Irruptions of the Dreamings in Post‐Colonial Australia

This essay is written round four ‘funny stories’ from Northern Australia. Metamorphosis instigated by a Dreaming is central to all four stories and this is why the stories are counted as ‘funny,’ and received with glee. The analysis illuminates a topic that has been attracting attention in recent contributions to Aboriginal ethnography: how Dreamings irrupt into contemporary histories and act in ways that have political significance, contesting whitefella paradigms and re‐asserting the world‐view of the original Australians.     

Timeline History and the Anzac Myth: Settler Narratives of Local History in a North Australian Town

This paper explores rural Australian settler historical narratives through an examination of the landscape of public history in the northwestern Queensland city of Mount Isa. In various sites of public history, including the city's 75th anniversary festivities, tourism sites, and popular historical literature, certain narrative themes are predominant. Themes of ‘discoverers’, ‘firsts’, and ‘pioneers’ coalesce into a ‘timeline’ approach to history, in which the past is ordered sequentially in a linear pattern of development and progress. Aboriginal people are incorporated into linear histories in various ways, notably through the concept of ‘the last of the tribe’, which separates an aboriginal past from a European, colonial present and presumes colonial authority to be effectively established. Aboriginal people, particularly the Kalkadoon, are also incorporated within a second narrative tradition, the Anzac legend, for their heroic, desperate and failed battle in 1884 against European invaders. Aboriginal leaders in Mount Isa use these settler narrative traditions to advance native title claims and to create a respected public space for Aboriginal people in the city. In short, settler historical narratives, while being conservative in language, are continually being reshaped and metaphorically extended to new contexts, and are mobilized for both conservative and critical political agendas..     

Anthropology,Self-determination and Aboriginal Belief in the Christian God

Over the past forty years the Aboriginal people of Galiwin'ku (Elcho Island) in north-east Arnhem Land have successfully incorporated Christianity into their world view. However, a Uniting Church report characterises members of this same Yolngu (Aboriginal) community as being overwhelmed with feelings of inferiority and powerlessness and unable to function within structures established by Balanda (non-Aborigines). This paper contrasts the ways in which Christianity has helped break down the separation between cultural groups with its function as a structure for explicit discourse on Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations and inequality. While some Elcho Islanders see anthropologists as people who listen in order to work for Aborigines, Aboriginal Christians see them and other ‘scientists’ as attempting to undermine Aboriginal belief in the Christian God. They are seen as degrading a spiritual movement which has its foundation in the Dreaming and as posing a potential threat to the momentum of Aboriginal directed change in the community.     

Whitewash: white privilege and racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia

This paper examines racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia to better understand the ways that whiteness—or more specifically white privilege—is positioned in and uses landscapes. Given a history of segregation, violently contested desegregation, and a contemporary student body that is disproportionately white (compared to the population of the entire state of Georgia), we investigate the meanings and contradictions of the University's historic ‘North Campus’. Using a multi-method qualitative approach—including open-ended interviews and ‘roving focus groups’—we argue that privileged, white landscapes operate through a kind of whitewashing of history, which seeks to deploy race strategically to create a progressive landscape narrative pertaining to ‘race’.     

Whose Ethics? Which Cultural Contract? Imagining Arrernte Traditions Today

The paper uses an account of ‘tradition’ by the philosopher, Alisdair MacIntyre, to argue for the view that local Aboriginal culture that has been through extensive change is nonetheless still specifying for the Aboriginal people involved. Therefore these local traditions must be taken into account in discussions about ‘contracts’ or ‘policies’ concerning Aboriginal people today. An example is drawn from the Lutheran tradition of Western Arrernte people in Central Australia.     

The Green Frog and Desalination: A Nyungar Metaphor for the (Mis‐)Management of Water Resources,Swan Coastal Plain,Western Australia

ABSTRACT In common with Aboriginal groups around Australia, the indigenous people, or Nyungars, of Perth adopt a holistic attitude towards groundwater resources. Of cultural significance are lakes, springs, soaks and watercourses that feature in Dreamtime creation narratives. Perth is experiencing major water shortages and many Nyungars feel that the degradation of the freshwater supply is a result of mismanagement and unsustainable development by non‐Aboriginal people. Proposals for dealing with the issue are seen as equally out of balance with the natural order of things. Water regulators have much to learn from indigenous Australians about water and environmental management. Although water continues to be central to Nyungar identity, the study on which this article is based found evidence of attenuated knowledge about the Dreaming, with discontinuities evident in the way significance is increasingly being read in everyplace rather than in specific ‘story places’.     

