Scars on the Archive, Visions of Place: Genocide and Modernity in Tasmania
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
SCARS ON THE ARCHIVE, VISIONS OF PLACE Genocide and Modernity in Tasmania JESSE SHIPWAY Scars on the Archive, Visions of Place: Genocide and Modernity in Tasmania Jesse Shipway BA (Hons) Submitted in fu lfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy UNIVERSITY OF TASMANIA This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by the University of Tasmania or any other institution. To the best of the candidate's knowledge it contains no material previously published by any other person except where due acknowledgement is given in the text. This thesis may be available for loan. Copying of any part of the thesis within two years of submission is allowable only with the written permission of the author. Limited copying after this date is permissible in accordanc;; with the Copyright Act, 1968. /// I / v * This thesis could never have reached its destination without the kind assistance, forthright advice and empathetic imagination of a loose affiliation of friends, family and co-workers. Thank you then to my wife Helena Shipway, my supervisor Philip Mead, Pascal "Posca" Beechey, Jacob Fischer, Andrew Harwood, Pete Hay, Brett Hutchins, Keith Jacobs, Anna Johnston, Fiona Martin, Mum, Dad, Lee and Marc Prince and the postgrad community in the School of English, Journalismand European Languages at the University of Tasmania. I would also like to thank the editors of Is land, Australian Literary Studies and Journal of Genocide Research for giving me the opportunity to refine a number of these chapters for publication. I apologise in advance for failing to mention by name everyone else who helped me along the way. * Abstract This thesis attempts to come to grips with the narrative traditions, the tropological models and the modes of speech through which Tasmania has come to be constructed as a place of genocide and a place of modernity. The dual nature of its structure responds to two important traditions in contemporary humanities scholarship, the study of genocide and the study of modernity. Through an examination of the way in which these two developmental trajectories have played out in Tasmania, I attempt to decentre and destabilise their disciplinary frameworks. In the first instance modernity is examined from an alternative perspective that allows for a mapping that is not regulated by the presence of Europe and North America, while in the second, genocide is uncoupled from the Holocaust in the name of an examination of a colonial iteration that has only recently registered on the radar screen of scholars working in the area. In this thesis genocide and modernity function dialectically. While, on the one hand, they serve as the objects of analysis, on the other, they provide the discursive resources for the construction of a dual optic that allows for a selective re-reading of the history of Tasmania. For my purposes genocide and modernity are generators of archival energy, drivers of the spectral web that spins out through historical time and transforms a physical location into a place by making that location symbolisable and communicable. This thesis posits a communal structure of feeling that gathers itself around the signifier "Tasmania". The linguistic traces that I have pursued are diachronic in nature but their mobilisation takes place in a continually refreshing present. Being-in-Tasmania is being with-the-archive and that archive is structured in important ways by genocide and modernity. CONTENTS Prefatory 7 Points of Departure What is Tasmania? 25 Looking through the Archive (of the Archive) 33 From Archive to Place and Back Again 53 Of Contrapuntal Trajectories 1: Genocide 62 Of Contrapuntal Trajectories 2: Modernity 79 Van Diemonian Time, or, The Civilisational Clean Break, 1803-1876 Genocide as Mo dernisation 106 Wishingfo r Mo dernity: Temporalityand Desire in Gould's Book ofFish 131 Tasmanian Time, or, One Hundred Years of Melancholy, 1876-1978 Trans-Civilisational Depopulation Anxiety 164 Wilderness and Industrial Mo dernity: A Plural Line of Sight 190 Global Time, or, The Uses of History in a Minor Place, 1978 ... Metaphorics of an Extermination 238 An Enchanted State: Rationalisation and the Sp irit of Tasmania 260 Works Cited 300 Prefatory - - ... ---._..... �-T""'<-•·.. - ...-· :-·�-__.-·:;-------� - . ------- UTAS il ---- ··--- l ��------- --· �-· -- ·---•--·-. ... ·•---•-..-· ...:...'-"-".