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. 225). The national symbolic is a fantasy of collective identity and expression but, at the same time, it Mnemotechnique operates everywhere; from is also a powerful system of control. Berlant what is collected in ‘national’ archives, galleries, points out that: and museums, to what receives government funding as suitable subject material for films or There is always an official television mini-series, to what gets “celebrated” story about what the nation on the national stage, for example the means, and how it works: not Bicentenary of so-called “discovery” and the only in the way propaganda Centenary of Federation. And, when teamed enacts a systematic fraud on with a system of law that, for example, citizen-readers, but also in the recognises indigenous land claims only insofar power of law to construct policy as relationships with that land can be proven and produce commentary that sustained “in living memory”, mnemotechnique governs the dominant cultural becomes a powerful material, as well as discussion of what constitutes symbolic, tool. national identity (1991, p. 11). Postcolonial particulars The national symbolic is the “official” or “objective” version of a nation’s publicly Although Australia fits as an example of a accepted history; in constructing this, however, country with a strong “official story” and active it must control collective memory. It must mnemotechniques, these are not necessarily actively exclude ‘counter memories’ that rebut mechanisms unique to this country. What or discredit the dominant discourse. Berlant, begins to compound Australian nationalism, borrowing from Nietzsche, calls this a however, is its postcolonial inheritance. One of

the oft-documented characteristics of perpetrators well knew its application to postcolonial national symbolics is internal Australia to be based in fiction, yet it was conflict. Sometimes this is called “doubling” subsequently treated and used as fact. Terra because of the twin points of definition and Nullius was a mnemotechnique which separated conflicting systems of perception set up by a those memories which had legal weight (writing centre/periphery economy of representation in an official journal about not seeing any (Tiffin, 1987); sometimes “uncanny” (Gelder & Aborigines) from those which had purely Jacobs, 1998) because of the ways in which the aesthetic value (writing in a letter home a colonial encounter with the other (that had pictorial description of those Aborigines who always hithertofore been the unruly foil for the were seen). Such conflicting versions then live self) forces that self to recognise the other within ongoing lives, and have ongoing effects, within itself. Whatever terminology is used, it is both the material and symbolic realms. acknowledged that postcolonial identities The material effects are lately becoming (national and individual) in general contain clearer to non-indigenous Australians as those formative inconsistencies across a number of most injured by national founding fictions fronts. Postcolonial nations have two “origins”; appeal to courts to reverse them. The symbolic first, the unrecoverable point of loss that effects remain largely denied, but can be characterises any attempt at national conception, identified by examining some of the ways in then a “new”, or more recent origin which conflicts, confusions, and conflations superimposed at the point of imperial annexure. between the literal and the figurative colour the “The settler,” Lawson writes, “seeks to establish contemporary sense of an Australian “nation” in a nation, and therefore needs to become native art, literature, and media texts. and to write the epic of the nation's origin” One of the chief functions of a national (1997, p.12). The trouble is, origin is “that symbolic, a political space of the nation, is to which has no antecedent, so the presence of Ab- overcome time and distance. Politics, argues origines is an impediment” (p. 12). Hence Young “must be conceived as a relationship of Palmer’s excision of the indigenous in strangers who do not understand one another in constructing his case for the national. a subjective and immediate sense, relating across time and distance” (cited in Ziarek, 1995, Uniquely Australian p. 1). Without the national symbolic, Australians confront aloneness, facing the extent In Australia, the peculiarities of postcolonial to which each of us is an “island” in a inheritance are further compounded by the particularly vast space. In constructing the particularities of the formative inconsistency symbolic, then, we seek to bring space/time known as Terra Nullius. It is not necessary to under our control; we label and name the examine the legal aspects of Terra Nullius in geographical and historical dimensions of depth here. Rather, it is helpful to address it first Australia, make