Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism: Australia, Race and Place 2018029646, 2018040614, 9781138359468, 9780429433733

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Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism

This book analyses the anxiety ‘well-intentioned’ settler Australian women experience when engaging with Indigenous politics. Drawing upon cultural theory and studies of affect and emotion, Slater argues that settler anxiety is an historical subjectivity that shapes perception and senses of belonging. Why does Indigenous political will continue to provoke and disturb? How does settler anxiety inform public opinion and ‘solutions’ to Indigenous inequality? In its rigorous interrogation of the dynamics of settler colonialism, emotions and ethical belonging, Anxieties of Belonging has far-reaching implications for understanding Indigenous–settler relations. Lisa Slater is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong.

Routledge Studies in Cultural History

58 The Medieval and Early Modern Garden in Britain Enclosure and Transformation, c. 1200–1750 Edited by Patricia Skinner and Theresa Tyers 59 Historical Memory of Central and East European Communism Edited by Agnieszka Mrozik and Stanislav Holubec 60 War Experience and Memory in Global Cultures Since 1914 Edited by Angela K. Smith and Sandra Barkhof 61 Libraries, Books, and Collectors of Texts, 1600–1900 Edited by Annika Bautz and James Gregory 62 Monsters and Borders in the Early Modern Imagination Edited by Jana Byars and Hans Peter Broedel 63 The Enlightenment, Philanthropy and the Idea of Social Progress in Early Australia Creating a Happier Race? Ilya Lazarev 64 The Transatlantic Genealogy of American Anglo-Saxonism Michael Modarelli 65 Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism Australia, Race and Place Lisa Slater

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Cultural-History/book-series/SE0367

Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism Australia, Race and Place

Lisa Slater

First published 2019 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Lisa Slater to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Slater, Lisa, 1968– author. Title: Anxieties of belonging in settler colonialism : Australia, race and place / by Lisa Slater. Description: First edtion. | New York : Routledge/ Taylor & Francis Group, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in cultural history ; 65 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018029646 (print) | LCCN 2018040614 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Australia—Race relations—History. | Belonging (Social psychology—Australia. | Women colonists— Political activity—Australia. Classification: LCC DU120 (ebook) | LCC DU120 .S575 2019 (print) | DDC 323.1199/15—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029646 ISBN: 978-1-138-35946-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43373-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements 1 Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging 2 Love and Complicity

vii xix 1 31

3 Desiring Belonging 51 4 Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility 70 5 This Is Not a Gift 88 6 Not Caring Like the State 107 Afterword Index

129 137

Preface

A few days before 2018 Australia Day, our official national celebration, I  was listening to ABC radio. The presenters of The Minefield were asking the question: ‘Is there a morally credible case for not changing the date of Australia Day?’ (Aly & Stephens, 2018). Australia’s national day of celebration falls on the 26th January, the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove.1 Or the beginning of colonisation. ­Familiar to many ‘national days’, there is a public holiday, flag waving parades, national honours, displays of modest, jingoistic to bellicose, racist patriotism, along with garish celebrations, BBQs and getting drunk. To paraphrase the present leader of the federal opposition, it can be an idiot magnet. The Minefield, hosted by public intellectuals Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, does not shy away from contentious and highly political issues, although arguably the push to ‘Change the Date’ has become mainstream. The current Prime Minister might be staunchly opposed, but public opinion regarding the national public holiday is changing (Karp, 2018). According to a recent poll by the Australia Institute, 56% of Australians ‘don’t mind when the national holiday is held, so long as we have one’, while 49% said ‘it should not be held on a day that is offensive to Indigenous Australians’, and only 38% know why Australia Day is held on the 26th January (The ­Australia Institute, 2018). ‘Change the Date’ is no longer a fringe issue or ­‘particular’ to Indigenous people. There is nothing new about protesting Australia Day: it has long been referred to by some as Invasion or Survival Day. For many years, Indigenous activists, and those in solidarity, have called for the date to be changed. For at least eighty years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, 2 and supporters, have gathered to mourn the invasion of their lands, celebrate their survival and protest the impacts of ongoing colonisation (Land, 2015). However, what is new, as The Minefield presenters illustrated, is the intensity, insistence and the unavoidability of the demand to change the date. Indigenous people have made it known to a too often complacent citizenry that celebrating on January 26th is highly offensive as it marks the onset of genocide, dispossession, injustice and is a day of deep pain. Celebrating Australian achievements

viii Preface on the 26th  January has become an affront to those non-Indigenous ­Australians who seek justice for and reconciliation with Indigenous people. The Minefield’s conversation then turned to the distinction between the gathering momentum to ‘Change the Date’ and the silence that met the Uluru Statement. In May 2017, over 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders from across the country met at Uluru in Central Australia, on the lands of the Anangu people, to discuss and agree on an approach to constitutional reform and recognition of the First Nations (Australian Parliament, 2017). The summit produced the ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, a moving and eloquent demand for significant sociopolitical transformation. The delegates sought ‘agreement making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history’ (National Constitutional Convention, 2017). The Uluru Statement urged Australians to move beyond symbolism and called for substantial changes. Joining the hosts of The Minefield, Aly and Stephens, as their weekly guest was Gemma McKinnon, University of New South Wales Indigenous Law Scholar. Despite the growing support for some Indigenous issues, McKinnon lamented, her people went unheard. The Uluru Statement, the panel concluded, was roundly rejected and willfully disregarded by the federal government and mainstream Australia. It did not ignite the public imagination, Aly stated, or a public discussion. Very few people were engaged generally, and fewer still were saddened or outraged by the government, media and public silence. They concurred, ‘Change the Date’ is no cost. Uluru asks for much more, including a voice in parliament. When there are costs, such as Uluru demands, Aly identified, ‘our fervency and passion dies away’. The Uluru Statement declares that the sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples ‘has never been ceded or extinguished and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown…. In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard’ (National Constitutional Convention, 2017). It fell upon deaf ears. The preoccupation of this book is progressive, settler Australians who cannot be moved, or stirred to action, by collective Indigenous political agency, yet are routinely moved by the national pastime of worrying about Indigenous people (Land, 2015). A great number of Australians are willing to support ‘Change the Date’ but simultaneously choose not to engage in public discussions about substantial constitutional changes Indigenous people are calling for such as the Uluru Statement. To paraphrase Aboriginal activist Gary Foley, it is as if notions of ­Aboriginal agency and self-determination are incomprehensible even to well-­meaning, anti-racist settlers (Land, 2015, p. x). I share other settler scholars’ commitment to examine the ‘settler problem’, analysing contemporary expressions of benevolent colonialism (Mackey, 2014; ­Regan, 2010). Unlike other recent studies however, my protagonists

