can be said to be Indigenous Australians’ worldview which govern all activities, rules, laws and how the everything is created.2 Actual knowledge of The Dreaming will not be provided here, but rather to convey its importance in the sense of phenomenology.

It is also important to let the reader know that this writer is a non-indigenous person and, in grappling with approach of the matter is using stories that are not my own and yet acknowledging the unavoidable of weaving my story and identity into the construction, structure and analysis. This is in line with the idea of phenomenology which will be discussed throughout as a supporting and guiding pillar. However, in order to create movement, a forward mind movement, and in order to not be too cautious and hindering creativity and intellectual thought, to dare to challenge my own mind-twisting capacity and unquestionably expose the

1 https://www.commonground.org.au/learn/connection-to-country 2 http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/Culture_2_The_Dreaming.html 5 lack thereof, I have accepted this limitation with awareness of its presence although veiled and assumingly not within my vison nor periphery. There is an open and welcome invitation for others and anybody to offer critiques, to surface knowledges, to shine a light on what is clouded and reveal a moment, or even just a glimpse, of clarity.

The theory of phenomenology, with particular influence from Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology and Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality, is applied and used throughout both as a guide, pointing in various directions steering this writer’s gaze over to and in to nearby and beyond proximities, and arguably also as a grounding theory, or a grounded pillar, to continuously lean towards, allowing the image of the unsettled settler resurface with contours both vague and at times sharp. Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th Century by Edmund Husserl3, a German philosopher born in 1859, who established the school of phenomenology. This paper will suggest a phenomenology of separation of body and skin in relation to colonialism in which the coloniser subject is comfortable with its skin, but uncomfortable in its skin and, further, that this unsettled body is unsettled due to a colonial imaginary foundational narrative.

In this paper, it is further argued that part of the settler’s movement includes a continuous nation-building, which in turn is resulting in furthering colonisation due to being built on an imagined foundational narrative. In this ongoing story the settler is the coloniser and the indigenous person the colonisee. Generally, the words coloniser and colonised are often preferred or used in post-colonial historical research. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, an Australian academic, indigenous feminist, author and activist for indigenous rights, is in her research using the term ‘post-colonising’ rather than ‘post-colonial’ to imply that it is an ongoing process4. In this dissertation, the words coloniser and colonisee are the terms used in order to give further emphasis to colonisation as an ongoing process.

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy) 4 (a) Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015) 1. I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a Postcolonizing Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 10 6

The terms overing5 and grafting6 are also concepts that will be discussed in this paper. In particular within the context of academia. The basic introductory understanding of overing may be explained in terms of implementing practical measures against inequalities and racism and thereby creating a sense that inequalities and racism having been dissolved. Overing is mainly used by colonisers. Grafting, on the other hand, is mainly used by colonisees in the colonial context. Colonisees may graft their stories and history when conveyed to colonisers due to a long history of mistrust of colonisee knowledge production. Therefore, colonisees graft their stories in ways more acceptable to the coloniser. Both overing and grafting result in silencing and lost translations. These concepts will be explored further in relation to academic knowledge production.

Although the theory of phenomenology will provide the axis for every direction, turn and twist and thereby be intrinsically linked throughout this paper’s unfolding and development, firstly a brief presentation of methodology and a literature review of the main influential writers in this paper will follow. Secondly, a presentation of the theory of phenomenology in relation to coloniser and colonisee is required, as well as a more in depth understanding of The Dreaming in relation to phenomenology. Thirdly, a discussion of bodily discomfort of both coloniser and colonisee in relation to skin – skin being the contour of the body. This will be followed by an investigation of the perception and creation of foundational narratives, grounded and imaginary, in relation to coloniser and colonisee. Further, the establishment of difference in knowledge production will be explored, using areas of feminism, mining and land rights as vehicles to further the discussion. Also, the concepts of overing and grafting within academia will be used in the discussion on establishing difference. Finally, it will be argued that the misalignment between the coloniser’s imaginary foundational narrative and the colonisee’s grounded foundational narrative, is allowing colonisation to continuously grow, unfold and develop.

5 (a) Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 180 6 Ahenakew, C. (2016) ‘Grafting Indigenous Ways of Knowing onto Non-Indigenous Ways of Being: The (Underestimated) Challenges of a Decolonial Imagination’, Cash Ahenakew, International Review of Qualitative Research, 9(3), November 1, 2016, pp. 323–340 7

2. Methodology & Material

The methodology necessitated a thorough reading of articles and literature demonstrating indigenous persons’ negotiation of mind-body space in relation to negotiation in mining extraction, feminism, educational leadership and academia, and of course a thorough reading of Sarah Ahmed’s material on phenomenology in order to apply and develop this theory in the context of colonialism.

Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism and has contributed a great deal to the theory of phenomenology. In this paper, the main focus has been on her research in Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality7, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations8, Objects, Others, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life9 and the article ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’10. Another influential writer on phenomenology is Franca Tamisari’s article, ‘Body, Vision and Movement: in the Footprints of the Ancestors’11, in which she is applying the theory of phenomenology in relation to colonisees in Australia/Country in connection to The Dreaming. Tamisari is a sociocultural anthropologist and has carried out research work in north-east Arnhem Land in Australia/Country since 1990. The following chapter in this paper, will further explore the concept of phenomenology in greater detail.

Martina Horáková’s research is emphasising that oral history and life stories have an important place and is fousing on story telling as a valid source of knowledge in the field of history. Her research interests include Indigenous literature in Australia and North America. Her recent book from 2017, Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non- fiction and Life Writing in Australia and North America12, has therefore been of great interest and inspiration since she is advocating that experience is a legitimate source of knowledge

7 (b) Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge (Transformations Ser) 8 (d) Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press 9 (a) Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press 10 (c) Ahmed, S. (2007) ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory, 8(2), pp. 149–168 11 Tamisari, F. (1998), Body, Vision and Movement: in the Footprints of the Ancestors. Oceania, 68 12 Horáková, M. (2017) Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and North America. Brno: Masarykova univerzita (Spisy Filozofické Fakulty Masarykovy Univerzity) 8 production. This is of interest since individual experience is important in relation to the theory of phenomenology.

Fiona Paisley, is a historian focusing her research on settler colonialism in Australia. In her article ‘Citizens of Their World: Australian Feminism and Indigenous Rights in the International Context, 1920s and 1930s’, in which she is much influenced by Antoinette Burton, a famous American historian with focus on colonialism, race and gender, she is putting the white colonial woman in a context where she is claiming global citizenship. She finds support in Burton’s research when presenting the colonial women and Western feminism as a movement speaking on behalf of colonisees. In this paper, their views lend support to further a discussion on feminism and academia in relation to phenomenology and foundational narratives.

Cash Ahenakew is an associate professor in the Department of Education at the University of British Columbia in Canada and is a Plains Cree, Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation member. In his research he is commitmed to the development of Indigenous theories and mixed methodologies and is exploring the intersection between Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledges. Ahenakew is, in ‘Grafting Indigenous Ways of Knowing onto Non-Indigenous Ways of Being: The (Underestimated) Challenges of a Decolonial Imagination’13, exploring knowledge production and introduces the concept of grafting and how knowledges are lost in translation when transferred from the place where it was naturally produced to a place where it is implanted. In other words, it may not be enough, as suggested Horáková, to acknowledge oral history as valid knowledge production. Ahenakew is forwarding the idea that it is also important to acknowledge and take into account that the interpretation of this knowledge may be both grafted and changed. In this paper this issue will be explored in relation to the theory of phenomenology and how this affect foundational narratives. Two research examples, by Jennifer Jones14 and Karen Hughes,15 will demonstrate how to make grafting visible. Jennifer Jones is a Senior Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies in a

13 Ahenakew, C. op.cit., pp. 323–340 14 Jones, J. (2012). Assimilation Discourses and The Production of Ella Simon's "Through My Eyes". Aboriginal History, 36, pp. 1-20 15 (b) Hughes, K. (2014). "Stories My Grandmother Never Told Me: Recovering Entangled Family Histories Through Ego-Histoire." In Ngapartji Ngapartji: In Turn, in Turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia, edited by Hughes Karen, Castejon Vanessa, Cole Anna, and Haag Oliver, ANU Press, pp. 75-92

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History Program and her research interests include Indigenous Australian history, and biography, Indigenous Australian literature, cross cultural collaboration, rural studies, religious history and histories of education. Karen Hughes is an Australian historian whose academic career is informed by Indigenous studies and collaborative research with Aboriginal communities in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Both are historians re-writing history in making grafting visible in previously told colonisee stories. Again, this issue will be explored in relation to the theory of phenomenology and how this affect foundational narratives.

The methodological approach has been to thoroughly read, analyse and be influenced by the above main contributors, for the purpose of this paper, in the field of race, colonialism and feminism whilst in parallel, or simultaneously, apply the theory of phenomenology to their material. It is this approach which made it possible in this paper to further develop the theory phenomenology, and to understand construction and the importance of foundational narratives. Ahenakew is firstly encouraging the acknowledgment of grafting, and secondly asking for more research which makes grafting of stories visible.16 After careful research merely two research examples could be found which made grafting visible.17 This suggest the importance of further research in this area in order to understand the construction of coloniser and colonisee foundational narratives. Before the development of a discussion on real and imagined foundational narratives in the context of colonialism, an exploration, investigation and presentation on the theory of phenomenology will here follow.

3. Theory: Phenomenology

In Queer Phenomenology18, from 2006, Ahmed, provides a step by step guide on how to approach the theory of phenomenology and attempts a disentanglement of the threads and queries which can result in intellectual confusion. However, the whole purpose and strength of phenomenology is probably that the reader-writer is led astray and Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology is a helpful guide that does not provide answers to questions, but lets the reader-writer understand how to ask questions, giving the reader-writer a nudge of there being

16 Ahenakew, C. op.cit., p. 333 17 (b) Hughes, K. op.cit.; Jones, J. op.cit. 18 (d) Ahmed, S. op.cit. 10 more to it, to dig deeper when stuck, by asking questions differently. Ahmed is using Edmund Husserl’s Ideas19 as a springboard before launching into developing and furthering the theory of phenomenology:

Phenomenology is often characterized as a “turn-toward” objects, which appear in their perceptual “thereness” as objects given to consciousness. Rather than consciousness being seen as directed toward itself, it is understood as having objects in its view – as being shaped by that which appears before it in “this here and now.20

According to Ahmed, Husserl’s view on phenomenology is limited since it is merely focused on perception.21 The perception of objects which the viewer presently has within view becomes part of the viewer’s consciousness. This suggests that the viewer can only ask questions from the perspective of what materialises within view in his/her present moment. The reason Ahmed is furthering and unfolding phenomenology is because Husserl’s view, focusing on perception, disregards history. “If phenomenologists were simply to “look at” the object that they face, then they would be erasing the “signs” history.”22 In other words, Ahmed is challenging phenomenology to make it possible to ask different questions and thereby enabling the reader- writer to understand more about who we are, where we come from, how we arrive and where we are going. This becomes of particular interest in relation to colonisation. If Husserl’s view were to be accepted, the situation and position of the coloniser body and its extension into space may seem valid and reasonable. The concept of Terra Nullius in Australia rests on, or is supported by, Husserl’s perception approach and was, or arguably still is, in spite of the Mabo23 case overruling the concept of Terra Nullius, the legal justification for taking and inhabiting land. The coloniser enters into what they perceive as empty space, because this is all that can be seen by the coloniser, and start inhabiting that empty space to build a home which resembles the home left behind. However, Ahmed is furthering the theory of phenomenology by asking questions about “arriving” and “bringing forth.”24

