THESES SIS/LIBRARY TELEPHONE: +61 2 6125 4631 R.G. MENZIES LIBRARY BUILDING NO:2 FACSIMILE: +61 2 6125 4063 THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY EMAIL: [email protected] CANBERRA ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA USE OF THESES This copy is supplied for purposes of private study and research only. Passages from the thesis may not be copied or closely paraphrased without the written consent of the author. Melancholic attachments: the making and medicalisation of Aboriginal 'loss' by Christine Adams A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University November 2005 Declaration I hereby declare that this is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material previously published or written by another person nor material which to a substantial extent has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma of a university or institute of higher learning, except where due acknowledgment is made in the text of the thesis. I hereby also certify that the work contained in this thesis has not been submitted for a higher degree to any other university or institution. Christine Adams November 2005 Acknowledgments The complexities of conducting research on matters related to Aboriginal health mean that I am indebted to a number of people for their assistance across the time-span of this project. My deepest gratitude is first and foremost extended to the staff, clients and affiliates of Winnunga Nimmityj ah Aboriginal health service in Canberra, who readily shared their stories and a portion of their lives with me. I pay particular tribute to the service's Chief Executive Officer, identified in this thesis as 'Kerri', for her advocacy, humour, friendship, and directness, which opened doors as well as my eyes. I was extremely fortunate to share the journey of this thesis with an excellent supervisory panel. Margot Lyon's incisive intellectual vision was a consistent source of inspiration and motivation. From the humble beginnings of this project, Maggie Brady acted as a patient listener, advocate and mentor. During the trial by fire posed by the circuitous process of ethical clearance, Ian Anderson not only tolerated my naivete, but fired my enthusiasm, convincing me of the value of this undertaking. And at those times when details threatened to become all-engulfing, Francesca Merlan could be relied upon to astutely reorient me towards larger frames of analysis. In the preliminary stages of fieldwork, the guidance of Ian Keen, Bev Sibthorpe and Tom Brideson was invaluable. I have also greatly benefited from and enjoyed conversations with Nie Peterson, Tim Rowse, Stephen Wilde, and John Morton. I very much appreciated the office space and resources provided to me by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) during 1999 and 2000. Thanks are due to library staff at both AIATSIS and the Melbourne Transcultural Mental Health Unit, in particular Lorraine. VI As is often the case, the process of thesis writing extended over a much longer·period than originally imagined and certainly hoped. A number of friends and colleagues helped to preserve my sanity. Special thanks to Sallie Anderson, Janet Aitken, Rachel Eggleton, Diana Glazebrook, Faiza Janmohammed, Leonie and Paul Keal, Doris Kordes, Heather Martinson, Karen van den Broek, and Cate Timothy. I pay a special tribute to my mother for her remarkable emotional and practical support and for cultivating in me the qualities of perseverance and determination. I dedicate this thesis to her and to Bruce and Joschka Koepke, with heartfelt thanks for the manifold gifts they have brought to my life. Abstract This thesis examines the loss of Aboriginal Australians as both an embodied experience and a powerful form of identity-construction. The focus of research is on southeast Australia where Aboriginal people, having suffered profound and often violent dispossession and state-authorised intrusion into their lives and communities, have been consistently defined in terms of their 'loss' of those .. qualitiesseento constitute.'authentic'Aboriginality.I-showhowAborigineshave·· · taken up and interacted with these dominant ascriptions of their identity such that the experience of loss has become a constitutive quality of Aboriginality in southern Australia, a pivotal basis of identification in public and political arenas. Further, I demonstrate how Aborigines' experience of loss has been reframed in dialectic with dominant forms of knowledge in changing socio-political milieux. In particular, I contend that in the last decades of the twentieth century, Aboriginal loss has been subsumed and redefined within the categories of psychology and psychiatry. I argue that this psychologisation of Aboriginal experience has significant