-.:..; 'o�.;::-'' PREFATORY How are we to conceive of the [archive], if it corresponds neither to the archive in the strict sense- that is, the storehouse that catalogs the traces of what has been said, to consign them to fu ture memory -nor to the Babelic library that gathers the dust of statements and allows fo r their resurrection under the historian 's gaze. (Giorgio Agamben, 1999) This thesis takes its most basic impetus from the articulation of an equivocally textual object called the Tasmanian archive. The Tasmanian archive is the locus for the storage of utterances that concern Tasmania, but it also plays a part in ushering a discursively mediated Tasmania into being. It is both about, and constitutive of, Tasmania in a social- symbolic sense. In regard to its ontology, a principle of captivity plays the pre-eminent role. A fluid, permeable entity, the Tasmanian archive is a mobile site where the text and talk of everyday discursivity are gathered together. It is where, in Jacques Derrida's terms, an act of"consignation" takes place.1 It has a secondary function, however, that derives from its place in Giorgio A gamben's discourse on Emile Benveniste's "The Semiology of Language" as described in Remnants of Auschwitz: Th e Witness and the Archive? Here, the archive is encoded - 7 - Prefatory through the work of Foucault so that it comes to designate "the system of relations between the unsaid and the said", or "the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act of speech."3 The archive in this sense does not bring together the content of what has been written or said about Tasmania, but rather, marks the conditions of its "sayability", the material but non-communicative dimensions that attend every act of enunciation. Because the archive responds to the being of language, as well as to its fecundity of meaning, its location is simultaneously discursive and material. It encloses a language that is anchored to speakers, places and events: phenomena that translate matter into meaning. The Tasmania archive trespasses into the order of things. Its ontology is indifferent to the boundaries of the linguistic plain that Foucault, at least, is uneasy about violating. What [ ...] we wish to do is to dispense with 'things' . To 'depresentify' them. [ ...] To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these obj ects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to fo rm as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions oftheir historical appearance.4 By drawing attention to the way the archive encloses the material conditions that make possible a given statement, Agamben prevents the "virtuality" of the discourse itself from entirely eclipsing the objects to which it is wed. This is an important achievement because it kills off the shibboleth of a cheapened version of Derrida's "there is nothing outside the text", the disingenuous reductio ad absurdum that many critics of the deconstructive approach rehearse. For Agamben, the archive protects the materiality of things-in-the-world, buttressing them against the mesmeric gravity of linguistic reductionism. In the case of a concrete location like Tasmania, the very physicality of a - 8- Prefatory ;;LtlL'I11l:nt rdlt.:ct�.:d in lhi.! archiv� conn�cts that statement to the place it names. The �1rd1i\\! provides us with a way to link language games to specific places even as those pbcL'S ar..: in p�1rt a product of the discourses that they anchor. This thesis places a frame around a collection of moments that carry a special rL'son:wci.! within th� Tasmanian archive. As a temporalised assemblage of freestanding L'ssays, the threads of continuity that hold it together are the contrapuntal problema tics of gcnocidl! and modernisation. These two trajectories mirror each other, I contend, in that thi.! first �mbodies a collective despair and recuperates its emotional charge from the past, whik the latter embodies a collective hope and looks fo rward to the fu ture. Throughout th� history of the Tasmanian archive both genocide and modernisation have been made the subj ect of contested, affectively charged statements, propositions and utterances. But these speech acts are not hopelessly dispersed. Some of them are bound together in contingent assemblage by their collective emergence from a series of shared moments of inauguration. Perhaps we might more precisely describe their operative dimension as multilateral or omni�directional. At any given point in the history of Tasmania, these two trajectories position their moments of enunciation as dialogical nodes connecting the past with the fu ture. Current discussions about the "truth" of the Tasmanian genocide, for instance, are not only played out in remote enclaves as isolated exchanges between vested interests. Rather, they enter the agon in the company of future projections on apparently unrelated matters like the fu ture of old growth logging to produce an ensembled dialogue, an echolalia that rolls the mnemonics of Tasmania's past into the wall of sound through which the present itself becomes audible. To address the problem of signal to noise presented by this formulation, this thesis targets the narrow frequency ranges of genocide � 9 � Prefatory and modt:rnily, providing a provisional and partial tabulation of their unfolding through lhl.l Tasmanian archive. Th� contrapuntal method as I envisage it, should not be confused with the dialogic method that Mikhail Bakhtin distinguished in his work on Dostoevesky's poetics.