The “bringing forth” of the object involves, for sure, its arrival; in coming into being it comes “here”, near enough to me, or to you, as it must do if it is to be seen as this or that object. Nothing is not brought forth “without” coming to reside somewhere,

19 Husserl, E. and Gibson, W. R. B. (2002) Ideas: general introduction to pure phenomenology. Routledge (Muirhead Library of Philosophy) 20 (d) Ahmed, S. op.cit, p. 25 21 Ibid., pp. 25-63 22 Ibid., p. 41 23 Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (commonly known as Mabo) was a landmark High Court of Australia decision in 1992 recognising native title in Australia for the first time. 24 (d) Ahmed, S. Ibid., pp. 39-40 11

where the somewhere (say, the house, the room, or the skin) shapes the surface of “what” it “is” that is brought forth. In “having arrived” how does the object become “what”, where “what” is open to the “perhaps” future?25

If Ahmed’s view were to be accepted, the situation and position of the coloniser body and its extension into space would seem, if not valid and reasonable, to at least provide and explanation for colonisation. Ahmed’s phenomenology is opening up for a new sorts of questions to be asked such as how did you arrive here, where did/do you come from, did the journey here transform you, did the arrival change your way of being, what was your thoughts before you arrived and what are your thoughts now, what can you do here, what will you do here, what was within your reach where you came from, what was within your reach in journeying here, what is/was within your reach upon arrival etc.? This view on phenomenology acknowledges that the consciousness of subjects is not just shaped by what materialises in front of it at the present moment, but rather that consciousness is also formed by awareness, or lack of awareness, of what has materialised in front of the body.

An arrival takes time, and the time it takes shapes “what” it is that arrives. The object could even be described as the transformation of time into form, which itself could be redefined as the “direction” of matter. What arrives not only depends on time, but it is shaped by the conditions of its arrival, by how it came to get here.26

Further emphasis is given to the fact that the coloniser did not just appear all of a sudden. Reaching the shores and beaches of a mass of land, in this case Australia/Country, was not an aimless walkabout. It required a ship, navigation instruments, a voyage with likely surprising events, a starting point, access to courts and institutions, a house, maybe cigars, pencils, a study room and a writing desk. In fact, Ahmed is using the “table”, throughout Queer Phenomenology, in order to develop a discussion on phenomenology. The “table” was also used by Husserl, and Ahmed is picking up the thread from him. The table is and is not, a metaphor. It is a marker of a current position allowing for the reader to follow the reasoning of the body’s extension into space and objects within the body’s proximity. Proximate objects will shape the subject’s body since proximate objects will also shape the subject’s actions – the objects that are within reach allows certain actions. Actions creates experience and become part of the consciousness of the subject.

25 (d) Ahmed, S. op.cit, p. 40 26 Ibid. 12

I have suggested that the orientation of objects is shaped by what objects allow me to do. In this way an object is what an action is directed toward. […] The relationship between action and space is hence crucial. It is not simply that we act in space, spatial relations between subjects and others are produced through actions, which make some things available to be reached. […] So the space of the study is shaped by a decision (that this room is for this kind of work), which itself then “shapes” what actions “happen” in that space. The question of action is a question of how we inhabit space.27

In other words, in relation to the coloniser, it is also very likely that the objects that were within reach in the study room shaped the subject’s actions to such a degree that it led the subject to the present position of Australia/Country.

What makes bodies different is how they inhabit space: space is not a container for the body; it does not contain the body as if the body were “in it”. Rather bodies are submerged, such that they become the space they inhabit; in taking up space, bodies move through space and are affected by the “where” of that movement. It is through this movement that the surface of spaces as well as bodies takes shape.28

Firstly, it may therefore be inferred that bodies are affected by the direction of its action – the “where” of movement. The mere fact of the coloniser reaching foreign shores denotes and holds countless movements, with objects within its reach allowing for these countless movements to occur, which shapes the surface of the coloniser’s body.

4. Background: Terra Nullius & The Dreaming

Before exploring the surface of the coloniser’s body, that is the surface of the coloniser’s skin, the theory of phenomenology in relation to subjects in Australia/Country is here in equal measure applied to the colonisee. Ahmed’s phenomenology allows the reader-writer to ask questions about the coloniser prior to becoming a coloniser and therefore it is also interesting to ask questions of phenomenology of the colonisee prior to becoming a colonisee. The questions will be similar, such as how did you arrive here, where did/do you come from, did the journey here transform you, did the arrival change your way of being, what was your thoughts before you arrived and what are your thoughts now, what can you do here, what will you do here, what was within your reach where you came from, what was within your reach in journeying here, what is/was within your reach upon arrival etc.? There is plenty of material

27 (d) Ahmed, S. op.cit, p. 52 28 Ibid., p. 53 13 from anthropologists, ethnographers, historians and archaeologists. Recognisably, this written material is created mostly by colonisers, but there are also some colonisee material – both written and oral. “The ‘Dreaming’ is the Indigenous worldview that provides a blueprint for life and rules for governing most activities.”29 The purpose of this paper is not to tell stories of The Dreaming or even to explore its content, but rather to convey its importance in the sense of phenomenology.

On 3 June 1992, the High Court of Australia decided that Terra Nullius should not have been applied to Australia (Mabo). Since Terra Nullius means “nobody’s land”, the Mabo case acknowledges that the land was inhabited – it was somebody’s land. Tamisari suggested in 1998, just a few years after the ruling in Mabo case, “… that it is through the `working actual body... as an intertwining of vision and movement' that the fusion of body and place in Aboriginal cosmology and epistemology may be approached as not `submitting passively to space and time' but as assuming them in `their basic significance' of perception and intentionality.”30 In other words, the colonisee, just like the coloniser, did not wander around aimlessly in space. In her article ‘Body, Vision and Movement: in the Footprints of the Ancestors’, Tamisari applied the theory of phenomenology and therefore pinpointed, in her view, the shortcomings in anthropological writings;

If one of the reasons for the limited attention to, or static portrayal of, the relationship between people and land in anthropological writings is the modernist philosophical legacy which asserts the primacy of time and which approaches land as space rather that a series of experienced places, the other is certainly the neglect of the pervasive images of bodies becoming, moving, and being visible on the land. Rather than according primacy to place over time and the body thus maintaining, albeit reversed, an intellectualised dualism, I would like to build on and elaborate Munn's insights by drawing attention to the fact that land becomes place through being-the-world, that is by being experienced through the body. Thus, in suggesting that there would be no place without a perceiving, living and phenomenological body. I am principally concerned to explore the ways in which the body works in its constitutive relationship with place.

Tamisari is here bringing forth the idea that the coloniser, in this case the colonising anthropologist, placed emphasis on land as mere space and was thereby disregarding land as a series of experienced places. The phenomenological approach made it possible for Tamisari to

29 Kamara, M. (2017) Remote and Invisible: The Voices of Female Indigenous Educational Leaders in Northern Territory Remote Community Schools in Australia, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49:2, p. 136) 30 Tamisari, F. op.cit., p. 250 14 make the connection between the notion of visibility in relation to “[so]cial and emotional relationships and ritual/political links”.31 In explaining further, Tamisari writes about the connection of visibility in relation to, in this case, Yolngu knowledge;

For Yolngu, ancestral power always manifests itself, makes itself visible, in embodied forms such as landscape features, objects, names, songs, dances, paintings and trajectories. These embodiments are considered as proof of ancestral actions as well as repositories of their present powers which emanate from them. In a similar way, access to and acquisition of this ancestral power is gained through bodily experience. It is through experience of these manifestations and in many cases through just being at a place -hunting, visiting, camping, walking witnessing an event, seeing a dance or a painting, listening to and following the sequence of chanted place names in a song - that ancestral power and knowledge of ancestral and human events are accumulated, negotiated and transferred among people.32

In many materials and readings there is an acknowledgment, similar to above quote, that the colonisee subject is aware that the present objects within its proximity is part of the subject’s bodily experience extending into a past and is brought forward into the future making part of the subject’s consciousness. Phenomenology is a theory developed within academia, but there are strong reasons to suggest that the law of The Dreaming is basically the same as, or at least resembles, the theory of phenomenology. The theory of phenomenology is a concept, one of many, created to explain and understand human behaviour. This writer does realise that, suggesting The Dreaming is the same as phenomenology is perhaps somewhat provocative considering the lack of actual knowledge of The Dreaming. Nevertheless, this writer is suggesting that there seem to be strong indications of the colonisee subject’s heightened awareness of knowing that everything within, and also beyond its proximity, informs actions of the subject and that the actions performed now is connected to past, present and future. Hughes is giving further weight to this notion of connectivity between past, present and future in noting a “… a remarkably different sense of temporality and indeed of time-space continuum, and subsequently to a more monumental sense of history that confounds and indeed shatters all notions of western historiography.” 33 Hughes is writing about The Dreaming being used to make sense of the world around the subject34;

31 Tamisari, F. op.cit., p. 251 32 Ibid. 33 (a) Hughes, K. (2015). Arnhem Land to Adelaide: Deep Histories in Aboriginal Women’s Storytelling and Historical Practice, ‘Irruptions of Dreaming’ Across Contemporary Australia. In McGrath A. & Jebb M. (Authors), Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place, ANU Press, p. 86 34 Ibid., pp. 83-100 15

What became starkly apparent was that ‘historical stories’, including on occasion those in which white people played a significant role, are not separate from but rather part of the big ceremonial stories, belonging to a temporality far deeper and more intricate than I had hitherto imagined, in which locale and kinship – not only human but interspecies kinship – superseded, or perhaps indeed swallowed or enveloped, ordinary time. Creation accounts, for example, fuse spatial and temporal realms, and render present lived-experiences coexistent with the Creative past. As anthropologist WEH Stanner eloquently noted: ‘Dreamings populate an everywhen – all the instants of being, whether completed or to come.35

This is how lived experiences are described when three colonisees have told a story to Hughes which, is not just acknowledging the presence of colonisers, but also how to make sense of coloniser behaviour. The told story conveyed the coloniser’s lack of knowledge of The Dreaming and an embodiment of its consequences, in a narrative fusing past, present, future and space. In other words, the colonisee is acknowledging the coloniser, not as separate entity from lived experience, but as part of lived experience.

‘The information visible in the landscape’, as anthropologist Fred Myers has shown, is not ‘sufficient in itself to illuminate the underlying reality’. The immanence of the three sisters … – vitalised with knowledge, kin and Dreaming – points to a vastly deeper and broader essence of personhood than is conceived within present academic understanding across fields of history and biography, or even in much of the literature on totemic relationships. … Notably, the agency and embodiment of Rosalind’s women-kin as sentinels of the Dreaming is an undeniable material, as well as a conceptual element, of personal and family biography that moves through time from its beginnings millennia ago, and resides infinitely in place. … Crucially, the Aboriginal concept of relationality embraces not only people, country, totems and other living things, but also encompasses the multiple dimension of time.36

In light of above discussion concerning coloniser and colonisee in relation to phenomenology, it is here argued that the concept of phenomenology can be equally applied to all living subjects in the world and can enable the reader-writer to be challenged by asking different questions, but that the colonisee subject, in this dissertation, seems to have had such a strong connection and awareness of space and actions, of what can be reached, how movements are shaped by what went on before and how movements performed now will shape what is beyond. This may seem as a typical coloniser interpretation and maybe it is, however, this interpretation is not meant to suggest that the colonisee was conservative and never changed their ways. Instead, it is suggested that The Dreaming itself capsules the theory of phenomenology. The content of The Dreaming, whatever it may be, guides what is reached for and as the colonisee is reaching

35 (a) Hughes, K. op.cit., pp. 86-87 36 Ibid., p. 90 16 for it there seem to be a strong sense of being aware that the movement is guided as the colonisee is moving. Moreover, there is an awareness, as the movement is ongoing, that the movement has purpose. It is in this awareness of movement being guided and movement having purpose and extending beyond, that separates the coloniser and the colonisee. It is not suggested that the coloniser is completely unaware of its movement in terms of being guided and in terms of purpose, but that this was not, and is not, so intricately meshed into every part of the coloniser subject’s living existence.