Preface  ix are not activists, self-consciously anti-racist or allies, or professionals working within the ‘Indigenous sector’ (Kowal, 2015; Land, 2015; Lea, 2008). My focus is a more generalised condition of everyday progressive settler Australians, and their emotional responses to Indigeneity. In particular, I zero in on anxiety, the much renowned, but now little examined, settler condition. I turn the readers’ attention to the blind spots: settlers’ embrace of Indigenous culture and the ceaseless worry and concern for Indigenous people, coupled with an evasion of Indigenous political will. I refer to this conflation as settler anxiety. My protagonists are left-­leaning settler Australians who want to engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, cultures and social issues. Rather crudely, I refer to them as ‘good white people’. More pointedly, my subjects are anxious white women. Intimate, complicated and highly emotional ‘feminised’ spaces, such as those discussed in the following chapters, are often overlooked as political encounters that provide insights into the ‘settler problem’. Focusing upon white women’s emotional responses to Aboriginal people and politics is uncomfortable, to say the least. It risks re-centring settler experience. But we need to stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2010) to enable a deeper understanding of how settler care and concern works to maintain colonial power relations. To borrow from Irene Watson, mine is a meditation on discomfort. She questions, ‘[i]s there no possibility of a political space to be heard on the concerns we hold as Aboriginal people?’ (2007, p. 36). Despite their good intentions, progressive settlers continue to respond to Indigenous politics and efficacy as a provocation. In response to Watson’s concern, I explore how settler anxiety neutralises or displaces Indigenous agency. Worrying about Indigenous people, together with the embracing of forms of Indigenous culture can act to deny the political encounter. Throughout this book, I trace the anatomy of a particular cultural ­subjectivity that largely goes unanalysed in Australian society and, however inadvertently, works to contain Indigenous political difference. That subjectivity (good white people) displaces political engagement. ­I ndigenous people, who are economically marginalised, have extremely poor health, high suicide and incarceration rates, and low education and employment are not being listened to by government and broader Australia. The chatter and worrying about Indigenous people continues to drown out the voices of Indigenous people themselves, their concerns and visions for the present and future. Blocking the space to be heard, be it at a national or more personal level, contributes to making too many Indigenous people’s lives unendurable, by limiting, frustrating and immobilising the collaborative struggle for social justice and Indigenous self-determination. Notably, I am identifying two modes of anxiety. First, the guilt, fretting and pity, which displaces the political encounter with the familiar settler response to worry about and try to fix the ‘Indigenous problem’. Second, an encounter with the political that

x Preface disturbs settler authority, interrupts certainty and brings good white people undone. The latter can be harnessed to create political spaces in which Indigenous people might be heard. I was listening to The Minefield while walking along the headland close to my home in Wollongong, New South Wales (NSW), on ­Dharawal country.3 To the west, I can see Mt Keira, which Dharawal refers to as mother mountain, a place of learning. The University of Wollongong, where I work, sits at its base. Looking south-east, out into the Pacific Ocean, are the Five Islands clustered just off the coast where the once-­ booming steelworks still billow industrial steam. Not far to the south is Port Kembla, and the Aboriginal community of ­Coomaditchie, located on the old mission grounds. There is a children’s book, beautifully illustrated with artwork created by the children of Coomaditchie, which tells the Five Islands creation story (The Children of Coomaditchie, 2016). No doubt there are Dreaming stories4 throughout this country, rich in fish, fresh water and natural beauty. The stories I’m more familiar with are of colonisation. In the early 1880s, British colonisers travelled south from Sydney to ‘open up’ the country and to exploit the rich pastures and resources (Organ & Speechley, 1997). Colonial history would have it that the explorer Charles Throsby, and his convict servant Joe Wyld, with the support of two Aboriginal guides ‘discovered’ the Illawarra in 1815 (NSWNPWS, 2005). Not long after, Throsby drove his cattle into the Illawarra using an Aboriginal trail down the steep escarpment, where he was one of the first ‘settlers’. Land began to be granted to absentee landlords dispossessing Dharawal; punitive military campaigns were used to reinforce the encroaching frontier (NSWNPWS, 2005, p. 17). In 1816, the much-memorialised Governor Macquarie unofficially declared war, implementing a secret campaign to rid the Cumberland Plain, in the Sydney region, of its Aboriginal population. He instructed his soldiers to seek out the Aborigines and ‘strike them with terror… drive them to a distance from the settlements of the White Men… inflict terrible and exemplary punishments’. In the early hours of April 17, 1816, the 46th Regiment attacked an Aboriginal camp at Appin. At least fourteen Aboriginal people were massacred, including the elderly, women and children. Macquarie labelled the incident ‘unfortunate.’ (Organ & Speechley, 1997, p. 10). In 2016, an Appin Massacre memorial ceremony was held to remember the Dharawal people who died. All of this, and much more, happened and is happening in this place I now call home. All spaces are heterogeneous, abundant with conflicting interests and histories and unexpected alignments. It is only to state the obvious to say, what one sees, knows and experiences in any particular location is cultural, just as the particular time and place educates, shapes and frames one’s perspective. In our contemporary moment, the politics of neoliberalism fosters fear, suspicion, defensiveness and indifference. More and more people are becoming economically and socially

Preface  xi marginalised. ‘The rich get richer, and the poor get the picture’, as Midnight Oil sang, in what now feels like halcyon days (Midnight Oil, 1982). Australia is in an era of the bureaucratisation of social services and punitive remedialism: the most disadvantaged are made responsible for their problems, treated as deficient and the fix is to submit to demoralising disciplinary regimes, or be abandoned. It is worth remembering that certain forms of life are cultivated at the expense of others. What is one’s responsibility to invest in the multiplicity of life? It seems of vital importance to know that Australia has an Aboriginal history, present and future, that the local has sites of cultural significance, colonial and contemporary violence, and that all places hold divergent memories, histories and ways of life. What motivates this project is a desire to expand our capacity to understand settler–Indigenous relations, invest in the plurality and diversity of places and grow our imaginative life to create more just futures. To do so, also requires appreciating how feelings and emotions inform one’s sense of self, place and experiences.

ii If I were to zoom in on my idea of home, like a GPS for deep and persistent feelings, you would see a farm tucked into and surrounded by a national forest, complete with freshwater creeks, cavernous Moreton bay figs, hills for rolling down: an early childhood home, to borrow from Williams, a place where I first lived, where I came alive and learned to see (1973, p. 84). How did the country of my childhood shape and inform my capacity to see and feel now? A key concern of this book is with how the taken-for-grantedness of settler authority plays out in the everyday. I explore the feelings and sensations of everyday certainty, belonging and personhood that settler colonial legal and political structures give rise to, as Mark Rifkin proposes, and the questions that are suspended and made moot by an all-encompassing settler sovereignty (2013, p. 322). The givenness, or what Rifkin conceptualises as settler common sense, framed my experiences of and attachment to my childhood home and continues to orientate my subjectivity and embodied relationships to people, place and history. Such experiences of the self in relation to place normalises ongoing dispossession of Indigenous people (Rifkin, 2014). I was brought up on the far north coast of NSW, on a farm fed by the rich volcanic soil of the Border Ranges. Bunjalung country. As a child I knew nothing about Aboriginal sovereignty or colonisation. I did, however, sense denial, a defiant refusal to acknowledge that this had been home to others long before ‘us’. It was something to do with Aboriginal people. I wondered but dared not ask. To me, this place was proudly Bellbird Appaloosa Stud. My father was a cattle grazier and a horseman and my mother could cook, care and help on the farm, and to my child’s

