“MAPPING ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA”
Abstract: The article presents a short history of Australia and discusses the representations of aboriginal Australia as a case of Orientalism.
Keywords: Symbolic geographies, Australia, orientalism, the antipodes
Aboriginal Australia is a schoolbook case of Orientalism. It is a construct produced by the colonial context of dispossession, appropriation, discrimination and assimilation. It contains all the characteristics of Said’s favourite subject: Aboriginal Australia has been “suitable for study in the academy, for display in the museum, for reconstruction in the colonial office, for theoretical illustration in anthropological, biological, linguistic, racial and historical theses about [hu]mankind and the universe, for instances of economic and sociological theories of development, revolution, cultural personality, national or religious character”.1
However, Said’s term “Orientalism” is not appropriate in its possible application to Australia for the obvious reason that it implies “the Orient” or the East and not the South. I propose my own neologism Antipodeanism instead. Like any “ism”, Antipodeanism relies on its heavily charged root: Antipodes. As the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature informs us, the word “Antipodes” emerged in English at the end of the fourteenth century to describe those who dwelt on opposite sides of the globe. It then came to mean the diametrically opposite regions of the earth, as in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, where Benedick, anxious to avoid Beatrice, offers to ‘go on the slightest errand now to the Antipodes’. Early references to the Antipodes, which were sometimes imagined as a Utopia, were to the eastern as well as the southern hemispheres, but in 1800 the Antipodes Islands, just over 700 kilometers south-east of NZ, were so named by British seamen because they were diametrically opposite Greenwich; in the nineteenth century ‘Antipodes’, ‘Antipodean’ and other derivatives were applied more generally to Australia and NZ, again from a British perspective. … A popular colloquialism derived from the concept of Antipodes is ‘down under’…2
The semantic charge of the word “Antipodes” is seen in its literal translation: “having feet opposed”, as if one is expected to find in those places some mysterious, monster-like creatures like those described in ancient European myths.
Historically, Australia has been subsumed under the headings of Oceania, Australasia, Terra Australis, the Southern Hemisphere, the Antipodes, terra nullius, and Downunder. The categorization depended on the culturally and politically motivated decisions and the speaker’s (geographical) point of view. The continent has always been positioned according to the “good old Europe” perspective, as exemplified by the President Howard’s endorsement of the term “Australasia”, to position Australia in the world of the global economy.
As argued by Said’s critics, not all Orientalists (or Antipodeanists) necessarily share a uniform perspective. The views of the British Crown on Aboriginal matters were sometimes diametrically opposite to those of the colonial government: some English observers were appalled by the colonial treatment of the dark-skinned “British/Crown subjects”. Not even settler Australia was uniform in its view of Aboriginal people and their place in society, and neither is it uniform today. As Maria Todorova and Bruce Grant pointed out, “the incredible diversity of ethnographic pioneers… convincingly ‘challenges our expectation of ideological homogeneity in colonial societies…'”3
In Australia, the 1990s saw an emergence of a vast body of academic writing based on the reexamination of the colonial narrative. Some of the best studies were undertaken as doctoral dissertations, for example Elizabeth Ferrier’s “Mapping the Space of the Other: Transformations of Space in Postcolonial Fiction and Postmodern Theory” (1990) and Patrick Wolfe’s “White Man’s Flour: Imperialism and an Appropriated Anthropology” (1994).4 The consideration of colonialism and imperialism and their impact on the postcolonial present now constitutes the key element of Australian historical and anthropological work. Fieldwork has become increasingly important, not any more as an attempt to find out what we as “experts” can observe and conclude about “others”, but rather as an endeavour to present to the best of our humble abilities how “others” see themselves (and often in cooperation with them). Contemporary research rests upon the premise of its efficiency in dissolving boundaries between the researcher and the researched, between academic disciplines, between the past and the present, between “black” and “white” Australia. My own research also revolved around these issues, as I tried to recover the Aboriginal narrative through the post-colonial reading of historical writings, combined with museum research and oral history work.5 In my presentation of these multiple voices (explorers, settlers, colonial government, historians, anthropologists, linguists, museum curators, Aboriginal people, etc.), I tried to make myself as a researcher as transparent as possible, to allow the readers to contextualize my own position and its impact on the text before them. While some researchers may insist on keeping and reinforcing their positions, I used what Todorova calls “a dignified possibility” of allowing my listening to the “other” to change my own position.6
Said’s recognition of the epistemological and not simply military nature of a conquest found its reflection in Elizabeth Ferrier’s and Margaret Somerville’s work. Ferrier views colonialism as primarily a spatial conquest, the primary tool of which is the practice of mapping. The knowledge plays a crucial role in this process: “we map and we know, we know and we map”.7 However, Ferrier argues, “by attending to spatial practices it is possible to contest and transform the dominant spatial order constituted through imperialist discourses. She notes that spatial transformations can be made through myths and narratives, through legislation, through the establishment or contestation of official classifications”.8 The “spatial transformations” which had been used by Antipodeanists to conquer Australia and its indigenous inhabitants, can now be used to counteract the elusiveness and invisibility of Aboriginal (hi)stories in the Australian discourse. My research has been a preoccupation to find/locate both the physical and symbolic places on the map of Aboriginal Australia (or rather on one part of it), to reinstate them in their own right: to put them (back) on the map. This means that I was thoroughly engaged in searching for absences and no-places, in an attempt to recover what had been left off the map, erased from the map, or replaced by something originally non-existent. One way of doing this was by employing close textual readings and juxtaposing written and oral history sources.