What Remains? Reconciling Repatriation,Aboriginal Culture,Representation and the Past

ABSTRACT This paper uses the repatriation and ceremonial reburial of Indigenous remains to La Perouse, an Indigenous community in Sydney, as a lens through which to examine the cultural politics of representation and recognition that are central to contemporary Aboriginal identity construction. The return of the skeletal remains of 21 individuals highlights the role that representative bodies — past and present, individual and organizational — play in engagements between the State and Aboriginal people. Heralded by some as a sincere sign of reconciliation and treated as suspect and misguided by others, the reburial produced diverse responses from both Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people alike. Speakers at the repatriation focused on righting the wrongs of the past, reconciliation, and moving forward in cooperation, suggesting the redemptive significance of these events. Among Kooris at La Perouse, debates about community, representation, and belonging expose the ways that Aboriginal people and communities operate through, against, and beyond ‘whitefella’ structures of recognition to define who they are and what their culture is.     

(Post)Colonial [1] Encounters: gendered racialisations in Australian courtrooms [2]

This article identifies how the Australian legal system has generated knowledge about ‘traditional’ gender relations in Aboriginal Australia. Using a sample of artefact cases from the Australian judicial system, constructions of Aboriginal gender relations are mapped. By tracing knowledge production in these cases, it demonstrates how the non-Aboriginal Australian legal system has fabricated its own versions of ‘Aboriginal Customary Laws’, or Aboriginal ‘traditions’ about violence committed by Aboriginal men, against Aboriginal women. (Post)colonial understandings about the Aboriginal ‘other’ have occupied spaces in legal understandings and then been enforced in law. The Australian judicial system itself is therefore guilty of perpetuating and privileging the ‘colonial’ in these encounters.     

Orality and the reception of late Byzantine vernacular literature

Abstract

The starting point for this paper is the belief that orality has to be understood in a wider sense than is given to the term by the oral-formulaic theory of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. This is the more important when the field of study is medieval or modern Greece, societies far removed from what Walter Ong (1982: 31–75) has termed the ‘primary orality’ of a culture from which writing is absent. The oral formulaic theory, although excellent as a tool for the analysis of materials actually transcribed from oral performance, has come to be seen in the last fifteen years or so as an unwieldy and often unreliable yardstick for assessing the interaction of oral and written types of discourse. The insistence of the theory that for a text to be considered oral, the three processes of composition, performance and transmission should be simultaneous, imposes a definition of orality which is unjustifiably restrictive, and despite the well-intentioned efforts of Albert Lord and others to address the problem of the ‘transitional’ text, the method of analysis developed through close study of one particular oral tradition in Yugoslavia has proved disappointingly inflexible in its attempt to account for texts which are neither, according to its own definitions, truly oral nor fully literary (cf. Beaton 1987).     

Ecofeminism and First Nations Peoples in Canada: Linking culture,gender and nature

Many ecofeminists see women's subordination as a result of linking women with nature. Thus one of their tasks has been to unravel the underlying dualistic structure of the categories ‘women’ and ‘nature’ and to argue for a reconceptualization of these categories. However, there exist amongst ecofeminists epistemological differences pertaining to the ways in which the women–nature connection should be addressed. Spiritual ecofeminists argue that the connection between women and nature is worth reclaiming and celebrating. In contrast, social ecofeminists contend that the connection represents a patriarchal artifice that reinforces oppression. In support of both perspectives, ‘Western’ ecofeminists have invoked the cultural beliefs and histories of Aboriginal peoples. Such use of Aboriginal beliefs and experiences within much of Western ecofeminist discourses is partial and uninformed. In this article an alternative approach is offered—one that emphasizes the importance of listening to Aboriginal voices describing contemporary connections to nature. Aboriginal voices are presented in the context of in-depth interviews conducted with Anishinabek (Ojibway and Odawa peoples) living in one First Nations community and three cities in Ontario, Canada. The interviews highlight the importance of listening to Anishinabek describe their connections to Mother Earth (nature) as they reveal counter-narratives that offer the potential to reconcile spiritual and social ecofeminism and to reconceptualize nature (Mother Earth) as an active and dynamic agent. Such counter-narratives may improve current understandings of gender–nature connections within Western ecofeminisms.     

‘Narratives of Survival in the Post-Colonial North’

Scholars have recently paid more attention to narratives of colonial contact in Australia, as elsewhere (cf. Hill 1988). Western elements and characters (such as Captain Cook) have been widely documented in Australian Aboriginal narratives which nevertheless are clearly not close accounts of past events. This has promoted reconsideration of the distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘history‘. If we follow Turner's (1988) suggestion that myth is the formulation of ‘essential’ properties of social experience in terms of ‘generic events‘, while ‘history’ is concerned with the level of ‘particular relations among particular events’, we need not restrict ourselves to seeing myth as charter for a social order distinct from western influence. In the paper I examine two stories of cultural and physical survival from the Katherine area, Northern Territory, and seek to identify in them fundamental themes and enduring narrative precipitates of social experience lived in intense awareness of colonial and post-colonial relationships between Aborigines and whites.     