xii Preface eyes was stylish and elegant (a cut above the rest, and this gave me hope). We were country kids, bush kids, a little too far beyond the pale for some. I knew the words to Kenny Rogers’ ‘The Gambler’ and Tammy Wynette’s ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’ like little girls today know the words (and moves) to Jennifer Lopez’ ‘Ain’t your Mama’. Farming communities extend kindness, and help people out when they can, out of necessity and a moral order. Did this include Aboriginal people or those said to have a ‘touch of the tar brush’? The language of eugenics and assimilation taught us racial prejudices and warned of social exclusion. At a young age I learned to work hard against its pull; the ever-present threat of being battered by the loneliness and poverty of the margins. Individual Aboriginal people might be helped out, and there were the star boxers or football players who were championed in the ring or on the field, but I felt a collective hostility that I did not understand and made little sense. These are all dimly light memories, there was undoubtedly much more, but I am tracking the tributaries and undercurrents of feelings. Many years later, in an interview I undertook with the Nynoogar writer Kim Scott, he asked me where my interest stemmed from in the relationship between black and white Australia. Maybe I told him a few stories of growing up in Kyogle; of the haunting sense that what seemed unquestionably ours, wasn’t. He responded, you’re asking the questions you couldn’t ask as a child. He was right. Things have changed dramatically since my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s rural ­Australia. Still it’s the uncanny, in and out of place, the unspoken social ­hierarchies, the training of the heart, the uncertainty buried deep in that ­taken-for-grantedness that plagues me. In the country of my childhood, it was easy to believe in God. This wasn’t because we lived on the edge of what is now the heritage-listed Murray Scrub – a lowland subtropical rainforest on the far north coast of New South Wales. We lived on fertile farming land alongside a rich and complex ecological system. I remember my father calling it ‘apple tree country’. Riding along the clear, stony, icy-cold creek – the boundary between the farm and Toonumbar State Forest – he pointed out native apple trees. ‘They don’t bear fruit,’ he said, ‘the timber is no good for milling or for making furniture, but they are the sign of good country.’ It wasn’t the perennial fear of drought or flood destroying the family livelihood that demonstrated the presence of a distant, fierce God. Each year there seemed to be a drought, the earth cracking open, turning the flat between the house and the yards into a mosaic. Followed by a flood, the sky settling low and heavy, dark as a battle ship, obscuring the ranges. It wasn’t the devotions to ‘beauty rich and rare’ that we chimed each morning when we raised the school flag that persuaded me that this was God’s country. Or the nationalist poetry we read at school that sang of the county’s splendor and abundance. Women were beautiful, sometimes a cowboy, but not the country. It was too clever to get caught in a

Preface  xiii net of words, especially one as dangerous as beauty – dragging with it suspicion and reproach. Language fell across the country like a veil; the world turned, words slipped off, dropped behind. The God I learned about in Sunday school meted out his whims from some far away non-place. In the country of my childhood, the men, despite their fierce belief that they were kings of the country, their practical intelligence and toughness, sometimes appeared unanchored and fragile. It was as if authority came from elsewhere, even further away than town. The men embodied the taken-for-grantedness of settler colonialism, but there was also vulnerability. It is this dynamic of entitlement and helplessness that I want to examine, to analyse how it masks settler common sense, and transfers complicity and personal responsibility to a higher authority that can ruin or reward. In the case of Australian settlers, the government. And the women you ask. Where were they? It was a man’s world. But no one doubted that the place would fall to pieces without a ‘good woman’. Judged harshly, often found wanting, expected to be ‘handy on the farm’, grow the kids up (more-or-less on her own) and ‘scrub up well’ when the occasion required. Not too pretty of course, and flirting was out. But you couldn’t help but admire them; they could do just about anything. I knew women to be kind, a great reservoir of gentleness and understanding. There were plenty of women who were mean, harsh, if not scary but maybe I didn’t really think of them as women. Us kids talked amongst ourselves, wondered what went wrong: what made her so tough or ‘unpredictable’? Rumours circled such women; some man was to blame. The men of my childhood could be wild and reckless, forthright and reliable but better not trust your heart to them. Lots of things went unspoken, most especially the often-drunken violence and anger rained down upon women. As they say, in tough times everyone sticks together. After all, the country was hard won, and some-how we all knew to keep quiet, not to question what worried at our hearts.

iii I tell the above stories to locate myself and what inspires the spirit of this book. Like many country kids, I left and moved away to go to university, fulfill career and personal ambitions and became urban, even cosmopolitan and certainly middle class. From a young age, I became acutely aware that ‘country’ girls like me leave the bush. In my teens I started to find the life provincial and restrictive. Nonetheless, I loved the country but it felt like there was no place for me. Other women who have grown up in and left the bush have shared similar feelings of loss. I wonder if it creates a yearning for an idealised, seemingly unmediated relationship to place, that one felt as a child. In the 1990s and early 2000s, many progressive settlers responded to the ‘revelations’ of colonial violence

xiv Preface that circulated through government reports, the ­media, scholarship and personal accounts, with shock, anxiety and guilt. It left them feeling out of place. Throughout those years, I remember thinking ‘we’ did know, the evidence was everywhere. It was an open secret. The country was violently won, but such knowledge was buried, and hardened against. In rural Australia, there seemed to be so much pain and grievance – accidental deaths and injuries, loss of crops and stock through drought and flood, and the anger worn by women, children and outsiders – which pile up and become a burden to carry. In settler ­Australia we celebrate and bury the trauma. What does this strange mix of grief, exclusion, privilege and knowing silences produce? What relationships to place, people and the self? What is allowed to find ­expression and what is censored? The women of this study are searching for a sense of belonging, which they pursue through an engagement with Aboriginal Australia. Not all of my subjects were raised in rural Australia, but their longing for a connection to country and to Aboriginal people and culture shares a gender and racial politics that continues to mark and circumscribe settler–­I ndigenous relations. Their pursuits also furnish productive questions that reveal more than they conceal. Hidden within the anxiety to belong, reconcile with Indigenous people and reckon with colonial history, and coupled with the threat that Indigenous political will pose to good white people, lie insights into an architecture of Australian subjectivity that we don’t talk about. A particular concern is that in our historical moment, there is a retreat, a wariness for settlers to disclose what it feels like to be the beneficiaries of living in a colonised country. It is shaming to discuss these awkward, if not ugly emotions, and much easier to dismiss them as personal failings or hide behind the valorisation of Aboriginal ‘culture’ or a deep empathy for the marginalised, the dispossessed, the injured (Pedwell, 2014). Consequently, progressive settlers could fail to confront colonial history, examine one’s complicity in maintaining power and privilege, and work in solidarity with ­I ndigenous people. A note on my use of the term country. In Aboriginal English, country refers to a holistic connection to land. It is a word for home and takes in everything within the landscape: the land, sea, sky, rivers, special sites, seasons, plants, animals and stories. Country is a place of Aboriginal heritage, belonging and spirituality (Eades, 2013). My application and understanding of how the term is often used in rural, white Australia is that the word shares a sense of a deep connection to and recognition ­ ountry cannot be of the fecundity of land, but there is no equivalence. C entirely captured within an economic logic, but it readily captures the heart. Nonetheless, it remains caught in the settler colonial ­imaginary. Rural white Australians still assert the largest claim on a­ uthentic belonging.