It is here argued that colonisation was both an opportunistic and a strategic, as supported elsewhere37, venture. There is a dichotomy between the words strategic and opportunistic. Strategic in the sense that colonisation was pre-planned. The word “opportunistic” stems from Latin, ob portum veniens, and is a term that referred to coming into a port, where opportunities for profit were to be found.38 There are other definitions inferring sentiments such as “self- seeking”, “taking immediate advantage, often unethically, of any circumstance of possible benefit” or “the practice or policy of exploiting circumstances or opportunities to gain immediate advantage”.39 Could it be that the coloniser is so unaware of its own phenomenology? In other words, is the coloniser subject so disconnected from the content of its own Dreaming and phenomenology and therefore only allowed to act opportunistically due to having lost sight of ‘beyondness’? On the other hand, colonisation was strategic and the coloniser subject was part of the project acting on behalf of the Crown. Did this strategic and opportunistic venture cause a disorientation in the coloniser subject? Losing sight of awareness of guided movements and movement purpose may cause discomfort. What does it mean to be disoriented and how does this show on the surface of the skin? More importantly, does it show on the surface of the skin?

5. Discussion 5.1 Establishing difference and strange encounters

In her book Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality, Ahmed is discussing encounters in relation to phenomenology. Coloniser and colonisee encountered each other in Australia/Country and it is reasonable to describe it as a strange encounter. The mere fact of

37 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/european-racism-africa-slavery 38 https://www.etymonline.com/word/opportunity 39 https://www.thefreedictionary.com/opportunism 17 meeting another subject that has not been met before does not make it a strange encounter. It is often not a strange encounter when for e.g. greeting a neighbour on the street that has not previously been met. “The term encounter suggests a meeting, but a meeting which involves surprise and conflict.”40 The stranger is not a stranger until the subject stranger is encountered. However, in line with the theory of phenomenology, the encounter signals that the stranger subject is within proximity and this allows the stranger body to be named a stranger. “The stranger does not have to be recognised as ‘beyond’ or outside the ‘we’ in order to be fixed within the contours of a given form: indeed, it is the very gesture of getting closer to ‘strangers’ that allows the figure to take its shape.”41 In furthering the phenomenology of strange encounters it therefore becomes important to examine action, following the subjects movements, in strange encounters. Ahmed suggest that strange encounters leads to finding ways to recognise:

The surprising nature of encounters can be understood in relation to the structural possibility that we may not be able to read the bodies of others. However, each time we are faced by another whom we cannot recognise, we seek to find other ways of achieving recognition, not only by re-reading the body of this other who is faced, but by telling the difference between this other, and other others. The encounters we might yet have with other others hence surprise the subject, but they also reopen the prior histories of encounter that violate and fix others in regimes of difference...42

It is here suggested that movement and action following a strange encounter in varying ways create a representation of current state of consciousness, and further, that these movements of reaching for proximate object’s, as a response to the encounter, will also colour the ‘beyondness’. Ahmed is using the phrase “fleshing out” to describe the body’s extension into space. “In the gesture of recognising the one that we do not know, the one that is different from ‘us’, we flesh out the beyond, and give it a face and form. It is this ‘fleshing out’ of strangers in encounters with embodied others that […Ahmed,] examine[s].”43 Perhaps actions taken upon a strange encounter will forever be a part of subject’s consciousness. If it is accepted that subjects have a limited range of actions due to the movement of reaching is limited to the mere proximate objects, it then follows that these actions shape the surface of the body and ultimately our consciousness. There is documented material, the coloniser’s written documentation, to suggest that in some Countries and Nations, in Australia/Country, the colonisee was initially

40 (b) Ahmed, S. op.cit., p. 7 41 Ibid., p. 4 42 Ibid., p. 8 43 Ibid., p. 3 18 trying to teach the coloniser of The Dreaming and The Law and to enter trade relations44. There are also accounts of violence on part of the colonisee, however this was often a retaliate response in facing coloniser violence45. It has generally been accepted that colonisation has had, and has, disastrous effects on the colonisee. Therefore, it is important to look closer at what the coloniser brought to “the table” now that coloniser and colonisee are in the same “room” and what the process of differentiation means in relation to strange encounters in light of phenomenology.

5.2 Establishing difference and surface of the skin

Ahmed is clarifying the importance of the surface of the skin in bodily encounters in establishing difference;

An analysis of strange encounters as bodily encounters suggests that the marking out of the boundary lines between bodies, through the assumption of a bodily image, involves practices and techniques of differentiation. That is, bodies become differentiated not only from each other or the other, but also through differentiating between others, who have a different function in establishing the permeability of bodily space. Here, there is no generalisable other that serves to establish the illusion of bodily integrity; rather the body becomes imagined through being related to, and separated from, particular bodily others. Difference is not simply found in the body, but is established as a relation between bodies: this suggests that the particular body carries traces of the differences that are registered in the bodies of others. […] I consider how different bodies come to be lived through the establishment of boundaries and contours between the inside and the outside, in which the very habits and gestures of marking out bodily space involve differentiating ‘others’ into familiar (assimilable, touchable) and strange (unassimilable, untouchable).46

In the article, ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Ahmed is furthering a discussion around reachability of whiteness in the sense of inheriting whiteness47. “Whiteness could be described as an ongoing and unfinished history, which orientates bodies in specific directions, affecting how they ‘take up’ space.”48 She is not suggesting whiteness as an object within reach, but rather that whiteness is an inherited orientation:

44 Cahir, F. (2012). Aboriginal People and Mining. In Black Gold: Aboriginal People on the Goldfields of Victoria, 1850-1870 (pp. 5-20). 45 Broome, R. (1992). Resisting the Invaders. In Aboriginal Australians – Black Response to White Dominance 1788- 1980, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, pp. 36-51 46 (b) Ahmed, S. op.cit., p. 44 47 (c) Ahmed, S. op.cit., pp. 149–168 48 Ibid., p., 150 19

…we inherit the reachability of some objects, those that are ‘given’ to us, or at least made available to us, within the ‘what’ that is around. I am not suggesting here that ‘whiteness’ is one such ‘reachable object’, but that whiteness is an orientation that puts certain things within reach. By objects, we would include not just physical objects, but also styles, capacities, aspirations, techniques, habits. Race becomes, in this model, a question of what is within reach, what is available to perceive and to do ‘things’ with.49

Ahmed is here bringing in the concepts of race and whiteness in relation to the theory of phenomenology. Whiteness entails movements towards objects within proximate reach which are in place due to whiteness as an orientation. “Phenomenology helps us to show how whiteness is an effect of racialization, which in turn shapes what it is that bodies ‘can do’.”50 This may be interpreted as white being a mere colour. However, the colour of white, in this case the colour on the surface of subject’s body, allows actions that has a particular style, capacity, aspiration, technique and habits. “‘Doing things’ depends not so much on intrinsic capacity, or even upon dispositions or habits, but on the ways in which the world is available as a space for action, a space where things ‘have a certain place’ or are ‘in place’.”51 In other words, whiteness is not equal to style, capacity, aspiration, techniques and habits, but rather the objects within reach allows for the movement to hold a particular style, capacity, aspiration, technique and habit. Both coloniser and colonisee are reaching for objects and all subjects’ movements hold a particular style, capacity, aspiration, technique and habit. It could be argued that the outcome of these are shaped differently in relation to coloniser and colonisee and it is here that Ahmed’s discussion on strange encounters, the surface of the skin and the consequent importance of establishing difference, is of relevance.

The corporeal schema is of a ‘body-at-home’. If the world is made white, then the body-at-home is one that can inhabit whiteness. … [B]odies are shaped by histories of colonialism, which makes the world ‘white’, a world that is inherited, or which is already given before the point of an individual’s arrival. This is the familiar world, the world of whiteness, as a world we know implicitly. Colonialism makes the world ‘white’, which is of course a world ‘ready’ for certain kinds of bodies, as a world that puts certain objects within their reach. Bodies remember such histories, even when we forget them. Such histories, we might say, surface on the body, or even shape how bodies surface. Race then does become a social as well as bodily given, or what we receive from others as an inheritance of this history.52

49 (c) Ahmed, S. op.cit., p. 154 50 Ibid., p. 150 51 Ibid., p. 153 52 Ibid., pp. 153-154 20

In other words, colonisers are subjects brining the orientation of whiteness with them and is a way of the body’s extension into the space. The orientation of whiteness is inherited and therefore it could be suggested that colonisation is ongoing. Colonisation is using assimilation as a way of extension into space, as a way of making the world white, placing objects in space in order to continue actions of white orientation since subjects then continually can keep reaching for these objects.

In line with the theory of phenomenology, the surface of the skin is shaped in reaching for proximate objects and, for the coloniser, this is a white orientation. Ahmed describes it as a way to make the ‘body-at-home’ - making the world white. At the same end of the spectrum the surface of the skin, of the soon-to-be colonisee, was, and is, also shaped in reaching for proximate objects. However, pre-colonisation this was not a black orientation. There was action, movement and orientation, but it was neither black nor white. Whiteness as an orientation shaping the surface of the skin was introduced when the coloniser arrived and white orientation is described is a way to establish difference. It is therefore reasonable to suggest that this strange encounter re-shaped the surface of the colonisee skin since colonisation changed which objects were within reach, it changed actions and it changed movement. Therefore, colonisation and racialization go hand in hand. This suggests, in establishing difference, the coloniser treated the colonisee differently with actions resulting in colonisee skin discomfort. On the other hand, making the world white means placing reachable objects in space resulting in coloniser skin comfort. This reasoning does not suggest that concepts of black and white arose at the time of strange encounter on part of the coloniser. Colonisation was a pre-planned structured project, with initial roots in the slave trade, in which the coloniser created white and black hierarchies in order to justify this strategic economic venture.53

5.3 Phenomenological separation of skin and body in relation to foundational narratives

In order to discuss the difference between coloniser and colonisee construction of foundational narratives an attempt is made here to develop, or suggest, a furthering of Ahmed’s phenomenology in relation to skin and body. This writer is suggesting a theory of phenomenology which is separating skin and body in order to explain differing foundational

53 Olusoga, David, ‘The roots of European racism lie in the slave trade, colonialism – and Edward Long’, in The Guardian, 2005, 8 September, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/european-racism-africa- slavery 21 narratives. The skin is an organ, the body’s largest organ, and also happen to be the organ that is protecting the body. The skin has the function of holding the body together. The expression ‘it is only skin deep’ has many explanations/definitions such as for e.g. shallow, external, depthless, superficial, aimless, narrow, restricted etc. Therefore, the orientation of whiteness held by the coloniser and the subject’s skin comfort, perhaps, does not necessarily translate into being comfortable in that skin even though the skin enjoys comforts due to availability of proximate objects. Could it be that although the surface of the body, the skin, allows subjects to act comfortably, that there still can be signs of bodily discomfort? Whiteness allows actions and movements comfortably in space, but can a notion of bodily discomfort simultaneously be present in the same subject? The colonisee subject, due to the ‘differing process’ resulting in skin discomfort, is arguably restricted in actions and movements, but can there be a bodily comfort simultaneously present in the same subject? In this dissertation a presentation will be developed, suggesting that the dichotomy of coloniser skin comfort/body discomfort and the colonisee skin discomfort/body comfort provide and explanation for the construction of respective foundational narratives. Clearly, the actual narratives are different, but the phenomenological approach of the skin-body dichotomy is reflected in the construction of the colonisee subject’s grounded foundational narrative as opposed to the coloniser subject’s imaginary foundational narrative. The colonisee body has a grounded sense of belonging and a sense of entitlement to inhabit space, whereas the coloniser creation of imaginary foundational narratives is a reflection of a disorientation, a restlessness and an unsettled body. How does this sense of a grounded body and a non-grounded body affect construction of foundational narratives in relation to colonisation and subjects who inhabit the same space?