Ways of Whiteness: Harlemising Sydney’s Aboriginal Redfern

The inner Sydney Aboriginal settlement known as The Block has been monitored by police, the media and welfare organisations since its inception in the early 1970s. The Block is the subject of an ongoing commentary, a ‘discourse of decline’ about a place that is commonly considered to be Australia's own Harlem‐like ‘black ghetto’. In stark contrast, the predominantly non‐Aboriginal suburbs of Darlington, Redfern and Chippendale, which surround The Block, are undergoing gentrification. Within this zone of gentrification there are complex and seemingly confused responses to the presence of The Block. The responses challenge and/or embellish the official (‘white’) narrative that The Block is imploding in a sea of drugs, crime and cultural inferiority.     

Truth-Telling in the Wake of European Contact: Historical Investigation of Aboriginal Skeletal Remains from Normanton

This study heeds the call for a ‘truth-telling’ of injustices carried out on Aboriginal communities during the colonial acquisition of Australia as stated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart 2017. Here, we discuss the lives of eight Indigenous people buried in Normanton in north-west Queensland (QLD) who died and had their remains collected in the late 1890s as scientific specimens. The remains were later repatriated to the community before being further exposed by erosion in 2015. With the consent and participation of local traditional owners—the Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people—this assessment utilised bioarchaeological, historical and anthropological methodologies to gain a better understanding of Indigenous life and health on the Australian colonial frontier. Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people were engaged throughout the investigation, and statements throughout this piece made by them illustrate how bioarchaeology can inform on past injustices in Australia’s history, bringing them into the public consciousness and aiding the transition to reconciliation through ‘truth-telling’.     

The tourist landscape paradox

This paper is about tourist practices of landscape. Landscape has long been a key reference point in the construction of tourist imaginaries and, to this day, plays an important role in tourists' experience of travelling and their encounters with Otherness. Yet the ambivalent ways in which tourists conceptualize landscape is inherently paradoxical; indeed, it is by travelling that tourists try to overcome the tension produced by such a paradox. Putting into practice two alternative conceptions of landscape at once—a ‘Vidalian’ landscape-as-essence and a ‘Cosgrovian’ landscape as ‘way of seeing’—the tourist inevitably falls into an intriguing epistemological trap. Tourists' embodiment of the landscape experience becomes an attempt to evade that trap. In this paper, I note how this is exemplified in the ways in which tourist rhetoric frames the idea of Morocco and, in particular, the Jamaa el Fna square in Marrakech, the most ‘landscaped’ (and photographed) tourist site in the Maghreb. To help unpack this paradox, I take a brief look at what tourists actually do in the Jamaa el Fna, in order to reproduce, in place, their landscape-driven idea of Moroccan cultural space. The spatial practices of most tourists in that iconic place reveal, indeed, that the landscape paradox that drives tourist readings of the Jamaa el Fna cannot be avoided, but only endlessly performed, for this paradox is constitutive of the very formation of the Modern travelling European subject.     

Salutary Lessons: Native Police and the ‘Civilising’ Role of Legalised Violence in Colonial Australia

Over much of the nineteenth century, recurring problems of covert and opportunistic conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples produced considerable debate across the British settler world about how frontier violence could be legally curbed. At the same time, the difficulty of imposing a rule of law on new frontiers was often seen by colonial states as justification for the imposition of order through force. Examining all the mainland Australian colonies from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, this paper asks how this contradictory dilemma played out through deployment of ‘native police’ and the ‘civilising’ role of legalised violence as a strategy for managing the settler frontier. In light of wider debate about a humanely administered empire, Australia’s first native police force established in New South Wales in 1837 was conceived as a measure that would assist in the conciliation and ‘amelioration’ of Aboriginal people. In the coming decades, other Australian colonies employed native police either as dedicated forces or as individual assistants attached to mounted police detachments. Over time, the capacity they held to impose extreme violence on Aboriginal populations in the service of protecting pastoral investments came to reflect an implicit acceptance that punitive measures were required to bring order to disorderly frontiers.

By tracing a gradual shift in the perceived role of native police from one of ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people to one of ‘civilising’ the settler state itself, this paper draws out some of the conditions under which state-sanctioned force became naturalised and legitimated. It concludes that, as an instrument of frontier management, native policing reflected an enduring problem for Australia’s colonial governments in reconciling a legal obligation to treat Aboriginal people as subjects of the crown with a perceived requirement to bring them under colonial authority through the ‘salutary lessons’ of legalised violence.     