Another method involved the physical process of tracking down (the remnants of) Aboriginal material culture in Australian museums, and analyzing what, how and why remains on display and what does not. The complex jigsaw puzzle that emerged is far from complete, for the media, the Internet, literature, music and other vehicles of the postmodern culture-generating machinery perpetually convey, reinforce and disseminate the stereotypical imagery of Aboriginal people and their culture, and Australia in general.
* * *
Owing partly to its historical isolationism, Australia is in today’s geopolitics seen as marginal, as exemplified by its ties with the British Crown. Despite the nationalist movement in the past two decades which would like to see Australia separated from its British connection, the national referendum two years ago revealed that most Australians still have a strong attachment to the figure of royalty: the British Queen. The Queen thus appeared to be not merely a figure of the colonial past, but also of the
present and possibly the future. An important side question can be asked: Does the retention of the Queen in the minds of the people as well as in the political landscape of Australia mean that Australia is still overwhelmingly attached to its colonial past? For, as demonstrated by a number of postcolonial critics, old concepts and Weltanshauungs die hard.
The power of the Queen metaphor becomes perhaps even more pertinent when viewed in its relation to certain Aboriginal notions of the colonial past. The terms “Queen/Queenie” and “King” were often used by colonial authorities to denote Aboriginal Elders, despite the inadequacy of the application of these terms to Aboriginal society. The linguistic appropriation of landscape included not only the places, but also the people. Moreover, such people of authority in their communities were sometimes given brass breastplates with their names and the nominal suffix engraved in them. The images (however stereotypical) of what have become modern and official symbols of Australia: kangaroo and emu, usually accompanied the words. Today, both scholars and Aboriginal intelligentsia consider such representations of Aboriginality a matter of national shame.9
In producing what became his life work, Said hoped to “illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves or upon others”.10 In this sense, the case of Mary Jane Cain (1844-1929), a Gamaroi “Queen”, is revealing. Although defining her identity in Aboriginal terms (she had nine children and considerable family responsibility, and was “queen of her own domain, ruler of the house and the [Coonabarabran] mission”;11 Mary Cain also endorsed the Antipodean view of herself by adopting (and priding herself on) the royal addition (with its full implications of authority) to her own (English) name. For her Aboriginal people, Mary Cain’s status as Queen had its roots in her straddling two eras of Aboriginal history: the one before and the one after colonization of the area.12 In the missionary journal The Bush Brother, an anecdote is described which confirms Mary Cain’s status as Queen: “[A]t a concert and dance we had at Forked Mountain in January… We finished dog tired, with singing ‘God Save the King’ and when the Queen of the camp begged us not to go without singing ‘God Save the Queen’ in her honour – why we did”.13 (The “we” obviously stands for the missionaries and other non-Aboriginal people present at the festivity.) As Somerville observes: “Mary Jane Cain had used the discourse to which she had access, that of queenliness, to constitute herself as having authority in relation to her place and her people, and she expected that authority to be recognised publicly”.14
The far-reaching implications of the Queen metaphor do not exhaust themselves here. On 28 June 1893, Mary Cain wrote a letter, asking for her family’s land to be measured and fenced, and requesting written proof of their ownership, title and rights to their land. She based her claim on her being “the only native belong in to here”15 and on her motherhood (she also asked for rations for her big family as her husband was ill and unable to work). The crucial question is: Who did she write this letter to? The Aboriginal people of the area still believe it was Queen Victoria, and the letter is often referred to as “[Mary Cain’s] Letter to the Queen”.