Preface  xv

Chapter Summary Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism traverses multiple cultural sites – memoirs, film, cultural tourism and policy – and a picture begins to emerge. Each chapter is a piece of the puzzle, and the logic of the book’s organisation is to trace a cultural dynamic across a particular time, and to explore how it manifests in different terrain. By analysing varied cultural sites, I investigate a broad cultural subjectivity – good white people – to argue that settler anxiety is an effect of and a refusal to encounter Indigenous political claims and difference. My subjects of study are those who have been profoundly affected by the post-1970s Indigenous rights movements or whose subjectivities have been deeply informed by the politics of reconciliation and Indigenous testimony. At the height of the reconciliation era, the 1990s to early 2000s, there was a proliferation of work that examined settlers’ responses to and turmoil over the revelations of Australia’s colonial violence. Many people were accused of reacting with self-pity and being overly concerned with their sense of belonging rather than expressing horror towards ongoing ­colonial violence and stirring to support Indigenous self-­determination. Now the routine is to worry about Indigenous people. One might not be any better or worse than the other; both are expressions of settler authority straining to regain control. There was however a revealing honesty in the self-­conscious settler anxiety of the 1990s to 2000s, which I want to mobilise to scrutinise our contemporary moment. Thus, I examine texts from the reconciliation era to the present, post-­ reconciliation Australia. Initially, I examine crafted expositions of s­ ettler anxiety of belonging – Chapter 2, Kim Mahood’s Craft for a Dry Lake (2000); Chapter 3,  M ­ argaret Somerville’s ethno-­autobiography, Body/­ Landscape ­Journals (1999), and Chapter 4, Jeni Thornley’s poetic filmic essay, ­Island Home Country (2008). In Chapter 5, I move to an ethnographic account of s­ ettler–Indigenous co-presence, in which I witness the ‘trauma’ of the political encounter unfold, and then how settlers are reorientated ­towards Aboriginal self-­determination. In the final chapter, I turn my attention to government policies to examine how the ‘governing of care’ works to conceal colonial power relations. Australia is a cosmopolitan society, a complicated place and one of the most multicultural countries in the world. My subjects of study are ­Australians with an Anglo heritage, of British and Christian ­descent, ­urban, east coast and educated middle class. Those who are ­‘unquestionably’ accepted as Australian, yet do not identify nor are readily celebrated as quintessentially Australian. Notably however, Australia has a diverse migration history. Some of the largest migrant populations are from China, India, Vietnam, the Philippines and Italy, to name but a few. In the post-second world war period, there were waves of migration from Europe, and over the last 50 years, Australia has become

xvi Preface home to people from across the globe. In Chapter 1, I discuss in detail why these particular Anglo protagonists. Notably being white does not equate with a sense of belonging. There are many people of European descent who for reasons of class, education, sexuality, cultural differences, etc., ­despite their fair skin, are excluded, or have never felt at home in ­Australia. This is simply to say that there is diversity of cultures, and within this book I am not attempting to address the variegated textures of contemporary Australia. My own background, experiences and preoccupations have provided me with a level of proficiency and a position from which to speak about a particular subject position, which I refer to as ‘good white people’. I will leave it to readers to draw connections and distinctions with their own lives. Chapter 1 introduces the broad themes and concerns of the book, and revisits and revises the concept of settler anxiety. To extend the analysis of settler anxiety, first, I examine and detail the cultural dynamic that produces ‘good white people’. Second, to develop a more nuanced understanding of the anxious subject, I draw upon the work of critical studies of affect and emotion and critical theory. Third, I analyse the threat that Indigenous political will pose to settlers’ sense of home and ethical belonging. The following chapters investigate ‘sites of discomfort’: each is a detailed case study of a particular sociopolitical contestation. Chapters 2–4 explore settler, feminist memoirs, in which the women, in various ways, confront the limits of their ‘goodness’ and capacity to bear difference. The focus of these chapters is ‘personal journeys’ in which the women come undone when they are confronted by issues of race, gender, belonging and colonial history and complicity. In each there is a loss of innocence. Chapters 5 and 6 move the study from the personal to the collective good intentions of settler Australians. Chapter 5 explores a Yolngu5 cultural tourism program, in remote Northern Australia, which harnesses non-Indigenous tourists’ fascination with Aboriginal culture to assert political and economic autonomy and sovereignty (Wright et al., 2012). The result is both settler turbulence and ease, antagonism and alliance. I conclude that the political encounter unsettled and disorientated the tourists, which reoriented them towards a Yolngu ethos. Chapter 6 analyses the role that settler anxiety plays in shaping public policies that are designed to ameliorate Indigenous disadvantage. In particular, the current federal initiative, Closing the Gap (CtG). Seemingly, CtG makes minimal demands upon the broader population, other than on occasion to enact concern and worry. I examine what claims on life and the future are being made and how governmental care limits good white people’s political engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. I ask what are ‘we’ caring for? Throughout this book, I pause over moments when, however acciden­­ tally, good white women are confronted with Indigenous political will, and it brings them undone. They are made anxious, uncertain and do not

Preface  xvii know how to proceed. These contests are material and ­embodied: not mediated through the media, film and books. She is out of place and out of her depth. I ask, what can settler anxiety reveal about the complex cultural dynamics of settler–Indigenous Australia? More so, can anxiety teach progressive settlers how to make a home in an Australia comprised of multiple stories, knowledge, histories and political agency? I conclude that staying with anxiety – being disturbed, halted and unsettled – ­provides ways to renew our imaginative life and contribute to creating ethical settler–­ Indigenous relations that do not rely on reconciliation, recognition and resolution. Another key motivation for this book is the belief that if we closely examine the complexity of material encounters between settler and Indigenous Australians, we can see moments when settler anxiety gives way to a potentially radical political empathy. We need to turn ameliorative settler projects into political encounters, and in so doing create ways to see, be and think differently.

Preface Acknowledgements Parts of this preface were originally published as ‘A meditation on ­discomfort’, Australian Feminist Studies 32(93), 2017, 335–343, and ‘No Place like Home: Staying Well in a Too Sovereign Country’, M/C Journal 10(4), 2007, np.

Notes 1 Australia Day has only been held on the 26th January since 1994. 2 Throughout this book, I largely use the term ‘Indigenous’ and am referring to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. When I can I will refer to the particular language group/traditional owners. When I use the term Aboriginal, I am not also discussing Torres Strait Islanders. 3 Also referred to as ‘Tharawal’, they are the traditional owners of large tracks of land in ‘the southern and south western Sydney area from the south side of Botany Bay, around Port Hacking, Illawarra Escarpment, as far south as the Shoalhaven River (Nowra) and extending inland west to Campbelltown and Camden.’ (see https://www.tharawal.com.au/who-we-are.) 4 The English word, Dreaming, does not capture the extent of the complexity of the Aboriginal spiritual concept. In Aboriginal languages, there are many different words used for the term. However, the Dreaming is ongoing and refers to the creation process and spiritual ancestors. 5 The traditional owners of north-east Arnhem Land, North Territory.

Bibliography Aly, W., & Stephens, S. (Presenters). (2018, January 17). Is there a morally ­credible case for not changing the date of Australia Day? [Radio broadcast]. In The minefield. Sydney, NSW: ABC Radio National. Australian Parliament. (2017). Uluru Statement: A quick guide. Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved from https://www.aph.gov.

xviii Preface au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/ pubs/rp/rp1617/Quick_Guides/UluruStatement Eades, D. (2013). Aboriginal ways of using English. Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press. Haraway, D. (2010). When species meet: Staying with the trouble. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28(1), 53–55. Karp, P. (2018, January 29). Australia Day’s date will not change while I’m prime minister, Turnbull says. The Guardian Australia. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jan/29/australia-daysdate-will-not-change-while-im-prime-minister-turnbull-says Kowal, E. (2015). Trapped in the gap. New York, NY: Berghahn. Land, C. (2015). Decolonizing solidarity: Dilemmas and directions for ­supporters of Indigenous struggles. London, England: Zed Books. Lea, T. (2008). Bureaucrats and bleeding hearts. Sydney, NSW: UNSW Press. Mackey, E. (2014). Unsettling expectations: (Un)Certainty, settler states of feeling, law, and decolonization. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 29(12), 235–252. Midnight Oil. (1982). Read about it [Recorded by R. Hirst, J. Moginie, P.  Garrett, M. Rotsey & P. Gifford. On 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 [record]. New York, NY: Columbia Records. National Constitutional Convention. (2017). Uluru Statement from the heart. Canberra, ACT: Referendum Council. ­ boriginal National Parks & Wildlife Service (NSWNPWS). (2005). A history of A people of the Illawarra 1770 to 1970. Hurstville, NSW: Department of­ Environment and Conservation. Organ, M., & Speechley, C. (1997). Illawarra Aborigines: An introductory history. Retrieved from http://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent. cgi?article=1022&context=asdpapers Pedwell, C. (2014). Affective relations: Transnational politics of empathy. ­London, England: Palgrave. Regan, P. (2010). Unsettling the settler within: Indian residential schools, truth telling, and reconciliation in Canada. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia. Rifkin, M. (2013). Settler common sense. Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3–4), 322–340. Rifkin, M. (2014). Settler common sense: Queerness and everyday ­colonialism in the American renaissance. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. The Australia Institute. (2018). Australians laid back about Australia Day – Poll. Retrieved from http://www.tai.org.au/content/australians-laid-back-about -australia-day-poll The Children of Coomaditchie. (2016). The story of the Five Islands. ­Warrawong, NSW: Coomaditchie United Aboriginal Corporation. Watson, I. (2007). Aboriginal sovereignities: Past, present and future (im)possibilities. In S. Perera (Ed.), Our patch (pp. 23–44). Curtin, WA: Network Books. Williams, R. (1973). The country and the city. Oxford, England: Oxford ­University Press. Wright, S., Lloyd, K., Suchet-Pearson, S., Burarrwanga, L., Tofa, M., & Bawaka Country. (2012). Telling stories in, through and with Country: Engaging with Indigenous and more-than-human methodologies at Bawaka, NE, Australia. Journal of Cultural Geography, 29, 39–60.

