Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan
to the town. An impatient senior barrister, acting for the Katherine land claim, had dismissed them as a “cancer” on the case. Such selective recognition of indigenous claims has become known as “repressive authenticity.”10
This situation brought home to me that we cannot expect successful land claims to heal all the injuries of dispossession. The terms on which claims were to be made were unavailable to many. To satisfy the enormous machinery of administration and governance required to restore land ownership many of the Aboriginal people I knew in the 1970s had had to reorient their lives away from the bush, toward town and community where they lived an increasingly cash- and store-dependent life. While their aspirations to claim land grew as they came to understand what was possible, claiming land was only one concern in their lives. The intensity of emphasis on claiming land seemed to be a symptom of a much larger mismatch in indigenous-nonindigenous relationships (Merlan 2007). Land rights, like the current “Recognise” initiative, which figures in my Introduction and Chapter 8, has been a settler preoccupation, and this requires interpretation.
I nevertheless went on to be involved in as many claims as I could manage in the region I knew well, on the basis that here, at least, was some provision for indigenous futures. Was this a good choice? The processes have indeed resulted in the return to Aboriginal landholders of large areas of otherwise vacant Crown land. The resulting changes have not necessarily included clear improvements in life conditions broadly understood. The claims era has left in its wake many landholding groups, many institutions (governmental and otherwise) that have responsibilities for looking after and managing the affairs of such groups, and related business groups and arms. Government policy has encouraged indigenous people to form corporations through which they could interact with the formal and informal institutions of Australian society.11 The Aboriginal people who provided the information and experience that helped to win land claims were made signal members of corporations, but their inclusion was often titular rather than empowering, in my experience. These corporations are now staffed and led by younger people with different, and usually less intensive and extensive, experience of country.
Observing this transition over almost forty years, I have been led to write this book and to explore what we may understand as cultural that persists in circumstances of radical change and how differences change and emerge.
INTRODUCTION
Persistent Difference
This book is about relationships between indigenous and nonindigenous people in Australia engaging with one another across major disparities of knowledge, cultural orientation, and power since the first arrival of Europeans. It is about how they engage with each other in ways that define and redefine the understood meanings and implications of these differences.
Writing about Australian indigenous social orders has emphasized continuity of difference (with variable emphasis on colonizing assaults on it); race and racialization as defining of indigenous-nonindigenous relations; and the power of the state, the state culture of bureaucracy, and its self-preserving circularity.1 In Australia any portrayal of indigenous lives is written in knowledge of the intensity of public debate about indigenous issues. I think this is, in fact, particularly so in Australia: as historian Patrick Wolfe (2016) recently repeated, indigenous issues reverberate in the public sphere well beyond indigenous proportion in the population. Indigenous issues in Australia are topics of almost daily front-page news and debate, differing in this way in degree from Fourth World (Native American) matters in the public sphere of the United States.
Recent ethnographic, anthropological, and historical works concerned with Australian indigenous people have had at their conceptual core incommensurability of indigenous and nonindigenous social orders (Povinelli 2001, 2002; Clendinnen 2005), the experiential specificities of the collisions between these orders (Austin-Broos 2009), as well as the relation between anthropology and history (Wolfe 1999, 2016) and the importance of mutually supportive partnership between these two disciplines. The colonization of Australia and its aftermath shaped broadly similar, continent-wide structural patterns of domination, expropriation, and subsequent state interventions (Wolfe 1999, 2016). Ethnographers have persistently observed patterns of colonialism viewed as “structures,”2 remarking on the histories, in different parts of the continent, that have given rise to specific forms of experience (Macdonald 2000; Austin-Broos 2009). Through all these generalizations and specificities, indigenous-nonindigenous difference is clearly seen as neither eliminated nor fully transformed despite the intensity and enormity of colonial and postcolonial events.
As I stated in the Preface, I take “difference” to denote 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.” What reflexive senses of these differences those involved may have is a matter for discovery and interpretation. Anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli (2001, 2002), her work ethnographically grounded in a neighboring region of the Northern Territory to the one I write about, has for some time proposed a view of differences as evidence of incommensurability between indigenous and nonindigenous ontologies: ways of being that are irreconcilably different, which nonindigenous institutions and agents seek to police and make commensurate with their own terms.3 Her concerns first focused on what she represented as European heterosexualization of indigenous experience, against evidence of indigenous diversity of modalities of attachment to land and persons (Povinelli 1993). She also traced scientific and other colonial sanitizing efforts that purged indigenous lives of their “repugnant” aspects, sexual and other. This book aims to identify some of the dynamics of difference in indigenous-nonindigenous relations. In it I draw on both historical and ethnographic materials from my research to illustrate and interpret dimensions of difference that emerge in different times and situations of encounter. All of the chapters explore what I take to be persistent dimensions of difference that continue to play a significant role in indigenous lives and in indigenous-nonindigenous encounter.
Chapter 1 treats the earliest recorded arrival of Captain James Cook in Botany Bay; it relates how Aborigines apparently refused to “see” the arriving outsiders despite their physical proximity. It presents evidence of two modes in which indigenous people attempted to shape early colonial encounter: one, surprisingly, by refusing to react; and the second, by recognizing arriving colonials, not only as spirits of the dead4 but as specific relatives. This encounter could be called an instance of indigenous “nonrecognition,” argued to have cultural specificity but also ubiquitous in human interaction. The book goes on to examine somewhat different questions of seeing, knowing, recognizing, at different points in time. Chapter 2 addresses an often-raised issue of the imitative behavior of indigenous peoples in encounter, aiming to reinterpret its social significance in this circumstance. Chapter 3 examines great disparities between indigenous and nonindigenous attitudes to “things.” Chapters 4 and 5 contrast nonindigenous and indigenous ways of stereotyping the actions of the “other”: colonial generalization of indigenous character as “treacherous,” the indigenous retrospective evaluation of nonindigenous action as “cruel.” This contrast opens out into consideration of indigenous modes of recognition with their avenues for incorporation of even unbiddable outsiders, prompting reflection on how this has sometimes made them vulnerable to different, powerful others. Chapter 6 brings in questions of state and nation in shaping exclusion, inclusion, and changing emphases on difference as a matter of race; the chapter discusses recent governmental liberalization of definitions of “Aboriginal.” The book ends by turning to the current Recognise initiative in 2016. The material in this book gives us insight into social and bodily affective and recognitional modes shaped over a long term. I do not suggest unqualified continuity but point to the historical and social embeddedness of the modalities involved, no doubt affected but perhaps in some ways intensified