‘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.     

Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.     

Redfern as the Heart(h): Living (Black) in Inner Sydney

Before the arrival of the ‘white fella’ over 200 years ago, the Gadigal people and others of the Eora Darug occupied the place where the city of Sydney now stands. At the heart of this second tier global city, the inner‐city suburb of Redfern has become a mainstay of urban Aboriginal identity. Yet, this troubled and stigmatised focal point of populist media representations and government policy does not reflect the diversity of urban Aboriginal life in inner Sydney. This paper draws on a range of sources about living in Redfern, from the difficult politics of establishing and retaining an Aboriginal urban space and place in the contemporary gentrifying city – achieved in large part through the establishment of now long‐standing service provision – through to the rise of alternate visions and lives and many more ‘ordinary’ ways of living in the city. This paper seeks to highlight that Aboriginal people variously inhabit, occupy, and sometimes thrive in Australia's first colonial city and the site of invasion. It also provides several of the author's personal experiences of engagement with some of these processes.     

Fishing Lifestyles: ‘Territorians’, Traditional Owners and the Management of Recreational Fishing in Kakadu National Park

The relationships between traditional Aboriginal land owners and other Park users in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory are characterised by competing agendas and competing ideas about appropriate ways of relating to the environment. Similarly, the management of recreational fishing in the Park is permeated by the tensions and opposition of contested ideas and perspectives from non‐Aboriginal fishers and Aboriginal traditional owners. The local know‐ledge and rights of ‘Territorians’[non‐Aboriginal Northern Territory residents] are continually pitted against the local knowledge and rights of Aboriginal traditional owners. Under these circumstances, debates between non‐Aboriginal fishers and Aboriginal traditional owners are overwhelmingly dominated by the unequal power relationships created through an alliance between science and the State. The complex and multi‐dimensional nature of Aboriginal traditional owners’ concerns for country renders these concerns invisible or incomprehensible to government, science and non‐Aboriginal fishers who are each guided by very different epistemic commitments. It is a state of affairs that leaves the situated knowledge of Aboriginal traditional owners with a limited authority in the non‐Aboriginal domain and detracts from their ability to manage and care for their homelands.

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Identity,uncertainty and responsibility: privileging place in a risk society

That young people today reside within social worlds of unprecedented ‘risk’ is a persuasive position. While such discourses have become increasingly pervasive, there has been little interest in exploring contemporary shifts within specific socio-geographic contexts: place has been largely invisible. This paper considers Ulrich Beck's ‘risk society’ theses as a framework for exploring the experiences of 85 young residents of a regional Australian centre. These young people's stories revealed complex and often contradictory, tensions in relation to identity, uncertainty and responsibility. Socio-geographic location was found to be a significant feature in the negotiation and repercussion of these young people's lives.     

Palawa Kani and the Value of Language in Aboriginal Tasmania

Over the past forty years the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, long marked as an iconic case of extinction, have revitalized many elements of their ‘lost’ culture. Palawa kani, the constructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language, is an example of such efforts. The construction and utilization of palawa kani is one element of a broader Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural politics working to strengthen the Indigenous status, authenticity, and presence in Tasmania specifically and Australia more generally. In this article I recount the historical documentation of Tasmanian Aboriginal languages and analyze the process through which multiple historical languages were utilized in the construction and consecration of a single ‘official’ Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Rather than existing strictly as a tool for communication, I argue palawa kani is a cultural artifact that, like an emblem, works to distinguish the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, one that lacks many of the stereotypical components of Australian Aboriginality, within Tasmanian society. As such, it is best understood in relation to Clifford's ‘indigenous articulations’ (2001) and Cowlishaw's mythopoeia of Aboriginality in Australia (2010, 2011). I examine what palawa kani does for, and what it represents to, the larger Tasmanian Aboriginal community.     

You gotta throw away culture once you become Christian: How ‘culture’ is Redefined among Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in Rural New South Wales

ABSTRACT This paper is an ethnographic and historical exploration of Aboriginal Pentecostalism, which permeated quickly into the Aboriginal community in rural New South Wales in Australia during the early twentieth century. Today the Aboriginal Pentecostal Christians in this region renounce Aboriginal ‘culture’. This, however, does not mean they reject Aboriginality. By examining Malcolm Calley's ethnography on the mid‐twentieth century Pentecostal movement in this region and drawing upon my own fieldwork data, I show the way in which this group of Aboriginal Christians of mixed descent in a ‘settled’ part of Australia have maintained Aboriginality and reinforced attachment to the community through faith in the Christian God, whilst, paradoxically, developing strong anti‐culture and anti‐tradition discourses. This paper advocates shifting the study of social change from a dichotomised model that opposes invading moral orders against resisting traditional cultures, to one that examines the processual manifestations of the historical development of vernacular realities.     