The Aboriginal (and indeed wider public) insistence on Mary Cain’s authority in the area brings forth yet another interpretation: the letter was written by a queen to a queen. The two queens could thus be seen as being of the same rank, and “the Queen of Burrabeedee” may be conceived as the equal to the Queen of the British Empire. There is both written and oral history evidence that Mary Cain was a public figure in her own right: she made a special trip to Sydney to agitate for a reserve for her people and succeeded (Burrabeedeee Mission grew out of Mary Cain’s small settlement at Forky Mountain in the 1880s and was officially established in 1910, after nearly twenty years of Mary Cain’s political activism, of which “the Letter to the Queen” was only one instance); she was a well-known person in the area; and her Aboriginal descendants claim that she could do anything and that she bossed around the government officials in town.16 Given my own experience with old Aboriginal women, I can easily identify Mary Cain with the matriarchal figure of a queen. As Somerville concludes: “The story of Mary Jane Cain and the beginning of Burrabeedee is quite a different one to the usual story of Aboriginal people being forced onto reserves and missions and governed by an officialdom beyond their control.”17
As Somerville reveals after excavating the all-important letter from the State Archives, it was actually the Governor of the colony as the Queen’s representative, and not the Queen herself to whom Mary Cain wrote her letter. In Aboriginal imagination, however, the granting of the mission land was a direct outcome of Mary Cain’s writing to the Queen. It was the Queen that gave Mary Cain the land, not the Governor, and Mary Cain’s descendants insist on the very physical act of the Queen’s granting the land: “It [the mission] was ‘anded to my great-grandmother from Queen Victoria, but they ‘aven’t got the documents to show it” or: “The Queen granted that land there, the mission, and it was granted to ‘er providin’ she made a place for the dark people to live on.”18
The myth perpetuated by Aboriginal people thus gains in importance: the Queen is seen by Aboriginal people as a matriarch intervening on their behalf, and is possibly equated (if only figuratively and in an isolated instance of her “active” role in their history) with their own concept of an Elder. Therefore, any connection to the Queen (no matter how remote) is seen as a matter of great personal and communal pride. The romanticizing of the past extends to the present.
* * *
I shall now focus on the three basic questions that necessarily emerge in any cross-cultural inquiry: 1) how “others” are seen by Antipodeanists; 2) how “others” see themselves, and 3) how two (or more) “others” see each other. I hope that my answers will further illuminate the intricate relationships that constitute the core of much of the post-colonial investigation.
I HOW ARE “OTHERS” SEEN BY ANTIPODEANISTS?
(HOW WERE ABORIGINAL PEOPLE/CULTURE SEEN IN THE COLONIAL PAST, AND HOW ARE THEY SEEN TODAY?)
The relationship between settler and Aboriginal Australia has been a relationship of power and domination, tipped in favour of the settlers’ imagery and conceit. Like “Oriental” cultures referred to by Said, Aboriginal people were made Aboriginal in the process of physical and cultural colonization-genocide. Likewise, Aboriginal Australia does and does not exist. The colonial view of the continent expresses this ambiguity: given the concept of terra nullius (“empty land”) which legislatively enabled the British take-over of the land, one wonders why should such, “empty”, land ever become the subject of exploration and subsequent settlement? The answer, of course, lies in the core colonial practices of transplantation and transformation.
Aboriginal people’s knowledge of their environment was often used by explorers and settlers to find their bearings in the new lands. The early explorers depended on Aboriginal trackers for their very survival. The Aboriginal guides also provided cartographic information, and their contribution in the “discovery” of the continent has only recently been acknowledged.19 The first explorers were usually surveyors whose task was to describe the geographical features and other characteristics of the land ahead. The process usually implied imposition of European names upon Aboriginal landscape, a common colonial method of appropriating new territories.20 So New England is found not only in the United States of America, but also in New South Wales, neither of which the English would allow back home!
The metaphors applied to colonial Australia are generally not so flattering as Catherine’s “Garden of the Empire”21 (the exception is the state of Victoria which was until a few years ago called “the Garden State”). In the experience of the colonizers, Australia was a dangerous place to be, either full of “hostile natives” or a drought-ridden nowhere. The reflection of Australian landscape on the minds of European arrivals produced unique metaphors such as “the Outback”, “the Bush”, “the Black Stump” and the places where “the crows fly backwards”. Such landscape, of course, had to be Europeanized, that is, “civilized”. The literal transplanting of European tastes and values, or the horticultural appropriation of space, dominates both urban and rural landscapes of modern Australia. As native landscapes of dense eucalypt and native pine forests gave way to fenced-off pastures, wheat and corn fields, prickly pear and, in recent decades, cotton and canola or “rape seed”, so did native animal wildlife succumb to the infestation of introduced rabbits, foxes, wild pigs, European carp, and above all, sheep and cattle.
The linguistic appropriation of new (cultural) landscapes is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the English names given to Aboriginal individuals, and the thirty-odd spellings of the name of a single Aboriginal group. English ortographic conventions were (and are still being) imposed upon Aboriginal languages, and are fiercely defended by Australian (non-Aboriginal) linguists. Recovering the “correct” version from historical sources does not yield any results (all spellings are anglicized anyway), and the word of old Aboriginal people stands against the proliferation of self-congratulating ortographic forms that often have nothing in common with each other let alone with the reality. This, of course, is only one way of destroying someone’s individual and collective identity.
