USES OF ABORIGINALITY Popular Representations of Australian Aboriginality Robert Windsor Thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English, University of Adelaide South Australia December 2001 co nts the beginning 1 part one: primitives 13 part two: problems 91 part three: proPhets 172 the ending: 259 bibliography: 266 for lisa who gave me the best reason in the world to write this. for nelly and stella who were there and loved me. for the anangu people of mimili and amata who were always an inspiration and helped me to better understand what australia really means. for paris flat who sheltered me thank you penny, sue, paul and max for being a constant source of guidance and support. a special thank you to martin nakata and all at the aboriginal research institute at underdale south australia. without you this would never have been finished. 1 the beginnitg 2 "Wanti nindo ai kabba? NÍngkoandi kuma yerta." l directions Analysing the various mythologies that inform Australian understandings of Aboriginal people, Marcia Langton concludes that what is revealed is not by and large a relationship between actual people but a relationship between white Australians and the symbols created by their predecessors: "Australians do not know and relate to Aboriginal people. They relate to stories told by former colonists" (Langton, 1993: 31). This thesis concentrates upon this relationship of non-Aboriginal people (especially white Australians) to the symbols and narratives they use to produce what is called Aboriginality. lt is a study of popular or broadly circulating representations of Australian Aboriginality. lt does not concentrate to any significant extent upon representations produced by Aboriginal people themselves: lt is important to recognise that the Aboriginality that is the subject of this thesis is an object largely independent of the cultural expressions and identity formations of Aboriginal people themselves. Here Aboriginality, like madness or sexuality for Michel Foucault, is a Western discursive object "charged with instrumentality" (Foucault, 1979: 103). ' "Whe." have you pushed me to? You belong to another country." A song sung in 1844 by Ngurpo Williamsie, of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide plains, in protest at the invasion of his country. J The research for this thesis began with a largely serendipitous collecting of primary texts2. Parameters were very loosely defined: no restrictions were placed on date of publication, on genre, on whether the texts were fiction or non-fiction, or on medium (films, photographs, television, and web sites were included with print texts). There were two requirements for the gathering together of this collection of objects: each item had to be (in some way) definable as "popular", and each item had to have been produced by a non-Aboriginal person or persons. ln many ways this was something of an unwieldy task, not simply because of the enormous number of objects that fall into these categories but also because of difficulties in determining what actually constituted "the popular"3. The idea of a popular text was essential to the project. An attempt has been made to use the widely consumed to uncover the broadly representative. This aim sprang out of the personal experience of a number of years spent in higher education, where I was largely exposed to progressive approaches to the understanding of Aboriginality, followed by the experience of entering the workplace and discovering that different attitudes prevailed. This was doubly surprising in that the 'The term text, as used in this thesis, refers not only to print material but to a range of representational objects including films, television and photographic material. ' Initially I began simply by purchasing texts that were available through popular outlets such as newsagents, certain secondhand bookstores and Aquarian bookstores. I sought fiction that would be unlikely to fit into the category of the literary. I tried only to select texts that were widely available and ready to hand: texts that were not aimed at any kind of specialist audience but appeared to be targeting the general public. 4 workplace I entered was a Central Australian Aboriginal school. Amongst the non-Aboriginal teachers, and other workers in the community, it was not uncommon to hear forms of racism and essentialism expressed. Many of these views I believed at the time (naively I now recognise) had long since fallen inlo widespread disrepute. This was in 1995; in 1996 - following the emergence of Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party - I was made fufiher aware of the pervasiveness of such attitudes. The Howard Liberal government provided tacit support to One Nation's racism through pronouncements such as: "ordinary Australians" now felt relaxed and comfortable enough to speak their minds. At this time - in supermarkets, on public transport, in pubs and chemist shops - I overheard "ordinary Australians" speaking their minds. This thesis grew out of a desire to gain some understanding of the genealogy and the function of the barrage of misinformation and myth that (re)entered public discourse at this time. Textual objects that were in broad circulation and widely consumed seemed to be the most suitable resource for this task. Having gathered a large number of different kinds of objects it became necessary, in order to make my task more manageable, to arrange the objects into categories. This was by no means a simple task. At first I attempted to arrange according to a form of genre distinction. lt seemed that most of the objects fitted roughly into three categories: popular ethnography, crime fiction, and New Age texts. While these initially functioned well as working categories they finally proved 5 unsatisfactory. A number of texts I was including in the category of New Age representations were not strictly speaking informed by New Age ideology, but were either coming from a generalised spiritual or religious attitude or were more specifically Christian approaches. Popular ethnography also proved an inadequate term that I was using to describe a collection of non-fiction texts that, while including Australian Aboriginality as a primary subject, were in fact generically quite diverse consisting of personal memoirs, travel writing, Australiana, postcards, magazines, photographs, and a web site. I finally arrived at the conclusion that the unifying principle of each of these groupings was less one of textual category than of dominant representational strategy. For example, in the category of texts I had termed popular ethnography the dominant strategy of representation is one of primitivisation; that is, Aboriginality is visualised as the Other of modernity, and the primitive is utilised as a negative term that valorises the modern. ln the case of the crime fiction texts the principal strategy is one of problematisation: Aboriginality is represented as a state problem, a problem of social governance, a problem for the law, something to be corrected, eradicated or concealed. ln terms of the category that I had originally called the New Age the prevailing strategy is a form of idealisation in which a spiritualised and nostalgified Other is called upon as a means of supplementing the modern; Aboriginality is represented as a spiritualised entity that offers solutions to the discontents of modern life. 6 The central argument of this thesis - that Aboriginality as Western discursive object functions to further the interests of the West and to obstruct the self-representations of Aboriginal people themselves - grew out of a reading of the work of Martin Heidegger, especially the essay "The Question Concerning Technology" (1978); my reading of this essay has been influential in the writing of this thesis. However, this is not to claim that this is a Heideggerian analysis of Aboriginality, but only that this essay initiated a way of seeing, or facilitated an approach, that remained when others fell by the way. ln a discussion of Nietzsche (1977), Martin Heidegger concludes that Western culture is pervaded by a will to power: "[The] desire to dominate in order to remake the world to satisfy Western desires"(D'Arcy 110-11). This will is enhanced, one might say compounded, by what Heidegger calls the technological. For Heidegger modern technology is not fundamentally the mechanistic or the technical, although obviously these are included in Heidegger's concept, but rather the way of thinking or mode of comprehension that accompanies and precedes the proliferation of machinery. ln this mode of comprehension, or way of revealing, "everything possesses significance only insofar as it is seen and is taken charge of as something useful for serving an end beyond itself" (Lovitt & Lovitt, 229). Heidegger illustrates with reference to the damming of the Rhine to produce electric power. The power station dominates the river, disclosing it solely as resource, an entity for using: The hydroelectric plant is not built into the river, as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is 7 now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station (Heidegger 1978: 321). Unlike the bridge which draws people into mutual and meaningful relations with the river and its environs, allowing the river to show itself as itself , the power station is a derogating employment of the river that prevents the river from revealing itself: The river as "an entity of unique integrity and intrinsic power" is lost to us (Lovitt & Lovitt 231). This disclosure of entities as something useful for the achieving of a goal (that so clearly applies to examples from the natural world such as rivers that are dammed or forests that are logged) applies equally to the human world; to art, to writing, to philosophy, to science, and to human beings themselves. According to Heidegger, the phrase human resource concisely "unconceals" the kind of thinking that prevails in the modern world.