The starting-point of foundational narratives belonging to the creation of nation are vastly different in terms of time and space for the subjects involved – coloniser and colonisee. At the time of strange encounter the coloniser may or may not even had begun to think of a foundational narrative, but rather paving the way to prepare for a narrative. Perhaps one aspect of this was to declare Terra Nullius. At the time of initial encounter, the coloniser arguably felt that the foundational narrative was belonging to the Crown. The coloniser emigrated and became an immigrant in a nation today named Australia and is also recognised by other foreign nations as the nation Australia. Ahmed writes, “[c]ommunity is not just established through the designation of pure and safe spaces, but becomes established as a way of moving through 22 space.”54 Phenomenology therefore allows the question of “how” the subject is moving through space.

Encounters with culturally alien people are defined by anxiety and uncertainty, which inhibits social interaction and reinforces social boundaries. The projection of danger onto that which is already recognisable as different – as different from the familiar space of home and homeland – hence allows violence to take place: it becomes a mechanism for the enforcement of boundary lines that almost secure the home-nation as safe haven.55

Invariably, this writer would argue that resorting to violence as a response to just about anything denotes a sense of body discomfort. Ahmed writes that “[t]he ultimate violent strangers are … figured as immigrants: they are the outsiders in the nation space whose ‘behaviour seems unpredictable and beyond control’.”56 When Ahmed is writing about the ‘immigrant’, she is generally not indicating the contour of the coloniser body, but rather the modern immigrant which we know as a refugee or a person seeking residency in a foreign nation. It could be argued that Ahmed’s words are, for the purposes of this paper, taken out of context. However, this writer suggests this is a reflection of Ahmed not having made the phenomenological disconnection between skin and body in relation to colonisation. Instead, Ahmed discusses inter-embodiment and ‘with-ness’:

We need to complicate what it means to be ‘with’, such that ‘with-ness’ is a site, not of shared co-habitance, but of differentiation (= sociality as differentiation). In other words, in the inter-bodily movements that allow bodies to be formed (as well as de- formed), bodies are touched by some bodies differently from other bodies.57

Ahmed is here developing a discussion about the touchability of bodies58 and this indicates touching the skin of the body, but clearly the words ‘body’ and ‘embodiment’ is used throughout this reasoning concerning inter-embodiment. In light of this writer’s reasoning, Ahmed’s ‘inter-embodiment’ is interpreted as coloniser and colonisee not co-habiting, but are rather body contours moving in space in physical proximity to each other. Due to the creation of differentiation, the colonisee subject is considered out of place, thereby displaced and therefore touchability (of skin) of colonisee subject is different. In order to further the discussion on foundational narratives, it is in this paper understood that coloniser and colonisee

54 (b) Ahmed, S. op.cit., p 34 55 Ibid, p., 36 56 Ibid, p., 36 57 Ibid. p., 48 58 Ibid, pp., 48-49 23 do not co-habit, but are aware of each other’s presence and know each other’s physical proximity. It therefore requires an examination of whether this has influenced the colonial foundational narrative.

5.4 Foundational narrative grounded in establishment of difference

In the article59, ‘Assimilation begins in the home”: the State and Aboriginal women’s work as mothers in New South Wales, 1900s to 1960s’, Heather Goodall, a Professor of History at University of Technology in Australia, examines the effect of the colonial apprenticeship system, colonial assimilation strategies and the colonial administrative and medical approach to Aboriginal women's mothering and concludes that “[t]o a significant degree, the 'assimilation' policy failed to achieve its aims of resocialising and relocating Aboriginal people, men or women. In part this was because of Aboriginal people's cultural and political resistance, demonstrated in the life histories of Aboriginal people who refused to sever their links with their kinsfolk or their land”.60 Goddall is pointing toward the importance of reading life stories in order understand nationhood and connection to land. Although, this writer does agree on this importance, and much research has been spent reading life stories in relation to this paper, it is acknowledged here that The Dreaming is the foundational narrative of the colonisee subject. The organisation Working with Indigenous Australians has posted an explanation of The Dreaming for non-indigenous persons to understand;

The Dreaming is the worldview which structures many Indigenous cultures, providing Indigenous Australians with an ordered sense of reality - a framework for understanding and interpreting the world and the place of humans in that world. This worldview performs three major functions in Indigenous cultures:

• It provides an explanation of creation - how the universe and everything within it came into being. • It provides a set of blueprints for life - all living forms were created through The Dreaming. • It provides a set of rules or laws for living. The Dreaming provides rules for social relationships, economic activities, religious activities and ceremonies, and art - in short, the rules governing all activities.

The term 'The Dreaming' is a European term, coined by anthropologists. This use of the term was particularly consolidated by the well-known anthropologist WE. H. Stanner in his 1953 article 'The Dreaming' (reprinted in Stanner, 1979). However,

59 Goodall, H. (1995) ‘Assimilation Begins in The Home: The State and Aboriginal Women’s Work as Mothers in New South Wales, 1900s to 1960s’, Labour History, (69), pp. 75-101 60 Ibid., p 95 24

we should note that the concept really has nothing to do with dreaming - although sometimes dreams can convey messages. Different language groups use their own terms to refer to what Europeans call 'The Dreaming'.

The Dreaming is sometimes referred to as mythology. While technically this is an appropriate term, we should also note that this can be used as a derogatory term as in 'It's just a myth', meaning 'It isn't really true'. The Dreaming is not mythology in this sense of not being true and it isn't about dreams - for many Indigenous Australians it is the truth about the meaning of everything. The Dreaming should always be spelt with a capital 'D' to distinguish it from ordinary dreaming and it can also be preceded by a capital 'The' following the precedent established by Stanner.61

The Dreaming is the real foundational narrative of the colonisee subject since it provides ‘an ordered sense of reality - a framework for understanding and interpreting the world and the place of humans in that world’ and ‘provides a set of rules or laws for living governing all activities’.62 A framework for this real foundational narrative can be discerned when reading life stories of the colonisee subject, however, often life stories are told in the context of an encounter with a stranger or told knowing that the story will be heard or read by a stranger. The stranger here, is the coloniser. Several of these life stories indicate coloniser subject’s disbelief in the colonisee subject’s narratives and therefore it would be reasonable to suggest that these narratives are shaped or influenced by this awareness. In the following, it is important to approach and to examine the foundational narrative of the coloniser and instead read colonisee subject’s narrative as something that will inform, contribute or be a reflection on the coloniser foundational narrative. Again, Ahmed, through the theory of phenomenology, describes this process of how strangers, and their proximity to each other, influence the way in which a national body is created.

While I would not want to imply that we can make a simple analogy between bodies and nations, I think we can understand how bodily and social spaces leak into each other, or inhabit each other. The nation becomes imagined and embodied as a space, not simply by being defined against other spaces, but by being defined as close to some others (friends), and further away from other others (strangers). In this sense, only some others are read as strangers within the nation space. The proximity of strangers within the nation space – that is, the proximity of that which cannot be assimilated into a national body – is a mechanism for the demarcation of the national body, a way of defining borders within it, rather than just between it and an imagined and exterior other.63

61 http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/Culture_2_The_Dreaming.html 62 http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/Culture_2_The_Dreaming.html 63 (b) Ahmed, S. op.cit., p. 100 25

In other words, the mere presence of strangers will shape and form the construction of a foundational narrative. In this case, the stranger coloniser drew borders within the nation in order to separate themselves from the stranger colonisee due to these subjects not having a place in the national body the coloniser was in the process of building – the coloniser’s foundational narrative. When Ahmed, in above quote, writes about an ‘imagined and exterior other’ this writer believes she is referring to nations’ exterior to both the coloniser and colonisee space – other foreign nations outside of Australia/Country. Nevertheless, this suggests that the coloniser, in the process of demarcating interior borders, also created an imagined and interior other. The imagined and interior other is the colonisee – an imagined other because the colonisee subject is a stranger, and interior other because the colonisee is situated within the proximity of the coloniser and within the space in which a foundational narrative is in construction. Therefore, this paper suggests, the construction of a foundational narrative in which an imagined and interior other plays part, and hence leads to an imagined foundational narrative.

5.5 Establishment of difference and imagined foundational narrative

Ahmed seems to purport the idea that a nation can be both real and imagined and, in fact, that the opposition between these two ideas should be suspended:

The nation does not refer to something that simply exists: nations are produced and constructed as places and communities in which ‘a people’ might belong. Of course, to say that nations are imagined is not to say that they are not real. The question of nationhood cannot be properly addressed without a recognition of the political economy of modern nation-states. An entity can be imagined and real at the same time: in some sense, the opposition between imaginary and real must be suspended if we are to understand how the nation comes to be lived as an ‘organic community’. The imagining of the nation as a space in which ‘we’ belong is not independent of the material deployment of force, and the forms of governmentality which control, not only the boundaries between nation states, and the movements of citizens and aliens within the state, but also the repertoire of images which allows the concept of the nation to come into being in the first place.64

Ahmed is writing that an entity, in this case a nation, can be both real and imagined at the same time and propose that imagined nations can also be real. Further, Ahmed acknowledges the concept of the modern state and its dependency on government control of the nation’s’ boundary, but that the creation of nation also relies on images in relation to its initial formation

64 (b) Ahmed, S. op.cit., p. 98 26 or birth of the nation.65 It is unclear whether Ahmed describes the modern nation’s border as that which is real, and the images that led to creation of border as that which is imagined. The actual border of the modern nation is assumingly very real to both coloniser and colonisee and, therefore, the issue here is of imagined and/or real foundational narratives. Contrary to Ahmed, it is here suggested that the foundational narrative must be real, and not imagined, in order for bodies, which are the subjects of the nation, to rest, to be settled, to be grounded and to have a sense of belonging. This of course leads to a discussion on what is real and what is imagined, or, it could even be a question of what can be accepted as real?