More radical were the attempts to Europeanize Aboriginal people by dressing them up in European clothes, by uprooting them from their land and imprisoning them within the confines of reserves and missions, by forbidding them to speak their own languages and practice their own customs, by stealing their children and turning them into “white man’s (and woman’s) slaves”. Physical and social boundaries were created to separate Aboriginal people from both their old (“savage”) ways and the new (“civilized”) colonial society. The colonial preoccupation with fencing which is a powerful metaphor on its own, reemerges in the post-colonial critique of the past: the film Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) exploits the theme of the forceful separation of Aboriginal children from their families. In the film, the fence, used by the children to find their way home, becomes an inverted metaphor of a possible reunion, of “coming home”.
The settler notions of Aboriginal Australia became solidly entrenched and reflected in the anthropological, social, political and cultural discourse that has spanned over two
centuries. In early writings the identifying features of Aboriginal people (or “natives”/”savages” as they were regularly called) are their skin colour, their physique, their character, their customs, and the way of life. In reality, Aboriginal men and women were treated as chattel, and were evaluated almost exclusively for their potentially useful contribution to the new economy. Like the new land to be conquered,22 Aboriginal women were seen as a sexual commodity: there were no Aboriginal ladies or women at least, the colonizers saw only “lubras”, “gins”, and most denigrating of all: “Black Velvet”.23 To Europeans, Aboriginal people were inferior in every respect: they were lazy and dirty, and their social organization was below any other. The “savage” construct dominated the nineteenth-century “scientific” discourse, and Darwin’s (and Darwinian) theories were used to place them even lower than humans on the evolutionary scale.24 As such, their skulls merited a closer look by “scientists”, and when there was a shortage of supply, well, skull-hunting and body-snatching would certainly provide some.25 Shipped off to overseas museums along with other cultural items,26 the indigenous human remains are silent witnesses of the human and cultural genocide that few institutions have so far found necessary to redress. The “scientific” component of colonialism has also had its popular counterpart: the historical legacy of Rousseau’s concept of the “noble savage” found an outlet in the recent New Age movement where appropriating indigenous identities has become a fashionable (and lucrative) affair.27
The terminological exclusion of the “savage” from the “civilized” has permeated Australian anthropological writings until the present day: Aboriginal Dreamings have been dismissed as “myths”, “legends”, or “superstitions”, and Aboriginal spirituality reconstructed as a “religion”. The Western understanding of social organization was readily applied to Aboriginal societies. The anthropologist Norman B. Tindale produced a series of Aboriginal genealogies which are in fact taxonomic maps. Despite their flaws and racist implications,28 today they are (paradoxically) used by Aboriginal people as useful tools in the reconstruction of their own (family) identity.
The Western interpretation of Aboriginal material culture was primarily in economic and aesthetic terms. For instance, the Gamaroi carved trees used in elaborate male initiation ceremonies were seen as having a mainly aesthetic function, as evidenced by the method (the tossing of a coin) used to divide them into two lots for transportation to the South Australian Museum in Adelaide and the Melbourne Museum, respectively. The trees were divided into two lots on the basis of craftsmanship and richness of patterns, and none of the non-Western meanings was taken into consideration.29 The reason for this obviously lay in the curators’ inability and indisposition to read the culturally inscribed symbols.
To sum up, Aboriginal people were rarely if ever described in their own right. Always compared to other indigenous peoples, such as those in southern India (in an attempt to prove their Asian origin), they were continually fixed in their position of “others”. This trend continues as the New Age movement exploits the notion of the “other”. Today, the dispossession of indigenous traditions does not mean so much an exploitation of their natural resources or their material culture; it is focused rather on the exploitation of indigenous knowledges – it has become epistemological. The New Age maps based on Aboriginal traditions are entirely different from their original and authentic settings: uprooting them from their cultural context, and transfering them to non-indigenous places with a variety of non-indigenous agendas in mind, the New Age maps thus created raise serious ethical questions. These questions are not really different from those called into mind by the colonial practices of the nineteenth century. This new form of exploitation of indigenous traditions deserves to be called by its proper name: neocolonialism.
II HOW DO “OTHERS” SEE THEMSELVES?
(HOW DO ABORIGINAL PEOPLE SEE THEMSELVES?)
This question is, of course, best answered by Aboriginal people themselves. I shall therefore only briefly sketch some of the main features of Aboriginal culture relevant to this paper.
Places, maps and mapping are the key elements of Aboriginal identity. As Heather Goodall points out: “Land… is central to Aboriginal self-identification on many levels because it forms the physical and symbolic basis on which one is related: related to religious knowledge and practice, related to one’s kin and wider society, related to one’s history and to the economic resources to which one is entitled by right.”30 The knowledge of how one is related needs to be learned.31 Aboriginal people were especially aware of this need to learn knowledge, and they instituted special (initiation) ceremonies to facilitate the process. In the learning process, a wide variety of materials was used to make “maps”: the ground, sand, rock, wood, bark of a tree, animal skin, songs (music), and even waves!
