AAlinter 1997
CONTENTS
From the desk of the Director 2
Nicholas Thomas Indigenous presences and national
narratives in Australasian museums 3 Dipesh Chakrabarty
Minority histories, subaltern pasts 17
Greg Dening Endeavour and Hokule'a:
The theatre of re-enactment histories 33 Sasha Grishin Art into landscapes: New Australian images through British eyes 46
CCR Staff 59
ARC Fellows at the HRC 66
HRC Visitors 66
HRC Conference 78 Work-in-progress seminars 81
CCR Conferences 83
Forthcoming conferences 85
From the desk of the Librarian 88
HRC monographs 90
HRC conference information and registration forms 91 MANE ti
EDITOR: Benjamin Penny W.J.F. Jenner, Australian National University EDITORIAL ASSISTANT: Misty Cook Peter Jones, University of EDITORIAL COMMITTEE: Graeme Clarke, Edinburgh Ann Curthoys, lain McCalman, Tessa E. Ann Kaplan, State University of Morris-Suzuki, Nicholas Thomas. New York at Stony Brook Joan Kerr, Australian National EDITORIAL ADVISORS: University Tony Bennett, Griffith University Dominick LaCapra, Cornell Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of University Chicago David MacDougall, Australian James K. Chandler, University of Chicago National University W. Robert Connor, National Humanities Fergus Millar, University of Oxford Center Anthony Milner, Australian John Docker, ARC Fellow, Australian National University National University Meaghan Morris, ARC Senior Saul Dubow, University of Sussex Fellow, University of Technology Valerie I.J.Flint, University of Hull Sydney Margaret R. Higonnet, University of Martha Nussbaum, University of Connecticut Chicago Caroline Humphrey, University of Paul Patton, University of Sydney Cambridge James Walter, Griffith University Lynn Hunt, University of Pennsylvania lain Wright, Australian National Mary Jacobus, Cornell University University
COVER ILLUSTRATION 194.1 • Australian Museum exhibition, copyright: The Australian Museum NICHOLAS THOMAS 3
INDIGENOUS PRESENCES AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES IN AUSTRALASIAN MUSEUMS
This paper takes up the much debated issue of the entry of indigenous artifacts and art into western museums and galleries. I try to see this in a new way by suggesting that the . Vecontextualization' involved is not necessarily bad. Putting indigenous and western pieces together does not necessarily impose a universal aesthetic; it may rather draw attention to the incommensurable differences between things, and the history that lies behind such differences.
It's become something of an axiom in geographic label to remind us that discussions of the collection of indige- in the last quarter of the nineteenth nous people's artifacts that the century, when magazines such as The abstraction of things from ritual activi- Australasian Sketcher made the term ties or everyday uses for sale in the tribal current, both countries were highly art market, and for storage or display in conscious of the singular character of private collectors' cabinets and public their antipodean coloniality, as, in a museums, is an operation of decontextu- different way, we are today. National alization. And in a sense it surely is: the histories are re-presented with the space of the specimen is often not a best of intentions, which means that mere vacancy or absence, but a non- indigenous presences are to be acknowl- space of a singular and radical kind. The edged. It is the awkward character of unnatural isolation of the displayed that acknowledgement, the ways in object appears to be especially poignant which it has worked and not worked, now, given that mainstream audiences that I explore in this essay, through have become increasingly aware of the discussion of two recent exhibitions in singular values that indigenous objects national institutions. once had within the fabric of sociality and still retain from an indigenous Let me begin by going back to decontex- perspective: these are not simply tools or tualization. The grievous abstraction of art works, but—to use the Maori word — indigenous things from indigenous lives taonga or inalienable possessions. That is not an operation that 'western' institu- understanding is part of a broader re- tions have performed exclusively upon imagining of the histories of the artifacts of non-western or tribal Australasian white settler societies. I peoples. Rather, it mirrors what is under- have picked that awkward and dated stood as the key attribute of the modern 4 NICHOLAS THOMAS
art museum: that is, the displacement of clothes and footless shoes, together with painting and sculpture from religious and many other objects isolated from their aristocratic situations into a space in functions, in department stores and other which things seem defined by an absolute shops. Although there are some analogies function-lessness, by a similar evacuation between the presentation of these of private significance, exchange value, commodities and the exhibition of use, and context. Certainly, modernists museum specimens, the objects don't and contemporary artists may produce seem strangely isolated, because we know particularly for the museum, but our that they're being displayed for sale. At galleries include many works ranging other levels, they are there to Make class from religious icons to far more recent and subcultural distinctions visible in pieces of so-called craft or decorative art material form; and they could be seen, that were made with churches or dining ideally, to empower consumers by tables rather than display cases in mind. enabling them to imagine themselves One of my starting points is that this variously in the terms suggested by fash- familiar and obvious point—that things ionable clothes, books, health foods, or in museums are decontextualized—is a exercise equipment. Arrays of things in bad assumption to begin with, if we are the market may thus be abstracted from concerned with the meanings and poli- their most obvious and specific uses, but tics of museums and exhibitions. My in fact they do all kinds of things; perhaps purpose is not to deny that indigenous most importantly, they teach us not only artifacts were removed from community to desire specific objects, but to invest our uses, and too often stolen; I am not ques- efforts of self-definition in that desire. tioning the desirability of repatriating By the same token, museum objects may material or otherwise restoring the rights be removed from their primary intended of the groups from whom things were uses—the mask floats headlessly, the jug taken. The point is rather that exhibited is sadly without wine—but they are things are not Aecontextualized', but nevertheless making themselves useful, contextualized in special and powerful busily and perhaps in too many ways. ways. Equally importantly, these The context is quite different to that of `contexts' are not simply social or institu- the market, but also similar to it, in the tional relations that are external to sense that objects have specific meanings, objects and exhibits: context is projected but also more general and implicit effects, and defined, to some degree, by content. in teaching habits of viewing Perhaps I can make this clearer by draw- and registers of aesthetic and historical ing attention to another sort of apparent recognition. Exhibitions may present `decontextualization' that's very familiar. particular bodies of art work, convey We often see racks of disembodied information about fields of natural
INDIGENOUS PRESENCES AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES 5
history, or specific arguments concerning To appreciate a connection between an history and nationhood; their pedagogy individual's aesthetic responses and the may be disguised as entertainment or efforts of a dispersed modern bureau- aesthetic stimulation, but they also cracy to socialize a population, is not convey attitudes toward art, heritage, however to suggest that the museum and technology, ethics of self-refinement, should now be understood as an instru- and perceptions of citizenship. With ment of surveillance or discipline in any respect to the last, I am not suggesting strong or repressive sense. Museums may that either art galleries or museums of make vigorous efforts to define their audi- natural history have generally been ences and present them with certain directly concerned with civics education understandings of history and culture, but in a narrow sense, but it is obvious that their aspirations are often more powerful many institutions present the natural than their accomplishments. Confusion environment, histories of military experi- and contention may be endemic features ence, and artistic traditions alike, from a in public representations of nationality, specifically national point of view, but there is perhaps a special reason why encouraging viewers to imagine them- the rhetoric of many exhibitions is not selves as Australians or New Zealanders, grasped, or not accepted, by their audi- at once intimately and collectively ences. Artifacts and art works are objects connected with a natural and cultural that can be ordered and captioned and heritage, that may be presented in presented in ways that suggest a story but certain terms with certain implications. their material characteristics, and the The museum proffers both particular objectified intelligence that they carry, memories, and a habit of memory that is may undermine or conflict with whatever nationalized; just as it suggests that art larger narrative is implied or expressed. works do not cohere merely as the Let me illustrate this briefly through products of individual artists, local reference to an exhibition that took place milieux, or aesthetic movements, but also, in Sydney in 1941, that at the same time and in more powerful and embracing gets me back to the theme I have drifted terms, in national canons. In suggesting away from, that of the relation between that galleries and museums convey habits indigenous presences and national narra- of collective and national consciousness, tives in the settler societies of Australia I am only restating a point that has and New Zealand. I mentioned earlier that become familiar: these institutions, I wanted to draw attention to the funda- like schools, health services, and mental similarity between the cultural censuses, are very much part of the logic of colonization in the two countries, business of government that interested which sometimes simply excluded indige- Foucault in his later work. nous people, or denigrated them, yet also 6 NICHOLAS THOMAS
frequently celebrated indigenous folklore and design; the enthusiasm of arts and and art, and argued that indigenous refer- crafts practitioners to provide work ence provided the means for Australians meant that the show expanded rapidly; or New Zealanders writers, composers, with the result that it ended up taking artists, and designers--to fashion their place at the David Jones auditorium, own distinctive national cultures that rather than in the more limited space would not simply be impoverished and available at the Museum (cover, fig. i). displaced versions of British tradition. As (It's tempting to talk further about the Margaret Preston put it, with characteris- hybrid gallery-department store space, tic urgency, The attention of Australian especially because there's been a long people must be drawn to the fact that tradition of displaying pieces of tribal art [Aboriginal art] is great art and the foun- in the middle of the fashion departments dation of a national culture for this in that particular store; nothing comple- country' 1 Affirmation and appropriation ments a Perri Cutten suit quite so well, it thus went hand in hand. seems, as a Sepik mask). One might have anticipated that the anthropology curator, Early in 1941, staff at the Australian Frederick McCarthy, who otherwise Museum began to prepare an exhibition wrote extensively on Aboriginal ari and of Aboriginal art, together with material archaeology, might have been using the that demonstrated its potential as a stimu- designers' interests as a vehicle for the lus for modern china, fabric, architecture, promotion of the indigenous forms in FIGURE their own right. Though the Aboriginal 941 Australian Museum exhibition, work itself only constituted one section copyright: The Australian Museum
INDIGENOUS PRESENCES AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES 7
of the exhibition, Museum staff went to white 'applications', rather than their considerable lengths to obtain photo- indigenous sources. One reviewer was graphs of rock paintings and engravings, circumspect, noting that while the barks and loans of 'weapons, utensils, sacred showed 'the aboriginal to be a sensitive objects and ornaments' from collections artist with a true feeling for design' the in Melbourne and Adelaide as well as paintings 'should be compared with the around Sydney. In the event, however, crude decoration they have inspired on the claims McCarthy made for Aboriginal the glassware on view nearby.'3 Another art in a press release, and in an article in was much more categorical: the Museum's magazine, were not only Best exhibits by far were the aboriginal modest but broadly consistent with a bark-paintings... The aboriginal stuff was primitivist settler-nationalism, that saw swell, but all the modern application wasn't. Aborigines providing the new nation (Glaring examples of the unswell were of with a singular prehistory and a set of the china and glass, and that gay little frieze. distinctive motifs that would have a All horrible beyond belief...).4 future, not in new expressions of indige- And this in a magazine, Ure Smith's nous culture, but in craft produced by National Journal, that had featured these white settlers for white settlers. 'applications' a good deal in its own pages. As he wrote, Paradoxically, then, in this case, the effort It is not contended that aboriginal art equals to assimilate indigenous culture to a the abstract and imaginative qualities, or the distinctively national school of design richness of design, of the art of many other had underlined the incommensurability primitive peoples, nor that it approaches the magnificence of the art of the classical civi- of indigenous and settler forms, and lizations, but it may be claimed that the hardly sustained the idea that a transition variety and simplicity of the wide range of from one to the other, from an aboriginal motifs and equally numerous techniques... prehistory to a settler future, represented give it a character sufficiently distinctive to any kind of cultural progress. In this case, identify it with the people, and for this reason content could be seen to have contra- it may be said to represent a definite phase dicted context, or at least to have of art in Australia. Adapted with intelligence unsettled both the particular agenda and taste, aboriginal art can make a unique of the exhibition and the larger idea contribution to modern Australian craft of national cultural development that work... In addition, the myths and legends, daily life and art motifs, form an inspiration it manifested. that may give rise to a national decorative It is, of course, this understanding of element in Australian architecture. 2 national history, from indigenous prehis- Given the hesitancy of this assessment of tory through pioneer accomplishment to Aboriginal art, it's striking that the critics the expansiveness of antipodean moder- of the day were ambivalent about the nity that is no longer unashamedly NICHOLAS THOMAS
embraced, either officially or in public followed from much consultation and was perceptions. in Aotearoa New Zealand certainly well-intentioned. It not only and Australia. I do not want to go into the emphasized the Maori presence (figure 3), similarities and contrasts between indige- but also incorporated a good deal of envi- nous experience and debates about race ronmental history and foregrounded relations in the two countries, and am women's experiences of events that had merely concerned with the point that a conventionally been seen almost exclu- history of indigenous activism, together sively from a male perspective. with shifts in the dominant settler popu- Unfortunately this was done in too heavy- lation's attitudes, have prompted handed a way and one journalist ---a governments to take the project of woman, as it happens—observed rather redressing dispossession and discrimina- archly that you could leave the exhibition tion more seriously; over the same period, with the sense that men had played no museums have become theatres for the part at all in the second world war.5 renegotiation of the national histories Reports in the media suggested that many that they showcase. (Ideas of nationality FIGURE 2 have also, of course, been challenged by Voices exhibition, courtesy of Museum non-British and non-white migrants, but of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa„ I do not discuss the significance of their 1996 cultural affirmations here).
