Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan

      PREFACE

      Region, Position, and Ethics of Representation

      This book is about relationships between indigenous and nonindigenous people in Australia at different points in time and especially about “differences” as detectable and active in those relationships. I take differences to be identifiable forms of being in common, together with some sense of commonly shared values, that contrast with other forms similarly held in common by “others.” The aim in each following chapter is to explore kinds of difference and the extent to which difference has served as a mode or pathway of engagement or a delimiting boundary, in the first place between indigenous and nonindigenous actors but subsequently in ways that make those categories more complex and more directly contested. The book’s aim is not to examine “culture/s” as if entirely separate but to examine what we understand as cultural by considering difference in indigenous-nonindigenous engagement and its implications. I have found it plausible and indeed illuminating to consider differences over long time spans, so the material in this book moves between moments of early indigenous-nonindigenous encounter and the present.

      Many nonindigenous people in southern Australia say that they infrequently meet and do not know any indigenous people. That this is possible is some indication of the relatively peripheral position and small proportion of indigenous people and communities in urban and especially southeastern Australia. Like many who set out to do research with indigenous communities, my intention on coming to Australia was to go north, where indigenous people constitute a much larger proportion of the population and it is unlikely that one would not “see” them. Seeing is different from getting to know, and in this Preface I set out the conditions in which I came to know Australia’s north and became involved in the indigenous-nonindigenous relations this book explores.

      The book is concerned with historicity but is also ethnographic, based partly on my own ethnographic research, as well as on my search to win ethnographic insights from historical material. The link between ethnography and analysis in the book raises two issues that need to be addressed here. The first is what is nowadays often called in the human sciences “positionality”—the call for us as researchers and authors to reflect on our own position in relation to the people we write about, focusing on issues of relative privilege and our ethical responsibility to avoid exploitative research. The other is the matter of “relationship.” The book is about indigenous-nonindigenous relationships, and this account focuses on relationships I came to have with indigenous people and communities over time.

      I came from the United States in 1976 to take up a three-year research fellowship in the Top End of the Northern Territory of Australia. I had never been in Australia before. What made me think I could arrive and do this kind of research? I had some personal preparation and inclination. As a child I had spent periods of time in North American Indian communities in which Indians were the majority, and as a PhD student I had done research in communities where relations between Indians and outsiders were marked by a high degree of physical and social separation, but influences from dominant North American society were also pervasive. Both of these things are true of northern Australia too. There had been in my family history some relationships with indigenous people in northern New Mexico where I was born, and I felt a continuing interest in those Native American settings that seemed as interesting as others I knew, including that of the first-generation Italian immigrants in Brooklyn on my father’s side of the family with whom I also spent much of my childhood. I cannot, however, recall any personal feeling of nostalgia for traditional lifeworlds other than the ones I found around me (cf. Rosaldo 1989). But I did have a sense from early on of different social milieus, their uprooting and reconfiguration. At the time I set out for northern Australia, I had few specific preconceptions about what life would be like there or the