Currency Culture: Australian Identity and Nationalism in New South Wales before the Gold Rushes

This article examines the white, native-born population of New South Wales, known as ‘the currency’, between the 1820s and the discovery of gold in the 1850s. While Britishness was the dominant cultural influence before, and after, the gold rushes, the ‘currency lads and lasses’ often found their identity in opposition to British-born colonists, known as ‘the sterling’. This early incarnation of Australian nationalism is significant, it will be argued, as it reveals how quickly indigenous roots were claimed at the expense of Aboriginal Australians. Further, rather than a sense of Australianness within a larger British identity, the currency community held Britishness as part of their larger Australian identity. Drawing on examples of popular culture from the theatre, the press, and the sporting arena, this article explores the nature of this unique community who held Britishness as a secular religion but identified most strongly as white Australians.     

(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.     

His Two Mates Around Him Were Crying: Masculine Sentimentality in Late-Victorian Culture

Abstract

Commentators on late-Victorian culture often tell us that two interrelated developments took place. First, there was a shift away from Victorian sentimentality; second, there was a growing insistence on toughness and emotional reserve as desirable for white men. Commentators on late-Victorian Australia often suggest that these developments were unusually conspicuous there. This is what the historian of mourning Patricia Jalland tells us in a discussion of the paradigmatic representation of death in Victorian Australian culture. In the Australian colonies, she writes, the paradigmatic death was the tough white man’s in the solitary bush. Representations of such deaths were legion, most often infused with ‘ironic realism’ rather than sentiment. In this article I challenge this view. Focusing on the work of popular Australian writer, Henry Lawson, I show that depictions of white men dying in the bush were profoundly sentimental in that they promoted pathos for white men’s suffering and grief in conventional ways. Representations of dying bushmen were indeed part of a specifically white, masculine sentimentality emerging throughout Anglophone culture in the late-Victorian years, part of a process through which white men insisted on the primacy of their emotional experiences and needs. In Australia and other settler colonies, this new masculine sentimentality also supported settler colonialism because promoting tenderness for hardy white frontiersmen diverted sympathy from the Aboriginal peoples they dispossessed. This article accordingly rethinks the dynamic between masculinity and sentiment in late-Victorian culture, paying particular attention to its relationship to power.     

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.     

Indigeneity and the refusal of whiteness

Drawing on international literature examining mismatch between racial appearance and racial identity, this paper analyses the subgroup of Indigenous Australians who have been identified, and self-identify, as ‘light-’, ‘fair-’, ‘pale-’ or ‘white-skinned’. We utilise the term ‘race discordance’ to describe the experience of regularly being attributed an identity that is different from how one personally identifies. In contrast to existing terms such as elective race, ethnic fraud and transracialism, race discordance does not seek to explain or judge the validity of identity claims that do not match perceived appearance. When unnoticed or unchallenged, ‘race discordance’ corresponds to ‘passing’. We propose the term ‘race refusal’ to describe instances when a person rejects the race they are ascribed to. In the case of white-skinned Indigenous Australians who are frequently assumed to identify as white, race refusal entails the refusal of whiteness. When light-skinned Indigenous people refuse whiteness, what are they refusing? In conversation with Audra Simpson’s notion of refusal of state recognition as an assertion of continued Indigenous sovereignty, we find that these particular micro-politics of race refusal demand rather than negate state recognition. We argue that identity refusal by pale-skinned Aboriginal people acts to disrupt histories of assimilation, white sociality and everyday racialisation while simultaneously reinforcing Australian recognition regimes.     