One could argue that “maps” represent the core of Aboriginal culture, its identity, for the whole society is based on mapping. The importance of (significant) places, often referred to as “sacred sites”, as living and pulsating Ancestral Beings, has been analyzed by and used for the construction of both anthropological and popular narrative.32 Aboriginal Dreamings encompass both time and space, they have (and do not have) both temporal and spatial dimensions. Dreaming stories can be interpreted as maps of the social norms of behaviour and sanctions for deviations from these norms. Aboriginal knowledge of the celestial bodies, in particular the southern constellations which figure prominently in their Dreamings, has certainly produced elaborate maps the equivalents of which are only now being “discovered” by modern science. The small, everyday events such as the trips that children took to various places, were subsequently mapped on the ground or sand by old women using symbols with their culturally recognizable and interpretable meanings, fully understood only by those initiated into them.33 Moreover, Aboriginal people mapped their own relationships with stunning accuracy. Genealogies and marriage rules were men’s knowledge and constituted oral mappings as they were passed on from one generation to the next. Actually, any specialized kind of skill or knowledge depended on (and presumed) the existence of knowledge keepers: song-makers, “clever men/women”, midwives, etc.
The Aboriginal mapping of land and corresponding relationships was, obviously, very different from settlers’. Aboriginal place names reflected the geographical reality,34 and not a symbolic one as in the Western discourse.
III HOW DO TWO (OR MORE) “OTHERS” SEE EACH OTHER?
(HOW DID I SEE ABORIGINAL PEOPLE AND HOW DID THEY SEE ME?)
Little has been written on how Aboriginal people perceived the first Europeans, in their position of the “other”. A glimpse into that may be gained not only by looking at historical writings, but also by observing Aboriginal attitudes today.
My position as a researcher was interesting, for I shared no common background with the Anglo-Saxon invaders. As a non-Australian, I was the “other” for both Australians and Aboriginal people, as any foreigner necessarily is in a foreign land. My negotiation of my own identity thus revolved around the concept of the double “other”. Aboriginal people are “others” for non-Aboriginal Australians. So an interesting question emerges: How does it look when two “others” meet?
I believe that, for most Aboriginal people, I was less of an “other” (or, certainly, a different type of the “other”) than most Australians. I often felt that, in my presence, Aboriginal people could more freely express their grievances against the injustices of Anglo-Saxon colonization. In a highly politicized context of Aboriginal research, this fact made us equal in our “otherness”: it was “us” against “them”. The fact that I was doing something most Australians consider an exoticism in itself, and my willingness to stick my neck out for Aboriginal values, eventuated in the people’s respect as my greatest reward. I also believe that, where it was known to the other side that I was an
offshoot of the Balkans ravaged by the recent war, this fact only brought us closer and not further apart as the case might have been if I had been doing research in a Western European country (if we exclude, for a moment, the fact that Australia is considered a Western democracy).
My Aboriginal speakers and I shared the experience of being “others” at different points in time and space, yet our common experience of aggression and oppression made us sympathetic to each other’s plight. It all came down to the basic human values: personal dignity in the face of humiliation and the ability to survive against physical and cultural genocide. In facing each other, this ability of the two (or more) “others” to survive becomes construed as heroism, so the general (Orientalist) idea of victimization falls apart, and a true cross-cultural dialogue may take place.
CONCLUSION
Like Eastern Europe, Aboriginal Australia “will continue to occupy an ambiguous space between inclusion and exclusion, both in economic affairs and in cultural recognition”.35 This is most evident in Australian place names: while some places retained their Aboriginal names, others were replaced by English words. So the suburbs of Woollomoolloo and King’s Cross exist side by side in Sydney, and Maribyrnong and Kensington are both found in the heart of Melbourne. It is only with this ambiguity in mind that the complex Aboriginal reality, imbued with its historical realities and inventions, can be constructed as meaningful.
This ambiguity has been exploited, both consciously and unconsciously, by the very historical narratives that had created it. Aboriginal people are still seen as backward economically and politically, to paraphrase Wolff: Aboriginal people’s “recourse to expert advice and economic assistance” from the government is “construed as the ultimate vindication of the success of [non-Aboriginal Australia] and the backwardness of [Aboriginal communities]”.36 This backwardness, however, is contradicted by the historical narrative itself. While classifying Aboriginal people as “savages”, the early authors admit they cannot penetrate the depth of Aboriginal kinship systems; indeed, these systems are/were so complex that no Western anthropologist can claim he/she fully understands it. Similarly, the historical narrative defines Aboriginal “tribes” in terms of absences: they lack(ed) the sophisticated parliamentary systems of Europe and the United States, the military machinery, etc. On the other hand, the crucial question is left unanswered: How on earth did Aboriginal people manage to survive as what Joseph Birdsell termed “large confederacies” (in some parts of Australia)37 without a highly organized sociopolitical structure? In terms of culture and spirituality, Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” persists: while acknowledging Aboriginal people as spiritual (whatever this means), scholars and the public alike still speak of Aboriginal “myths” and “animism”. Aboriginality itself is a construct and abstraction often contradicted by the reality: a girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, or an old woman with Chinese facial features and physique, readily (and primarily) identify themselves as Aboriginal.