Acknowledgements

Most books take a long time to research and write, or more so rewrite and wrangle into shape. This one is no exception. It is impossible to thank everyone who has influenced the book and supported me along the way. It has become very clear how vital small, everyday gestures of collegiality, friendship and kindness are to the process. I am especially appreciative of friends and colleagues who carefully read and gave detailed, perceptive feedback on draft chapters, discussed ideas and encouraged me over the years. In particular, I wish to thank: K ­ atrina Schlunke, Karen Crowe, Amanda Harris, Pia Smith, Ian ­Buchanan, ­Elspeth Probyn, Joshua Lobb, Sukhmani Khorana, Tanja Dreher, Mike Griffiths, Emily Potter, Eve Vincent, Gordon Waitt, ­Pauline McGuirk, Colleen McGloin, Brian Martin, Catherine Phillips, Leah Gibbs, Michael Cohen, Niki Owen, Michaela Spencer, Bronwyn Carlson, Wes Morris, Leah Lui-Chivizhe, the Centre for Colonial and Setter Studies (CASS) work-in-progress reading group, and Feminist ­Research Network (FRN) work-in-progress workshops. In particular, I am most grateful to my friend and colleague, ­A ndrew Whelan, for his generous engagement with my work, intellectual ­companionship, insight and humour. During my time as a research fellow at the University of South ­Australia, I was funded to undertake fieldwork and given the space to write. This is where I began to see a book emerging. I wish to acknowledge the financial support and sabbatical leave I received from the School of Humanities and Social Inquiry (HSI) and the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts (LHA), University of Wollongong. To a h ­ umanities scholar, time (and collegiality) is the greatest resource. Pockets of money that funded research trips, teaching relief, research assistants, conference attendance and workshops, all added up to greatly support the project. LHA’s funding of writing retreats, research networks and centres assists my scholarship but more so a collective, supportive culture. In particular, I wish to thank LHA for providing funds for an editor. A very special thanks to Haydie Gooder for not only being a thorough, encouraging editor but also deeply engaging with and caring about the issues and ideas I am reflecting upon.

xx Acknowledgements Some of the material in this book and earlier versions of several c­ hapters were previously published in articles and book chapters. I am thankful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for their feedback. The work is reprinted with permission: ‘A meditation on discomfort’, ­Australian Feminist Studies 32(93), 2017, 335–343; ‘Questioning Care’, in A. Hickey (Ed.), The Pedagogies of Cultural Studies, (pp. 116–131), New York: Routledge, 2016; ‘Waiting at the Border: White ­Filmmaking on the Ground of Aboriginal Sovereignty’, in B. Neumeier and K. ­Schaffer (Eds.), Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in ­Australia, (pp. 129–147), Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2014; ‘They were so Unbearably Fragile and Foolish: Apple Trees, Intimacy and the Strangeness of Possession’, in B. Holloway and J. Rutherford (Eds.) Halfway House: The Poetics of Australian Spaces (pp. 268–284), Crawley, WA: UWA ­Publishing, 2010; ‘Anxious Settler Belonging: Actualising the Potential for Making Resilient Postcolonial Subjects’, M/C Journal 16(5), 2013, np; ‘No Place like Home: Staying Well in a Too Sovereign Country’, M/C Journal 10(4), 2007, np; ‘Intimate Australia: Body/Landscape Journals and the Paradox of Belonging’, Cultural Studies Review 13(1), 2007, 74–89. I live and work in the beautiful Illawarra region, on Dharawal ­country, and I grew up on Bundjalung country. Throughout my life, I have lived in and travelled to many different places in Australia. Even if as non-­ Indigenous Australians we don’t know it or acknowledge it, country helps sustain us. Finally, special thanks to my family. Especially Tray and Jess – I fail to know how to reciprocate your generosity of heart.

1 Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging

Have you felt it in yourself or sensed it circulate in a space? Good white people writhing with discomfort, and no shortage of disdain and ­affront in the face of Indigenous political will. I’ll use an academic conference as an example. So as not to identify any particular scholar, below I sketch a scene drawn from several presentations, where the largely white, ­academic audience are called to account. A prominent Indigenous academic is delivering a keynote to an informed, receptive audience. We want to hear her well-researched arguments, and perhaps more so, learn from her, gather an intellectual and political arsenal, to be moved and ­galvanised to action. She states calmly and confidently: Indigenous people have never ceded sovereignty. Yet in any real sense how many people in this room, however good your intentions, genuinely accept Indigenous sovereignty? What does it mean to you? Indigenous people have repeatedly said that we are not being listened to, and despite the Prime Minister’s pledges, governments continue to do things to Aboriginal people, not work with us.1 We continue to be examined, probed, pitied, blamed for our poor health and socio-economic marginalisation, infantilised, and treated as ­incapable of finding solutions to the problems that beset our lives. Yet every day Indigenous people are working at local, national or international levels to improve our peoples’ lives and counter ­ongoing colonialism. She refuses an easy alignment and rejects settler benevolence and ­goodwill. When the speaker puts forth a political agenda that questions settlers’ intentions, their willingness to relinquish power, to treat ­Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as equals – equals who might have a very different understanding of the problems and the ­solutions – what happens? It’s early summer, not yet mid-morning and already threatening to be a hot day outside. Inside the air conditioning is too high, and many delegates shuffle in their seats, reaching into their bags for another layer of clothing to ward off the chill. Yet the room feels quiet and still. Bodies are so attuned to tension. In the audience,

