Dynamics of Difference in Australia. Francesca Merlan
writer and historian Patrick Wolfe (1999, 2016) characterized colonial settlement as a structure, not an event. By this he meant that certain lasting structures subtend and channel settler colonialism. The intent to stay, expand, and take over the land has meant replacement, not conciliation, of encountered peoples. It is one thing to colonize and intend to rely on newly subject peoples as a source of labor. It is another to arrive and rapidly begin to render the indigenous people physically, civically, and morally superfluous. Replacement involves the latter: what Wolfe calls a logic of elimination. The term “logic” is perhaps too rigid, or at least does not of itself make allowance for situational variability. But the drive to dispossession and elimination was certainly evident. Wolfe sees the logic enduring into present times in changing terms. The way and extent to which underlying structures have changed is a question we may ask concerning settler colonies like Australia. Kinds of change that have occurred are especially addressed in Chapters 5–8; the historical trajectory of settler colonialism becomes manifest and is in fact evoked in initiatives like Recognise. They are a moment of reckoning that calls forth competing perspectives on past, present, and future.
Anthropology and Difference
Anthropology in general was subject to searing postcolonial critiques in the 1980s. One critique said that anthropologists created their “object,” the “Other,” through an “allochronic discourse” of “other men in another Time,” as Africanist anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983:143) put it. Thus, I feel obliged first to reflect on changes of focus in anthropology and on related questions about the ethics of anthropological research.
Anthropology’s othering was paradoxical, Fabian argued, in that ethnographic research is inherently communicative and intersubjective: people in the same time and place, talking to each other, produces much of the empirical material of fieldwork. Anthropologist and subjects typically occupied very different social positions, however. The conditions of the growth of anthropology were colonialist-imperialist expansion and the spread of forms of capitalism, taking over space—the homelands of anthropology’s initial subjects. This brought with it what Fabian called one-way “chronopolitics,” contemporary research that excluded the subjects from colonial time and located them in their own time.
Much Australianist writing has been in terms of evolutionary and structural-functional paradigms, treating indigenous subject matter in isolation from its contemporary real-world colonial context. The theorization of early work typically involved intellectual partnerships of field-workers and scholars, as in the cases of missionary Lorimer Fison and exploreradministrator Alfred William Howitt, biologist W. Baldwin Spencer and postmaster F. J. Gillen in Central Australia. However, we still can learn from the storehouse of early field ethnography, as much of it does not “distance” indigenous people and social orders. William Lloyd Warner’s A Black Civilization (1937), concerning the Yolngu of northeast Arnhem Land, was deliberately titled to signal a significant departure from earlier stadial and primitivizing views of human societies: “civilization” was a call to evaluation of Aboriginal societies in terms of their social/moral worth. Much of what Warner (1937:10) discusses, for example, as the “primary articulation of Murngin [northeastern Arnhem Land] society with its natural environment” that is discernible in the relation between the Murngin ceremonial cycle and the environmental contrast between wet and dry seasons, resonates with many contemporary positive views of indigenous particularity and ethical environmental concern (Rose 2004, 2011). Mervyn Meggitt’s Desert People: A Study of the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia (1962, from fieldwork of 1953–55) featured a fulsome structural account of kinship, social and ceremonial organization, the first lifelike depictions of indigenous people’s contemporary lives in a remote settlement, in the process showing some of their continuing self-assertive style. Meggitt said little about settler impacts on their lives, nor much about their location in a settlement. Anthropologist, administrator, and public intellectual W. E. H. Stanner’s positive, recuperative take on aboriginal religion (1966) and subsequent Boyer Lectures (1968)12 helped to create a climate of opinion more favorable to Aboriginal interests, particularly to land rights, from the 1960s.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, and true to anthropology’s beginnings, anthropologists have undoubtedly tended to conduct research with bearers of the most distinctively indigenous ways of life: “othering” has taken the form of seeking out the “most other” indigenous difference. Much Australianist field research and writing from the 1960s onward originally pivoted on themes concerning ecology and human adaptation to the harsh environmental conditions here, a particular materially based form of interest in difference. But the concern of these researchers expanded in many different directions once they had established themselves with indigenous people and communities. One may without prejudice include here Fred Myers, best known for Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self (1986), who, from initial interests in the social organization of human mobility and aggregation in the desert environment, came to frame the most lasting account of emotions, autonomy, and relatedness among desert people and later came to study the rendering of landscape in aboriginal art. He also wrote on the relation of Pintupi to the welfare state and the awkward relationship between their political culture of “nurturance” and the government policy of self-determination. Elizabeth Povinelli’s original research interests related squarely to hunting and gathering. However, her questions about the characterization of “labor” and her involvement with indigenous people caught up in the land claims process led her to a critique of “late liberalism” and to the question of survival of alternative ways of being, the “otherwise” (Povinelli 2002).
Anthropological research work was largely done by men in remote Australia, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Englishwoman Phyllis Kaberry and Catherine Berndt in partnership with her husband Ronald), until quite recently. This was evidently quite deliberate. According to Jeremy Beckett (pers. comm.), Sydney University doyen of anthropology Professor A. P. Elkin (1933–56) urged young women students to work in “settled” Australia. Thus Aborigines in urban contexts attracted the attention of (mostly female) sociologists and geographers (e.g., Fay Gale, Ellen Biddle, Judy Inglis). The urban literature featured global analytical concepts of “adaptation,” “assimilation,” “acculturation,” “integration,” some of which were (also) policy terms (see Langton’s 1981 critique); while the anthropological work in remote communities, studying “kinship” and “traditional” social organization, was short on ways of treating the indigenous-nonindigenous encounter. This work had a foundational thematic: the Other. But it was becoming clear that this thematic was seriously flawed, or at least that it made far-reaching exclusions that were morally intolerable.
From the mid-1960s, in a decolonizing climate that regularly cited “self-determination” as desirable internationally (McGregor 2011:58–59), another postwar change filtered into Australianist work. Efforts began, largely on the part of historians, to break what anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, in his Boyer lecture of 1968 called the “Great Australian Silence.” Stanner diagnosed a “cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale” that had resulted in scant attention to indigenous history or presence in Australia and denied adequate representation of indigenous conditions. Stanner’s awareness had been shaped in part by a large research project initiated in 1964 by an Australian scholar, teacher, Pacific administrator, and Aboriginal rights advocate: Charles Dunford Rowley. Accepting a three-year appointment to the Social Science Research Council of Australia, Rowley studied (and commissioned others to study) the situation of Aborigines in Australian society. He wrote the first three volumes of a series, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (1970), Outcasts in White Australia (1971a), and The Remote Aborigines (1971b). The books conveyed a hitherto little-known history of the encounters between Aborigines and non-Aborigines and a masterly survey of present relations that helped to determine the agenda of the Whitlam Labor government (1972–75). In a final work (Recovery: The Politics of Aboriginal Reform, published posthumously in 1986) Rowley remained hopeful, suggesting possibilities for forms of Aboriginal autonomy in a continent whose white people, unlike those of Papua New Guinea where he had worked, would not go away and whose indigenous people still had “some business together which is not the business of other citizens”