Eventually, one comes to the inevitable conclusion: Aboriginal Australia (in its Antipodeanist context) is not about Aboriginal people at all, it is about settler Australians: their perception, their bodies, their minds, their fears, their wishes… The disparagement of Aboriginal people tells us more about those who employ it, rather than about its intended targets. It is exactly this construct of Antipodeanism/ Eurocentrism/ Anglocentrism that has recently come under scrutiny in contemporary academic work.
As Bakic-Hayden and Hayden note: “much of contemporary anthropological theory recognizes that cultures, and “traditions”, are constituted rather than found, permeable rather than bounded, multifaceted rather than uniform and evolving rather than static.”38 The overlapping area between Aboriginal and Antipodeanist Australia is much larger than had been traditionally acknowledged. The influence of the colonized upon the colonizing eventually erases some of the differences between them. The impact of Aboriginal culture on settler Australia has only recently become an area of investigation.
The historical dichotomy (or rather multivalence) was not only imposed from without, it already existed from within. The presumption of Aboriginal people’s uniformity is as much an Antipodeanist construct as it is that of Aboriginal Australia. It is contested by the great diversity of Aboriginal languages (between 540 and 600 languages are believed to have existed before the contact), dietary patterns, social practices and institutions, spiritual beliefs, initiation ceremonies,39 etc. Not even the physical reality supports Aboriginal racial and cultural uniformity: the Aboriginal people of Queensland look very different from those in Central Australia. Yet, in the post-colonial discourse imposed (again) by “white” Australia, all these nations succumbed to the notion of pan-Aboriginality. The “reason” or “justification” for this is often presented as Aboriginal nations’ common historical legacy and the evolving awareness of the common political goals and aspirations. The Antipodeanist framework is thus used by Aboriginal people despite its denigrating connotations.40
The notion of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic Australia is also being deconstructed in the multicultural framework of the contemporary society. The fact that modern Australia grew out of the efforts of many races and nationalities (the Chinese, Afghani, Japanese, Polish, etc.), some of which settled as early as the British migrants, gains in importance and will inevitably draw more scholarly attention in the future.
The problem of today’s Australia, as I see it, is not any more in the production and application of a set of negative images to the “other”. The political correctness appears to be forcing the discrimination in the opposite but equally dangerous direction. A recent discovery that one section of Aboriginal people’s brain was superior in its function to that of Caucasians spurred a heated public debate. The University of Sydney researcher felt obliged to present the results of his research, yet his decision was contravened by the purists’ interpretation that his revelation was discriminating and politically incorrect. This purist intervention advocates “sameness”, and is as racist and hegemonic as discrimination itself, for it presumes a loss of (different) identity. Its intention is to erase any existing differences between people and to produce a cloned (and much more boring) version of history. It is an artificial insemination of the anti-discrimination policy pushed to another extreme.
In the globalized world we all live in, new dichotomies emerge. The Jabiluka case did not epitomize a rift between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia. Rather, it was a struggle between neoimperialist policies of multinational companies and the Australian government economic interests on the one hand, and the “voice of the people” on the other. Supported by the international public and the media, Australian environmentalists, students and “people of good will” joined the Mirrar people’s plight. This joint action resulted in a moratorium on uranium mining for a period of time. This example shows how much has changed in the past several decades. The old colonial and racial paradigm is disappearing and new paradigms are continually being created.
NOTES
1 Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Penguin, 1978, pp. 7-8.
2 Wilde, William H., Hooton, Joy and Andrews, Barry. Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Oxford University Press Australia, 1991, p. 33.
3 Todorova, Maria. “Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution to the Debate between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid”, Kritika, 1, 4, Nov 2000, p. 722, citing Grant, Bruce. “Empire and Savagery: The Politics of Primitivism in Late Imperial Russia”, Russia’s Orient, p. 307.
4 Ferrier, Elizabeth. “Mapping the Space of the Other: Transformations of Space in Postcolonial Fiction and Postmodern Theory”, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Qld, 1990. Wolfe, Patrick. “White Man’s Flour: Imperialism and an Appropriated Anthropology”, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1994.
5 Kovacic, Leonarda. “Cataloguing Culture: In Search of the Origins of Written Records, Material Culture and Oral Histories of the Gamaroi, Northern New South Wales”, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2001.
6 Todorova, op. cit., p. 727.
7 Somerville, Margaret et al. The Sun Dancin’: People and Place in Coonabarabran, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1994, p. iii.
8 ibid.