There is vast coloniser material suggesting that The Dreaming is imaginary and a myth.66 This can be explained as a reflection of the coloniser building a foundational narrative in response to the imagined other – the colonisee. The coloniser had to perceive the colonisee foundational narrative as imagined in order for the coloniser foundational narrative to be perceived as real. The coloniser extension into space and land, this being the project of colonisation, meant an inability to accept two foundational narratives existing side by side. It is in this disregard, in this unacceptance and awareness of the presence of colonisee subjects and the silencing thereof - the silencing of subjects of the nation - on which the coloniser foundational narrative is built, and therefore, argued here, it can only be imagined. This reasoning is in line with the theory of phenomenology. Turning a blind eye is an active choice of turning a blind eye to someone, and to actively silence someone is to actively choose to not listen. Turning a blind eye, to not see, to silence and to not listen have inherent qualities of acknowledging the stranger’s proximity. This paper argues, building a foundational narrative, upon actively choosing to not see nor hear the subject’s of the nation, can only be imagined. Further, it is argued that the foundational narrative must be real since an imagined narrative has no foundation. In other words, it is only a narrative. Living in a nation with no real foundation is unsettling and has created an unsettled settler body. This is reflected in the coloniser’s continuous search for stories about who the coloniser’s subject is. It is reflected in the nervous grippling and the changing of stories, laws, terms and conditions, in discussions of reconciliation versus republicanism, the private versus public, state holders versus right holders, external versus internal, temporality and time, space and place and in what is real and what is imagined.

65 (b) Ahmed, S. op.cit., p. 98 66 http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/Culture_2_The_Dreaming.html 27

This writing of the history of the Australian nation as predicated on openness, tolerance and a ‘fair go’ could be considered a direct attempt to overcome the national discourse of shame about the historical dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Ironically, the diversity of Indigenous peoples is mentioned, or indeed claimed, as part of ‘our’ history of cultural diversity, alongside the diversity of migrant cultures: ‘Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have many cultures and languages and our migrants have come from all parts of the globe’. The use of the term ‘our’ is quite astonishing in its violence. As ‘our’ possessions, these natives and strangers have allowed ‘us’ to be ‘culturally diverse’. Such a narrative not only overlooks histories of violence, but it also performs its own violence: it signals another appropriation of ‘strangers’ into the achievement of multiculturalism itself (‘they’ have allowed us ‘to be’).67

Therefore, as conveyed here by Ahmed and in turn interpreted by this writer, colonisation is ongoing as long as the imagined narrative in relation to foundation continues to thrive and develop. The above quote signals a sense of ‘in betweenness’ where the settler is neither indigenous nor a migrant. There is also a sense of the settler relying on active appropriation of strangers in order to position themselves as subjects in space, but in the process, this leads to a place of being ‘in between’ and an estrangement to a settled body. Here referred to as the unsettled settler body. Before examining the possibility of the coloniser subject reaching for a real, rather than imagined, foundational narrative, this paper will explore some of the narratives supporting the idea of the unsettled settler body. This is the idea of the contour of the settler body enabling comfortable movement in space whilst reaching for proximate objects, yet the lack of a real foundational narrative is a reflection of the settler not being comfortable in its skin and therefore not comfortable in the body. The unsettled settler is a representation of the phenomenological separation of body and skin.

5.6 Establishing difference in knowledge production

5.6.1 Feminism Horáková, in Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and North America68, explores, as the title suggests, Indigenous women’s personal non-fiction and life writing in settler colonies published in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s.69

67 (b) Ahmed, S. op.cit., p. 112 68 Horáková, M. op.cit. 69 Ibid., p., 15 28

Both personal non-fiction and life writing present key notions reflected in the title of this book—inscribing difference and resistance—which Indigenous women’s writing emphasizes: writing informed by personal experience (which does not mean being anti-theoretical); using this experience as a legitimate source of knowledge production; writing theory through a personal story; recording one’s life as a way of resisting the imposition of the dominant order’s values.70

In publishing this book, Horáková is actively emphasising that oral history and life stories as having an important place in public discourse, modern historiography and allows “…the previously dismissed stories to be recognized as valid sources of knowledge and historical evidence”71. Using experience as a legitimate source of knowledge production is also in line with ideas of phenomenology and, arguably, the reason why Horáková includes both fiction and non-fiction72 as important parameters in learning more of indigenous feminism:

Few critics…relate feminist criticism with Indigenous cultural production. Yet, both fiction and non-fiction literature can significantly transform the ways of how we perceive the stories of Indigenous women – stories that would otherwise remain invisible or susceptible to misrepresentation and stereotyping. In this way, Indigenous women’s writing contributes to making Indigenous feminism more visible and worth further analysis.

Much has been written about the movement of feminism claiming to speak on behalf of indigenous women. In 1998 Paisley wrote, “[r]ecent feminist studies of empire have drawn our attention to the importance of investigating the relationship of white imperial subjectivity to the history of Western feminism, and to the long history of Western women’s determination to speak of colonized women”.73 Paisley examines Australian women’s feminism in an international context in the 1920s and 1930s. In these eras there was no clear ‘Australian’ identity, but it was rather partial in the sense that the coloniser first and foremost were British subjects and claimed a world membership via the British Commonwealth. 74 At the height of assimilation policy75 the colonial woman in Australia used colonisee women as part of furthering feminist movement on the premise and contradiction that colonisees were British subject, like them, yet had neither rights to country nor citizenship rights in Australia.76 Paisley’s research provides a framework for the coloniser woman’s search for her own full

70 Horáková, M. op.cit., p., 15 71 Ibid., p., 18 72 Ibid., p., 26 73 Paisley, F. (1998). Citizens of Their World: Australian Feminism and Indigenous Rights in the International Context, 1920s and 1930s. Feminist Review, (58), p. 66 74 Ibid., p. 72 75 Ibid., p. 69 76 Ibid., pp. 73-74 29 citizenship rights which likely led to a carte blanche inclusion of all women, including colonisee women, for the purpose of their own advancement.77 The following by Antoinette Burton, in ‘The white woman’s burden. British feminists and the Indian woman, 1865-1915’, may also be applied in the context of colonialism in Australia:

… the point must be made that liberal feminists, at any rate, enthusiastically claimed racial responsibility as part of their strategy to legitimize themselves as responsible and important imperial citizens - just as they used female moral superiority to justify emancipation.78

Paisley is referring to Burton’s important research in her own material:

In her study of British pre-suffrage feminist campaigns for Indian women’s rights, Burton states that the ‘embeddedness of feminists’ past and present in their own cultures, national assumptions, and geopolitical formations’ must be acknowledged and investigated in feminists’ relationship to colonized women. In her insightful 1990 article, Burton describes turn-of-the-century British feminists: ‘deliberately cultivating this civilising responsibility as their own modern womanly burden because it confirmed an emancipated role for them in the imperial nation state. From their point of view empire was an integral and enabling part of the woman question’. Their demand for ‘equality for women’ rested on understandings of the subordination of Indian women; it ‘prioritised the emancipation of white women and, moreover, made that emancipation dependent on the existence of a colonised Indian womanhood’, the ‘foil against which British feminism gauged its own progress’ Indian women were to be the ‘specific feminist-colonial possession’ of British feminists, a responsibility they mobilized in reply to anti-suffrage claims that white women were unfit to co-administer the Empire with white men It was membership within Britain’s ‘world empire’ which legitimized British suffrage internationalism, through which British imperial feminism envisaged a ‘universal womanhood’ moulded in its ‘own imperial self-image’.79

Thus, and in line with the above discussion on phenomenology, the coloniser women relied on the creation of establishing difference between themselves as colonisers and the colonisee women. Since the feminism of coloniser women brought in colonisee women, in relation to claiming citizenship, this is an issue that may inform and provide support of the coloniser imaginary foundational narrative. Some indigenous scholars argue that “…white feminism possess an inability to look outside their own cultural perspective. Yet, they constantly speak with some apparent legitimised authority about our own experiences80 and that “…”non-

77 Paisley, F. op.cit., pp. 77-78 78 Burton, A. M. (1990) ‘The white woman’s burden. British feminists and the Indian woman, 1865-1915’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 13(4), pp. 296 79 Paisley, op.cit., p. 77 80 Horáková, M. op.cit., p. 39 30 whites”, should take on the task of defining and directing the feminist movement and its struggle for emancipation, instead of pre-occupying themselves too much with the white women’s movement”81. On the other hand, other indigenous scholars, like Jackie Huggins, an Indigenous Australian author, historian and Aboriginal rights activist, shed a different light in expressing “…her belief in the possibilities of forming alliances between white and Aboriginal feminist historians, “particularly if the historians happens to have some grounding in race relations””82. Carol Williams, an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in U.S. cultural history of the American West; Women’s Studies, and North American Women’s History including Indigenous Women’s History, lends support to Huggins’ belief by asking – “[t]he argument that oral histories are better done by Aboriginal researchers has merit, yet if non-Aboriginal historians only analyze policy, representation, and the white gaze – however critically – will this reinforce an (unfortunately) detached view of Aboriginal women?”83 The two opposing views, on the one hand articulated as “[l]et us begin by talking to each other about ourselves”84 and, on the other hand “[i]t is imperative that we learn from each other…”,85 is here suggested as a possible hindrance in moving forward in developing a real coloniser foundational narrative. Williams acknowledges this problem in suggesting that “[t]o assume all research exploring experience and subjectivity is inevitably contaminated by colonialism may leave us in a potentially paralyzing cul-de-sac”86. Huggins seems to have the answer to this in “…the possibilities of cross-racial collaborations in research and writing without jeopardazing one’s own grounding in specific locations and histories.”87 In other words, if it is possible to create a new feminism without “…losing the critical edge of Indigenous women’s relations to mainstream feminism”88, then it may be possible create a real coloniser foundational narrative that does not require the coloniser to claim and perceive the colonisee foundational narrative to be imaginary in order for theirs’s to be real. Therefore, this writer suggests the importance of reading the fiction and non-fiction of both coloniser and colonisee personal narratives in order to understand how a real coloniser foundational narrative can be constructed.89 In other

81 Horáková, M. op.cit., p. 49 82 Ibid., p. 59 83 William, C. (Ed.). (2012). Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism. University of Illinois Press, p. 39 84 Horáková, M. op.cit., p. 49 85 Ibid., p. 59 86 William, C. op.cit., p. 39 87 Horáková, M. op.cit., p. 59 88 Ibid., p. 60 89 Suggested reading: Ginibi, Ruby Langford. 1988, Don't Take Your Love to Town, Penguin Ringwood, Victoria; Hughes, K. (2014). "Stories My Grandmother Never Told Me: Recovering Entangled Family Histories Through Ego- Histoire." In Ngapartji Ngapartji: In Turn, in Turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia, edited by Hughes Karen, Castejon Vanessa, Cole Anna, and Haag Oliver, ANU Press, pp. 75-92; (cont.) 31 words, if one part of phenomenology is the process of establishing difference then the establishment of the colonisee creation of difference is of equal value to coloniser creation of difference. These narratives may inform and surface both reasons for, and nuances of, the unsettled settler body. One possible reason for not having been able to move in the direction toward a real foundational narrative lies in not having accepted the colonisee narrative’s contributory character for this purpose. This in itself is part of continuing colonisation and reflection of the unsettled settler body.