The Voices exhibition at the Museum of New Zealand, which was opened about the beginning of 1993, has perhaps been the most unsuccessful of recent attempts to display an inclusive and democratic account of national history in a major public institution. -frbices, so named for its emphasis on sound and recorded older Pakeha visitors were put out by commentary, is of some importance what they saw as the belittling of the because it was presented as a kind of trial accomplishments of pioneers, who were for approaches that might be imple- charged with wholesale deforestation. mented in the museum's new \\lag was remarkable, though, was that harbourside building scheduled to open the show appeared to offend absolutely in 1998, which will quite appropriately be everybody in the sense that Maori were equally dissatisfied. organized around the understanding of the country as a bicultural nation that has The artist and art historian Brett Graham been officially adopted in fits and starts wrote that he'd looked forward eagerly to over the last decade. The exhibition the exhibition, but found the mock bush
INDIGENOUS PRESENCES AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES 9
lifeless and petrified, and other sections historical perspective up to the present', `strangely spiritless'." He was struck by the as one had expressed the aims, sawing up fact that the story of Polynesian canoe a lot of timber to create an awkward voyaging and colonization—which immobile replica of one of Cook's ships retains fascination for audiences remote seemed a curious way to go about it-- from the Pacific—was 'relegated to a tiny though it's perhaps inadvertently corner' when 'the most dominant and interesting, because this is the kind of thing that cargo cult followers in perhaps least successful feature... was a Melanesia are always supposed to have mock galley of a sailing ship, celebrating done. Maybe we have more affinities European arrival' (p. 14; figure 4). This was with our Pacific neighbours than we a point that had occurred to me, when I generally imagine. first walked through the exhibit: if cura- tors had really wanted to challenge the I suggested earlier that artifacts some- master narrative that has provided our times overwhelmed the narratives that curators attempted to frame them with, FIGURE 3 and perhaps this is what occurred here: it Voices exhibition, courtesy of Museum of was too easy to pass over the texts that New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa,
I 0 NICHOLAS THOMAS
aimed to engender ambivalence about surrounding them with images and early discovery and settlement, and words, distracts the viewer from the simply be overwhelmed by the monu- sheer power of the things themselves, mental size of the ship, which seemed to and in that sense may paradoxically effect diminish all the indigenous pieces that a more invidious decontextualization came before it. It could also be suggested than the artifact's isolation in the space that the installation failed on technical of the specimen.
grounds, in the sense that the plurality of I do not want to speculate further about, voices produced a cacophony. Brett or speak for, Maori responses, and instead Graham had written that the best speak- comment upon what seems to me to have ers on the marae choose their words... been the most significant underlying flaw wisely, economically. Here the voices of Voices. This is that the values rather seemed to scream in competition until I than the form of the national narrative felt uncomfortable, claustrophobic' (p. i4). were altered; adjustments that seemed to The value of inclusive plurality, in other be required by the idea of bicultural words, could be seen to contradict the nationhood were made, but a certain kind values of the indigenous tradition that the of history remained intact. That history curators sought to include. began in a particular natural setting; it Though the curatorial group was divided had an indigenous opening chapter, that evenly between Maori and Pakeha, as was followed by white discovery, settle- between men and women, it is possible ment, and twentieth-century experience, also that Maori preferences concerning which was marked particularly by the the presentation of taonga were over- great wars. This is the basic story that looked. Many conversations have virtually all of us, I imagine, had at school. suggested to me that a relatively conven- Altering the customary assessments of tional mode of museum presentation, these moments—such that Cook et. al. are which remains the approach in other disparaged rather than celebrated—does sections of the Museum of New Zealand, not so much empower Maori, as deprive • and in other institutions in the country, in anybody and everybody of the opportu- which artifacts are isolated on walls or nity to engage with the complexities of eighteenth-century exploration, of the pedestals and spot-lit, in fact seems promises and the risks of enlightenment wholly appropriate to many Maori, on the beaches, of the uncertainty around because the presence and power of their 'discoveries' that were regarded as atua and tupuna or ancestors, together morally problematic at the time. with the many of sacred heirlooms, are emphasized. Placing these things 'in More importantly, it fails to identify or context' by associating them with every- articulate an autonomous indigenous day traditional subsistence activities, by history in which nature, prehistory and
INDIGENOUS PRESENCES AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES II
Cook would not, self-evidently, have museums in Aotearoa New Zealand are defined the chapters. By gesturing toward impressed not only by the aesthetic the incorporation of a Maori perspective dynamism of the Maori pieces they within a national history, the exhibition encounter, but also by the Maori mana forestalled the possibility that incompati- that dynamism seems to exemplify. In ble histories might be presented in this case, surely, the content of museums tension. The laudable idea that everybody has helped shape their context. should be included seemed to presup- If this is so, the appropriate course of pose, in this case, the terms on which action must be to validate these indige- people and stories might be included. The nous perceptions of indigenous objects. point is not that people have different This must mean curatorial control and versions of histories, like bosses' and the continuing liaison with indigenous workers' accounts of a strike: some might communities that I imagine most in the not have histories that belong to this museum world would now support in birth-and-development of a nation principle. The Voices exhibition looks model. A Maori counterpoint to a Pakeha more and more like an extension of the history might take the form of an exhibit social or popular history strategy from with no chronological sequence at all, that the less privileged groups within white instead presented ancestors who embod- ied both past and future in principle, as society into the domain of settler-indige- they both commemorated and antici- nous relations; the strategy comes to pated a plethora of more particular pieces in that context because it is not a accomplishments and transactions. I am question of differing perspectives or not putting this forward as a utopian retelling a history from below, as I already projection of how a genuinely postcolo- noted, but a more fundamental matter of nial exhibit might look, at some point in acknowledging profound cultural the future, but rather suggesting that this differences that extend to constructions is one way in which Maori and others can of history itself. But if I have argued that already respond to exhibits that may these differences can be better addressed otherwise appear to be conventionally by exhibitions that foreground the intelli- ethnological. Almost inadvertently, that gence of indigenous artifacts old museology empowered the objects themselves and the kinds of historical that it encased, and created scope for imagining those artifacts suggest—that indigenous people to empower them- can surely only be a partial solution. It selves by reclaiming the objects—mainly would be partial because indigenous in a symbolic and political sense rather cultures are not, of course, wholly than through physical reappropriation- autonomous of the national narratives which led to the objects being that white settlers lurch between cele- re-empowered in turn. Most visitors to brating and lamenting. How can
I2 NICHOLAS THOMAS
museums and exhibitions mark this ularly the fact that they are not art works interplay, and the conflict of colonization, in any European sense. He goes on to without according indigenous people a stress that 'to say that the products of marginal role within an inevitably larger 19th-century Aboriginal communities national history, without, in effect, assimi- were not Art is not to devalue their design lating them? qualities, but rather to appreciate how This brings me to the National Gallery of different those cultures were from Australia. The rehang of the Australian industrial capitalism.' galleries there, unveiled in June 1994, was This strikes me as more valid as a critique generally commended and not much of an earlier exhibition of global master- debated. One critique, however, was pieces that occupied the large gallery contained within an otherwise mainly immediately off the NGA's entrance, which positive review by Humphrey McQueen, included the famous Lake Sentani double whose objections focussed upon the figure and the Gallery's paintings by inclusion of mid-nineteenth century Rubens and Tiepolo. The approach here Aboriginal artifacts in the rooms was similar to that of the Sainsbury containing paintings of the same period Centre at the University of East Anglia, (figure 4). McQueen wrote, where Jacob Epstein and Francis Bacon The meanings of those Aboriginal pieces rub shoulders with dazzling inlaid shields are... being expropriated as surely as was the from the Solomon Islands, and many country of the peoples who made them. The other African, Oceanic, and native juxtaposition of cane baskets with marble American pieces. All of these works are busts has the opposite effect of the one intended. Instead of highlighting Aboriginal put forward as works of fine art, and the creativity, the display is an inversion of old evolutionist ranking of cultures is Batman's offer of beads and blankets in neutralized on a relativist level plain. Most exchange for the Port Phillip district. In the curatorial strategies of course entail both NGA's context, the artefacts are not even gain and loss, and it is perhaps important tokens, but trinkets.? to see this affirmation of the products of Much as I respect Humphrey McQueen as non-European cultures as retaining some a cultural historian, I don't find this value, especially when 'the western canon' assessment of these galleries persuasive. understood in exclusive terms, retains His argument is really that a naive effort eloquent proponents. But the drawbacks to affirm Aboriginal creativity led cura- of this relativism are perhaps more tors to place baskets with paintings as conspicuous. It insists on a general equiv- though they exhibited artistic qualities of alence of value while obscuring the the same order; yet this strategy, he particular ground from which various suggests. can only obscure the meanings aesthetic expressions emerge. It removes of the Aboriginal pieces, and most partic- an invidious principle of linear progress
INDIGENOUS PRESENCES AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES 13
FIGURE The Australian Galleries, courtesy National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 1997 NICHOLAS THOMAS
but treats cultures as so many discrete different from the canvases decorated by systems, rather than as milieux that have von Guerard, Chevalier, and others, on the become mutually entangled through surrounding walls. Surely it would be exchange and colonization. Hence the difficult to find human products more overall form of this exhibit conveys no categorically different than these fighting sense of any speciffic relation between shields and baskets from eastern the people of Lake Sentani and those of Australia, and the antipodean expressions Europe, even though this particular piece of the tradition of romantic landscape is said to have been submerged in a lake painting. Yet in another sense these to avoid destruction at the hands of works are close. We could even say that missionaries, and though it, like a they are locked together, in a sense in number of other Oceanic pieces, has been which the Tiepolo and the west Papuan widely reproduced as much because it carving are not. was once in the collection of a well- And this is because of a fact that most known modernist artist as for its own visitors to those Australian galleries will interest. If facts of this kind, together with be conscious of. Von Guerard and others the power of the carving itself, make up were documenting a process of coloniza- an uneasy amalgam of meaning, they tion, and the fact that the have no significance in the context of its accomplishments of pioneers were juxtaposition with Tiepolo or Rubens. closely linked with the marginalization of Even if we go into the histories of each of Aboriginal people is sometimes made these pieces, the gaps are extreme, and explicit in their works, that, in a general we are left simply with a set of powerful sense, image the same ground as the arti- yet disconnected works of art. facts emerge from. Aboriginal and I find the effect of the Australian galleries colonial-settler societies were certainly to be very different. This is not because becoming entangled, but it would not be the works are more aesthetically proxi- true to say that Europeans and Aborigines mate. In some ways they are less so: shared a history in any meaningful sense. whereas the double Lake Sentani figure I am not really concerned with the cura- can immediately be categorized as a piece tors' intentions, but I take this exhibition of sculpture broadly comparable to west- not to fail, in 'highlighting Aboriginal ern figurations of the human body, the creativity', but to succeed. in underlining pieces in the case in the centre of the an incommensurable difference between room seem absolutely non-representa- the aesthetic practices of colonizers and tional; their intricate and powerful colonized, which marks -wider differences patterns can be regarded as the decorated between ways of life, relations to place, surfaces of utilitarian objects, that strike and perceptions of history in this period. us immediately as being fundamentally One body of work depicts the land: the INDIGENOUS PRESENCES AND NATIONAL NARRATIVES I 5
other reflects subsistence practice inti- The fact that this must be speculation, and mately connected with country, and tribal that the viewer does not know whether conflict that may have been occasioned by the geometric patterns are actually icono- dispute over it, or may have had quite graphic and meaningful as well as merely different causes: how can we know? I am optically compelling, marks the decontex- suggesting, then, certainly, that the juxta- tualization that McQueen referred to, yet I position of these pieces allows viewers to would see this abstraction from place and engage with the distinctive creativities of practice as being painfully evident (and in the various producers, but more immedi- some sense unavoidable for all viewers, ately and powerfully compels them to rather than apparent only to a sophisti- reflect upon the paradox of their cated minority peculiarly mindful of the difference and their connection. politics of curatorial presentation). It's worth stressing that this exhibition is one The implication surely goes beyond any in which the choice of an art historian or notion that there might be 'two sides' to even a cultural historian rather than the story of the settlement of Australia—a simply a connoisseur is conspicuous: narrative of resistance that would balance Duterrau's effort to image a grand recon- the narrative of accomplishment. The ciliation between the Tasmanian latter is charted out by the galleries' Aborigines and the colonial state in the progression from Cook voyage artists person of George Augustus Robinson is through Glover and Duterrau through to nothing to write home about, as a paint- the Heidelberg school and beyond, but ing, but is rightly included as an attempt there is no sense that Aboriginal experi- to grapple with the issue of national ence either simply precedes, or parallels narrative and indigenous presence that this, in some negative version of the we all know is with us still (figure 5). pastoral myth. What we have, rather, are In this context, it is the very decontextual- simply a number of implements. Several ization of the so-called artifacts that are intricately patterned, and one, one of speaks loudest. the so-called fighting shields, bears a dynamic zigzag. Because of my interest in The implication is not only that indige- the optical vigour and complexity of many nous ways of life in southeastern Australia Pacific art forms, I am inclined to assume were radically disrupted. It is that no that this visual energy complemented, smooth assimilation of this history within and was taken to exemplify, the energy of national narrative is possible. We are left the bearer; the fighter's physical prowess, with a sense that there are other histories in other words, was augmented by and other practices, perhaps in a condi- aesthetic brilliance manifest in these tion of enduring estrangement, rather kinds of artifacts, and surely in body paint. than on the point of some happy cultural 16 NICHOLAS THOMAS
FIGURE 5 'REFERENCES Benjamin Duterrau, Mr Robinson's first Margaret Preston, 'Aboriginal art', Art interview with Timmy, oil on canvas; inA.ustralia, i June 1941, p. 46. Collection, National Gallery opustralia, Canberra. 2 F. D. McCarthy 'Australian Aboriginal art and its application',Austratian and political synthesis. In some larger Museum Magazine, i September 1941, sense, the gallery may aim to image such PP 355-56. a synthesis, or at least may aspire to value 3 'Aboriginal art', Sydney Morning white and indigenous Australian art Herald, 12 August 1941. equally, and present the stories of both. 4 That is the sort of thing we expect such 'Abo. arf,Australia: National journal, institutions to do; but in this case the September 1941, p. 76. array of content seems in the end to resist 5 Rosemary McLeod, The mighty any unitary narrative, and if this is so, it is MONZ: artless at heart?' North and only true and appropriate to the disor- South, October 1 994, pp. 70-80. derly and contradictory character of 6 Brett Graham, 'An infinity of voices', history and art history in a cross-cultural, Midwest 3,1993, p. 13. settler-colonial situation. Humphrey McQueen, 'Capital outlook NICHOLAS THOMAS for home-grown art', The -Weekend Nicholas Thomas is Professor and Director Australian, 18 June 1994, p. 25. of the Centre for cross-cultural Research. DIPE,SH CHAKRABARTY 17
MINORITY HISTORIES, SUBALTERN PASTS
`...perhaps Abraham simply didn't do what the story says, perhaps in the context of his times what he did was something quite different. Then let's forget him, for why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?' Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (i843).