2  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging I feel anxiety flare, then swell to indignity and hurt. The room is heavy with worry and f­ retting. The keynote address ends, the Q&A is brief, as if the questions are stuck in the audience’s throats, and the applause ­restrained. At morning tea, no one directly addresses or speaks to the feeling, but we hold it close, unwilling to let it go. Maybe someone says she found the speaker a bit rude, aggressive – angry. But most stay quiet; fear ­being accused of insensitivity, or worse, ignorance and racism. ­Feelings of ­hostility and uncertainty linger. It is a familiar scene, which marks a particular cultural dynamic between progressive settlers and Indigenous people, and one that good white people don’t like to talk about. Throughout this book, I want to better understand why settlers experience Indigenous political will as disturbing and painful, disrupting their sense of self, belonging, ethics and politics. Pity, according to Tony Birch, is the ‘emotion that drives the relationship between conservative and liberal-minded Australians alike in their dealings with Aboriginal people’ (Birch, 2014, p. 41). It is this inequitable and patronising relationship, to borrow from Birch, which is my focus. There is no shortage of pity. However, when Indigenous people refuse settler benevolence, and the accompanying identity of historical victims, and assert political agency, good white people’s response is not pity but a self-defensive anxiety. When they encounter the materiality of Indigenous life, in all of its complexity, strength and vulnerabilities, they are confronted by the limits of settler innocence and goodness and feel uneasy and under siege. Indigenous autonomy and political will threaten a taken-for-granted sense of settler belonging, and a common response is anxiety. Indigeneity, as scholars have long observed, makes settlers anxious; the claim to land is a sharp reminder that the colonial project is incomplete and settlers are the beneficiaries of its ongoing violence (Byrd, 2011; Fanon, 1963; Tuck & Yang, 2012). The pity identified by Birch – the configuration of sympathy and worrying about Indigenous people – I conceptualise as a form of anxiety that works to displace Indigeneity. Central to this book is a particular demographic for whom, as former Prime Minister Tony Abbott put it, ‘few things matter more than the lot of Indigenous people’ (2015). My interest is, as I indicated in the Preface, ‘good white women’: progressive settler Australians who want to learn about and engage with Indigenous peoples, cultures and social issues. To be more accurate, my protagonists are anxious, good white women. Those who are deeply troubled by the so-called ‘Indigenous problem’: socio-economic inequality; poor health, education, housing; racism; growing incarceration and suicide rates; the closing of remote communities; the ‘loss’ of culture; and the list could go on and on. There is a lot to worry about. All Australians should be alarmed by ongoing discrimination, injustice and disadvantage. However, what does the culture of concern and ‘care’ reveal about settler colonialism?

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  3 To be clear, not everyone cares. It is only too obvious that Indigenous issues do not matter to a lot of Australians. Even more so, as Clark and colleagues found in their recent study of non-Indigenous attitudes ­towards Aboriginal reconciliation, a ‘large body of the population ­remains disinterested and unengaged’ (2016, p. 2). Indigenous lives remain invisible, their voices go unheard, are met with a powerful form of apathy and inaction or worse with outright hostility and racism ­(Buchanan, 2012; Davis, 2016; Dodson, 2014). As much as indifference, resentment or aggression are an ever-present backdrop, and bring good white people into sharp relief, it is not the target of my analysis. My intellectual curiosity is animated by what appears to be a contradiction at the ‘heart’ of progressive settler cultural politics: the desire for vital Indigeneity – strong people and culture – an end to (neo)colonialism, and a deep concern about Indigenous well-being, but coupled with an inability to negotiate Indigenous political agency. However, as I will go on to argue, it is not a conflict but rather exposes the architecture of ­settler colonialism. Notably, I am identifying two modes of anxiety. Firstly, worrying about Indigenous people, which is an evasion of the political: a virtuous anxiety. Secondly, an encounter with the political that interrupts settler certainty and suspends agency. The latter is politically potent, I argue, if it is harnessed to reflect upon what is going on here: not for (poor) me but in settler colonialism’s troubling relationship with Indigenous Australia. Anxiety is often perceived as an undesirable emotion, a sign of a lack of cultivation and self-control. It is revealing, not so much of the individual but of a cultural dynamic (Pedwell, 2014, p. 56). One’s own ­anxiety can bring one undone; another’s can make onlookers squirm with embarrassment and discomfort. There is nothing majestic about anxiety. I share Sianne Ngai’s interest in what she refers to as minor ­affects: envy, anxiety, irritation, boredom and bewilderment (2005, p. 7). These weaker, petty categories of feelings, which she calls ‘ugly feelings’, call attention to ‘real social experience and a certain kind of historical truth’ (2005, p. 5). Minor affects, or ugly feelings, are important, Ngai contends, because they are ambivalent and confusing, thus such feelings are ‘explicitly amoral and noncathartic, offering no satisfactions of virtue, however oblique, nor any therapeutic or purifying release’ (2005, p. 6). Ambivalence obstructs or suspends agency. It is the sudden, however momentary, realisation of helplessness and hopelessness. Such negative emotions evoke pain or displeasure. They can make you feel passive in the face of something significant or what Ngai refers to as ‘powerful powerlessness’ (2005, p. 1). Virtuous anxiety, however, affords catharsis and satisfaction: it displaces the political. Nonetheless, it is activated by brushing up against Indigeneity and colonial complicity. Thus, as I will go on to illustrate, anxiety signals both an evasion and confrontation with Indigenous sovereignty and political will.

4  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging In a sense, Indigeneity is everywhere and nowhere. There is the relentless bad news reported by the media, policy announcements, interspersed with occasional good news; Aboriginal television drama’s such as Redfern Now; the burgeoning film industry; celebrated artists, musicians, sports people; and no shortage of corporate and government walls adorned with Indigenous art; and the now commonplace Welcome to Country. 2 As Ken Gelder discusses: in the contemporary postcolonial moment, Aboriginal people have more presence in the nation even as so many settler Australians ­(unlike their colonial counterparts) have less contact with them. Postcolonialism in Australia means precisely this, amongst other things: more presence, but – for non-Aboriginal Australians – less Aboriginal contact. (2005, p. 172) His concern, as is mine, is that genuine political encounters have been ­replaced by mediated images, the personal and social. Settler ­Australians are often occupied with the powerful realm of the symbolic but rarely engage with Indigenous people. Despite settlers’ lack of contact with ­I ndigenous people, there is no shortage of opinions and judgements. Mainstream perceptions of ‘Aborigines’ and Aboriginality, as Chris Healy outlines, have little to nothing to do with experiences of h ­ istorical or contemporary Indigenous peoples, but rather are the product of s­ tories inherited from colonists and colonialism (2008, pp. 4–5). What happens when mediated images and colonial stories are swapped for contact with contemporary Indigenous people? In the following chapters, I analyse very material, visceral ­encounters between Aboriginal people – who are asserting their ongoing sovereignty, autonomy and self-determination – and good white women. They refuse settler benevolence, pity and authority. I zoom in on and slow down these moments to examine a particular formation of settler ­anxiety ­­– the worrying, sympathy and self-pity – to argue that it is a displacement and avoidance of the political. However, in the encounters that I survey, the political encounter cannot be easily escaped, and virtuous anxiety is disturbed. Anxiety registers a confrontation with the unfamiliar and interrupts self-mastery (Heidegger, 1973). The world turns into something remote and strange. The subject is rattled, which potentially generates change. One can escape the distress by fleeing into the familiar, the known or seeking reassurance. We need to stay with the discomfort, as Irene Watson advises, and thoughtfully meditate upon how settler colonialism reproduces subjects who desire the luxury and security of exclusive possession, while also limiting good white people’s capacities to reimagine belonging, shared existence, social justice and solidarity (2007). Anxiety exposes a choice: one can step into or evade discomfort.