5.6.2 Mining and land rights

The coloniser, as discussed above, is turning away from the colonisee narrative and not accepting this knowledge as valid. Ahenakew is exploring this issue in her article ‘Grafting Indigenous Ways of Knowing onto Non-Indigenous Ways of Being: The (Underestimated) Challenges of a Decolonial Imagination’90. There are “problematic aspects of the interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing”91:

This critique points to the fact that when Indigenous knowledge is recognized by mainstream knowledge production mechanisms, it tends to be presented through the frames of Western epistemology rather than on its own terms. …Western frames cannot comprehend, for example, the way Indigenous knowledge places ‘animals, plants, and landscapes in the active role of teacher’ or the notion that knowing ‘literally comes from the ground, above, and beyond, from the wisdoms of continuous metaphysical engagements and familiarity with ‘‘all our relations’’’ refers to this limitation of Western legibility as ‘abyssal thinking’, stating that, on one side of the abyssal line, there is knowledge considered to be objective and to have universal worth; on the other side there are values and traditions with only local (if any) value. Those who lean towards the edge of the abyss to explore what they can see perceive themselves as objective, neutral, and transparent (devoid of ‘culture’) and select and describe what they see according to what can be made intelligible within their own cultural referents and imaginaries.92

Iota. 1871, Kooroona: a tale of South Australia, Simpkin, Marshall Oxford, London; Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015) 1. I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a Postcolonizing Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Moreton-Robinson, A. (2013) “Towards an Australian Indigenous Women's Standpoint Theory.” Australian Feminist Studies 28 (2013) pp. 331 – 347; Morgan, Sally. (1988) My Place, New York, Seaver Books; Nannup, Alice. & Marsh, Lauren. & Kinnane, Stephen. (1992), When the Pelican Laughed. South Fremantle, W.A, Fremantle Arts Centre Press; Scott Cowen, Rose, 1961. Crossing Dry Creeks: 1879 to 1919, The Wentworth Press, Sydney; Simon, Ella. 1987, Through My Eyes, Collins Dove Blackburn, Victoria; Standfield, R. V., Peckham, R., & Nolan, J. (2014). Aunty Pearl Gibbs: leading for Aboriginal rights. In J. Damousi, K. Rubenstein, & M. Tomsic (Eds.), Diversity in Leadership: Australian women, past and present (1 ed., pp. 53 - 67). ANU E Press; 90 Ahenakew, C. (op.cit., pp. 323–340 91 Ibid., p. 325 92 Ibid., pp. 327-328 32

This limitation on behalf of the coloniser is also reflected in many legal cases concerning right to land as in the case of Mining at Coronation Hill where the concept of “beliefs” was discussed at length93 and in another case where the discussion concerned the definition of ‘nature’ as opposed to ‘Aboriginal place’ in relation to Kakadu National Park.94 Fiona Rapsey-Probyn is Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry at the University of Wollongong in Australia, and is researching the intersection of feminist critical race studies and Animal studies. She is presenting the migrant colonial settler caught in between republicanism and reconciliation, as being both colonised and a coloniser95 and argues, with support from Moreton-Robinson, that a non-indigenous person can never share the indigenous ontological relationship and connectivity to land, however that “…settlers can have, indeed, should have the knowledge of Aboriginal connectedness to land, but that we cannot have connectedness itself.”96 This writer would like to add that it would be impossible for a coloniser to establish the complicated legal requirements of Native Title, which is a legal framework that sprung out of the Mabo case in 1992. The creation of this legal framework is here argued to be a reflection of the imaginary foundational narrative of the coloniser since the legal criteria created could never be fulfilled by its creator if asked to do so;

(1) The expression native title or native title rights and interests means the communal, group or individual rights and interests of Aboriginal peoples or Torres Strait Islanders in relation to land or waters, where: (a) the rights and interests are possessed under the traditional laws acknowledged, and the traditional customs observed, by the Aboriginal peoples or Torres Strait Islanders; and (b) the Aboriginal peoples or Torres Strait Islanders, by those laws and customs, have a connection with the land or waters; and (c) the rights and interests are recognised by the common law of Australia.97

This legal framework is fraught with words open to dissection and interpretation such as “possessed”, “traditional”, “acknowledged”, “observed”, “connection”, “recognised by common law” and most importantly the word “and”. There is not scope in this paper to discuss Native Title, but it is argued here that the legal framework itself is part of the creation of the

93 Keen, I. (1993). Aboriginal Beliefs vs. Mining at Coronation Hill: The Containing Force of Traditionalism. Human Organization, 52(4), 344-355 94 Palmer, L. (2007). Interpreting 'nature': The Politics of Engaging with Kakadu as an Aboriginal Place. Cultural Geographies, 14(2), 255-273 95 Probyn-Rapsey, F. (2008) ‘Country Matters: Sexing the Reconciled Republic of Australia’, Feminist Review, 89(1), pp. 73–86 96 Ibid., p. 81 97 s. 223 Native Title Act 33 coloniser imaginary foundational narrative due to the coloniser not having this connectedness to land yet creating a framework for others, the colonisee, to establish such connectedness. The process of proving connectedness to land to another, whom does not have connectedness to land, is a reflection of the latter’s unsettled body. In other words, for the coloniser it is within reach to establish such as legal framework due to this subject’s body contour, but the intermittent changes of this legal framework from Terra Nullius, to the Aboriginal Land Rights Territory Act in 197698, to Mabo and the now existing Native Title Act is here argued to be a reflection of the coloniser’s uncertainty and unsettled settler body. This supports this writer’s theory of a phenomenology of the separation of body and skin in relation to colonialism. Therefore, “…issues of belonging, legitimacy and sovereignty, are still traded…each time the nation is imagined”.99

5.6.3 Overing and grafting

In coming back to Ahenakew, how can indigenous knowledge become part of a legal framework and contribute to legal reasoning and, in furtherance, how can indigenous knowledge overall be acknowledged and accepted? Ahenakew has also turned to Ahmed’s research on phenomenology in order to support the idea that it is not enough for the coloniser to simply open the doors for colonisees into academia and believe that this, in and of itself, signals an acceptance of indigenous ways of knowing and knowledge creation;

[Ahmed], in [f]ocusing on ethnographic work carried out in higher education institutions in different countries, she illustrates how Eurocentric educational systems simultaneously give voice to and silence minority groups. She outlines how the will to ‘include’ diversity/Indigeneity in institutions, curricula, and research becomes a wall to diversity/Indigeneity. In other words, a commitment to inclusion may ironically and paradoxically be used to prevent the transformation of systemic racism within institutions because it reinforces the naturalization of the ‘norm’ and prevents diversity/Indigeneity from becoming habitual. For instance, she illustrates how, by making diversity/Indigeneity visible, the mainstream is made invisible/normal and how benefitting from diversity commitments creates a debt for diverse bodies. She refers to this as a politics of ‘stranger making’, ‘how some and not others become strangers, how emotions of fear and hatred stick to certain bodies, how certain bodies become understood as the rightful occupants of certain spaces’.100

98 Keen, I. op.cit., p. 345 99 Probyn-Rapsey, F. op.cit., p. 84 100 Ahenakew, C. op.cit., pp. 330-331 34

In On being included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Ahmed discusses at length the concept of ‘overing’.101 “The reproduction of a category can happen at the moment in which it is imagined as overcome or undone. This is why the very promise of inclusion can be the concealment and thus extension of exclusion. This is why a description of the process ‘‘of being included’’ matters.”102 In order to exemplify this aspect of ‘overing’ in areas outside of academia, this paper will briefly turn to negotiations in relation to mining extraction and educational leadership.

Benedict Scambary has a PhD in Anthropology that focuses on alternate forms of Aboriginal economic development in the context of agreements with the mining industry in Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory and is the Chief Executive Officer at The Aboriginal Areas Protection Authority. Scambary is, in ‘Mining Agreements, Development, Aspirations, and Livelihoods’103, highlighting the poor agreement outcomes on behalf of colonisees in spite of existing and, so called, beneficial agreements between coloniser and colonisee.104 The reason for these poor outcomes is that the “…mining industry …struggles to accommodate cultural diversity within its corporate framework”105, while also “…the link between Indigenous productive action and cultural diversity…is not necessarily quantifiable in economic terms”.106. Katherine Trebeck, with a PhD in Political Science from the Australian National University, is giving further weight to Scambary’s reasoning in ‘Corporate Responsibility and Social Sustainability: Is there any connection?’107:

In seeking to attain a social licence to operate, the language of ‘win-win’ outcomes is often used by miners to justify their presence and promote what they bring to a community. This assumes that mining will proceed and that local communities can derive outcomes sufficiently beneficial they can be described as a ‘win’ for the communities.108

101 (a) Ahmed, S., op.cit., 180-183 102 Ibid., p. 183 103 Scambary, B. (2009). Mining Agreements, Development, Aspirations, and Livelihoods. In Altman J. & Martin D. (Eds.), Power, Culture, Economy: Indigenous Australians and Mining, pp. 171-202 104 Ibid., p. 171 105 Ibid., p. 191 106 Ibid., p. 190 107 Trebeck, K. (2009). Corporate Responsibility and Social Sustainability: Is There Any Connection? In Altman J. & Martin D. (Eds.), Power, Culture, Economy: Indigenous Australians and Mining, pp. 127-148 108 Ibid., p. 139 35

Undoubtedly, this language of win-win has a tone of the ‘overing’ quality previously presented by Ahmed, and even more so, in light of the actual poor outcomes in relation to mining agreements.

Ciaran O'Faircheallaigh is teaching in area of Evaluation Policy and Measuring, and Delivering Policy109 at Griffith Business School at Griffith University in Australia. It is therefore of particular interest when the conclusion is reached, in ‘Women's Absence, Women's Power: Indigenous Women and Negotiations with Mining Companies in Australia and Canada’110, that the criticism of colonisee women not being part of mining negotiations is oversimplified.

Playing the role of ‘negotiator’ in discussions with a company confers little power if the matters one regards as most important are not on the agenda, or are sacrificed to achieve gains in other areas. Being able to set the agenda for negotiations confers considerable power, even if one never sits at a negotiation table.111

O'Faircheallaigh is arguing that, in assessing the extent to which colonisee women are part and parcel of negotiations at the physical and actual negotiation table, does not infer to what extent the colonisee women have an actual part in setting the agenda. Again, this writer is considering academia’s role in ‘overing’ and whether O'Faircheallaigh’s conclusion is reasonable in light of the poor agreement outcomes in relation to mining, and also in light of “…the key objective of [the writer’s] paper is to help ‘write women into the social history of mining’”.112 Similarly, Sara Bice, Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University, in ‘On the Radar?: Gendered Considerations in Australia-Based Mining Companiesʹ Sustainability Reporting, 2004–2007’113, “… examines the extent to which Australia-based mining companies report on gendered issues and how those issues are addressed under the auspices of ‘sustainable development’ or ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) programs”114 and reaches the conclusion that “…gender issues are seen as marginal in relation to other major sustainability issues, such as the environment.”115 This writer is

109 https://www.griffith.edu.au/griffith-business-school/departments/government-international-relations/contact- us/ciaran-ofaircheallaigh 110 O'Faircheallaigh, C. (2013) Women's Absence, Women's Power: Indigenous Women and Negotiations with Mining Companies in Australia and Canada, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36:11, 1789-1807 111 Ibid., p. 1797 112 Ibid., p. 1793 113 Bice, S. (2011). On the Radar?: Gendered Considerations in Australia-Based Mining Companiesʹ Sustainability Reporting, 2004–2007. In Lahiri-Dutt K. (Ed.), Gendering the Field: Towards Sustainable Livelihoods for Mining Communities, pp. 145-176 114 Ibid., p. 146 115 Ibid., p. 154 36 suggesting that both O'Faircheallaigh and Bice, in efforts to “help” colonisee women’s visibility, may represent academia’s contribution to ‘overing’ and thereby further colonial silencing and blurring gaze. Whilst the coloniser may be ‘overing’, Ahenakew is suggesting that it is difficult for the colonisee to not be ‘grafting’;