Recent debates on multiculturalism in memory. Official or officially-blessed the Western democracies have often accounts of the nation's past have been fuelled discussions of minority histories. challenged in many countries by the As the writing of history has increasingly champions of minority-histories. Post- become entangled with the so-called modern critiques of 'grand narratives' `politics and production of identity' after have been used as ammunition in the the Second World War, the question has process to argue that the nation cannot arisen in all democracies of including in have just one standardized narrative, that the history of the nation the histories of the nation is always a contingent result groups previously left out from it. In the of many contesting narratives. Minority ig6os, this list usually contained names histories, one may say, express the strug- of subaltern social groups and classes— gle for inclusion and representation that viz., formers slaves, working-classes, are characteristic of liberal and represen- convicts, women, etc. This came to be tative democracies. known in the seventies as 'history from below' Under pressure from the debates Conceived in this way, 'minority histo- on multiculturalism, this list was ries' are oppositional chiefly in the early expanded in the seventies and eighties to part of their careers. They are opposi- include the so-called ethnic groups, the tional in so far as they are excluded from indigenous peoples, children, the old and mainstream historical narratives; as soon gays and lesbians. The expression as they are 'in', the oppositional stance `minority histories' would thus now refer becomes redundant (or its continuation to all those pasts on whose behalf democ- would be seen as a sign of ingratitude if ratically-minded historians have fought not something in bad taste). Begun in an the exclusions and omissions of main- oppositional mode, 'minority histories' stream narratives of the nation. The last end up being additional instances of ten years, as a result, have seen the `good history' They expand our vista and flourishing of almost a cult of pluralism make the subject-matter of history more in matters pertaining to history or representative of society as a whole. One
8 DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
can ask legitimate Foucauldian questions construct a narrative of a group or about who has the authority to define class that has not left its own sources? what 'good' history is or what relation- It is questions of this kind that often ships between power and knowledge are stimulate innovation in historians' invested in such definitions, but let us practices, and these questions, taken put them aside for the moment. together, constitute what I call 'the question of crafting.' The transformation of oppositional, minority histories into 'good' histories I give two instances to show, therefore, illustrates how the mechanism of incor- that so long as these two questions—can poration works in the discipline of the story be told? And does it allow for a history. History is a subject primarily rationally-defensible position in public concerned with the crafting of narra- life from which to tell the story?—can be tives. Any account of the past can be answered in the positive, the discipline absorbed into, and thus made to enrich, has no serious problems incorporating the mainstream of historical discourse if into itself, or even making central to two questions could be answered in the itself, what once occupied a marginal positive: Can the story be told/crafted? or minority position. 'Minority histories', And does it allow for a rationally-defensi- as such, do not have to be subversive in ble point of view or position from which the long run. to tell the story? The point about the My first case is that of British social- authorial position being rationally defen- democratic.history or so-called 'history sible is important. It can be an ideology, a from below' Consider for a moment moral position, a political philosophy what the results have been of incorporat- but, as we shall see, the choices here are ing into the discourse of history the pasts not unlimited. A mad man's narrative is of majority-minor groups such as the not history. Nor can a preference that is working classes and women. History has arbitrary or just personal—something not been the same ever since a based on taste, say—give us rationally- Thompson or a Hobsbawm took up his defensible principles for narration (at pen to make the working classes look like best it will count as fiction and not major actors in society, or since the time history). I will return to the issue of ratio- feminist historians made us realize the nality The other question of crafting, importance of gender-relations and of however, is what has enriched the disci- the contributions of women to critical pline for a long time by challenging social processes. So to the question as to historians to be imaginative and creative whether or not such incorporation both in their research and narrative changes the nature of historical strategies. How do you write the histories discourse itself, the answer is simple: of of suppressed groups? How do you course, it does. But the answer to the
MINORITY HISTORIES, SUBALTERN PASTS 19
question, Did such incorporation call the meta-narrative of the nation is easily discipline into any kind of crisis? would accepted in the book which promotes the have to be, No. To be able to tell the story message popular now with most histori- of group hitherto overlooked, to be able ans with a liberal conscience: Let us have to master the problems of crafting such many narratives and hear groups whose narratives—particularly under circum- histories have not been previously heard, stances where the usual archives do not let there not be only the story of Euro- exist—is how the discipline of history centric America as the grand narrative of renews and maintains itself. For this the nation. Where the book registers a inclusion appeals to the sense of democ- much stronger degree of discomfiture, racy that impels the discipline ever however, is where it encounters argu- outward from its core. Both conditions of ments that in effect use the idea of history-writing were met in the tradition multiplicity of narratives to question any of 'history from below': the stories could idea of truth or facts. For here the idea of be told provided one were creative and a rationally-defensible position in public enterprising in one's research, and they life from which to craft even a multi- could be told from a position (liberalism vocal narrative, is brought into question. or Marxism) rationally-defensible in If 'minority histories' go to the extent of public life. questioning the very idea of fact or The point about historical narratives evidence, then, the authors ask, how requiring a certain minimum investment would you find ways of adjudicating in rationality has recently been made in between competing claims in public life? the discussion of postmodernism in the Would not the absence of a certain mini- book Telling the Truth About History.' mum agreement about what constitutes The question of the relationship between fact and evidence seriouslyiragment the minority histories and post-war democ- body politic in the United States of racies is at the heart of this book America and would not that seriously authored jointly by three leading femi- impair the capacity of the nation to func- nist historians of the U.S. To the extent tion as a whole? Hence the authors that the authors read postmodernism as recommend that a pragmatic idea of allowing for multiple narratives—the `workable truths'—based on a shared, possibility of many narratives and multi- rational understanding of historical facts ple ways of crafting these and evidence—must be maintained in narratives—they welcome the influence order for institutions and groups to be of postmodernism and thus align them- able to adjudicate between conflicting selves with the democratic cause of stories/interpretations and for the nation minority histories. The idea of multiple to function effectively even while narratives challenging any one dominant eschewing any claims to a superior, over-
2 0 DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
arching grand narrative. 2 What Appleby discomfort among many professional and her colleagues see as postmodern historians. Minority and majority are, resistance to the idea of facticity does not after all, no natural entities; they are thus meet the second condition for constructions, as I said at the outset, of incorporation into the discipline of identities made in very particular histori- history of other narratives about the past: cal conditions and circumstances. The Can the story be told on the basis of a popular meaning of the words 'majority' rationally-defensible principle in public and 'minority' are statistical. But the life? The book makes clear that citizenly semantic fields of the words contain practices require a certain minimum another idea: of being a 'minor' or a agreement on such principles as other- `major' figure in a given context. For wise the clamour of contesting example, the Europeans, numerically narrative—based on completely arbitrary speaking, are a minority in the total pool ideas of historical evidence—would of humanity today and have been so for a reduce public life in American democ- while, yet their colonialism in the nine- racy to a chaos. teenth century was based on certain I am not criticizing Telling the Truth ideas about being 'major' and `minor': the About History nor is it my purpose to idea, for example, that it was their histo- defend what the book identifies as post- ries which contained the majority modern positions. The book is important instances of norms that every other in that it shows the continuing relevance human society should aspire to, or that of the two questions about crafting and compared to them others were the still connections to public life in any situation the 'minors' for whom they, the 'adults' of where the discipline of history hears calls the world, had to take charge. So numeri- to renew itself. I am simply saying that so cal advantage by itself is no guarantor of long as the two conditions can be met a major/majority status. Sometimes, you `minority histories' can change the can be a larger group than the dominant discourse of the discipline without one, but your history could still qualify as having to practice any principle of `minor/minority history.' The problem of permanent revolution. Successful `minority histories' thus leads us, one instances of 'minority histories' are like could say, to the question of what may be yesterday's revolutionaries become called the 'minority' of some particular today's gentlemen. Their success helps pasts, i.e. constructions and experiences routinize innovation. of the past that stay 'minor' in the sense The debate about minority histories, that their very incorporation into histori- however, allows for another understand- cal narratives converts them into pasts 'of ing of the expression 'minority', one that lesser importance' vis-a-vis dominant produces a more enduring sense of understandings of what constitutes fact
MINORITY HISTORIES, SUBALTERN PASTS 2 I
and evidence (and hence the underlying 'minority' identities alone. Elite and principle of rationality itself) in the prac- dominant groups can also have subaltern tices of professional history. Such 'minor' pasts. Being a historian, however, I argue pasts, one might say, are those experi- from a particular instance of it. My exam- ences of the past which have to be always ple comes from Subaltern Studies, the made inferior as they are translated back group with which I am associated, and into the historian's language, that is to from an essay by the founder of the say, as they are translated back into the group, Ranajit Guha. Since Guha and the phenomenal world the historian—as a group have been my teachers in many historian, that is, in his or her profes- ways, I offer my remarks not in a hostile sional capacity—inhabits. These are pasts spirit of criticism but in a spirit of self- that, to use Kant's expression from his understanding, for my aim is to essay 'What is Enlightenment?', are understand what 'historicizing' the past treated as instances of 'immaturity' on does and does not do. With that caveat, let the part of the historical agent, pasts me proceed to the instance. which do not prepare us for either Subaltern Studies is a series of publica- democracy or citizenly practices because tions in Indian history that was begun they are not based on the deployment of under the general editorship of Ranajit reason in public life.3 Guha in the early 19805. Its explicit aim Let me call these histories subordinated was to write the subaltern classes into the or 'subaltern' pasts. They are not margin- history of nationalism and the nation and alized because anyone consciously to combat all elitist biases in the writing intends to marginalise them but because of history. To make the subaltern the they represent moments or points at sovereign subject of history, to stage which the very archive that the historian them as the agents in the process of of a (marginalized) group mines in order history, to listen to their voices, to take to bring the history of that group into a their experiences and thought (and not relationship with a larger narrative (of just their material circumstances) seri- class, of the nation, etc.), develops a ously—these were goals we had degree of intractability with respect to deliberately and publicly set ourselves. the historian's project. In other words, These ambitions and the desire to enact these are pasts that resist historicization them are political, they are connected to just as there may be moments in ethno- modern understandings of democratic graphic research that resist the doing public life; they do not necessarily come of ethnography. from the lives of the subaltern classes 'Subaltern pasts', in my sense of the term, themselves. That is why the early intellec- do not belong exclusively to socially- tual moves made in Subaltern Studies had subordinate or subaltern groups, nor to much in common with the British social-
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democratic tradition of writing `history insurgency is regarded as external to the from below' Looking back, however, I peasant's consciousness and Cause is made see the problem of `subaltern pasts' to stand in as a phantom surrogate for dogging the enterprise of Subaltern Reason, the logic of that consciousness.4 Studies from the very outset and, indeed The critical phrase is the 'logic of that it is arguable that what differentiates the consciousness' which marks the distance Subaltern Studies project from the older Guha has to take as a historian from the tradition of 'history from below' is the object of his research which is this self-critical awareness of this problem in consciousness itself. For in pursuing the the writings of the historians associated history of the Santal rebellion of 1855— with this group. the Santals are a 'tribal' group inhabiting large areas of what is today Bengal and Let me explain this with the help of Bihar—Guha, unsurprisingly, comes Ranajit Guha's justly celebrated and bril- across statements by peasant-leaders liant essay, `The Prose of Counter- which explain the rebellion in 'supernat- Insurgency' published in an early ural' terms, as an act carried out at the volume of Subaltern Studies and now behest of the Santal god `Thakur.' Guha considered a classic of the genre. A himself draws our attention to the certain paradox that results precisely evidence and underscores how impor- from the historian's attempt to bring the tant this understanding was to the rebels histories of the subaltern classes into the themselves. Quoting statements made by mainstream of the discourse of history in the leaders of the rebellion, Sidhu and India, it seems to me, haunts the very Kanu, to military interrogators wherein exercise Guha undertakes in this essay. they explained their own actions as flowing The paradox consists in this. A principal from instructions they had received from aim of Guha's essay is to use the Santal their god (Thakur) who had also assured rebellion of 1855 in order to make the them that British bullets would not harm insurgent peasant's consciousness the the devotee-rebels, Guha takes care to mainstay of a narrative about rebellion. avoid any instrumental or elitist reading As Guha put it in words that capture the of these statements. He writes: spirit of Subaltern Studies: These were not public pronouncements Yet this consciousness [the consciousness of meant to impress their followers.... these the rebellious peasant] seems to have were words of captives facing execution. received little notice in the literature on the Addressed to hostile interrogators in mili- subject. Historiography has been content to tary encampments they could have little use deal with the peasant rebel merely as an as propaganda. Uttered by men of a tribe empirical person or a member of a class, which, according to all accounts had not yet but not as an entity whose will and reason learnt to lie, these represented the truth and constituted the praxis called rebellion.... nothing but the truth for their speakers.5
MINORITY HISTORIES, SUBALTERN PASTS 23
A tension inherent in the project of which inspired it ... [was] explicitly religious Subaltern Studies becomes palpable here in character. It was not that power was a in Guha's analysis. His phrase 'logic of content wrapped up in a form external to it consciousness' or his idea of a truth called religion...Hence the attribution of which is only 'truth for their speakers' the rising to a divine command rather than to any particular grievance; the enactment are all acts of taking critical distance of rituals both before (eg. propitiatory cere- from that which he is trying to under- monies to ward off the apocalypse of the stand. Taken literally, the rebel peasants' Primeval Serpents....) and during the upris- statement show the subaltern himself as ing (worshipping the goddess Durga, declining agency or subjecthood in bathing in the Ganges, etc.); the generation action. 'I rebelled', he says, 'because and circulation of myth is its characteristic Thakur made an appearance and told me vehicle—rumour. 6 to rebel.' In their own words, as reported But in spite of his desire to listen to the by the colonial scribe: `Kanoo and Sedoo rebel voice seriously, Guha cannot take it Manjee are not fighting. The Thacoor seriously enough, for there is no princi- himself will fight.' In his own telling, ple in an 'event' involving the divine or then, the subaltern is not necessarily the the supernatural that can give us a narra- subject of his history but in the history of tive-strategy that is rationally-defensible Subaltern Studies or in any democrati- in the modern understanding of what cally-minded history, s/he is. What does it constitutes public life. The Santal's own then mean when we both take the subal- understanding does not directly serve the tern's views seriously—the subaltern cause of democracy or citizenship or ascribes the agency for their rebellion to socialism. It needs to be reinterpreted. some god—and want to confer on the Clearly, in the narrative of the rebels, the subaltern agency or subjecthood in their Event (the rebellion) was not secular; in own history, a status the subaltern's state- our language, it included the supernat- ment denies? ural. The supernatural was part of what Guha's strategy for negotiating this constituted public life for the non- dilemma unfolds in the following modern Santals of the nineteenth manner. His first move, against liberal century. This, however, simply cannot be or standard Marxist historiography, the past in the language of professional is to resist analyses that see religion history in which the idea of historical simply as the non-rational expression evidence, like evidence allowed in the of a secular-rational non-religious entity, court of law, cannot admit of the super- relationship (class, power, economy, etc.) natural except as part of the non-rational or consciousness: (i.e. somebody's belief-system). Religiosity was, by all accounts, central to Fundamentally, the Santal's statement the hool (rebellion). The notion of power that God was the main instigator of the 2 4 DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
rebellion has to be anthropologized (i.e. cases in discoveries of subaltern pasts, converted into somebody's belief) before constructions of historicity that help us it finds a place in the historian's narrative. see the limits to the mode of viewing Guha's position with respect to the embodied in the practices of the disci- Santal's own understanding of the event pline of history. Why? Because, it has becomes a combination of the anthropol- been argued by many (from Greg Dening ogist's politeness—'I respect your beliefs to David Cohen in recent times), that the but they are not mine'—and a Marxist (or discipline of history is only one particu- modern) sense of frustration with the lar way of remembering the past. It is one intrusion of the supernatural into public amongst many.9 The resistance that the life. An sum', he 'writes, 'it is not possible 'historical evidence' offers in Guha's essay to speak of insurgency in this case except to the historian's reading of the past—a as a religious consciousness', and yet Santal god, Thakur, stands between the hastens to add: democratic-Marxist historian and the -except that is, as a massive demonstration Santals in the matter of deciding who is of self-estrangement (to borrow Marx's the subject of history—is what produces term for the very essence of religiosity) 'minor' or 'subaltern' pasts in the very which made the rebel look upon their process of the weaving of modern histor- project as predicated on a will other than ical narratives. Subaltern pasts are like their own. 7 stubborn knots that break up the other- Here is a case of what I have called 'subal- wise evenly woven surface of the fabric. tern pasts', pasts that cannot enter history Between the insistence of the Subaltern ever as belonging to the historian's own Studies historian that the Santal is the position. One can these days devise agent or the subject of his own action and strategies of multivocal histories in the Santal's insistence that it was to their which we hear Sidhu and Kanu more god Thakur that such sovereignty clearly than we or Guha did in the early belonged, remains a hiatus separating phase of Subaltern Studies. One may even two radically different experiences of refrain from assimilating these different historicity, a hiatus that cannot be voices to any one voice and deliberately bridged by an exercise that simply stud- leave loose ends in one's narrative (as ies the Santal's statement as evidence for does Shahid Amin in his Events, Memory, anthropology. When we do 'minority Metaphor).8 But the point is the historian, histories' within the democratic project as historian, and unlike the Santal, of including all groups and peoples cannot invoke the supernatural in within mainstream history we both hear explaining/describing an event. and then anthropologize the Santal. We In other words, the act of championing treat their beliefs as just that, 'their 'minority histories' has resulted in many beliefs.' We cannot write history from