Rum,seduction and death: ‘Aboriginality’ and alcohol

Racism is here examined in relation to its origins in the colonial culture and in the motivations and intents of the colonisers. It is contained in the metaphors and icons, onto which the stereotypical information is projected, which express fear and attempt to tame the native and turn him into a mendicant. Bennelong is shown as the first instance of the British constructing the image of the ‘degenerate native’ the ‘drunken Aborigine’ the ‘urban Aborigine’. Whites are made innocent of the destruction of Aboriginal society because the Aborigines are ‘drinking themselves to death’. This paper asks whether the notion of social pathology has allowed anthropologists to avoid dealing with the realities of Aboriginal social life.     

Resource Development and Aborigines: The Case of Roebourne 1960–1980

The pervasive and dynamic influence of economic restructuring on political and social relations is highlighted in many aspects of Australian daily life. The effect of economic restructuring on already marginalised and disempowered groups in society is often overlooked Development of iron ore mines and associated new towns, railways and ports transformed the regional economy of Western Australia's Pilbara region in the 1960s and 1970s. For Aborigines in Roebourne, this restructuring represented a new phase in their relations with ‘White Australia’. Interacting historical legacies, corporate strategies, government policies and economic processes further marginalised the region's Aboriginal population and linked the region to the global economy in ways which created significant barriers to the development of Aboriginal self-management strategies. This paper reviews this period with particular emphasis on the social impact of the iron ore ‘boom’ on local Aboriginal people. In the current climate of renewed economic and political crisis in Western Australia, this review provides a timely reminder that such processes occur in a broader context than is often recognised in regional planning processes.     

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..     

Erasing Culture and Race: Practising ‘self-determination’1

This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the process heralded by the progressive policies of Aboriginal self-determination. The discourse of self-determination was based on anti-racist ideals and a break with the past. However, state officials did not divest themselves of their cultural baggage, and proceeded by trial and error to implement a program of creating autonomous Aboriginal communities for people of whom they had no knowledge. In attempting to reshape communities there was little recognition of the cultural specificities of the Aboriginal domain let alone the way difference, both as race and as culture, had been constructed and perpetuated in practice. The state erased its own white past. The ordinary practices of state officials became a glass barrier, precluding Aborigines from responding either as expected or as they themselves desired. Neither incompetence, ignorance nor ill-will is at the root of these failures, but rather the liberal, common sense, anti-racism which informs the state's refusal to deal with the social realities of history and race. The absence of history and race from anthropology's study of cultural dynamics frames the discussion.     

Private Politics,Public Strategies: White Advisers and their Aboriginal Subjects

This paper investigates the working relationships that have emerged between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people involved in the governmental project of ‘Aboriginal self‐determination’. I argue that these partnerships developed into significant sites of administrative and cultural mediation, both delineating and channelling the aspirations of Aboriginal people and government. As such, they facilitated the formation of various strategic forms of Aboriginal cultural and political subjectivity and thus helped operationalise the policies of Aboriginal self‐determination.     

The Polygamy Question: Missions,Marriage, and Assimilation

Polygamy was a vexed question for missionaries in the Northern Territory of Australia. In the mid twentieth century, Christian missions of various denominations worked with the Australian Commonwealth Government to achieve a policy of assimilating Aboriginal people into white Australian culture. Yet there was little consensus as to how this assimilation policy could or should be applied to Aboriginal marriages. This article demonstrates that the issue of polygamy exposed divisions between church and state as well as among Christian denominations over their understandings of marriage. These differences stemmed from differing spiritual visions of assimilation in Australia. The conflicts over marriage in the Northern Territory, therefore, reveal that assimilation, and settler‐colonialism more broadly, operated on a religious plane as Aboriginal people, missionaries, and bureaucrats engaged in a spiritual contest over what represented a legitimate and acceptable marriage in that land.     

Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and Settler‐Colonial State Formation

This paper examines the use of the concept of cultural genocide to understand one particular episode in Australian legal, political and social history, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, mostly during the 20th century. After outlining the approach of Australian courts to the idea of cultural genocide, the paper examines the construction of the UN Genocide Convention, particularly the clause concerning the forcible removal of children, which illustrates the underlying instability of the boundary between a cultural and a physical understanding of genocide. It then explores how this instability was manifested in the development of early 20th century Australian legislation concerning the ‘protection’ of Aborigines, indicating the underlying racially‐oriented coerciveness of conceptions of Aboriginal ‘welfare’, and concludes by reflecting on the wide range of ways in which the concept of genocide can and should be used, especially in capturing the experience of Indigenous peoples under settler‐colonialism.     

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.