Thus, when we are carrying out research in a context that is primarily non- Indigenous, using alphabetic and computer literacies (rather than orality and sensuous and metaphorical land engagement), being funded by the state (through our jobs or research agencies), and aspiring to be legitimised in academia, grafting is inevitable. As I mentioned before …it becomes a problem when we cannot recognize what is lost in translation. What happens when the root of the plant and the land that sustains it are severed from the plant’s body? It is highly problematic when we assume that this is a neutral exercise without consequences or when we cannot even recognize that we are grafting.116

In other words, academia is perceived as a colonial space and ‘grafting’ in this context means carrying out research on colonial terms. This ‘grafting’ is also reflected in the experience of colonisee women’s educational leadership, as depicted by Martha Sombo Kamara, in ‘Remote and invisible: the voices of female Indigenous educational leaders in Northern Territory remote community schools in Australia’117. Kamara is Professor in the Department of Department of Education at La Trobe University in Australia and has particular research interest in Sociology. In her article, Kamara presents five colonisee principals who describes the difficulties in being appointed by the coloniser, without endorsement of elders and ceremony118, and at the same time staying true to their communities. It is described as being “…sandwiched between their people and the central bureaucratic offices”119 and are trying to resolve this by finding ways to move between two worlds.120 Colonisee educational leadership means leading “…from a position of relatedness that is far removed from western science and philosophies”121 and “…extends beyond the school walls that requires strategic culturally appropriate negotiation skills to gain community consensus on school matters”122. In other words, colonial bureaucratic administration does not expect this from their leadership and is not part of their appointment, however colonisee communities has more extensive expectations on leadership which the principles in this study also adheres to. The ‘grafting’ is here performed in a very practical manner where their work is likely measured within the state apparatus on the basis of written

116 Ahenakew, C. op.cit., p. 333 117 Kamara, M. op.cit., pp. 128-143 118 Ibid., pp. 134-135 119 Ibid., p. 137 120 Ibid., p. 137 121 Ibid., p. 138 122 Ibid., pp. 139-140 37 reports etc., however leadership toward the community is hidden or carved out in the process of colonial administration. In turning toward academia, is it possible to move beyond ‘overing’ and ‘grafting’ within the academic world?

Ahenakew suggests that a first important step is to make these qualities visible in academic research;

For those of us writing within academia, the first small step we need to take is to make grafting visible. Making grafting visible means writing in a way that makes what is invisible noticeably absent so that it can be remembered and missed. Learning to write like this means resisting the temptation for certainty, totality, and instrumentalization in Western reasoning by keeping our claims contingent, contextual, tentative, and incomplete. Another step, already used widely in Indigenous literature, is to make what is absent present, by using devices that redirect reading from a prosaic to a poetic orientation or from the rational to the metaphorical mind.123

Therefore, two research examples are presented here which demonstrate how to make grafting visible in very different ways. This is demonstrated in Jones’s ‘Assimilation Discourses and The Production of Ella Simon's "Through My Eyes"’124 and in Hughes’s ‘Stories My Grandmother Never Told Me: Recovering Entangled Family Histories Through Ego- Histoire’125. Both are historians re-writing history in making grafting visible in previously told stories. However, the former research is making grafting visible within the framework of a sort of ‘instrumentalization in Western reasoning’ and the latter has a more ‘prosaic to a poetic orientation’ in reaching this visibility.

Ella Simon, a colonisee activist, made oral recordings in order to share her life narrative in 1973 and the result was the publication of Through My Eyes in 1978.126 Her narrative was recorded when she was alone, in the presence of a coloniser friend, and in conversation with a colonisee relative127 and there was also colonial transcriber and editors involved.128 Using a very instrumentalised methodology, Jones has in retrospect listened to all recordings from 1973 and made comparisons with the published result and can therefore show “…how the oral narrative addressed to the insider audience [, the colonisee relative,] was most heavily edited;

123 Ahenakew, C. op.cit., p. 333 124 Jones, J. op.cit., pp. 1-20 125 (b) Hughes, K. op.cit., pp. 75-92 126 Jones, J. op.cit., p. 1 127 Ibid., p. 8 128 Ibid., p. 9 38 with only 15 per cent of topics covered final included in the published text. Thirty per cent of topics narrated in the presence of Simon’s non-Aboriginal friend were included in the published text, while 47 per cent of topics addressed to the imagined reader were included in the published text.”129 In this process, Jones discovered, what this writer would argue, a ‘grafting’ on behalf of both coloniser and colonisee. “Ella Simon’s collaborators lacked the cultural literacy required to value important cultural characteristics of her oral narrations”130, whilst also Ella Simon recounted different versions of particular stories to different audiences131.

The editorial treatment of her oral manuscript starkly demonstrates how … interpretation of assimilation differed from those of her non-Aboriginal collaborators. Ella Simon advocated equal rights, respect for difference and expected that assimilation was reciprocal; that mainstream white culture would adapt to Aboriginal lifeways and accept a degree of indigenisation. Her collaborators, by contrast, acted upon the then prevalent and homogenising assumption that assimilation was a process by which Aboriginal people adjusted to western civilisation and that equal treatment was necessarily ‘difference-blind’.132

In other words, this archaeological excavation on words and meanings on behalf of Jones, made re-interpretation and visibility of grafting possible. “The failure of [Ella Simon’s] collaborators to acknowledge the value of the oral features of her narration suggests the assumption of a less hospitable view of assimilation; that being treated equally required the homogenisation of difference.”133

In ‘Stories My Grandmother Never Told Me: Recovering Entangled Family Histories Through Ego-Histoire’, Hughes, a coloniser historian, is making ‘grafting’ visible within a more poetic framework. Perhaps Hughes’s experience as a collaborative historian has opened up such possibility:

Rosalind [a colonisee,] patiently taught me ways of understanding and doing history from an expressly Indigenous epistemological and pedagogical base. She approached history holistically, seeing caring for stories as intrinsic to active custodianship of Country, and overall family and community well-being. It was her firm belief that histories resided in the bodies of people and in the land, and that historical knowledge is inalienable from this nexus. She showed me how knowledge

129 Jones, J. op.cit.,. p. 9 130 Ibid., p. 16 131 Ibid., p. 17 132 Ibid., p. 2 133 Ibid., p. 17 39

travelled intergenerationally through genealogies, linked to specific Dreaming tracks and belonging to place. By adopting me as a daughter, Rosalind drew me into a correct relationship with that knowledge and began instructing me in an ethics of working and being by which it might be possible to begin to move toward a cross- cultural approach to history: as much socio-political and scholarly as deeply personal.134

Hughes is calling her history an Ego-Historie135 since her history is deeply personal. Due to having been adopted as a daughter by Rosalind and learning about belonging to place, yet also being strongly connected to her own kin, maternal lineage and home in the area of Lower Murray lakes, the same area of belonging as Rosalind, made it possible for Hughes to realise the need to unravel her own family history’s ‘grafting’. “When I saw my grandmother’s birthplace and the site of my childhood from the ‘othered’ shore, history for me became an elemental force. It was at that point that I began to fully perceive my family history and Ngarrindjeri history recalibrated in the same geo-social space—intersubjective and entangled.”136 Hughes visited her grandmother to ask questions:

Nanna, do you remember Aboriginal people living around Milang when you were a child?’

‘There weren’t any’, she replied.

As I told her about accompanying Aunty Hilda Wilson to the former Point McLeay Mission she became animated, interrupting excitedly:

‘I’ve been to Point McLeay’.

‘What for?’

‘The football!’ she exclaimed.137

In her continued search, starting with football, Hughes journey of interconnectedness, lost possibilities and missed encounters unfolded.

“Remarkably, I realised, rather than actively remembering the spectacle of the oval and its players, the act of crossing the Lake by wood-powered steamer boat, and the pleasure of these culturally transgressive intercommunity events, my grandmother had internalised a construction of settler-colonialism’s grand narrative that there ‘weren’t any’ Aboriginal people around Milang. So strong was this fiction, that it

134 (b) Hughes, K. op.cit., p. 78 135 Lutz Niethammer, a German historian, in Ego-Histoire? Und andere Erinnerungs-Versuche (Verlag Böhlau, Vienna, 2003) has described ego-historie as a tool for scholars and researchers to use as a way to deconstruct social categories which influence them in their work. 136 (b) Hughes, K. op.cit., p. 79 137 Ibid., p. 83 40

was only when I regaled her with Aunty Hilda’s stories that she began to relate vivid memories of football matches between the two communities, often followed by picnics and dances—at a time when she said ‘football was all there was’—with an Aboriginal presence.138

It is not intended here to present many stories of interconnectedness, which there most likely are, but rather to give emphasis to the colonial imaginary foundational narrative and how Hughes through ego-historie, collaborative and cross-cultural history, made grafting visible. Hughes found inspiration in “[t]he cultural theorist, Gail Jones, [who] described the significance of an ‘imagined real’ in navigating through subterranean histories, suggesting that ‘any child, who imagines her own history, re-dreams it, enters impossible perspectives … performs the transitive and transferential, recognises in an almost intuitive way that her nation has various and diverse “situated knowledges” within it’.”139 Hughes writes:

My creative dream-space, with its impossible leaps of agency and place, was indelibly linked to ‘remembering’ the Lake, and indeed my maternal lineage, through an improbable white male resistance history, embodied in the mythic figure of Kelly [, an Australian bushranger and outlaw140]. Yet it was this listening for deeper layers of meaning, as Gail Jones suggests, that inspired my search for ‘situated knowledges’ and continuity of story as I grew. It also revealed much of my childish positioning of self in a suburban nuclear family during Australia’s deeply assimilationist 1950s and early 1960s, in which powerful women were marginalised and Aboriginal peoples barely visible, Kelly’s dislocated mask, superimposed across the Lake’s surface, usurped the space where localised stories of strong, skilled women and enduring Aboriginal presence continued.141

Hence, and as suggested by Ahenakew, “[f]or those of us writing within academia, the first small step we need to take is to make grafting visible. Making grafting visible means writing in a way that makes what is invisible noticeably absent so that it can be remembered and missed.”142 In this paper, it is suggested that making grafting visible is a first step toward the creation of a real colonial foundational narrative. Hughes is describing this in her article:

My sense of place is entirely different than before, and it is no longer possible to tell one story without the other, or to write histories of here or elsewhere to which I am disconnected. Bruce Pascoe calls this coming into knowledge of the settler-colonial atrocities, the unexpected ruptures of kindness, the injustices, the

138 (b) Hughes, K. op.cit., p. 83 139 Ibid., p. 79 140 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Kelly 141 (b) Hughes, K. op.cit., p. 82 142 Ahenakew, C. op.cit., p. 333 41

misunderstandings, the whole wham-bam thing, as ‘learning to fall in love with your country’.143

Therefore, it is here argued, in order to create a foundational narrative, it is important to become knowledgeable of one’s real history with all of its limitations, imperfections and violations. A real foundational narrative may settle today’s unsettled settler body, and a first step is to become aware of both the language of overing and the grafting of stories.