9 cf. Cleary, Tania. Poignant Regalia: 19th Century Aboriginal Breastplates and Images: a catalogue of Aboriginal breastplates held in public, regional and private collections in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Australian National Territory, Historic Houses Trust of NSW, Glebe, NSW, c.1993, and Healy, Chris. “Chained to Their Signs: Remembering Breastplates”, in Creed, Barbara and Hoorn, Jeanette (eds). Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific, Pluto Press, Routledge in association with Pluto Press and University of Otago Press, 2001, pp. 24-35.
10 Said, op. cit., p. 25.
11 Somerville, op. cit., p. 65.
12 ibid.
13 The Bush Brother, 1909, p. 154, cited by Somerville, op. cit., pp. 79-80.
14 Somerville, op. cit., p. 80.
15 Cain, Mary Jane. [letter held in Letters to the Colonial Secretary, 1893], location number CSIL 5/6137, State Archives of New South Wales, Sydney, cited by Somerville, op. cit., p. 76.
16 Mary Cain’s descendant: “She used to come to town and tell them what to do and what not to do”, cited by Somerville, op. cit., p. 52.
17 ibid, p. 76.
18 ibid., p. 52.
19 cf. Thrower, Norman J.W. Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1996, p. 270, note 8.
20 Thrower, op.cit., p. 67, mentions “European ‘acquisition’ of territory through cartographic nomencature which became a common practice”, and Antohi notes that “geographical explorers (not merely colonialists) frequently baptized newly “discovered” places with toponyms from back home, out of nostalgia and civilizing zeal”, in Antohi, Sorin. “Romania and the Balkans: From Geocultural Bovarism to Ethnic Ontology”, Tr@nsit, 21 Feb 2002, p. 20.
21 Schonle, Andreas. “Garden of the Empire: Catherine’s Appropriation of the Crimea”, Slavic Review, 60, 1, 2001.
22 For the colonial parallel between Australian landscape and woman as the “other”, see Kay Schaffer’s Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
23 “Black Velvet” is the colloquial term used to indicate the sexual attraction of the Aboriginal female for the white male. Indulgence in black velvet, a common practice in outback areas where white women were often unavailable, was tacitly condoned as an inevitable phenomenon of frontier life”; Wilde et al, op. cit., p. 90.
24 cf. Lewis H. Morgan’s [“Paper on Australian Kinship…”], Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 12 March 1872, and Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, 1871, reprinted by Anthropological Publications, Series: Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Vol. 17, No. 2181, Oosterhout, 1970.
25 The most brutal form of museum “trade” was “body-snatching”, a common nineteenth century method of supplying overseas museums with Aboriginal osteological material, as discussed by Monaghan, D. “The Body Snatchers”, Bulletin: 30-38, 12 Nov 1991, and Turnbull, Paul. Science, National Identity and Aboriginal Body-Snatching in Nineteenth Century Australia, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, University of London, London, 1991.
26 cf. Carol Cooper’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections in Overseas Museums, The Institute Report Series, Aboriginal Studies Press for the Aboriginal Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1989, and Cracks in the Mask [videorecording], Talking Pictures, Sydney, 1997.
27 Literature has been a fertile ground for the appropriation of Aboriginal identity, not only by non-Aboriginal Australians, but also by other nationalities. For instance, Sreten Božic (1936-), Serbian writer and anthropologist, came to Australia in 1960 where he published a series of books under the Aboriginal pseudonim of B. (‘Banumbir, Birrimbir’) Wongar. His European origins were not fully disclosed until 1981; Wilde, op. cit., p. 753. The book Mutant Message Downunder (1991) by the American author Marlo Morgan became immensely popular in the northern hemisphere in the 1990s. While not assuming Aboriginal identity herself, Morgan appropriates the Aboriginal discourse at the expense of Aboriginal people, with primarily financial interests on her agenda.
28 As the Aboriginal scholar Marcia Langton once put it, Tindale’s genealogies, with Tindale’s insistance on classifying Aboriginal people as “1/4-caste, 1/16 caste”, etc., resemble stock lists.
29 cf. Kovacic, op.cit., pp. 70-73, and Young, Freda. “Scientists Save Sacred Trees…”, Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 Nov 1949, [pp. 20-21].
30 Goodall, Heather. Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770-1972, Allen and Unwin in association with Black Books, St Leonards, NSW, 1996, p. 8.
31 As Thrower, op.cit., p. 1, put it: “A knowledge of maps and their contents is not automatic; it must be learned…”
32 Many contemporary films and literary and art works have been inspired by the Aboriginal notions of place. Often, a place itself features as the main character, as in Sally Morgan’s My Place, Joan Lindsay/Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1976), John Bryson’s Evil Angels (1985) and Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines (1987). In “Re-Reading Cultural Geography”, in Foote, Kenneth E. et al (eds). Re-Reading Cultural Geography, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1994, p. 22, Peter J. Hugill and Kenneth E. Foote emphasize the importance of “how meaning is perceived in, ascribed to, or imposed on places by human action. This action, whether conscious or unconscious, serves to construct worlds of meaning in which people develop strong positive and negative emotive bonds with place and environment. Art is vital to the construction of meaning. The poet, playwright, novelist, painter, and film-maker all construct places, imagined or real.”