MINORITY HISTORIES, SUBALTERN PASTS 25
within those beliefs. We thus produce about multi-culturalism puts on official `good', not subversive, histories. or nationalist histories in the Western However, historians of Pacific islands, of democracies—has resulted in method- African peoples, of indigenous peoples ological and epistemological questioning throughout the world have reminded us of what the very business of writing that the so-called societies 'without histo- history is all about. Only the future will ries'—the object of contempt for tell how these questions will resolve European philosophers of history in the themselves but one thing is clear: that the nineteenth century—cannot be thought question of including 'minorities' in the of as societies without memories. They history of the nation has turned out to be remember their pasts differently, a much more complex problem than a differently, that is, to the way we recall simple operation of applying some the past in the history departments. Why already-settled methods to a new set of must one privilege the ways in which the archives and adding the results to the discipline of history authorizes its knowl- existing collective wisdom of historiogra- edge? This is not a rhetorical question. It phy. The additive, 'building-block' view of is a question being asked seriously by knowledge has broken down. What has many historians today.1° become an open question is: Can the This fact has an important implication: it discipline of history speak for any kind of suggests that the kind of disciplinary experience of the past? Are there experi- consensus around the historian's meth- ences of the pasts that cannot be captured ods that was once—say, in the by the methods of the discipline or which sixties—represented (in Anglo-American at least show the limits of discipline? universities at least) by 'theory' or 'meth- Fears that such questioning will lead to a ods' courses which dished out breakout of irrationalism, that some kind Collingwood or Carr or Bloch as staple of postmodern madness will spread like a for historians working on any area of the dark death-inducing disease through world, has now broken down. This does Historyland, seem extreme, for the disci- not necessarily mean methodological anarchy (though some feel insecure pline is still securely tied to the positivist enough to fear this) or that Collingwood impulses of modern bureaucracies, judi- et al have become irrelevant but it does ciary and to the instruments of govern- mean that E H Carr's question 'What is mentality. Minority histories, if they are History?' needs to be asked again for our going to be about inserting hitherto own times. The pressure of plurality neglected identities into the game of inherent in the languages and moves of social justice, must also be good, and not minority histories—which, as I have subversive, histories, for history here speaks argued, is really the pressure that debates to forms of representative democracy
2 6 DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
and social justice that liberalism or But the Santal with his statement 'I did as Marxism have already made familiar. my god told me to do' also faces us a way Attending to the limits of history is about of being in this world, and we could ask another realization: that the task of ourselves: Is that way of being a possibil- producing `minority' histories has, under ity for our lives and for what we define the pressure precisely of a deepening our present? Does the Santal help us to demand for democracy, become a double understand a principle by which we also task. I may put it thus: `good' minority live in certain instances? This question history is about expanding the scope of does not historicize or anthropologize social justice and representative democ- the Santal, for the illustrative power of racy, but the talk about the `limits of the Santal as an example of a present history', on the other hand, is about possibility does not depend on the partic- fighting for forms of democracy that we ular period or society from which the cannot not yet either completely under- example is drawn. In this mode of under- stand or envisage. This is so because in standing the Santal stands as our the mode of being attentive to the contemporary and the subject-object `minor-ity' of subaltern pasts, we stay relationship that normally defines the with heterogeneity without seeking to historian's relationship to his/her reduce it to any overarching principle archives is dissolved in this gesture. This that speaks for an already-given whole. gesture is akin to the one Kierkegaard There is no third voice which can assimi- developed in critiquing explanations that late into itself the two different voices of looked on the Biblical story of Abraham's Guha and the Santal leader, we have to sacrifice of his son Isaac either through stay with both, with the gap between psychology or as a metaphor or allegory them that signals an irreducible plurality but never as a possibility for action open in our own experiences of historicity. to him/her who had faith. Pihy bother This is the way I understand the question to remember a past,' asked Kierkegaard, of heterogeneity here. We can—and we 'that cannot be made into a present?'" do usually in writing history—treat the To stay with the heterogeneity of the Santal of the nineteenth century to doses moment when Guha the historian meets of historicism and anthropology. We can, with the Santal, the peasant, is then to in other words, treat him as a signifier of stay with the difference between these other times and societies. This gesture two gestures: that of historicizing the maintains a subject-object relationship Santal in the interest of a history of social between the historian and his evidence. justice and democracy, the other of refus- In this gesture, the past remains ing to historicize and of seeing the Santal genuinely dead; the historian brings it instead as throwing light on a possibility `alive' by his or her telling of the story. for the present. When seen as the latter,
MINORITY HISTORIES, SUBALTERN PASTS 27
the Santal puts us in touch with the like a possible statement from a Martian. heterogeneities, the plural ways of being, Why? Because the principle is not that make up our own present. The completely strange to us. We have a archives thus help bring to view the pre-theoretical, everyday understanding disjointed nature of our own times. That of it precisely because the supernatural is the function of subaltern pasts: a or the divine, as principles, have not necessary penumbra of shadow to the disappeared from the life of the modern. area of the past that the method of We are not the same as the nineteenth- history successfully illuminates, they century Santal. One could even easily make visible what historicizing does and assume that the Santal today would be what it cannot do. very different from what they were in the Attending to this heterogeneity could nineteenth century, that they would take many different forms. Some scholars inhabit a very different set of social now perform the limits of history by circumstances. The modern Santal would fictionalizing the past, by experimenting have the benefit of secular education and to see how films and history might inter- may even produce their own professional sect in the new discipline of cultural historians. No one would deny these studies, by studying memory rather than historical changes. But the astrological just history, by playing around with columns in the newspapers (in spite of forms of writing, and by similar other Adorno's frustrations with them), the means. While such experiments are practices of 'superstition' that surround welcome, let me conclude with a point the lives and activities of sportsfans, for about how the fact that there are subal- example, practices we are too embarrassed tern pasts, unassimilable to the secular to admit in public—not to speak of all narratives of the historian, allows us to the deliberately 'cultic' expressions of see the complex understanding of time— religiosity that have never gone away— treated as invisible in most historian's go to show that we are all, in principle, writing—that must underlie and indeed capable of participating in supernatural make possible the secular chronology of events and the sense of the past they help historical narratives, the construction of create. The nineteenth-century Santal- before-after relationships without which and indeed, if my argument is right, there cannot be any historical explana- humans from any other period and tion. Let me elucidate. regions—are thus in a peculiar way our The broad statement that the Santal had a contemporaries: that, I would argue, would past in which events could belong to the have to be the condition under which order of the supernatural does not they become intelligible to us. Thus the appear as something completely beyond writing of history must implicitly assume our own experience—it is not something a plurality of times existing together, a 28 DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
discontinuity of the present with itself. porary anthropological evidence in Making visible this discontinuity is what introducing Gurevich's work. Gurevich, `subaltern pasts' allow us to do. writes Burke, 'could already have been described in the 196os as a historical An argument such as this is actually at anthropologist, and he did indeed draw the heart of modern historiography itself. inspiration from anthropology, most One could argue, for instance, that the obviously from the economic anthropol- writing of 'medieval history' for Europe ogy of Bronislaw Malinowski and depends on this assumed contemporane- Marcel Mauss, who had begun his ity of the medieval, or what is the same famous essay on the gift with a quotation thing, the non-contemporaneity of the from a medieval Scandinavian poem, present with itself. The medieval in the Edda. '12 Europe is often strongly associated with the supernatural and the magical. But Similar double moves—both of histori- what makes the historicizing of it at all cizing the medieval and of seeing it at the possible is the fact that its basic charac- same time as contemporary with the teristics are not completely foreign to us present—can be seen at work in the as moderns (which is not to deny the following lines from Jacques Le Goff. Le historical changes that separate the two). Goff is seeking to explain here an aspect Historians of medieval Europe do not of the European-medieval: always consciously or explicitly make People today, even those who consult seers this point but it is not difficult to see this and fortune-tellers, call spirits to floating operating as an assumption in their tables, or participate in black masses, recog- method (in the same way as anthropolo- nize a frontier between the visible and the gists may refer to examples more invisible, the natural and the supernatural. familiar to their readers in order to This was not true of medieval man. Not only explain that which seems strange at first). was the visible for him merely the trace of In the writings of Aron Gurevich, for the invisible; the supernatural overflowed into daily life at every turn.13 example, the modern makes its pact with the medieval through the use of anthro- This is a complex passage. On the surface pology—that is, in the use of of it, it is about what is separates the contemporary anthropological evidence medieval from the modern. Yet the from outside of Europe to make sense of difference is what makes the medieval an the past of Europe. The strict separation ever-present possibility that haunts the of the medieval from the modern is here practices of the modern—if only we, the belied by their contemporaneity moderns, could forget the 'frontier' suggested by anthropology. Peter Burke between the visible and the invisible in comments on this intellectual traffic Le Goff's description, we would be on the between medieval Europe and contem- other side of that frontier. The people
MINORITY HISTORIES, SUBALTERN PASTS 2g
who consult seers today are modern in further, one can see that this requirement spite of themselves, for they engage in for a rational principle, in turn, marks the `medieval' practices but are not able to deep connections that exist between overcome the habits of the modern. Yet modern constructions of public life and the opening expression 'even today' projects of social justice. That is why a contains a reference to the sense of Marxist scholar like Fredric Jameson surprise one feels at their anachronism, begins his book The Political as if we did not expect to find such prac- Unconscious with the injunction: Always tices today, as if the very existence of historicize!' This slogan,' writes Jameson, these practices today opens up a hiatus in `the one absolute and we may even say the continuity of that present by insert- "transhistorical" imperative of all dialec- ing into it something that is tical thought—will unsurprisingly turn medieval-like and yet not quite so. It out to be the moral of The Political makes the present look like as though it Unconscious as well.'" If my point is were non-contemporaneous with itself. right, then historicizing is not the prob- Le Goff rescues the present by saying that lematic part of the injunction, the even in the practice of these people, troubling term is 'always'. For the something irreducibly modern lingers— assumption of a continuous, homoge- their distinction between the visible and neous, infinitely-stretched out time the invisible. But it lingers only as a which makes possible the imagination of border, as something that defines the an `always,' is put to question by subaltern difference between the medieval and pasts that makes the present, as Derrida the modern. And since difference is says, 'out of joint', non-continuous with always the name of a relationship, for it itself.15 One historicizes only in so far as separates just as much as it connects as one belongs to a mode of being in the indeed does a border, one could argue world which is aligned with the principle that alongside the present or the of 'disenchantment of the universe' that modern the medieval must linger as underlies knowledge in the social well if only as that which exists as the sciences (and I distinguish knowledge limit or the border to activities that from practices). It is not accidental that a define the modern. Marxist would exhort us to 'always Subaltern pasts are signposts of this historicize', for historicizing is tied to the border. With them we reach the limits of search for justice in public life. This is the discourse of history. The reason for why one welcomes 'minority histories', this, as I have said, is that subaltern pasts be they of ethnic groups, gay-rights do not give the historian any principle of activists, or of subaltern social classes. narration that can be rationally-defended Here the historical discipline enriches in modern public life. Going a step itself by incorporating these histories but 3 o DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
its very methodological dominations we live in time-knots that we can under- create what I have called subaltern pasts. take the exercise of straightening out some part of the knot (which is what a For the 'disenchantment of the world' is chronology is).17 Subaltern pasts— not the only principle by which we world aspects of these time-knots—thus act as a the earth. There are other modes of supplement to the historian's pasts and in being in the world—and they are not fact aid our capacity to historicize. They necessarily private, the superstitious acts are supplementary in a Derridean of sportsfans, for example, being often sense—they enable history, the disci- public. The supernatural can inhabit the pline, to be what it is and at the same world in these other modes and not time help to show forth what its limits always as a problem or result of belief; are. But in calling attention to the limits the supernatural or the divine can be of historicizing, they help us distance brought into presence by our practices. ourselves from the imperious instincts of Here I am reminded of the story of the the discipline—the idea (of Haldane's for old Irish woman who allegedly, once example) that everything can be histori- while asked by Yeats whether or not she cized or that one should always believed in fairies, insisted that while she historicize—and returns us to a sense of did not believe in them, her disbelief did the limited good that the modern histori- not stop them from existing—'They are cal consciousness is. Gadamar once put there Mr Yeats, they are there.'" These the point well in the course of discussing other worlds are not without questions of Heidegger's philosophy. Let me give him power or justice but these questions are the last word: The experience of history, raised—to the extent modern public which we ourselves have, is ... covered institutions allow them on terms other only to a small degree by that which we than those of the political-modern. would name historical consciousness.'" However,—and I want to conclude by Subaltern pasts persistently remind us of pointing this out—the relation between the truth of this statement. what I have called 'subaltern pasts' and t""Zz1=.00 the practice of historicizing (that the Marxist in us recommends) is not one of An earlier version of this essay was mutual exclusion. It is because we always presented at the annual conference of the already have experience of that which American Historical Association in makes the present non-contemporane- January 1997. I acknowledge with grati- ous with itself that we can actually tude the criticisms and comments I historicize. Thus what allows medievalist received there. A subsequent presenta- historians to historicize the medieval or tion at the University of Colorado at the ancient is the very fact these worlds Boulder at the invitation of my co- are never completely lost. It is because panelist Patricia Limerick also benefited
MINORITY HISTORIES, SUBALTERN PASTS 31
from the criticisms of those present. I 6 Ibid., p.78. thank Sandria Freitag for her original 7 Ibid., p.78. invitation prodding me to think this topic and Anne Hardgrove and Uday 8 Shahid Amin's book Events, Memory, Mehta for more recent conversations on Metaphor (Berkeley, 1995) is an the subject. All errors remain mine. excellent illustration of the points being made in this essay and shows a REFERENCES self-conscious appreciation of the Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret problems of translating the subaltern's Jacob, Telling the TruthAbout History voice into a modern political project (New York, 1994). (without giving up the socially- 2 Cf. Georg G.Iggers, Historiography in necessary attempt to translate). the Twentieth Century: From Scientific 9 Objectivity to the Postmodern See Greg Dening's essay The Poetics Challenge, (Hanover and London, of History' in his Performances 1997), p.145: 'Peter Novick has in my (Chicago, 1995) and David Cohen's The opinion rightly maintained that Combing of History (Chicago, 1994). objectivity is unattainable in history; Ashis Nandy's essay 'Themes of_ State, the historian can hope for nothing History and Exile in South Asian more than plausibility. But plausibility Politics', Emergences, No.7/8,1995-96 obviously rests not on the arbitrary pp 104-125 makes comparable points. invention of an historical account but involved rational strategies of 10 A sensitivity to the question of determining what in fact is plausible.' alternative pasts is increasingly Emphasis added. becoming visible in the work of many 3 Immanuel Kant, `An Answer to the historians: my very personal and Question: What Is Enlightenment?' random list of such scholars would (1784) in Immanuel Kant, Perpetual include Klaus Neumann, Stephen Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Muecke, Christopher Healy, Patricia Humphrey (Indianapolis, 1983), Limerick, Ajay Skaria, Saurabh Dube. PP41-48. Sumathi Ramaswamy, lain McCalman 4 Ranajit Guha, 'The Prose of Counter- and others. Insurgency' in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak eds., 11 See Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Selected Subaltern Studies (New York, Trembling.. Dialectical Lyric by 1988), pp.46-47. Johannes de silentio, trans. Alastair Ibid., p.80. Hannay (Harmondsvvorth, 1985), p.6o. 3 2 DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
12 Peter Burke, 'Editorial Preface' to 15 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: Aron Gurevich, Medieval Popular The State of the Debt, the Work of Culture: Problems of Belief and Mourning, & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and Perception, trans. Janos M Back and London, 1994). Paul A Hollingsworth (Cambridge, 16 I 199o), p.vii. owe this story to David Lloyd. 17 I owe the conception of time-knots to 13 Jacques Le Goff ed. The Medieval Ranajit Guha. World, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (London, 199o), pp.28-29. 18 Hans-Georg Gadamar, 'Kant and the Hermeneutical Turn' in his 14 Preface' to his The Political Heidegger's Ways trans. John W. Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Stanley (New York, 1994), p.58. Symbolic Act (New York, 1981), p.9. Emphasis in the original.
