Exporting Truth from Aboriginal Australia

TOBY MIu.ER EXPORTING TRUTH FROM ABORIGINAL AUSTRAUA IPORTIONS OF OUR PAST BECOME PRESENT AGAIN, WHERE ONLY THE MELANCHOLY LIGHT OF ORIGIN SHINES' J don't think there can be any doubt that unnecessarily. Of course, we could look for Aborigines have been the most important the global trace of contemporary Australia Australian exporters of social theory and by a form of desperate content analysis. cultural production to the northern Adding up references to it in the Manhanan hemisphere over the past century. How fiction of Jay Mcinerney, for example: eight could one come to such a conclusion? in Bright Lights, Big City (986) if you count When Jock Given approached me to write the 1984 New York Post, none if you don't; this paper, he referred to a recent essay of four in Ransom (] 987); ten in Story ofMy Life mine. It began like this: 'When Australia (989) if you count each mention of Nell's, became modem, it ceased to be interesting'. three if you don't; and none in Brightness I ran the argument there that Aboriginal Falls (992). Or we could turn to the 1995 Australia had provided Europe with a 'Down Under' episode of The Stmpsons, in 'photographic negative' of itself. The which a State Department representative essence of the north, s~creted by the briefs the family on bilateral relations: 'As blllowtng engines and disputatious I'm sure you remember, in the late 1980s the parliaments of the modern, could be US experienced a short-lived infatuation secreted by examining 'the prediarnarue with Australian culture (this is accompanied realities of the Antipodean primordial' by a cartoon-slide of Paul Hogan as (Miller T 1994. 206-7). Once Australia was a 'Crocodile' Dundee]. For some bizarre sovereign state, and able to deny Aboriginal reason, the Aussies thought this would be a people citizenship, it was merely one more permanent thing. O( course it wasn't [the place filled with whitefellas. 'Australians' latter spoken before a slide of a boarded-up were transformed in northern hemisphere film theatre With 'Yahoo Serious Festival' on theory from dashing blacks living OUt of time the decrepit building].' into dull Anglo-Celts living out of place. Bur Alternatively, much could be said about today, the country is returned to the lists of the contributions made by the country's international intellectual pleasure. Lawrence principal passport-holders in this field. My Grossberg announces it as the site for own quick list, compiled from popular cultural studies on the cover of Stephen repute and academic citauonal texts follows, Muecke's book about Aborigmaliry and in as idiosyncratic an order as possible: WK cultural studies (1992) and elsewhere Hancock, Nick Cave, George Miller, Hedley (Grossberg 1994, 17), and postrnodern Bull, Fred Emery, Coral Bell, RW Connell, Aboriginal-style cover an provldes a Felix the Cat, Elizabeth Grosz/Gross, Martin marketing ploy for Routledge's greatest hits Indyk, Meaghan Morris, Joan Sutherland, of Australian cultural and media theory Dennis Altman, Patrick While, VG Childe, (Turner G 1993). Tony Bennett, Mudrooroo Nyoongah/ So I arrived here with that provocation, Mudrooroo/Mudrooroo Narrogin/Colin derived from a previous publishing folly. My Johnson,JiII Ker Conway, Errol Flynn, INXS, more general brief - to discuss the Colin Clark, Rolf Harris, Gillian Armstrong, B international circulation of Australian Wongar, Robert Hughes, CliveJames, Yothu sociocultural ideas - is subsumed somewhat Yindi, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Taussig, by this heritage, but not, I think, Alan Donagan, Bob/Roberr/RIV Hodge, No 76- May 1995 7 EKporting Truth from Aboriginal Australia Peter Weir, Gunther Kress, Air Supply, Elton make of this distant world? Durkheim Mayo, Kylie Minogue, Malcolm Williamson, provides half of the faux quotation that AL Burns, Fred Schepisl, julius Stone, Boris gives this essay a title. He saw the study of Frankel, Sidney Nolan, Rick Springfield, Aboriginal people as a way to make Graeme Turner, Tracey Moffatt, Paul Hogan, 'portions of our past become present again' MAK Halliday, Jane Campion, Judy 0961, 22). Europe's modernity had Wajcman, Wilfrid Thomas, John Passmore, weakened its version of the affective bonds andjack Davis. I do not seek to minimise the that provided the grout holding societies significance of their achievements or of together, in favour of an intense process of others who might be added (briefer individuation. Nevertheless, 'the ensemble residents such as Enoch Powell, John Fiske, of mental habits' clearly on view in black or the Bee Gees). I want to argue, however, Australia was still at work in Europe; that no set of nominated individuals submerged perhaps, but operant as exercises the significance outside Australia classjficatorv mechanisms for coordination that Aborigines have done, and continue to and hierarchisation (Durkheim & Mauss do, as a collectivity, via their uptake by 1970,88). Only the primitive, particularly its forms of social and cultural rheorisation Australian variety, could provide Benedict dedicated to understanding moderniry and with her desired 'laboratory within which