33 The role of women in map-making was recognized by Thrower, op. cit., p. 265, note 5, who states that women’s contribution to mapping has been “shamefully neglected”. One of the reasons is the fact that women’s maps (e.g. sandpaintings and dilly-bags) were more ephemeral than men’s (e.g. rock art and carved trees), and did not survive the test of time.
34 E.g. Goondiwindi, “a place where wild ducks are found”.
35 Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1994, p. 9.
36 ibid. Aboriginal people are often accused for having “hand-out mentality”, and their reliance on government assistance is seen as parasitical.
7 Birdsell, Joseph B. “Some Environmental and Cultural Factors Influencing the Structuring of Australian Aboriginal Populations”, American Naturalist, Vol. 87, No. 834: 171-207.
38 Bakic-Hayden, Milica and Hayden, Robert M. “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics”, Slavic Review, LI, 1, 1992, p 14.
39 The matrilineal versus the patrilineal initiations have been discussed by the anthropologists Elkin and Tindale.
40 cf. Bakic-Hayden and Hayden, op.cit., p. 3. Apart from identifying with the political discourse of pan-Aboriginality, most uneducated Aboriginal people freely use words such as “black” and “blackfella” when talking about themselves. One may argue that such use of Antipodeanist terminology does not have the same connotations as when used by non-Aboriginal people.
REFERENCES
Antohi, Sorin. “Romania and the Balkans: From Geocultural Bovarism to Ethnic Ontology”, Tr@nsit, 21 Feb 2002.
Bakic-Hayden, Milica and Hayden, Robert M. “Orientalist Variations on the Theme ‘Balkans’: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics”, Slavic Review, LI, 1: 1-15, 1992.
Birdsell, Joseph B. “Some Environmental and Cultural Factors Influencing the Structuring of Australian Aboriginal Populations”, American Naturalist, Vol. 87, No. 834: 171-207.
Cain, Mary Jane. [letter held in Letters to the Colonial Secretary], location number CSIL 5/6137, State Archives of NSW, Sydney.
Cleary, Tania. Poignant Regalia: 19th Century Aboriginal Breastplates and Images: a catalogue of Aboriginal breastplates held in public, regional and private collections in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Australian National Territory, Historic Houses Trust of NSW, Glebe, NSW, c.1993.
Cooper, Carol. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections in Overseas Museums, The Institute Report Series, Aboriginal Studies Press for the Aboriginal Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1989.
Cracks in the Mask [videorecording], Talking Pictures, Sydney, 1997.
Healy, Chris. “Chained to Their Signs: Remembering Breastplates”, in Creed, Barbara and Hoorn, Jeanette (eds). Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific, Pluto Press, Routledge in association with Pluto Press and University of Otago Press, 2001.
Ferrier, E. “Mapping the Space of the Other: Transformations of Space in Postcolonial
Fiction and Postmodern Theory”, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Qld, 1990.
Goodall, Heather. Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770-1972, Allen and Unwin in association with Black Books, St Leonards, NSW, 1996.
Hugill, Peter J. and Foote, Kenneth E. “Re-Reading Cultural Geography”, in Foote, Kenneth E. et al (eds). Re-Reading Cultural Geography, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1994.
Kovacic, Leonarda. “Cataloguing Culture: In Search of the Origins of Written Records, Material Culture and Oral Histories of the Gamaroi, Northern New South Wales”, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2001.
Monaghan, D. “The Body Snatchers”, Bulletin: 30-38, 12 Nov 1991.
Morgan, Lewis H. [“Paper on Australian Kinship…”], Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 12 Mar 1872.
Morgan, Lewis H. Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, 1871, reprinted by Anthropological Publications, Series: Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Vol. 17, No. 2181, Oosterhout, 1970.
Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, Penguin Books, 1978.
Schaffer, Kay. Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Schonle, Andreas. “Garden of the Empire: Catherine’s Appropriation of the Crimea”, Slavic Review, 60, 1, 2001.
Somerville, Margaret et al. The Sun Dancin’: People and Place in Coonabarabran, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1994.
Thrower, Norman J.W. Maps and Civilization: Cartography in Culture and Society, University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1996.
Todorova, Maria. “Does Russian Orientalism Have a Russian Soul? A Contribution to the Debate between Nathaniel Knight and Adeeb Khalid”, Kritika, 1, 4, Nov 2000.
Turnbull, Paul. Science, National Identity and Aboriginal Body-Snatching in Nineteenth Century Australia, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, University of London, London, 1991.
Wilde, William H., Hooton, Joy and Andrews, Barry. Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Oxford University Press Australia, 1991.
Wolfe, Patrick. “White Man’s Flour: Imperialism and an Appropriated Anthropology”, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1994.
Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1994.
Young, Freda. “Scientists Save Sacred Trees…”, Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 Nov 1949, [pp. 20-21].