GREG DENING 33
ENDEAVOUR AND HOKULE'A: THE THEATRE OF RE-ENACTMENT HISTORIES Public Lecture, April 23, 1997
FIGURE FIGURE 2
Endeavour Replica in Port Phillip Bay Hokule'a approaching Maui from Honolulu
It is my honour and my privilege to have University of Melbourne. Since that day been invited by this University to be the concerns of cross-cultural studies Adjunct Professor in the Centre of Cross- have been my life. cultural Research. I am most I have a reflection this evening on two appreciative of the warm welcome and icons of cross-cultural research: the care for our needs by the administrative Endeavour replica, here in a place the staff of the centre: Julie Gorrell, Anne- original Endeavour had never been, Maree O'Brien and Jenny Newell. My first Port Phillip Bay, Victoria. And Hokule'a, association with the ANU was in 1964 the replica of an Hawaiian voyaging when Jim Davidson and Harry Maude canoe, here undergoing sea-trials in offered me a position as research fellow 1975 off the north shore of Oahu in the in Pacific history. But it was forty years Hawaiian islands. ago almost to the day that I began my work in cross-cultural history under the My reflection is about re-enactment tutelage of John Mulvaney at the histories, the sort of social memory 34 GREG DENING
evoked by these replicas. I won't be thing to be said about cross-cultural focusing so much on their history, the research, I think. It always begins with a accuracy or otherwise of their replica- little giving, whatever way one crosses. tion, so much as their theatre. Social Endeavour and Hokule'a. Where's the memory, I will be wanting to say is as giving in that? That is what I wanted to much about the present as the past. lecture about. Social memory enlarges the continuities between past and present. Social The Endeavour replica. Perhaps you have memory is, in that word of Aristotle of seen her. I confess I had a lump in my , the theatre, catharsis, getting the plot, throat when I first saw her. Much of my seeing the meaning of things. work has been concerned with the poet- ics of space on an eighteenth century Let me say first that I am not much for re- naval vessel: the rituals of the quarter- enactments. I remember when my deck that were the theatre of Bligh's prejudices about re-enactments were command; how important were the divi- born. It was at a meeting of the American sions between private and public space Historical Association in New York in the and how dangerous it was to blur their 196os. I attended a session on 'New Historical Methods' with high expecta- boundary; how the proper order of that tions only to discover that it was about space was turned upside down in the the advantages for historical realism in reverse world of skylarking and sailors' wearing Napoleon's hat while taking baptism rituals; how a ship was energized hallucinegetic drugs at the same time. by the tempo and rhythm of sailors' bodies. It was not by chance that the That's what I tend to think. The danger in ship's most skilled seamen were also the re-enactments is that they tend to hallu- ship's best dancers. There was much cinate us into seeing the past as us in choreography in a sailing ship. funny clothes. But the past is its total- ity—its postures, its smells and dirt, its That space had a language, too, to tones and accents. The past in its totality describe it, as precise and inventive as is different, as different if you like, as any science. Sailors' lives depended on another culture, another country as the speed with which they could compre- David Lowenthal has said. All history in hend an order. Precision, economy and that sense is cross-cultural. But distinctiveness were the marks of sailors' difference is the hardest thing to see. language. For any landsman pressed into Difference is the hardest thing to accept. His Majesty's service, his first months To see difference we have to give a little were a language school. Joseph Conrad of ourselves: old to young, young to old, called that language 'a flawless thing for male to female, female to male, black to its purpose'. On the Endeavour replica, white, white to black. That is the first this language world was materialized for
ENDEAVOUR AND HOKULEA 35
me: sheets, bowlines, chewlines, bunt- when I first saw the Great Cabin. I haven't lines, reeflines, brails, gaskets, halliards, got a slide of it. This will have to do. It did staysails, shrouds. I discovered when I not seem possible that so much could saw her first what was a mainmast heart come out of such a cramped space. and why it was seized around the bowsprit. Where could Joseph Banks, let alone his I won't fool you I know. I've done all my dogs, spread himself out, Sydney sailing in the library I do all my reading Parkinson paint, Daniel Solander cata- in ships logs with a plan of ships rigging logue. And Cook! Where did he find beside me. When Cook or Bligh write in room in his tiny quarters on the side of their logs that a 'severe gale' abated into a the Great Cabin or on that elaborate `mere storm', I reach anachronistically fold-away table, to make his maps, to for my Beaufort Wind Scales to under- write his log. stand what it might mean and what are Now that I have these spaces re-shaped in the signs in the sea to determine it. my mind, why don't I try a little re-enact- It is in the props of re-enactment that the ment of my own. Let me take you to a realism of its theatre is created. Of course part of the Endeavour's voyage that gets there are many compromises. There are perhaps only a line in most histories. It's engines now on the.Endeavour and a the passage from New Zealand and the propellor. Desalinization plants, and sighting of the East Coast of Australia at toilets (Cook once flogged a drunken Point Hicks. This passage took place in marine down in the Arctic Circle because the first nineteen days of April, 177o. he pissed on the sails in their locker You'll be able to re-enact the weather rather than from the heads out amid the for yourselves. ice and snow. The marine, presumably There was a warm and expansive feeling drunk again, was lost overboard later among Cook and his companions in the doing it from the heads). There are metal Great Cabin as they left Cape Farewell. fittings now, and artificial materials in the They felt that they had done well circum- sails. Instead of oak, elm and spruce, navigating the two islands of New there are WA jarrah and other Australian Zealand, proving it to be no part of a hardwoods. And much hidden symbol- Southern Continent. They collected to ism. The tallow wood hanging tree decide what they would do now They had supporting the weather beams came three options. One, to run to the east and from trees near Port Macquarie, old Cape Horn below latitude 4o degrees. enough for Cook to have seen, but That would determine finally whether logged because of the widening of the there was a Southern Continent. Already Pacific Highway. they had narrowed the possibility of a I suppose the most magical moment of Southern Continent to a small part of the all for me on the Endeavour replica was Pacific deep to the south of Tahiti. But 3 6 GREG DENING
their rigging and their sails were already It was a reasonably easy run, although in such poor shape that they doubted that old cat-built collier griped into the whether they could complete a voyage in breeze all the way and drove herself these high latitudes. uncomfortably upwind. Endeavour was
The second option was to sail westward, near perfect for her discovery tasks, but a south of Van Diemen's Land to the Cape little unforgiving in hard weather. Cook of Good Hope. There was no discoverer's used to say her best sailing was with joy in that, nothing new to be seen. square sails set, a fore topmast staysail What's more they were too well supplied. and a breeze on her port quarter. The They had six months supplies left. The night watches, without Cook looking thought of having to throw out or give over their shoulders in these safer waters, back what had been so hardly earned would let the Endeavour edge more galled them too much for that. northerly and say it was the current that did it. They hankered for warmer climates. They voted unanimously therefore for the third option which was to sail west- Cook drove a hard ship. Halfway between ward slightly north of 38 degrees latitude Cape Farewell and Point Hicks, he gave so that they would come upon the north- Jonathan Bowles, marine, twelve lashes ern extension of Van Diemen's Land, for refusing to do his duty. The marines follow the coast northward or wherever were the men most frequently flogged by it took them, and come across, if they Cook and every other voyaging captain. were there, de Quiros's Solomon Islands. Marines had too little to do. If they happened to be Irish and younger than FIGURE 3 25 years, God help them. Cook used to say that the Endeavour's best sailing was with square sails set, Cook grew in status every day of this a fore topmast staysail and a breeze on first voyage. But he was peeking over her port quarter the shoulders of the 'experimental gentlemen' in the Great Cabin as well as his helmsman. He was an auto-didact and he learned from them what it was to be a discoverer. He searched their books. He began to form large thoughts. For most of the voyage he had felt that his best discoveries were his knowing where he was at every minute. Accurate navigation was his obsession.
But now he was beginning to reflect on what the place the things he was doing
ENDEAVOUR AND HOKULE'A 37
would have in a larger scheme of things. Pacific—by asking islanders where to go. He was scornful of discoverers who Cook was finding in this part of his voyag- thought that they saw signs of new lands ing that in cross-cultural matters he had but would not follow their clues. But he to give a little in respect to the navigating knew what people would say if prudence abilities of islanders who had preceded dictated to him that he had gone far him everywhere he was to go in the enough, and there was still places to Pacific. Respect too in a little while for discover. While Joseph Banks still Australian aborigines who didn't seem to favoured—rather guiltily—the idea of a need his civilizing influences. He would Great Southern Continent, Cook was muse in his journal about his doubts at sure that there was none. And while he how they would benefit by it. was not prepared to say there was none The nineteen April days of this leg were until he had seen for himself, he is easy sailing, but rather slow. They were nonetheless sure. In any case, he was forever cannibalizing old sails for patches already planning the second voyage. in less ragged ones, leaving their better He had on board a Tahitian priest, Tupaia. sails for when they might need them He was taking Tupaia back to England most. They were a little bewildered at with him to meet King George. Joseph sudden changes of temperatures—warm Banks had said in Tahiti that other men one minute, cool the next. Banks slowed doing their Grand Tours brought back them down, insisting on taking out the tigers and the like. Why couldn't he bring small boat to collect birds and fish and back a noble savage at less expense? As it whatever there was to be seen in the sea. happened, Tupaia would not survive the He shot Wandering Albatross, Black fevers of Batavia, but he helped Cook Browed Albatross, Grey Headed Albatross wonderfully in his navigation and his and petrels in even greater variety. He encounters with native peoples. Tupaia, fished sea anemone and Portuguese men- the priest, was also the holder of Tahitian o'-war and took them back to the Great navigation lore. Tupaia knew of all the Cabin where Solander described them islands the Tahitians knew of. Tupaia the and Sydney Parkinson painted them. navigator drew Cook a map of the Out on the water there was great and Central Pacific. There were 140 islands innocent scientific excitement. It lived in on that map. Cook knew that these island their minds their whole lives long. names made a great circle some 6000 km in diameter. Tupaia was with them Came the 16th, I 7th and i8th of April. now pointing out all the signs of land to The seaweed was getting thicker and the east, that they did not see until he more frequent. More and more land pointed them out. Tupaia taught Cook birds passed them or rested in their how he might be a discoverer in the rigging. Shearwaters fished beside them.
