Space, Memory, and Power in Australia: the Case for No Nation
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Space, Memory, and Power in Australia: The case for No Nation. Elspeth Tilley Bond University & The University of Queensland Narratives of nation-building, as attempts to their few acres, throw down tenacious roots, and impose "the impossible unity of the nation as a weave a natural poetry into their lives by symbolic force" (Bhabha), contain the seeds of invoking the little gods of creek and mountain. their own destruction. Certain fetishised themes The land has been something to exploit, to tear in Australian non-indigenous literature, for out a living from and then sell at a profit. Our example the vanishing explorer, can be read as settlements have always had a fugitive look, working against any idea of a coherent national with their tin roofs and rubbish-heaps. … Very identity. Vanishing characters undo the colonial little to show the presence of a people with a narrative project's attempts to a) inscribe the common purpose or a rich sense of life." (1942, imaginary landscape with markers of imperial reprinted in Lee, Mead & Murnane, 1990, pp. 7- presence and b) thereby cement both ownership 8). of property and the identity of the coloniser. Two decades later, on the other side of the That the vanishing narrative trope persists in world, Frantz Fanon penned a sentence that contemporary literature indicates not only that serves as a useful reply: the discursive annexation of Australian space continues, but that questions about ownership of If you really wish your country land are not confined to landrights battles in the to avoid regression, or at best courts. Rather, they pervade our culture, our halts and uncertainties, a rapid everyday lives, and our sense of who we are. An step must be taken from important consequence is that the imperative for national consciousness to reconciliation extends beyond the rights of political and social indigenous Australians to encompass the consciousness. (1961, cited in symbolic needs of all Australians. Al-Kassim, 2001, p. 2). In 1942, immediately after the Japanese army Had Palmer and Fanon engaged in actual took Singapore and bombed Darwin, Vance dialogue, Fanon might have addressed the Palmer wrote an essay called “Battle” that regressive consequences of Palmer’s sheer articulated a strong (non-indigenous) Australian blindness to indigenous achievements, sense of national inadequacy: monuments, “dreams in stone”, and sacred "The next few months may decide not only places. He may have pointed out that the whether we are to survive as a nation, but Australian continent could boast at least 40,000 whether we deserve to survive. As yet none of years of tenacious peoples who wove “natural our achievements prove it, at any rate in the poetry into their lives by invoking the little gods sight of the outer world. We have no of creek and mountain”. And he would certainly monuments to speak of, no dreams in stone, no have problematised the need that Palmer takes Guernicas, no sacred places. We could vanish for granted, to leave visible signs of our (non- and leave singularly few signs that, for some indigenous) presence that mark out a unified, generations, there had lived a people who had singular, national identity. made a homeland of this Australian earth. A The concept of national identity has lately homeland? To how many people was it become problematic. There have been calls for primarily that? How many penetrated the soil its retirement, not least because, as Hobsbawm with their love and imagination? We have had pointed out more than a decade ago, “the no peasant population to cling passionately to ongoing removal of the flow of capital from the control of nation-state(s) renders nationalist (1997) that the origin is crucial but deceptive; ideologies obsolete” (1990, cited in Balkyr, essential yet inimical to historical discourse: 1995, n.p.). Non-indigenous Australians, however, remain attached to the notion that the The origin makes possible a island continent also has a correspondingly field of knowledge whose islanded symbolic or cultural identity. Regular function is to recover it, but efforts to peg out that identity’s borders tend to always in a false recognition cluster around occasions such as the Sydney due to the excesses of its own Olympics, before which one organiser defined speech. The origin lies at a his role as “to establish, rather than reinforce, a place of inevitable loss, the strong vision of Australian culture” (Hassall, point where the truth of things cited in Leishman, 1999, p. 6). Likewise, the corresponded to a truthful Centenary of Federation organisers announced discourse, the site of a fleeting their intention to focus on “nationhood and what articulation that discourse has it means”, to strengthen “national confidence obscured and finally lost (1977, and identity”, and to “celebrate” national p. 143). “achievements” (National Council for the Centenary of Federation, 2000, pp. 1-8). A nation’s origin (and hence the “nation” Perhaps more so than almost any other nation itself) is a deferred quantity, "an epistemological on earth, however, Australia should heed object whose presence or absence cannot be Fanon’s warning; for Australian constructions of definitively located" as Ivy wrote of Japan national identity are even more problematic than (1995, p. 22). To describe “Australia”, for most. Yet Palmer-like anxiety recurs in other, example, as a phantasm is not to say that the far more recent, texts. Non-indigenous Australia continent and people who inhabit it do not exist: is still worried about “vanishing” from the face clearly, Australia is a “real” site with living, of this continent, and still considers it important breathing occupants. Rather, it is to understand to struggle to make its mark as a nation. that the moment of conceptualisation of that land and those people as a symbolic “nation” The nature of nations with particular unifying characteristics exists “across a relay of temporal deferral” (Ivy, 1995, Bhabha (1990) suggests that every nation is p. 22) through which an ”original” or “truth” based in phantasm; that is, every “imagined cannot be reached. That a nation is phantasmic community” (a term from Anderson, 1983) has is not necessarily problematic; except when some illusory entity or idea at the centre of its those who narrate their own identity against that culture that permeates that culture's narratives of phantasm begin to confuse symbolic with real; unity with destabilising emanations. to conflate the figurative national symbolic Nationalism, Bhabha writes, is by nature (arbitrary and selected features made ambivalent (1990). The concept of phantasm representative of an imaginary “whole”) with the comes from Freud’s and Lacan’s work on literal (the unrepresentable multiplicity of deferred interpretation, in which the phantasm is peoples, places, and spaces that makes up any described as an event built in the consciousness nation). To be comprehensible as a singular by layering interpretations which take place after entity, a national symbolic is necessarily the supposed time of the “original” occurrence. exclusive. The effects of such exclusion, There is considerable study that extrapolates the however, can be problematically real. When concept of phantasm from individual identity to women begin to feel that they do not exist, collective. For example, for Foucault, “origin” because they do not figure in the national is conceived as the foundation stone of identity, is that not a real problem? When nationalistic discourse; without “origin” there migrants feel that they do not belong, are can be no history, no progress, and no identity. somehow “amputated” (to borrow again from He explains in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” Fanon, 1967) because they are not represented on the national canvas, is that a problem? When Palmer obliterates the validity of indigenous “mnemotechnique—a form or technology of sacred places and monuments with the stroke of collective identity that harnesses individual and a pen, is that a problem? When the dead of wars popular fantasy by creating juridicially fought on behalf of other nations on other legitimate public memories” (1991, p. 8). Only continents are memorialised and honoured, yet some memories are allowed; for example in the dead of what Reynolds has called the Australia Prime Minister Howard (using “Frontier Wars” on our own soil are repressed terminology borrowed from historian Geoffrey and denied, is that a problem (Reynolds, 1995, Blainey) has publicly condemned the “black 1999)? When one group of people, gripped by armband” approach to history (Howard, 1998). nightmarish fantasies about the land swallowing Howard’s repeated criticisms of “people [who] their children (Pierce, 1999) nevertheless feels it essentially see Australia’s past in a negative, legitimate practice to remove another group’s pejorative light” (Howard, 1998, n.p.) show children in the service of “national interest”, is mnemotechnique in action: some ways of that a problem? So, do we problematically remembering are figured as not “helpful” to the conflate the literal with the figurative here in “nation’s progress”. Thus, writes Berlant, the Australia? Do we believe our own tall tales about ourselves? Are there important modern nation installs itself consequences for those whom the national within the memory and the symbolic excludes? conscience of citizens—in part The main difficulty with national symbolics by explicitly interpellating the is that, while they exist on a non-real level, they citizen within a symbolic have effects at a very real level. Lauren Berlant nationalist context...and in part defines “national symbolic” as the “political by providing a general space of the nation” (1991, p. 5). Such a space, technology of memory that she writes, is “is not merely juridical, establishes the subject's "destiny" territorial...genetic...linguistic or experiential, to receive her/his national but some tangled cluster of these” (1991, p. 5). inheritance (1991, p.