Is the Aboriginal Landscape Sentient? Animism,the New Animism and the Warlpiri

ABSTRACT It is now commonplace for some anthropologists, and others, to say that for Aboriginal Australians in the remote regions, the landscape is ‘sentient’, however, what that means is not always clear. Are the anthropologists using this term metaphorically or do they understand Aboriginal people to be animists? The ‘new animists' have no doubt that the anthropologists are describing what they call the ‘new animism’. Much of this literature refers to the Warlpiri or their near neighbours. Here I examine the evidence for whether Warlpiri speakers are animists.     

Kinship,Organisations and ‘wannabes’: Aboriginal Identity Negotiation in South‐western Sydney

ABSTRACT This paper explores the ambiguous and dynamic nature of Aboriginal identity in south‐western Sydney. While for most of the Aboriginal people in rural and remote areas, identity has been primarily a matter of kinship ties associated with their perceived place of origin, Aboriginal people often recognize each other as Aboriginal by sharing and recognizing certain ‘Aboriginal’ cultural mores and traits. These two principles of identity are flexible enough to be extended to those who are not raised in an Aboriginal family environment; one meeting with their Aboriginal family is a minimum requirement. In south‐western Sydney, where organizations dealing with Aboriginal issues provide ways of connecting Aboriginal people from various backgrounds, in line with the government's homogenized notion of Aboriginality, Aboriginal people from Aboriginal family environments encounter those who cannot even meet this compromised criterion. Their presence gives rise to tension and conflict revolving around the concept of Aboriginality. Aboriginal cultural values that emphasize actual engagement provide ways of overcoming such dilemmas. Through common participation in the activities of the aforesaid organisations, Aboriginal people in south‐western Sydney develop a new sense of ‘Aboriginality’, which embraces those who cannot claim kinship ties.     

The Politico‐Historical construction of the Pintupi Luritja and the Concept of Tribe

This paper explores the history of the emergence of Pintupi Luritja as the dominant language in the Central Australian community of Amunturrngu (Mt Liebig), traced from the people's first encounters with settlement in the 1940s at Haasts Bluff, through to the present. It is a political history, as movement toward settlement demanded a re‐structuring of social relations within a newly settled polity. To elaborate on this polity I examine the concept of a language community through the construction of Pintupi Luritja as a ‘communilect’. The development of this communilect as a lingua franca in these early settlements signals the value of the original term ‘Luritja’ as a trope. The meaning of this original Indigenous term is not only indicative of the regional history, but also of the flexible potential in group formation. The pattern of contact and settlement in this Pintupi Luritja region has compelled a socio‐linguistic re‐configuration, lending a currency to the label Pintupi Luritja that suggests a modern, firmed up, ‘tribe’. This tribe is a ‘secondary phenomenon’ formed through the manipulation of relatively unstructured populations — stateless societies — by the colonial State (Fried 1975). At issue here is the inter‐cultural aspect of this language formation that is the elemental process in the creation of this ‘new’ social formation.     

‘Tomorrow comes when tomorrow comes’: Managing Aboriginal Health within an Ontology of Life‐as‐Contingent

ABSTRACT The authors have worked in Australian Aboriginal communities within the Wiradjuri area of central‐western New South Wales. Examining what appear to be distinctive Aboriginal approaches to time, we argue that these stem not from a different notion of time as such but, rather, from the relationship between the social and the self which places a distinctive value on the use and management of time. One way to access the dynamic between time and self is to realise that life is understood as fluid and contingent rather than predictable. This continually subverts the idea that time is measurable and controllable; that life is lived within domesticated sedentary space; and that planning ahead and self‐discipline are virtues. Yet these are notions central to practices associated with contemporary health care. A majority of health care providers, whether Aboriginal or not, are trained in the Australian mainstream health system and may consequently underestimate the implications of different ways in which a person acts on the temporal/spatial dimensions of her life, and how this influences ways in which she manages time in relation to her health and well‐being. Temporal concepts, such as ‘planning’, ‘discipline’, ‘future’, ‘boredom’, or ‘patience’, as well as that of the ‘long‐term’ with regard to managing illness or money, interact with the ways in which Aboriginal people experience themselves as ill or in need of health care, influencing how they act on medical advice. We argue that the key to understanding the use of time lies not in the concept of time per se but in what is involved in developing a responsive social self when the time/space dimensions of the day to day are informed by a fluid and thus contingent ontology of that day to day.