3 8 GREG DENING
Dolphins were around them all the time, They had, of course, the whole of the east leaping out of the water like salmon. coast of Australia to go. All the time, Cook They even thought they saw a butterfly. would be at his brilliant best, mapping, Then at first daylight on the igth, Zachary surveying, commanding, keeping the Hicks made his name. He saw land— expedition safe. sloping hills covered with trees and There's my re-enactment. There is bushes, interspersed with large tracts of theatre in it of course. I the story-teller sand. The land they saw ran away to the want you to have what Aristotle said was southwest and to the northeast. They necessary in good theatre. I want you to came pretty much to Point Hicks on a get the plot, experience catharsis. I want north south line. you leave my theatre saying what the By noon they had passed the point and story meant. I am hoping that you will say had gone on to a remarkable point of that I told a story about Cook's personal discovery of what it meant to be a discov- land which Cook named Ramshead after the point in Plymouth Sound. Between erer. How he was beginning to discover that he was to discoverer to somebody as i.00 and 3.o opm they saw three or four well as the discoverer of some place and water spouts—columns of water rising to how complicated that was beginning to a cloud, transparent like a tube of glass, make his life. Banks said, contracting and dilating, curving with the wind. Two of the spouts My more general point which I must let joined and gradually contracted up into a lie rather baldly for want of time is about cloud. By evening they were off Cape Howe the theatre of encounter with this most and its island we call Gabo—some say from perfect Endeavour replica. Its catharsis is the aboriginal pronunciation of Cape Howe. to join us to a man of whom Charles Darwin said 'added a hemisphere to the It was not until the next day that they saw civilized world'. The speeches at its signs of inhabitants, or at least smoke in launching said that the Endeavour the day and fires at night. North of replica was a living creature imbued with Bateman's Bay through their spy glasses Cook's presence. Cook, they said, was the they saw their first aborigines. Banks says `most moderate, humane, gentle circum- he saw five of them 'enormously black'. navigator who ever went upon discovery'. But to do him justice for his sense of the The Endeavour replica was seen to be a ways in which others shaped his images, symbol of courage, tenacity skills he added: `so far did the prejudices we endurance and leadership and of the had built on Dampier's account influence us that we could see the colours when we Australian credo of 'Have-a-go'. could scarce distinguish whether or not I am not really setting up that to laugh at they were men'. it. I merely want to point out the sort of
ENDEAVOUR AND HOKULE'A 39
realism that a near perfect, five million ism and science. What was left was the dollar replica effects. It lends authenticity theatre of violence that Cook did in to our perceptions of our present Tonga, Hawaii, Aotorea and wherever humanistic, scientific selves. Cook is us he put foot on land he did not own. in our better moments. Then the theatre of re-enactment is about the resistance indigenous ances- I've written about the authenticating tors would have made had they known effect of theatrical realism before. When the history to follow. this famous painting of the Apotheosis of Captain Cook, with Cook looking rather Forty years ago our cross-cultural nervously at both Britannia and Fame, research was characterized by a sort of floated down on to the stage at the end of intellectual innocence. Our excitement a pantomime in 1797, the audience joined was sparked as much as anything by a the chorus with gusto: famous re-enactment voyage—Thor The hero of Macedon ran o'er the world Heyerdahl's Kontiki raft voyage from the Yet nothing but death could he give Peruvian coast to the great thousand kilo- Twas George's command and the sail was unfurtd metre arc of atolls northeast of Tahiti, the And Cook taught mankind how to live Tuamotus. The Pacific peoples, He came and he saw, not to conquer but to save specifically the Polynesians, came from The Caesar of Britain was he the Americas, Heyerdahl had argued. We Who scorned the conditions of making a slave scoured everything botanical, linguistic, While Britons themselves are so free genetic, material, mythological, histori- Now the Genius of Britain forbids us to grieve cal, anthropological, archaeological to Since Cook ever honour'd immortal shall live. prove him wrong.
The realism of a brilliant stage We locked horns too with another designer, Philippe de Loutherbourg, famous but more curmudgeon scholar and a brilliant painter, John Webber, of the day—this is 1956-57-58—Andrew authenticated their catharsis, made the Sharp. His Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific hyperbole seem true. It is the same with scoffed at the notion of Pacific Vikings the Endeavour replica. wandering vast ocean spaces freely. They were blown hither and yon, he Of course, off a NSW coast where there wrote. Traditions to the contrary were were Aboriginal eyes to see the just myths. Endeavour replica, and not in Port Phillip Bay, in the Bay of Islands where My first academic publication was a there were Maori eyes to see it, there was review essay on Ancient Voyagers in the another form of catharsis. With aborigi- Pacific in Historical Studies. I ghost wrote nal and Maori eyes to see it, the realism it for Mulvaney's Pacific Prehistory class. I of the replica was leached of its human- still have Sharp's stinging rebuke in my 4 0 GREG DENING
files. The faded blue aerogramme is between indigenous peoples and intrud- a sort of scout's badge of adversarial ing strangers that are the problem. It is academia. I keep it proudly because I the depth of the silences. Translating knew I was right. silences is the hardest thing in cross- cultural research. Anyone in cross- Do you want know how I knew I was cultural research will have to have right? One day I was reading in the glow trust and imagination to hear what is of a lamp in the gloom of the Great said in that silence. Reading Room of the State Library of Victoria, on a green leather desk carved Two other scholars were making their with the message that Too had been very first contribution to Pacific cross- there', with a bucket behind me into cultural research in those years. Marshall which rain water dripped from a vast Sahlins and Ben Finney. I felt jealous, I height, with a smelly, sleeping drunk have to confess, of them both. Sahlins beside me—I used to wear a clerical wrote `Esoteric Efflorescence on Easter collar in those days, and half the home- Island' in theAmerican Anthropologist. It less men in Melbourne used to sit beside was part of his library—rather than field me in the library because they thought orientation of his doctoral dissertation that they would not be thrown out if they on the Social Stratification of Polynesia. did—in this act of historical research I was jealous of him because he was which I re-enact for you right now in a reading everything that I was reading but sentence that clearly is never going to reading it differently and more creatively, end—I read Harold Gatty's survival —wrongly, but creatively. I decided that pamphlet for crashed airmen during the anthropology helped him do it. So I went Second World War. It was full of the lore off to do anthropology to get those Gaily had learned from islanders about reading skills. all the signposts to be found at sea— But it is Finney I want to talk about. ocean swells and the shadows islands He had just written an article in one of made in them, clouds and the colour of Finland's prime academic journals on the lagoons reflected in them, birds, ancient surf-board riding in Hawaii. For migrating or returning to land to roost, many years there has been a deep interest orienting stars. It was an enlightening in the tropical Pacific in Finland no moment for me in cross-cultural history. doubt there is plenty of trust and imagi- It was a moment of solidarity with expe- nation in that. I was a little jealous of riences I had never had, a moment of Finney because I thought that surf-board trust and imagination, if you want. research was a pretty good lurk to get you Anyone engaged in cross-cultural out of the library and onto the beach. But research will know that it is not the it was the beginning for him of a career mountains of texts of the encounter in which he has wedded theoretical ENDEAVOUR AND HOKULE'A
knowledge with practical skill. He calls it indigenous past and an indigenous `experimental archaeology' these days. present has been almost a presumption in Oceanic studies. 'The Fatal Impact' was Finney was about to reconstruct a Alan Moorhead's famous metaphor for it. Hawaiian double canoe, a replica of King Kamehameha III's royal canoe. There But all around the world, not just in the was a precise plan of it in a French Pacific, there has been some resurrection explorer's publications. Finney's purpose found amid so much death. Histories now was modest: to test whether shallow are of resistance. Not just of the open rounded hulls would give resistance to resistance that was crushed mercilessly leeway and whether the inverted triangu- by empires, but of that hidden resistance lar 'crab-claw' sail would drive the canoe that preserved native identities in a new into the wind. It was skepticism on these cultural idiom. 'Re-invented tradition' two points that drove, among other has been the phrase used to describe it, things, Heyerdahl's and Sharps argu- but that has been spurned by indigenous ments about the possibilities of peoples as suggesting political oppor- Polynesian deliberate voyaging. tunism and insincerity. I have not a phrase that would satisfy them yet. In my own When Finney brought the canoe to mind I see it as creative aboriginality: the Hawaii from California where he had ability to see, despite all the transforma- done his tests, Mary Pakena Pukui, one of tions, the continuities that connect an Hawaii's traditional scholars, called the indigenous past with an indigenous canoe Nahelia, 'The Skilled Ones'—for present. Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha the way in which the hulls gracefully in their subaltern studies have shown rode the swells and into the wind. how it is done. It is done by imagination. Already the project was getting larger Not fantasy. Imagination. The imagina- than itself. The admiration caught in the tion of those many silence- breakers— name Nahelia was a sign of deeper poets, novelists, painters, carvers, cultural and political forces beginning to dancers, filmmakers... I wish I had my be focused in the question of how the time again. I can see my own dyslexia. Hawaiians, Tahitians, Maoris and My reading skills have to be enlarged. Samoans encompassed Oceania, 'The Sea Finney in 1975, now supported by and of Islands'. eventually relieved of his leading role by In Oceania, the silences in cross-cultural native-born Hawaiians, turned to the research have been deep: the silences of construction of an ocean-going canoe, victims; the silence of powerlessness; the Hokule'a. Hokule'a means 'Star of Joy', silences of banal evil; the silences of what Arcturus, the zenith star, the homing star cannot be seen in any encounter with in Hawaii's celestial latitude. The overrid- otherness. The voicelessness of an ing ambition of all Hokule'a's great
42 GREG DENING
FIGURE 4 This University has long made creative Hokule'a's odyssey in the Central Pacific contributions to the question of Pacific peoples voyaging. Gerard Ward directed the first computer simulations. David Lewis initiated the experimental archae- ology of voyaging and began the tapping of living traditions of navigation. So let me bypass all the debates on prehistoric exploration and proceed to a re-enact- ment of my own.
It begins with an insight of a New Zealand archaeologist, Geoffrey Irwin. His is also a sailor's insight. Puzzling over voyages was to perform them as much as the fact that most of the expansion east- possible in the way in which they were ward into the Pacific was against performed a thousand years ago. prevailing weather conditions, he Hokule'a has voyaged to nearly all parts suggests that the chief worry for a sailor of the central Polynesian Pacific: was getting home. Prevailing and Hawaii—Tahiti—Hawaii; Tahiti- contrary weather conditions are not a Raro-tonga—Aotorea; Samoa- disincentive for exploration. They are an Aitutaki—Tahiti. incentive for it. Prevailing and contrary weather conditions will get a sailor These voyages have been an extraordi- home. He further suggests that the big nary achievement. There is no point in jumps, east, north and south in the Pacific being romantic about them. The thirty seemed to occur after about five hundred years of this odyssey have had their pain years localization in a region. Five and conflict, their tragedies and failures, hundred years is a long time to create a their political machinations, their greed, knowledge-bank of homing signs for a their absurdities. But they also have been way finder. courageous over-all triumphs, tapping well-springs of cultural pride in a sense Let me pick up the homecoming voyage of continuity with a voyaging tradition. of Hokule'a from Tahiti to Hawaii in June This has not just been in Hawaii, but in 1980. It begins in Matavai Bay, Tahiti and Tahiti, Samoa, Aotorea as well. ends 32 days later on the Big Island of Hawaii. Nainoa, a young man of Hawaiian Everywhere where she has gone it has birth, 25 years old, was the navigator. been the same. The landfall has been a theatre of who island peoples are, who Nainoa had apprenticed himself to Mau they have been. Piailug, the Micronesian navigator who
ENDEAVOUR AND HOKULE'A 43
had taken Hokule'a to Tahiti in 1976. Mau FIGURE 5 had given David Lewis much of his navi- North/South voyaging with Polaris and Crux gator's lore, too. Nainoa has not got a as latitude determinants Hawaiian tradition of navigation to call upon. That's gone, or rather, too deeply imbedded in mythology and the language of the environment to be of much use. Nainoa had virtually to invent his system. He does not do it by learning western celestial navigation. He avoids that. But he has the Bishop Museum Planetarium in Honolulu to set in his mind the night skies. He can simulate the FIGURE 6 rising and setting of the stars for all Calibrating a hand Southern seasons in Hawaii and for different lati- Cross tudes. He creates for himself a star ACRUX compass and sets it in his mind as in all systems of oral memory with a metaphor. His metaphor for Hokule'a is manic, a 17° bird with outstretched wings. He has not just a star compass in his mind— SOUTHERN HORIZON different from the ones we know of in
Micronesia but a directional compass island shores and in the island shadows. in his mind as well of 32 settings, or His navigational lines, latitudinally, north `houses' as he calls them, more regular and south in his system are relatively than the traditional settings. He sets easy. But his movements east and west himself to remember the rising and along a longitudinal line are far more setting of stars, sun and moon in these complex, involving dead reckoning of houses. He also sets himself to calibrate miles sailed and the relativizing of theo- his hand to the two great determinants of rizing and settings in his star compass. his Hawaiian latitudes, the North Star That will be the greatest anxiety of his and the Southern Cross. When he is not navigation. He has to make landfall in the Planetarium he is in the seas upwind of his destination, northeast of around Hawaii, experiencing the swells Tahiti, south east of Hawaii. Downwind, if made by the dominant weather patterns he ends up there, will require tacking. and their seasons, the seas created by the changing winds and the movements Let's join him on the last three days of the made by the backlash of the sea against voyage from Tahiti to Hawaii, May-June
44 GREG DENING
1980. He is tired and anxious. He sleeps the term they preferred to use rather hardly at all at night and not more than than navigation—each day and night an hour at a time in the day. For ten days, is a new calculation, a new assessment: high clouds had obscured the stars. He It is important to note that. What seemed had steered mainly with the sun and the undeniable in Sharp's argument was moon. The moon in its crescent carries that errors were cumulative and once the sun's shadow vertically near the committed drove canoes into oblivion. equator, then more angled as they move But the discovery over all of Hokule'a's north. The full moon on the horizon voyaging was that errors were random gave them a steering target. Dawn was and tended to counter one another. the most important time, not just for But that did not relieve the tension at the compass point of the sun's rising, moments of critical commitment. but because the angle of the sun made reading swells and seas and the weather FIGURE 7 of the day to come easier. Mau, the Tahiti to Hawai'i in 198o, showing Micronesian navigator, had thousands of the actual track of Hokule'a, the dawns at sea in his mind. The Southern reference course, and Nainoa's dead Cross as it moved lower and to the west reckoning (DR) positions estimated at brought him the judgement on that third sunrise (marked by 'a' following the last day that they were 55o miles SE of date) and sunset (marked by `b) O'o 150• 140•W Dune6,1980)`. Hawaii. But they saw a land dove during 40 20• HAWAIIAN ,1 0 ACTUAL TRACK , ----- the day. How could it have flown that ISLANDS 36 REFERENCE COURSE ---- 360 NAINOA'S DR. POSITIONS distance between dawn and dusk? NorM 200 They had passed through the equatorial Eomolorial 1b0 1c,, (June 1,1980) doldrums. They had passed through that • 316° 10• 316° part of the ocean where the NW swell of 30 Q300 touole,o1 the northern hemisphere passed over the 0297 Countarrunew 0286 I SE swell of the southern and had given ,2801 0276' 274 CHRISTMAS I. 266 I the distinctive pitch and roll movement South 0 Ji g) o• of the canoe Nainoa had learned to feel iessocvial _246/ Curter', .244 0236/ these different motions of the canoe °Do/ SEbai from Mau Piaulug—by lying prone 0216' 0216 206 on the decking. Now they were at the MARQUESAS ISLANDS CAROLINE I. 206 • r most anxious time of their voyage, 196 186 190 176 wondering whether they should trust 17 166 156 TUAMOTU SOCIETY. 15.0 ISLANDS their calculations and turn westward in ISLANDS 1460 / t ,146 the Hawaiian latitudes. In way-finding- 160•W TAHITI (May 13,1980) IL
ENDEAVOUR AND HOKULE'A 45
Tropic birds are plenty, but these are canoes—in the canoe's making, in its no sure sign of the direction of land. parts, in its launching, in its voyaging. But there are manu ku, land doves too. The canoe was an icon of all sorts of They knew land was near. They caught continuities of identity, an icon of a the angle of the North Star against the conjoining past and present. I don't have horizon and got a clear sighting of the difficulty in believing that island peoples Southern Cross. These convinced them can recognise themselves in Hokule'a and that their latitude calculations were embroider that recognition with all sorts right. On the second to last day Nainoa of re-births of traditional arts and crafts, said they were 210 miles from the Big with dance, poetry and song. Whatever Island, but nervously changed his calcu- the transformations of modernity that lations to 300 miles. masquerade as discontinuities — religion, science, politics—the theatre All day on the last day, the clouds on of Hokule'a's re-enactment is directed to the horizon seemed stationary. Clouds that recognition. at sea moved. Clouds over land stayed still. There was something different GREG DENING about the setting sun. They couldn't say Greg Dening is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Melbourne what, its colouring perhaps, as it caught andAdjunct Professor at the Centre for the air around and above Hawaii. They Cross-cultural Research. alter their course a little in its direction.