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  5 My protagonists are all pursuing a sense of ethical belonging, and their quests lead them away from the comforts and certainty of ‘home’ into Aboriginal Australia, with whom they desire recognition and ­acceptance. Instead they find themselves on contested ground; ­Aboriginal sovereignty is no longer an intellectual or symbolic issue, and they are confronted with their own colonial complicity. They are progressive, ­educated, middle class, cosmopolitans, whose political and personal identities are tested, and found wanting, in the face of cultural differences and Aboriginal self-determination. Typically, it brings them undone. They are overwhelmed by emotions, are riven with uncertainty and anxiety, questioning and self-absorbed. They feel lost and out of place. Spaces of encounter, such as these, with all their raw, unbridled emotion, are scary and compelling. My ambivalence about anxious white women is not only because I share some of their anxiety (most obviously), but also because, rightly so, there has been a rejection of the emotional self-­indulgence of the privileged white woman who is distressed, feels reproached or misunderstood, leaving Indigenous people burdened with comforting her. But there is a danger here. How can good white people understand their desires, if one can only speak of them once they have been made presentable; once passions and conflicts have been extracted? How can we understand the architecture of settler ­colonialism, renew our imaginative life and contribute to creating ethical settler–Indigenous relations and more just futures if we avoid ugly feelings? The following chapters detail corporeal settler–Indigenous engagements; however, for the remainder of this Introduction, I will outline the project and the broader settler subjectivity that is under examination.

Unsettling Times There is nothing new in worrying about Indigenous people. It is a mode in which the authority of the settler state is enacted (Fanon, 1963; Mackey, 2014; Tuck & Yang, 2012). Indigenous health is an ongoing national anxiety, and the idea that Aboriginal people, as Lea quips, need settlers help is a foundational assumption (2008). For decades, the poor health and socio-economic status of the Indigenous population have been a concern for many progressive white Australians. ­I ndigenous and non-Indigenous professionals and activists have worked in solidarity to improve Indigenous health, socio-economic and political conditions (Kowal, 2015; Land, 2015). There are many notable and inspirational historical and contemporary examples of settler Australians harnessing their concern to support Indigenous resistance, struggles for justice and the establishment of organisations and services that have considerably improved Indigenous lives. There are too many to name, and the history and significance are little known, but just to name a few: The Australian Aborigines’ League, The Federal Council of Aboriginal

6  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging Affairs Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), Aboriginal legal and medical ­services, ­Freedom Rides, land rights campaigns, The Wave Hill Walk Off, 1967 citizenship campaign, and land and environmental protests such as Jabiluka (Attwood, 2003; Land, 2015; McGinness, 1991). There is also a history of white paternalism, including a complete lack of consultation and dialogue, and too many cautionary tales. For those settlers who aspire to collaborate, as Land states, it is ‘important to be familiar with the work of those who have made significant contributions, and as well as those whose practices have been either particularly problematic or particularly positive’ (Land, 2015, p. 53). It is also important to ­understand our own historical and political moment. Mainstream Australia has a long history of remembering and ­forgetting Indigenous people (Healy, 2008). Indigenous activism, as noted, has repeatedly drawn government and non-Indigenous peoples’ attention to, and attempted to intervene in, the systemic erasure of ongoing colonial violence.3 The following chapters span a timeframe from the late 1990s to the present, 2018. I reach back into the years following the implementation of the Native Title Act (1993)4 and height of the reconciliation era, 5 when settler anxieties of belonging were u ­ nashamedly articulated. Arguably, this was a time of remembering. If worrying about Indigenous people is a national preoccupation, then what can a re-­examination of such anxious times tell about our present? It could be said, from the 1980s, mainstream Australia was called to account: Indigenous activism, the arts, revisionist history, law reform and the reconciliation movement, just to name a few, intervened in the great Australian silence (Stanner, 1968). These narratives transformed the public sphere: a discursive space opened up that made room for empathy and compassion. As is well documented, Aboriginal and Torres Strait I­ slander testimony detailing colonial violence and ongoing injustice, most significantly in the Stolen Generations report Bringing Them Home (Wilson, 1997),6 deeply disturbed settler Australians’ sense of belonging and legitimacy. It also galvanised progressive settlers to back movements for sociopolitical change. In the late 1990s, there was a boom in white community groups,7 supporting reconciliation and native title, which lead in to hundreds of thousands of Australians undertaking the historic ‘bridge walks’ of 2000, marching to support reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia (Foley cited in Land, 2015, p. 76). The years of the late 1990s to early 2000s could be said to be the most recent and the height of the demonstration of non-Indigenous people’s goodwill towards Indigenous people (Land, 2015). Notably, it was also an era of aggressive, paranoid nationalism with white settlers claiming that ­I ndigenous people were undeservedly being granted special rights. It was a time of reckoning and resentment (Potter, forthcoming). In post-­reconciliation Australia, despite notable exceptions, such as the National Apology and more recently the movement to ‘Change the Date’

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  7 (see Preface), large numbers of mainstream Australians have not been there in solidarity with Indigenous struggles. Since the mid-2000s, successive governments have focused upon ­citizens’ responsibilities – not rights (and arguably to the detriment of Indigenous rights). There has been a significant policy shift away from redress and reconciliation to neoliberal punitive interventions.8 The prevalent government approaches to improving the lives of Indigenous Australians are aimed at socio-economic equality, while often ignoring colonial history and the diversity of Indigenous circumstances, sociocultural distinctiveness and life worlds (Altman, 2009, p. 1). The state’s focus on mainstreaming, individualism, welfare reform and the ‘real’ economy expresses a neoliberal–colonial order. It figures individuals as rational, calculating creatures whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for ‘self-care’ – the ability to provide for their own needs and service their own ambitions. In making the individual fully responsible for her- or himself, neoliberalism equates moral responsibility with rational action; it erases the discrepancy between economic and moral behaviour by configuring morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits and consequences. But in so doing, it carries responsibility for the self to new heights: the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action – for example, lack of skills, education and childcare in a period of high unemployment and limited welfare benefits. Correspondingly, a ‘mismanaged life’, the neoliberal appellation for failure to navigate impediments to prosperity, becomes a new mode of depoliticising social and economic powers and at the same time reduces political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and political complacency (Brown, 2003). The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategises for her- or himself among various social, political and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter these options. The most marginalised are represented as dysfunctional. The current ‘crisis’ in Indigenous Australia is largely responded to by government agencies through reinforcing mainstream values and experiences, which fosters particular life worlds at the expense of others. Thus, in contemporary Australia, the response to Indigenous disadvantage is to deploy an array of techniques and methods to normalise Indigenous people. Yet, seemingly mainstream Australia has not noticed the disregard for other world views or does not consider this a problem, despite ­I ndigenous people’s loud and consistent protests (Davis, 2016; National Constitutional Convention, 2017). Nonetheless, I would argue that concern for Indigenous well-being remains a moral barometer of our time. Over the last twenty to thirty years, the political sentiment of broader, ‘well-meaning’ non-Indigenous Australians has shifted to a steadfast, dutiful recognition of past wrongs