connections between the as Alan Lawson has done, as a “cognitive disparate parts of it, tell stories to make it dissonance” at the core of the Australian distinct and memorable, a “place’” against national symbolic, then as a mnemotechnique. which we can define our own identities. Lawson describes Terra Nullius as "a kind of Ironically, the vigour with which non- repressed knowledge" (1997, p. 4) at the heart of indigenous citizens grasp at the symbolic nation non-indigenous narratives of identity. It was as a “rational” thing tends to make us irrational interpreted in such a particular way that glossed about symbolic markers of identity. Birch's the conflict between British common law, which study of an abortive 1989 attempt to restore established rights to possession through prior Koori place names to Gariwerd (The occupancy, and the imperial intention to annex Grampians) in western Victoria revealed among Australia to Britain. Lawson argues that that area's non-indigenous residents a sense of ignoring indigenous occupancy in invoking such insecurity and anxiety so strong and so a law created a fundamental “gap between irrational, that some felt the landscape's knowledge and belief” (1997, p. 4). Its original "features themselves [would] actually vanish" if

renamed (Birch, 1996, p. 177). Birch cites The condition of Australianness that Palmer letters of protest to local newspapers which described was akin to subjects without a nation; lament that "Ayers Rock is no longer," or at least not one that they can depend upon not following its renaming as Uluru. The letters to “vanish” at the first hint of trouble. One express fears that, similarly, after a local particular trope in contemporary non-indigenous renaming, "familiar places or landmarks ... literature which illustrates such an anxiety is the would disappear from the map" (p. 177). Birch Australian fascination with stories about people described the name restoration project as an (children and explorers in particular) who vanish important "test of white Australia's ability to into the Australian landscape. This fascination reconcile its own past, some of which it had was first noted by Hamer in 1953, then by attempted to erase from historical memory" (p. McKeller in 1954, by Hamer again in 1955, 185). The test failed, because "the people of the Scheckter in 1981, Holden in 1991, and Frost in western district had invested so much in a 1997. Most recently, it was the subject of a history of 'white mythologies' that a challenge to book by Pierce (1999). it questioned the basis of their collective and These sources provide numerous examples of individual identities" (p. 185). Gariwerd, stories and images about lost people, but are less although the same “space” (in the Cartesian forthcoming with explanations for our sense), was not the same “place” as The fascination with the topic. One possible Grampians. The plan to switch names activated explanation which builds upon Australia’s a different narrative of place and threatened the unique conditions of conflicted national subjectivities contained in the existing narrative. symbolism is that a fascination with vanishing The emotive reaction to the renaming clearly articulates the ever-present sense of physical indicated the vulnerability of Australian vulnerability caused by being subjects subjectivity: remove even one small marker peg interpellated by a national symbolic that clashes in the story which created it, and the whole with itself at every turn and is founded upon facade began to disappear from the imaginary. inconsistency—is so inconsistent, in fact, that “We could vanish”, as Palmer lamented in the every “national” occasion predicates its frenzied, opening quote, and no-one would know we had not reinvention, but invention, as the Olympic been here at all. arts officer declared. If, as McLuhan and Parker argue, Space prohibits providing here more than a "territoriality is the power of things to impose token example or two as test of such a theory, their own assumptions of time and space" (1968, although other research does bear out the p. 253), it should not come as a surprise that pattern. The chosen cases, then, are exemplary post-colonial de-territorialisations, even those as rather than representative; they illustrate a purely symbolic as the Gariwerd/Grampians supreme irony, which is that, in articulating the name reinstatement, cause perceived ruptures in non-indigenous Australian sense of the fabric of “conventional” European space- vulnerability, the stories that tell it tend to re- time—holes into which whole mountain ranges encode the very confusion which predicated it; a can vanish. As Berlant writes: conflation of literal with figurative. The boundaries between factual and fictional Disruptions in the realm of narratives of vanishing in Australia are the National Symbolic create a extremely blurred, as Pierce’s unsuccessful collective sensation of almost struggle in The Country of Lost Children to physical vulnerability: the subject separate vanishing narratives into categories of without a nation experiences “fiction” and “true stories” confirms (1999). her/his own mortality and They became particularly blurred in the vulnerability because s/he has discussion that surrounded the well-known lost control over physical space novel and later film, Picnic at Hanging Rock and the historical time that marks (1967). that space as a part of her/his Picnic is a wholly fictional account of inheritance (p. 24). disappearance. There were never any