It is in the right house of Nainoa's ACKNOWLEDGMENTS compass for land. The illustrations for this article and Then a stationary white cloud opens lecture are acknowledged as being presented by courtesy of Sailing up and reveals the long gentle slope Endeavour (Peter Petro and John of Mauna Kea on Hawaii. Nainoa says Ferguson) Maritime Heritage Press, to himself: 'The way-finding at this Sydney 199i; An Ocean in Mind (Will moment seems to be out of my hands Kyselka) University of Hawaii Press, and beyond my control. I'm the one Honolulu 1987; Hokule'a. The Way to given the opportunity of feeling the Tahiti (Ben R. Finney) Dodd, Mead emotions of way-finding, not yet ready and Company, New York 1979. to have a complete understanding of what is happening. It is a moment of self-perspective, of one person in a vast ocean given an opportunity of looking through a window into my heritage'.
I think he is correct. All over Polynesia, island peoples saw themselves in their
46 SASHA GRISHIN
ART INTO LANDSCAPES: NEW AUSTRALIAN IMAGES THROUGH BRITISH EYES
The anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space." (Michael Foucault, 1967, Berlin lectures)
The Honourable Walter J. James, Lord James argued, a landscape could occupy Northbourne, devoted the inaugural the background where with 'charm due Charlton Lecture, delivered in October principally to naivety and childlike 1 919, to tracing the emergence of the simplicity'2 it complemented the sophis- modern landscape tradition in European ticated figurative compositions of the art. He argued that foreground. It was only when the land- 'Landscape in its wider sense appeals in scape became the subject of the some degree to most people, and probably foreground space 'as a product of affects all, whether they be aware of it or advancing civilization', that in James's not, yet as a subject for representation or categories we could speak of true interpretation by the artist it comes landscape art. chronologically, comparatively late into its own, and the pictorial treatment appears Both the physical landscape and land- to be the product of advancing civilization. scape art can be described as being In all European art the depiction of land- structured by history. Eric Hirsch, scape remains comparatively primitive approaching the landscape from an long after the artists have attained to a high anthropological perspective, draws a degree of skill in their treatment of the distinction between a 'foreground', as human figure'1 designating the here and now, an actual- His interpretation of what constitutes ity of place, and a 'background', which landscape art is predicated on a struc- falls into the realm of potentiality, the tural analysis of pictorial space. In this horizon and the more abstract under- sense, if a painting can be divided into a standing of space.3 The duality within foreground space and a background the landscape can also be related to the space, then by the Renaissance period, historian Paul Carter's notion of spatial
SASHA GRISHIN 47
history. This can be interpreted as a FIGURE process of claiming through the use of S.T. Gill, 'Spencer's Gulffrom language the foreground actuality and - Flinders Range, August io, 184'6, relating it to the background potentiality. watereoloui; 184 x mm Carter writes 'In the seventy years or so after the First Fleet's arrival, the Australian landscape was mapped—even discovered, since it was not until Flinders circumnavi- gated Australia in 1801-2 that it was established as a discrete and single land mass; the Australian interior was explored, its map-made emptiness written over, criss- crossed with explorer's tracks, gradually Expedition to the north-west'.' On the eve inhabited with a network of names; the of his departure he explained that he was Australian coastal strip, especially between travelling `as an amateur [explorer] for the Great Divide and the sea, was progres- the purpose of filling his note book' and sively furrowed and blazed with on his return he wished `to give a full, boundaries, its estuaries and riverine flats true and accurate report of his adventures pegged out for towns. The discoverers, with... faithful scenic representations.'6 explorers and settlers—and they were often one and the same person—were making Gill's faithful scenic representations spatial history. They were choosing direc- almost invariably cast the human activi- tions, applying names, imagining goals, ties within the foreground space of inhabiting the country.'4 actuality and these are shown against a
Like the discoverers, explorers and distant background of largely unexplored settlers, early Australian landscape potentiality. In the foreground space we artists, (again they were frequently either are presented with the mechanics of the same people as the explorers or at exploration—scenes of making camp, of least travelled with them), claimed the explorers seated around a campfire, of landscape by visually recording it. The surveying the terrain, of meetings with Anglo-Australian artist, S.T. Gill, who had the natives and with the exploits of hunt- arrived in South Australia from ing. The depictions are all annotated with Plymouth in 1839, travelled with the detail inscriptions which chart the exact John Ainsworth Horrocks expedition in location of each scene and with the 1846 in search of suitable grazing land in precise date. These are also cross-refer- the Lake Torrens region. He published enced to the written diary accounts. The his account in the same year in the South foreground space is an actuality which is Australian Gazette and Colonial Register given specificity through word and under the title 'Progress of Discovery-- image, the words record that the image
4 8 ART INTO LANDSCAPES
was done, while the image frequently depictions, not only did Gill's imagery records the veracity of the words. We are have a specific political agenda, but the presented with the visual evidence of landscape conventions of painting which Horrocks shown in the act of exploring he employed, the picturesque, itself and on several occasions the artist carried with it a considerable ideological depicts himself in the act of taking the baggage.8 The landscape which was views. The background deals with the recorded in words and in images was unknown and the unknowable, it is the historically structured and engaged a space outside the known and claimed whole series of competing discourses.
foreground. It is interesting to note that Social geographers have long argued that when Gill recreated these scenes in the `while the contents of landscapes and 185os, after he had shifted to Melbourne, places may be unique, they are nonethe- the foreground narratives remained less the products of common cultural and essentially fixed and unaltered, it was symbolic systems. Intersubjective inten- tangible reality with its own historical tions and experiences may be thought of narrative, while the background was as embodied in the physical environ- something fluid and pointed to the realm ment; and interpretable through a of the imagination. sympathetic reading of its cultural land- While much of the contemporary written scape.'9 In a similar way, a painted account of this exploration deals with landscape is essentially a cultural image encounters with 'hostile natives', it was `a pictorial way of representing or in fact the combination of two props symbolizing surroundings.'1° With brought along by the explorers them- painted landscapes the intersubjective selves, the camel to carry supplies and a intentions also compete with the shot gun, which lead to fatal unravelling discourse of the formal requirements of of the expedition. Horrocks decided to the pictorial conventions employed by shoot a bird as a specimen and while the artist. In nineteenth-century loading his gun for this purpose, the Australian landscape painting, notions of camel lurched unexpectedly and the the picturesque or of the sublime carried weapon accidentally discharged, wound- with them their own repertoire of ing the explorer fatally. In the three painted strategies." weeks which Horrocks spent dying, The pluralism of artistic strategies in amongst his final words he uttered '[Gill] recent twentieth century art has gener- has taken several sketches of this country ally shifted the emphasis from the which will show those interested how representation of the landscape to an very impossible it is that any stations can analysis of the beholder's perception of be made to the west of Lake Torrens.'7 landscape and the analysis of this percep- Despite the truth and accurateness of the tual process. If in the nineteenth century
SASHA GRISHIN 49
the perception of the physical landscape Australian landscape, unlike their prede- became predicated on the viewer recog- cessors, are no longer constrained by the nizing it as such from painted strict representational function of land- examples,12 in much of landscape art of scape art. Three such artists, David the second half of the twentieth century, Blackburn, Mary Husted and John this representational nexus is broken. Wolseley, while all rejecting literalness of The landscape architect Gina Crandell depiction as an end in itself, can be notes 'modern artists no longer produce viewed as exploring three different direc- illusions that attempt to convince us they tions in landscape art within essentially a are natural views. Instead they demand postmodernist context. David Blackburn, that traditional pictorial conventions be who for the past twenty-five years has measured against the actual experiences divided his time between Yorkshire and of the landscape. The focus of modern Australia, has found in the Australian painting is blurred, their aim has turned landscape a metaphor for an inner spiri- 18o degrees, their subject has changed: it tual life, an escape into a visionary is no longer the view 'out there'; instead, landscape tradition. Details found within it is the perceptual experience of the a foreground space are taken out of a spectators themselves. The emphasis is fixed actuality and are projected into the on seeing rather than on what is seen.'" background distance giving them the Once the requirements of the mimetic quality of a changing dream caught role of landscape art had loosened, -within a constant process of metamor- increasingly the artistic focus shifted to phosis. John Wolseley, who settled in the unexplored background potentiality Australia in 1976, has set out to systemati- which could then be shaped as an arma- cally study the workings of nature, the ture to carry a host of personal anxieties. mind of the environment. Through a In British art, Paul Nash, Graham precise empirical investigation of the Sutherland and David Bomberg used this processes of nature, he has sought to landscape of anxiety through which to comment on global changes. Mary graft formal elements drawn from Husted, a Welsh artist, is a relatively Surrealism onto recognizable landscape recent visitor to Australia, who in her elements. In the Australian experience, constructions and installations sets out to the apocalyptic landscapes of early Arthur create her own personal spatial geogra- Boyd, Peter Purves Smith and Russell phy of the Australian landscape. Drysdale, also employed a recognizable The visionary tradition of landscape Australian setting to express personal, as painting, associated with the work of well as broader social anxieties. David Blackburn, may be interpreted as Contemporary British-born artists, who one largely preoccupied with a back- trained in Britain and who tackle the ground potentiality, where anxiety points
50 ART INTO LANDSCAPES
to a path of spiritual escape. While the his twenty-fourth birthday; in June 1962, paintings of late Turner, William Blake David Blackburn arrived in Australia for and Samuel Palmer all contain elements the first time. He had behind him a thor- of this landscape vision, and ultimately ough and somewhat traditional training its general origins may be traced back to from the Huddersfield School of Art and the Northern European Romantic tradi- from London's Royal College of Art. tion of landscape painting and Earlier he had met the Austrian expres- printmaking,'` the visionary landscape sionist artist Gerhardt Frank-117 who had moved in a new direction in the twenti- introduced him to pastels, a medium to eth century when the mandatory links which he subsequently devoted virtually with a representational reality had all of his creative energies. largely disappeared. The three years and a bit which David David Blackburn, an Anglo-Australian Blackburn spent in Australia during his artist,'5 recalled recently: 'I was born in first visit were devoted to matching Huddersfield and remember as a child pictorial schema which he brought with living alongside engineering works him from Britain with the experience of which I perceived as grim, grey and ugly, the Australian reality. At the time, his and yet one could gaze at fields and letters back home were permeated with a woods intensely green across the euphoric enthusiasm for the Australian valley' 16 In a sense this can be inter- landscape and expressed an admiration preted as an awareness and conscious for the exotic scenery and the new quali- rejection of the foreground actuality and ties of light and colour. Although he the search for an escape in the potential- found the new quality of light a revela- ity of the background vision. Just before tion and was struck by the scenery he
Mil RE 2 encountered in Central Australia, on the David Blackburn, 'Pale stones in Nullarbor, in the west and in Queensland, 401;105, pastel, 508 X 6r6'mm, the drawings and prints which he made Private Collection, UK during this period reflected little of this and were essentially dark and almost monochromatic. It was as if he was over- whelmed by the vastness of the background potentiality and working primarily in black chalk, he concentrated on biomorphic studies taken from small precise elements in the very foreground space of nature. The gnarled shape of roots, designs which grasses made on sand, the bark on trees and the brittle
SASHA GRISHIN 51
broken pattern of leaves made up a Australian and European masters, partic- major part of the iconography of his ularly John Glover, Arthur Streeton, Tom first Australian exhibition. The focus was Roberts, Conrad Martens and Louis on minute details which disguised both Buvelot, who themselves were caught in the sense of scale and their relationship the process of interpreting the Australian to the whole. landscape in terms of European visual paradigms including the Claudian vision, The single major series of work to Barbizon naturalism and the 'glare emerge from the three-year period aesthetics' of Orientalism. which David Blackburn spent in Australia was the black pastel twenty-one When David Blackburn returned to panel The Creation series. In a way this Australia five years later in 1971, he found was a juvenile work of high a path through which he could reap- Romanticism, rich in literary allusions proach the Australian landscape. The and drawing on visual sources as diverse crucial factor was his meeting with Fred as Leonardo's drawing of man as the Williams, the Australian landscape measure of all things and William Blake's painter who in his practice introduced haunting image of The Ancient of Days. It the cubist structuring of pictorial space was also a series which grappled with to the Australian landscape. 18 Williams several of the central concerns in his deconstructed the individual elements in oeuvre, that of metamorphosis, polarities nature—rocks, trees, stumps, hillsides of light and darkness, and the question and shrubs; divorced them from the concerning the passage of time. In terms European conventions of constructed of the Australian landscape, it, more than perspectival space, and then reintro- anything else, marked his inability to duced them in startlingly new come to terms with the new forms and configurations on a totally flattened the new light which he encountered and picture plane which rejected the tradi- which so much fascinated him. As was tional divisions between the foreground the case with so many of his fellow coun- and the background. Within this process trymen, on his first visit to Australia, he also rejected notions of European David Blackburn was an Englishman in Picturesque compositions with their search of a familiar setting, but unlike scenic focal point and created a reading them he did not seek out to translate his of the Australian landscape which was surroundings into the terms of an fundamentally featureless, which had a English reality, but sought out details randomness and a breathing ease, and through which he felt he could uncover one which had a strong sense of site- the secret workings of nature in the specific authenticity. Although a number Antipodes. The painters to whom he of David Blackburn's Australian works of turned were essentially the Anglo- 1971-72 reflect closely his fascination 5 2 ART INTO LANDSCAPES
with Fred Williams's vision," this was instance, a drawing may suggest a cliff or essentially a liberating, rather than a a quarry, a flower-head or an oriental cloning experience. bowl, or an estuary seen from the air. The forms dissolve into each other like images David Blackburn's most recent visit to in a film. I am trying to allude to many Australia in 19 95-96, involved his first things rather than simply to describe one serious encounter with Aboriginal art. particular reality The drawings develop Almost as if in a logical progression, if Williams for Blackburn appeared to strip as much from each other as from the the Australian landscape of its visual • landscape itself so that the reality comes irrelevancies and expose its formal struc- as much from my own internal landscape tural elements which could be as from any external topography.' reassembled in accordance with a new If David Blackburn was born essentially artistic schema, Australian Aboriginal into a family with no artistic connections artists exposed the bones of the land- or pretentious and then found his own scape, those elements which were path into the visionary landscape tradi- created at the time of the Dreaming and tion, John Wolseley was born in England which are not subject to change through in 1938 into a family steeped in artistic ephemeral elements such as surface traditions and has spent much of his life vegetation or the changing seasons. For in attempting to repudiate this heritage. Blackburn's work the most significant His father, Garnet Ruskin Wolseley, was a Aboriginal artist was Rover Thomas,2° tonal realist painter, a prize-winning who with his fields of rich subduedcolour Slade School artist, who was part of the and crisp articulated surfaces, created an Newlyn artists' colony, and who was an authentic and convincing reading of the amateur archaeologist who championed Australian landscape. Blackburn's vision- the ideas of John Ruskin and was gener- ary landscapes over the past decade have ally hostile to most manifestations of absorbed the actuality of the foreground modernism. John Wolseley, after a tradi- space into a rich metaphoric vision tional training at Byam Shaw and then at which nevertheless retains the quality of the St Martin's School of Art in London, a sense of place, but one enriched turned his back on tonal realism and through a personal spirituality." immersed himself in post-war Earlier this year he noted 'I try to use the modernism in Paris where he worked for landscape as a metaphor for feelings, to eighteen months with the English use the recognizable outer world as a modernist printmaker, S.W. Hayter at means of giving form to my inner life— Atelier 17. What he shared in common my visions, fantasies, sense of the with his father was an enormous visual spiritual. The fact is that an object or a curiosity, a nomadic predisposition and landscape can have several realities. For the habits of a data-gathering magpie.