5.7 Acknowledging knowledge production

This paper has suggested a phenomenology of separation of body and skin in relation to colonialism in which the coloniser subject is comfortable with its skin, but uncomfortable in its skin and, further, that this unsettled body is unsettled due to a colonial imaginary foundational narrative. Other than these first steps of moving beyond overing and grafting, as part of making the invisible visible, how can colonisation come to a halt and allow for the body to become settled? Can a place be created in which subjects have no separation between body and skin, and, even further, no separation between body and mind?

Moreton-Robinson writes, in I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a Postcolonizing Society, “…the state’s legal regime privileges other practices and signs over our bodies because underpinning this legal regime is the Western ontology in which the body is theorized as being separate from the earth and it has no bearing on the way subjectivities, identities, and bodies are constituted”144. Elsewhere145, she describes Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint theory which challenges the Cartesian mind/body split146;

Standpoint theory’s recognition of partiality and subjectivity brings together the body and knowledge production, which is in contrast to the disembodied epistemological privileging of ‘validity’ and ‘objectivity’ within western patriarchal knowledge production.147

Moreton-Robinson seems to indicate a limitation within Western constructed academia and research methodology and that this limitation springs from an approach separating mind and

143 (b) Hughes, K. op.cit., p. 87 144 (a) Moreton-Robinson, A. op.cit., p. 17 145 (b) Moreton-Robinson, A. (2013) “Towards an Australian Indigenous Women's Standpoint Theory.” Australian Feminist Studies 28 (2013): 331-347 146 Ibid., p., 332 147 Ibid., p., 333 42 body resulting in a disembodied epistemology. “…Indigenous women’s standpoint theory is not predicated on the separation of ourselves from our countries, human ancestors, creator beings and all living things. Australian Indigenous women’s standpoint theory provides one way of exercising our sovereignty as an integral part of our research methodologies.”148 In other words, this suggests, an embodied epistemology within academia is made possible when sovereignty is grounded in a real foundational narrative and vice versa. This is giving further emphasis to the importance of the colonial subject moving away from the imaginary and toward a real foundational narrative in order for research methodologies within academia being able to bring contributions and development of history storytelling in the future. This writer suggests, the inappropriate use of words ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries in light of there being so much room for development all over the world. In particular since academia is in the initial phase of becoming aware of overing and grafting. In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, Ahmed is writing about academics as diversity workers, as blockage points and of the importance of going the wrong way and against the flow;

Diversity work … requires insistence. You have to become insistent to go against the flow, and you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent. A life paradox: you have to become what you are judged as being. Things might appear fluid if you are going the way things are flowing. When you are not going that way, you experience a flow as solidity, as what you come up against. In turn, those who are not going the way things are flowing are experienced as obstructing the flow. We might need to be the cause of obstruction. We might need to get in the way if we are to get anywhere. We might need to become the blockage points by pointing out the blockage points. I end this book with a maxim: don’t look over it, if you can’t get over it.149

Ahmed’s above maxim is referring to the importance of avoiding overing in academic work. Admittedly, this writer’s initial intent was to write an essay of how indigenous feminism and the successful stories of indigenous women’s leadership somehow could be a place in which to find inspiration on how global feminism could develop. To make the matter even worse the focus was to look closer at the language of contention in this context. In the very expansive and abundant research phase of this paper, the realisation was soon apparent that this exercise might have been a project in the name of overing based on a plentiful of grafted material. If this paper, in spite of attempts to reach beyond beyondness, became a symbol of, and further contribution to, continued colonisation is for others to judge and for this writer to then listen attentively to.

148 (b) Moreton-Robinson, A. op.cit., p., 344 149 (a) Ahmed, S. op.cit., pp. 186-187 43

Some may argue that the theory of phenomenology symbolises hindrance and an obstacle in creating change, since subjects keep reaching for the objects placed and positioned within its proximity. However, the possibility of changing direction is in line with the theory of phenomenology. Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology;

If orientations point us to the future, to what we are moving toward, then they also keep open the possibility of changing directions and of finding other paths, perhaps those that do not clear common ground, where we can respond with joy to what goes astray. So, in looking back we also look a different way; looking back still involves facing – it even involves an open face. Looking back is what keeps open the possibility of going astray. This glance also means an openness to the future, as the imperfect translation of what is behind us.150

This paper is in and of itself a project that changed direction and led this writer astray and it has been a very joyous ‘astrayment’. The task of being part of history in the making in the future seems adventurous and perhaps allowing for this writer to “…create wrinkles in the earth.151”

6. Conclusion

The question posed in this paper is: how can the theory of phenomenology contribute to understanding the ongoing colonisation in Australia/Country? How does the colonisee’s grounded body and the coloniser’s non-grounded body affect construction of foundational narratives in relation to colonisation and the respective subjects inhabiting the same space? The purpose has been to create and explore the connections between nation-building, colonialism and phenomenology.

In order to answer these questions, this paper has attempted to develop the theory of phenomenology in relation to colonisation. This paper has suggested a phenomenology of separation of body and skin in relation to colonialism in which the coloniser subject is comfortable with its skin, but uncomfortable in its skin and, further, that this unsettled body is unsettled due to a colonial imaginary foundational narrative. The colonisee body has a grounded sense of belonging and a sense of entitlement to inhabit space, whereas the coloniser creation of imaginary foundational narratives is a reflection of a disorientation, a restlessness and an

150 (d) Ahmed, S. op.cit., p. 178 151 Ibid., p. 179 44 unsettled body. The phenomenological approach of the skin-body dichotomy is reflected in the construction of the colonisee subject’s grounded foundational narrative as opposed to the coloniser subject’s imaginary foundational narrative.

Further, it is argued, colonialism cannot come to an end until the coloniser can create a real foundational narrative and, in turn, this cannot occur until colonisee knowledge production is acknowledged. Only through a real foundational narrative can the coloniser body become settled and the visibility of grafting and overing could be initial steps toward a real coloniser foundational narrative.

This writer has, in the writing process, realised that there is more to the theory of phenomenology than simply looking in a different direction and will be journeying on this path concerning most aspects of life. If the ambition is to be immersed in academic life, using history as the main vehicle in the unfolding of this journey, phenomenology as both a grounding and theorising tool and mindset, will be intrinsically and intricately meshed into this writer’s creation in the historicity of storytelling.

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LITERATURE & REFERENCES

(a) Ahmed, Sara. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

(b) Ahmed, Sara. (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge (Transformations Ser)

(c) Ahmed, Sara. (2007) ‘A Phenomenology of Whiteness’, Feminist Theory, 8(2), pp. 149–168

(d) Ahmed, Sara. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press

Ahenakew, Cash. (2016) ‘Grafting Indigenous Ways of Knowing onto Non-Indigenous Ways of Being: The (Underestimated) Challenges of a Decolonial Imagination’, International Review of Qualitative Research, 9(3), November 1, 2016

Bice, Sara. (2011). On the Radar?: Gendered Considerations in Australia-Based Mining Companiesʹ Sustainability Reporting, 2004–2007. In Lahiri-Dutt K. (Ed.), Gendering the Field: Towards Sustainable Livelihoods for Mining Communities (pp. 145-176)

Broome, Richard. (1992). Resisting the Invaders. In Aboriginal Australians – Black Response to White Dominance 1788-1980, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, pp. 36-51

Burton, Antoinette. M. (1990) ‘The white woman’s burden. British feminists and the Indian woman, 1865- 1915’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 13(4), pp. 295–308

Cahir, Fred. (2012). Aboriginal People and Mining. In Black Gold: Aboriginal People on the Goldfields of Victoria, 1850-1870, pp. 5-20

Goodall, Heather. (1995) Assimilation Begins in The Home”: The State and Aboriginal Women’s Work as Mothers in New South Wales, 1900s to 1960s’, Labour History, (69), pp. 75-101

(a) Hughes, Karen. (2015). Arnhem Land to Adelaide: Deep Histories in Aboriginal Women’s Storytelling and Historical practice, ‘Irruptions of Dreaming’ Across Contemporary Australia. In McGrath A. & Jebb M. (Authors), Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place ANU Press, pp. 83-100

(b) Hughes, Karen. (2014). "Stories My Grandmother Never Told Me: Recovering Entangled Family Histories Through Ego-Histoire." In Ngapartji Ngapartji: In Turn, in Turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia, edited by Hughes Karen, Castejon Vanessa, Cole Anna, and Haag Oliver, ANU Press, pp. 75-92

Horáková, Martina. (2017) Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and North America. Brno: Masarykova univerzita (Spisy Filozofické Fakulty Masarykovy Univerzity)

Husserl, Edmund. and Gibson, W. R. B. (2002) Ideas: general introduction to pure phenomenology. Routledge (Muirhead Library of Philosophy)

Jones, Jennifer. (2012). Assimilation Discourses and The Production of Ella Simon's "Through My Eyes". Aboriginal History, 36, pp. 1-20

Kamara, Martha Sombo. (2017) Remote and Invisible: TheVoices of Female Indigenous Educational Leaders in Northern Territory Remote Community Schools in Australia, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 49:2, pp. 128-143

Keen, Ian. (1993). Aboriginal Beliefs vs. Mining at Coronation Hill: The Containing Force of Traditionalism. Human Organization, 52(4), pp. 344-355

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(a) Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. (2015) 1. I Still Call Australia Home: Indigenous Belonging and Place in a Postcolonizing Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

(b) Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. (2013) “Towards an Australian Indigenous Women's Standpoint Theory.” Australian Feminist Studies 28 (2013) pp. 331 - 347

O'Faircheallaigh, Ciaran. (2013) Women's absence, women's power: indigenous women and negotiations with mining companies in Australia and Canada, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36:11, pp. 1789- 1807

Paisley, Fiona. (1998). Citizens of Their World: Australian Feminism and Indigenous Rights in the International Context, 1920s and 1930s. Feminist Review, (58)

Palmer, Lisa. (2007). Interpreting 'nature': The politics of Engaging with Kakadu as an Aboriginal Place. Cultural Geographies, 14(2), pp. 255-273

Probyn-Rapsey, Fiona. (2008) ‘Country Matters: Sexing the Reconciled Republic of Australia’, Feminist Review, 89(1), pp. 73–86

Scambary, Benedict. (2009). Mining Agreements, Development, Aspirations, and Livelihoods. In Altman J. & Martin D. (Eds.), Power, Culture, Economy: Indigenous Australians and Mining, pp. 171- 202

Tamisari, Franca. (1998), Body, Vision and Movement: in the Footprints of the Ancestors. Oceania, 68, pp. 249-270

Trebeck, Katherine. (2009). Corporate Responsibility and Social Sustainability: Is there Any Connection? In Altman J. & Martin D. (Eds.), Power, Culture, Economy: Indigenous Australians and Mining, pp. 127-148

William, Carol. (Ed.). (2012). Indigenous Women and Work: From Labor to Activism. University of Illinois Press

Legislation

Mabo v Queensland (No 2)

Native Title Act 1993

Websites: https://www.commonground.org.au/learn/connection-to-country https://www.etymonline.com/word/opportunity https://www.griffith.edu.au/griffith-business-school/departments/government-international- relations/contact-us/ciaran-ofaircheallaigh https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/skin-deep https://www.thefreedictionary.com/opportunism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/european-racism-africa-slavery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ned_Kelly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy) http://www.workingwithindigenousaustralians.info/content/Culture_2_The_Dreaming.html