schoolgirls, there is no Appleyard College, and How to move forward from this space of no-one has vanished at Hanging Rock in confusion, division, and discomfort? Perhaps to Victoria. Joan Lindsay made it all up. Yet the abandon, as Fanon (1952/1967) urged, a book made Hanging Rock into a tourist particular encapsulation of the “national”, and attraction, with hundreds of visitors annually embrace instead something in the nature of a combing its sides for evidence of the dialectic of local and global conceptualisations mysteriously vanished Miranda, and clamouring of identity. Certainly to recognise that people, for the publishing of Lindsay’s mysterious “final events, emotions, and issues cannot be repressed chapter” to find out the “secret” (1987). through a system of approved memories, but Likewise other vanishing narratives, such as continue to circulate within and throughout texts Carmel Bird’s novel The Bluebird Café, have (art, history, literary, fiction or non fiction, been believed by readers to be partly or media or film, etc.) and to influence our completely true. Bird writes, "perhaps we are reception and interpretation of current and future ready to believe these things because deep down events. To recognise, in other words, that the we think we don't belong here, and the land national symbolic is neither as purely symbolic itself will sometimes swallow up our children to nor as real as it first appears. punish us" (quoted in Holden, 1991, p. 62). Such conflation may be relatively harmless in the case of a story like Picnic at Hanging Rock-- References although it did irritate author Joan Lindsay sufficiently to prompt a passionate denial of Al-Kassim, D. (2001). The faded bond: factual sources on her part (1975)—but it is Calligraphesis and kinship in Abdelwahab obviously rather less harmless in a case such as Meddeb’s Talismano. Public Culture, 13 (1), the disappearance of Lindy Chamberlain's baby n.p. Available at: daughter Azaria at, coincidentally (or not?), that http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-pub- symbolically and materially contested site, cult/current/al-kassim.html (accessed Uluru. Tacey has described Lindy Chamberlain 30.02.02) as “martyred”; sacrificed on the altar of a Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities: “peculiarly Australian imperative” (1993, p. 47). Reflections on the origin and spread of Specific arguments about media representations nationalism. London: Verso. of femininity aside, he suggests that the way in Balkyr, Y. (1995). The discourse on ‘post- which the Chamberlain case captured so much nationalism’: A reflection on the interest showed that its elements went straight to contradictions of the 1990s. Journal of the heart of non-indigenous Australian identity American Studies of Turkey, 1, 25-31. struggles. Chamberlain was scapegoated (a Available at: material effect) on the imperative of our national http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~jast/Number1/Bal psychic vulnerability (a figurative affect). It was kir.html (accessed 13.01.02) less scary, non-indigenous Australians perhaps Berlant, L. (1991). The anatomy of national felt at the time, to believe in an ability to do fantasy: Hawthorne, utopia, and everyday violence to each other than to perceive of the life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. land (the space of the nation) itself (in the figure Bhabha, H. K. (Ed.). (1990). Nation and of dingo) turned violent against us. narration. New York: Routledge & Keegan Picnic at Hanging Rock and the Azaria Paul. Chamberlain case have in common a confusion Birch, T. (1996). A land so inviting and still of the literal with the figurative; a contradiction without inhabitants: Erasing Koori culture between the perceived and the imagined. from (post-) colonial landscapes. In K. Twenty years after Azaria’s disappearance, and Darian-Smith, L. Gunner, & S. Nuttall (Eds.), in the face of detailed new evidence and a Text, theory, space: Land, literature and pardon for Lindy, Australia remains divided and history in South Africa and Australia (pp. discomfited by the case, as witnessed by the 173-188). London: Routledge. renewed glut of “anniversary” media coverage.

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