ramifications in terms of how Aborigines are known and come to know themselves. Table of Contents Page Declaration 111 Acknowledgments v Abstract VII List of Maps xi Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Chapter 2 The terms of engagement 7 Chapter 3 Internalising loss in the 'post-colonial' state 35 Chapter4 Psychiatry and the colonial state 83 Chapter 5 The trauma of loss 131 Chapter 6 'Being Aboriginal' in the nation's capital 187 Chapter 7 Re-presenting 'Aboriginality' in the ACT 225 Chapter 8 A community of suffering 275 x Chapter 9 Conclusion 321 Maps 331 Appendix 1 Staff & services Winnunga Nimmityjah AHS 1999-2001 345 Appendix2 Staff affiliations, Winnunga Nimmityjah AHS 1999-2001 349 Bibliography 351 List of maps Map 1: Australia 331 Map 2: The greater ACT region 333 Map 3: Tindale's tribal boundaries, southeast NSW 335 Map 4: Language groups ofNSW 337 Map 5: The three Ngun(n)awal countries 339 Map 6: Southern Gulf of Carpentaria region 341 Map 7: Linguistic territories, Gulf of Carpentaria 343 1 Introduction There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss ofone's native land Euripides 431 BC (cited in Foley 2003) This thesis is concerned with the loss of Aboriginal Australians. I posit that this endemic state of being arises out of the interplay of two distinctive, but interactive trajectories: that of discourse and that of experience. In this thesis, I elucidate how the experience of loss pervasive in Aboriginal lives is rooted in their collective history of dispossession and dislocation and is continually reinforced by their marginal social-structural position in Australian society at large. However, I also argue that Aborigines' 'loss' is a social construction. This analysis explicates Aboriginal 'loss' as a concept, which although plainly grounded in material reality, has arisen, been accentuated and subsequently re­ interpreted in certain historical contexts. In ensuing chapters, it will become evident that in specific socio-political milieu, 'loss' has come to function as a powerful form of classification that has generated and shaped a particular kind of 'Aboriginality' (see Hacking 1995). Aboriginal loss can thus be seen to be both a somatic state and an influential type of identity-construction. Indeed, I propose that while 'loss' was once primarily imputed to 'deculturated', 'hybrid' Aborigines, an ascription that is manifestly entangled in the myths and economics 2 Chapter One of the (post-)colonial nation (see Macdonald 2001), in late-modern Australia, it has increasingly become a potent basis of the subjecthood and subjectivities of all Aboriginal people. This thesis is founded, therefore, on the premise that ideas and experience are inter-related and mutually constitutive. I suggest that while embedded in existential reality, 'Aboriginal loss' is a constructed form of knowledge that interacts with the subjective and bodily experience of Aboriginal persons (see Lyon 1996:69). Furthermore, I contend that this notion or category is itself shaped, consolidated and/or challenged by the responses of its Aboriginal subjects. A dynamic relationship, what Hacking (1999) terms an 'interactive looping', thus exists between Aboriginal people and the forms of classification through which they have become known and come to know themselves. Countering notions of a linear imposition of knowledge-categories upon passive subjects, this thesis explicates how (some) Aboriginal people have actively and variously engaged with and reworked their ascribed subjecthood of loss as a compelling means of representing their (dis)position in the (post-)colonial state. The predicament of Aborigines in 'settled Australia' is the primary focus of this thesis. 1 I posit that in this geographical region of intensive colonial 'settlement', the sense of loss pervasive although differentially experienced by Aborigines across the continent is especially pronounced. Aborigines in the southeast suffered early, severe and often violent dispossession and more than a century of intensive state-authorised intrusion and disruption of their lives. I propose, however, that the feeling of loss experienced by southern Aborigines has been further heightened by hegemonic discourses and practices that assign them to a socially and politically ambiguous realm. Caught between the simultaneous attributions of 'hybridity' and 'culturelessness', these liminal persons are delegitimated by their 'loss' of land and tradition, while remaining tainted and perennially marginalised by their residual 'blackness' (see Anderson 1997b). In post-colonial Australia, the majority of Anglo- and Aboriginal Australians co-exist in the towns and cities of the southeast.2 'Authentic' Aboriginality, however, remains located 'elsewhere',