irs post, we may study the dtversiry of human I wish to emphasise the following institutions' (1959, 17, 26, 33). And for limitation to the paper at this point. It is Freud, the 'savage and semi-savage races' negative critique. I am concerned here with are of 'peculiar interest for us, for we can the use of Aboriginaliry as a theoretical trope recognise in their psychic life a well by white people, not wirh the actual details preserved, early stage of our own of what could or could not be regrouped development'. His Totem and Taboo places retrospectively under that sign. I am writing, particular faith in combining knowledge of therefore, as an historian of white First Peoples from 'folklore' with 'the intellectual discourse outside Australia, not psychology of the neurotic', from analysis. of black thought itself. He goes off in search of correspondences If you turn to the principal European and between the two, and the 'youngest American sociocultural writers from the continent, namely Australia' offers a perfect 1820s to the 1960s - Georg Hegel, Karl Marx, instance via Aboriginal institutions and Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Marcel beliefs (1946, 3-5, 40). Mauss, Frederick Engels, Gaetano Mosca, AR Radcliffe-Brown, Ruth Benedict, Talcott SEARCHING FOR THE MODERN Parsons, Claude Levi-Strauss and Clifford John Hartley argues that the extermination Geertz are my arbitrarily selected sample of the Aboriginal people proposed by the here - you find Aboriginal Australians' likes of the Sydney Morning Herald in 1844, notions of human classification, duty and and taken up by populisr activity in New social organisation taken as critical keys to South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, was understanding lost truths of humanness actually more than a racism that marked out (something I first noted following a differences between white and black in a conversational aside from John Hartley). gruesome way. It was also a means of These truths are held to have been differentiating the colonists from Britain, an submerged in European and American expression of singularity that helped to modernity through the sweeping changes of bring a national identity into discourse. This industrialisation, urbanism, representative was part of the long haul to shift the signifier democracy and production-line culture. Not of 'Australians' to indicate 'white inhabitants' many of these theorists had much to do with rather than 'Aborigines', who instead come Australians face-co-face (Mauss, for to be known as 'our Aborigines' or example, acted as a translator between 'Aboriginal Australians'. They lost the master French and Australian troops during the signifier along the way. By 1951, the Herald Great War and called himself a museum and Weekly Times' Great Jubilee Book, ethnographer (Fournier 1993, 332; Mauss issued to commemorate the first half-century 1993, 7)); but nor did they need to for the of Federation, could respond to its question purposes of their work. So what did they 'Who are the Australians?' with a British! 8 Madia InlOIlllation Australia Toby Millet European answer. The volume's only the developing area of social anthropology reference to Aborigines came 'for the in Britain, France and the Netherlands. record', listed alongside Chinese, Afghans Symbolic classjfactions were investigated and Indians as the country's 'full-blooded from China to Greece, in accordance with non-Europeans'. Conversely, generations of Aboriginal standards (Needham 1970, xxxi young Britons had their version of the ii), mission ciuilisatrtce enunciated in textbooks Elementary Forms examines 'the most that utilised the Empire's positive treatment primitive and simple religion which is ofAboriginal people as an index of us moral actually known'; simple in terms of straight superiority (Hartley 1992, 201·4; Stratton forward social organisation, and simple 1989, 133-4). Clearly, Aborigines were because it is sealed off from other forms of tesring grounds for Britain: to be cleared sacred life, unlike the leaky ecumenicism/ from their territories by colonial subjects conflict of European faiths. Durkheim bent on a project of nation-building via the defines his work as an attempt to explain an economical use of space and time, bur/and 'actual reality which is near to us, and which to be protected in 'hose territories by distant consequently is capable of affecting our governors dedicated to a project of empire ideas and our acts'. This 'reality is man, and building via {he moral management of those more precisely the man of toda y'. Aboriginal same coordinates. 'At home' (in Australia), ways of life are deemed 'better adapted than dealing brutally with the problem of the any other to lead to an understanding of the indigenous people became a meter of religious nature of man'. His choice is progress, of fitness for independence. 'Back determined by the promise that the home' (in Britain), showing clemency to premodern will enable him to 'find the Aboriginal people was a measure of common foundation of the religious life maturity, of fltness for world leadership.

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