SASIIA GRISHIN 53
In an attitude to art most clearly FIGURE 3 expressed in the writings of Leonardo da John Wolseley, 'The dune remains the Vinci, the landscape and nature are not same, only the margins change, considered as static entities which 1992/93, lithograph, e5o x 4[o mm, Private Collection simply exist, but they are viewed as part of a process which is constantly in a state of change and the role of the artist is to try to decipher this process. Leonardo, for example, writing notes to himself about observing sand dunes, noted: `Describe the mountains of 'flexible dry things'. Treat that is of the formation of the waves of sand borne by the wind, and of its hillocks and hills as it occurs in through several strata of sand and Libya; you may see examples in the great revealed hidden layers of great anti- sand banks of the Po and the Ticino and quity say a thousand year old camp of other large rivers.' In another place he the Wanganuru people. Or revealed the noted 'If the earth of the antipodes which geography of an older dune system which sustains the ocean rose up and stood in turn may cover the fossilized remains uncovered far out of this sea but being of a Pleistocene forest. I have been look- almost flat, how in process of time could ing upon these layered 'archaeologies', mountains, valleys and rocks with their these gold and red piles of different histo- different strata be created? The mud or ries and systems as a metaphor for the sand from which the water drains off human psyche; the way each of us could when they are left uncovered after the be seen as a walking many-layered world floods of the rivers supplies an answer to of passions, ancestral memories, neuroses, this question...... 2 Exactly five hundred genetic patterns and ancient arche :23 years later, John Wolseley was to revisit similar themes. In 19 93 he observed: 'I The American geographer, John Kirtland have been trying to understand sand Wright, coined the term `Geopiety' which dunes their layering, their rhythms and married the Greek root for 'earth' with movements and their cyclic develop- the Latin 'piety', as an expression of ments which have the structure and reverence for the earth and the planet.24 elegance of a complex mathematical Yi Fu Tuan has extended this meaning to theory. Often I have been camped in the include `the compassionate urge to swale of some huge longitudinal dune protect the fragile beauty and goodness and during the night, the wind from of life against its enemies, not the least of some unusual quarter has quarried down which is time.'25 John Wolseley's attitude 54 ART INTO LANDSCAPES
to the environment can be seen to fall ment, John Wolseley's art engages with within the broad parameters of geopiety. conservation issues and tackles the He seeks not only to empirically observe forestry industry giants and their sense- and record the landscape, but also to less destruction of the Australian native actively interact with it. He noted forests. Although his work celebrates the recently 'When leaving a favourite place timeless scribblings of glaciers, it also I have been in the habit of making a refers to the anxiety of vanishing spaces. drawing and burying it by my camp... He writes in a catalogue `I have several I will usually return a year or two later. times returned to a site to finish a paint- One half of the drawing is still preserved ing and found my gaze meets earth pristine in my portfolio, but the part I ravaged and denuded. Often there are exhume maybe changed in the most rows of partly burnt debris and the area varied and mysterious ways according has been scorched, ploughed or ripped.'28 to the habitat. Waves of colour, stains, When Mary Husted first came to crystalline mosaics, specklings, Australia in 1989, it was not so much with dapplings, all hint at unknown agencies. a feeling that she had been here before, There are traces of unseen movements but with an overwhelming sensation that and events which fall through the sand she had arrived into a landscape which above the drawing as it lies in its silent she could traverse and claim as a resting place.'26 personal topography, a landscape through In the last few years John Wolseley has which she could establish her own iden- been concerned with tracing the break- tity Born in Leicester in England in 1944, up of the supercontinent of Gondwana as as the second of two twins, her mother it drifted apart into the continents of died at childbirth apparently having seen Australia, South America, Antarctica, the first daughter, Roma, but not Mary. Africa and India. By examining in great Questions of her identity, her relation- detail the tiny spores, pollen, seedpods ship to her mother, whom she never and lichen in Tasmania and Patagonia, he knew, and to her aunt who brought her establishes, what Paul Carter refers to in up, and to her Welsh and English ances- his essay 'The Anxiety of Clearings', the try, have been central to her life and art. feeling that of 'an uncanny sense of Like David Blackburn and John Wolseley, the natural landscape, ever since her having been here before.' 27 The details of childhood, has been a place of refuge and the foreground space, gathered with an escape, a place where one could both lose empirical accuracy, form a microcosm oneself and find oneself. through which to tackle the potentiality of the macrocosm. While tracing the Her constructed black boxes of land- move-ment of continents based on scape, like little islands of spatial anxiety evidence left within a fragile environ- surrounded by mirrors, convert the
SASHA GRISHIN 55
viewer into a voyeur, who is invited to making, Marcel Duchamp, somewhat peer into ambiguous spaces which are secretively, in a studio loft in New York loaded with visual clues. No matter how spent the last two decades of his life, from persistent the inquirer, the palimpsest 1946 to 1966, working on an installation which she builds up in her work does not landscape to which he gave the title permit a rational decipherment, the ttant Donne's: I) la chute d'eau, 2) le gaz enigma of identity and questions d'eclairage...'29 Now housed in the concerning the nature of the landscape Philadelphia Museum of Art, it is one of experience are forever present and the most famous and enigmatic works in remain unanswered. She creates a the entire history of twentieth-century labyrinth of associations and a series of art. No matter how closely one peers physical visual hurdles which the through the pair of holes in the weath- beholder needs to overcome to enter into ered wooden Spanish door, framed by a her constructed landscape spaces. brick archway, the image remains myste-
After the world at large was convinced rious and partly concealed. In the that the artist had retired from active art background there is a flowering garden of fecundity which is reproduced in the FIGURE 4 slightly garish colours resembling a Mary Husted, 'To some extent shared', cheap 193os picture postcard. The focal (detail)107, mixed media, collage on point of the background is a kinetic board with glass, r86o x 750 mm, waterfall, which appears almost like an Private Collection, UK ART INTO LANDSCAPES
abstracted and unattainable image of a unlike Duchamp who claimed that there heavenly utopia. It is a landscape of was no solution as there was no problem, fantasies and potentiality In the fore- Mary Husted's compositions point to a set ground, seen through a gap crudely of questions and propose solutions, but in punched out of a brick wall, lies a naked each instance vital elements in this woman's torso with erotically splayed out jigsaw are missing. The landscape which legs. She.is cast against an autumnal she constructs is both real and tangible, setting, which is barren and desolate, the but it is encoded as a personal topogra- branches are bare and prickly The poten- phy. Within this landscape she has tial for the voyeuristic pleasure of the experience is subverted by the sensation created her own spatial forms and idio- that we are witnessing a scene of syncratic fantasies, through this violence and violation. Yet no matter how symbolizing both her surroundings and intently we peer through the tiny aper- her imagined place within them. tures, we can never catch a glimpse of the Photographic images of herself as a child, woman's face, the sole clue as to her iden- her sister, mother and aunt, in some tity is the lock of blond hair which pieces are collaged into the darkened somewhat carelessly lies near her bosom. surfaces and are combined with trophies The reading of this foregrOund space, the from nature, leaves, twigs and feathers, traditional specificity of the here and themselves encoded symbols of a myste- now actuality as a scene of carnage or rious landscape. human sacrifice, is complicated by the fact that the nude is shown holding a Physical landscapes, landscapes of the burning lantern which illuminates the mind and landscapes in art are all struc- space, almost in a gesture of triumph or tured by history, are all, in one sense or defiance. Duchamp casts a set of clues another, cultural images which represent which automatically engage the and symbolize their surroundings. beholder, but which in their nature SASHA GRISHIN are irreconcilable. Sasha Grishin is a Reader Mary Husted's small installed landscapes in ,the Department of Art History, conceptually relate to the formal strate- ANU and is curator of the exhibition gies employed by Duchamp, however New Australian Images through British their intent and purpose are different. Eyes: David Blackburn, Mary Husted and Her boxes of memory create a deceptive John Wolseley which will open at the ANU space (where the sense of ambiguity is Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra on September heightened through the use of mirrors) and will continue until October s, 1-997. and where the cryptic clues refuse to point to accessible solutions. However, SASHA GRISHIN 57
REFERENCES 9 Peter Jackson and Susan J. Smith, 1 Walter J. James, 'The development of Exploring Social Geography, Allen and modern landscape', in Charlton Unwin, London 1984, PP 43-44 Lectures on Art, Clarendon Press, 10 S. Daniels and D. Cosgrove (eds.), The Oxford 1925, p II Iconography of Landscape: Essays on 2 Ibid., p 13 symbolic representation, design and use of past environments, Cambridge 3 Eric Hirsch 'Introduction', in Eric University Press, Cambridge 1988, p Hirsch and Michael O'Hanlon (eds.) The Anthropology of Landscape: 11 Tim Bonyhady, Images in Opposition: Perspectives on place and space, Australian landscape painting 18o1- Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995, p 4 1890, Oxford University Press, Melbourne 1985 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: 12 An essay in spatial history, Faber and Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural Faber, London 1987, pp xx-xxi World: Changing attitudes in England 15oo-1800, Penguin, Harmondsworth 5 Keith Macrae Bowden, Samuel 1984 Thomas Gill Artist, Hedges and Bell, 13 Maryborough 1971, p114 Gina Crandell, Nature Pictorialized: The view' in landscape history, Johns 6 South Australian Register, 4 July 1846, Hopkins University Press, Baltimore p 2d and South Australian Register, 15 1993, p. 161 July 1846, 3e, both quoted in Ron 14 Appleyard et al. S.T. Gill: The South Robert Rosenblum, Modern Painting Australian years 1839-1852, Art and the Northern Romantic Tradition, Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Thames and Hudson, London 1975; Keith Hartley (ed.) The Romantic 1986, p 86; Sasha Grishin, `S.T. Gill: Spirit in German Art 1790-1990, Defining a landscape', Voices, vol 2/4 Scottish National Gallery/Hayward (1992-93), PP 5-19 Gallery, London 1994 Bowden, op. cit., p 17 15 David Blackburn was born in 8 For example, see Ann Bermingham, Huddersfield in Yorkshire in 1939 and Landscape and Ideology: The English has lived for seven prolonged periods rustic tradition,170-1 860, University in Australia between 1963-66; 1971- of California Press, Berkeley 1986, pp 72; 1973-74; 1977-78; 198o-81; 1984 57-85; John Barrel!, The Dark Side of and 1995-96. He is included as an the Landscape: The rural poor in Australian artist in all editions of English painting 1730-1840, McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Cambridge University Press, Australian Art. See for example Alan Cambridge 198o 5 8 ART INTO LANDSCAPES
and Susan McCulloch, The Sedimentary Prints from the Simpson Encyclopedia of Australian Art, third Desert by John Wolseley, Rex Irwin, edition, Allen and Unwin, St Leonards Sydney 1993 np.
1994, P92 24 John K. Wright, Human Nature in 16 David Blackburn, artist's statement Geography, Harvard University Press, April 1997. Cambridge, Ma., 1966, pp 250-85
17 Gerhardt Frankl (1901-65) 25 Yi-Fu Tuan, `Geopiety: A theme in 18 James Mollison,A Singular Vision: man's attachment to nature and place', The art of Fred Williams, Australian in David Lowenthal and Martyn J. National Gallery Canberra 1989; Bowden (eds.) Geographies of the Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams Mind: Essays in historical geosophy, 1927-1982, Bay Books, Sydney 1987 Oxford University Press, New York
19 Sasha Grishin, David Blackburn and 1976,1334 the Visionary Landscape Tradition, 26 John Wolseley, artist's statement in To Hart Gallery London 11994 p 22ff. the Surface: Contemporary landscape,
20 Wally Caruana,AboriginalArt, Plimsoll Gallery Centre for the Arts, Thames and Hudson, London 1973, Hobart 1993, p 29 p 164 ff.;Rover Thomas et al, Roads 27 Paul Carter, 'The Anxiety of Clearings', Cross: The paintings ofRover Thomas, in exhibition catalogue John Wolseley: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Patagonia to Tasmania: Origin '994 movement species tracing the southern 21 David Blackburn, artist's statement, continents, Queen Victoria Museum April 1997 and Art Gallery/University of Melbourne, Melbourne 1996, np. 22 Edward MacCurdy, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci: Arranged, 28 John Wolseley, 'Endnote ... and a rendered into English and introduced, conclusion? A conversation between vol i, Jonathan Cape, London 1958 John Wolseley and Tim Cadman', in [1938], pp 346, 295 Ibid., np
23 John Wolseley, artist's statement in 29 In English: 'Given: I) the waterfall, 2) catalogue Paintings, Lithographs and the illuminating gas...'