8  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging and belief that government’s role is to alleviate Indigenous ­disadvantage. Being moved by Indigenous suffering is no longer the bastion of the bleeding hearts or activists. To be clear, I am not arguing that non-­ Indigenous people are mobilised to act, like they were in the height of the reconciliation movement, but rather that there is a broad sentiment of concern for Indigenous issues that is almost mainstream. Again, let me emphasise that this sits alongside a detachment, hostility and repugnant racism, and government policies that are punitive, interventionist remedialism. The more recent Change the Date movement indicates that non-Indigenous people can still be galvanised to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ causes. However, as discussed in the Preface, the 2017 Uluru Statement was largely met with silence, inaction and a lack of solidarity. What drives this book is not an argument that some people care and others do not, or that there are historical moments when the broader public are moved to support Indigenous struggles and at other times are apathetic and indifferent. As much as I think these are legitimate inquiries, my motivation is to analyse the anatomy of a particular form of settler subjectivity, which continues underneath the ebb and flow of settler ‘goodwill’, and I am naming settler anxiety. From the late 1980s, Indigenous testimony of colonial violence and the Native Title Act deeply disturbed many settler Australians’ sense of belonging. To borrow from Gelder and Jacobs, it turned ‘what seems like “home” into something else, something less familiar and less settled’. They diagnosed these effects as postcolonial anxiety – uncanny A ­ ustralia – and remind us that the uncanny is an experience of being ­simultaneously in and out of place (1998, p. xiv). Indigenous claims for recognition of injustice and rights threatened settlers’ sense of security and legitimacy and put white Australia’s authority under question. Fast-forward twenty to thirty years, now in the post-reconciliation era, good white people remember colonial violence, especially the cruelty of child removal policies, separation from community and country, and systematic discrimination. In our political moment, good white people do not forget Indigenous suffering; it has become too familiar, if not strangely comforting. White anxiety – configured here as guilt, worry and pity – about the legacies of colonialism works to neutralise the politics of sovereignty, and renew settler certainty and ethical belonging. Are settlers more at home worrying about and pitying Aboriginal people than genuinely listening, learning and engaging with other visions of the future? Indeed, do good white people need Indigenous vulnerability to maintain a sense of authority? Or to put it another way, why are ‘well-­intentioned’ white Australians so troubled and unsettled by Indigenous political agency? The aim of this book is two-fold. First, I wish to illuminate settler anxiety, if you like, as a practice of emotional fortification to maintain one’s sense of an ethical self. Second, and more so, I want to contribute to the work that ­destabilises the power relations that reproduce settler anxiety.

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  9

Affective Genealogies Good white people care about Indigenous people and culture; I am not doubting or questioning people’s intentions. They are anxious to ‘get it right’; their sense of self and belonging depends upon it. More so, ­anxiety is an historical subjectivity: a social practice, an activity through which the subject is constituted. Foucault claimed that the study of the genealogy of the modern Western subject needed to take into account two separate but related aspects. It is not enough to consider technologies of domination9; we also need to analyse the active practices of self-constitution. Foucault explains: techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of ­supernatural power, and so on. (2005, p. 214) In a simple sense, it is the work that we do to know ourselves, to ­constitute ourselves as subjects in relation to what one understands as the truth (Foucault, 1997, p. 271). A truth such as colonial violence is in the past and good white people work with Indigenous people to ­secure a just, shared future. I am arguing that a contemporary practice of self-seeking – technologies of the self – is the activity of knowing ‘who I am’ in relation to Indigenous issues and intercultural relations, which offers self-certainty. Of course, these activities do not produce an authentic self, but a kind of subjectivity that does particular work in the world: reproducing colonial relations of authority and vulnerability. These are, as Foucault argues: not something invented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group. (1997, p. 291) Foucault’s concern, as is mine, is that the attitude to the cultivation of the self is governed by claiming a self-knowledge or ‘truth’, which tells settlers how to behave in given situations but does not intervene in and transform politics. Indigenous people are vulnerable and redemption is performed through acts of benevolence that welcomes Indigenous people into an already determined future. Good white people take responsibility for past injustices, face up to colonial history and the ongoing ­destruction and marginalisation, often by feeling guilty and pitying Indigenous people, or empathising. We work to make amends. I am arguing that these

10  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging are practices of the anxious subject, which reproduce the ‘truths’ of settler colonial authority. Good white people’s role is to guide Indigenous people out of the past and into the present and predetermined future. Anxiety blocks settlers from engaging with Indigenous political will and the imperatives of Aboriginal testimony (Povinelli, 2002, p. 42). I am not suggesting that only white women are anxious, or that it is a particularly gendered subject position.10 But rather my choice to focus upon good white women is for several reasons, one of which is that as a white, settler Australian I too am implicated and complicit. Historically, white women have had significant involvement in Aboriginal social issues, which has been contentious – often criticised by black activists, feminists and scholars as serving a white feminist sociopolitical agenda and failing to understand the history of racism (Ahmed, 2005; hooks, 1989; Moreton-Robinson, 2000). As much as there is a contested history of white feminist solidarity (Land, 2015, p. 72), settler women have worked alongside Indigenous women to secure basic human rights and social justice – housing, maternal and child health, parental rights and education, to name a few – and there remains much to celebrate and take lessons from (see Lake, 2001; Paisley, 1997; Wilson, 2015). The inequalities and asymmetries remain, as does the drive for many white women to redress historical wrongs and ongoing injustice. In particular, Aileen Moreton-Robinson has demonstrated the role white women have played in the oppression of Aboriginal and ­Torres Strait Islander peoples, and the disregard they have shown for ­Indigenous political differences and sociocultural values (2000). Black feminists have argued that liberal feminism elides race: the good white woman understands herself as marginalised and therefore similar to and sympathetic with Aboriginal women’s dispossession. However, her misidentification of herself with marginalised women effaces the authority that she gains by being white and educated (Ahmed, 2005; hooks, 1989; Moreton-­Robinson, 2000). Thus, she maintains the familiar, powerful colonial role as the dispenser of truth about Aboriginal people (Whitlock, 2000, p. 156). White does not simply refer to people with white skin, nor am I suggesting that if one is faired skinned one is white, but rather whiteness is ‘a set of locations that are historically, socially, politically, and culturally produced’ (Frankenburg, 1993, p. 6). It does imply that good white women, however intentionally or unwittingly, participate in the racialised social structures that accord them privileges associated with mainstream Australian culture (Kowal, 2015, p. 11). Moreton-Robinson writes: Whiteness is both the measure and the marker of normality in ­ ustralian society, yet it remains invisible for most white women and A men, and they do not associate it with conferring dominance and privilege. (2003, p. 66)

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  11 Privilege manifests in many different ways; however, as Moreton-­ Robinson illustrates, whiteness is constituted in forms of epistemic privilege, in the form of visibility and representational power. The anxious white woman too easily assumes the role of rescuing and recuperating Aboriginal women (and children) into mainstream life, which is a loss of voice for Aboriginal people (Watson, 2005). I am responding to feminist and critical race and whiteness studies scholars call for relinquishment of white authority, and thus a reconfiguration of settler belonging. Feminist scholarship and activism guides this book. Feminists have worked to politicise what had previously been dismissed as unworthy of political and intellectual attention: the home, the body, childcare, ­motherhood and so on. They have long argued that cultural politics and power relations are embedded in everyday life and social relations, and produce our subjectivity, indeed our world. Most recently, studies of ­affect and emotion have become central to feminism, emphasising that ‘experience, perception and intellection are all highly mediated by affective states, rather than the product of “detached reason” or “objective observation”’ (Stephens, 2015, p. 274). Following this intellectual trajectory, I examine what is often overlooked as political: white women’s emotional response to Indigeneity. Attention to studies of affect and emotion provides further insights into the concerns of critical race and whiteness, Indigenous and settler colonial studies and feminism. It is the depersonalisation of anxiety that interests me: the way feeling states are part of shared and communal experiences, rather than ­personal or private sensations (Stephens, 2015, p. 274). What Lauren Berlant refers to as ‘public feelings’ (2004). We know and inhabit the world through emotional attachments: emotions are not something one has, but rather it is through emotional responses that surfaces, boundaries, distinctions and impressions are created in shared social spaces (Ahmed, 2004). They are forces on a sensory level that enable us to understand and make distinctions between self and other (Stephens, 2015, p. 278). Emotions, or as Ben Highmore prefers ‘passions’, are cultural. He writes: It is not simply me responding to the world with pleasure or pain, but of me being placed within a culture where passions circulate, and where I am impassioned in a whole host of ways. (2009, p. 12) Good white women are impassioned by the colonial injustice, ongoing inequality and marginalisation that affect too many Indigenous lives, and they want to be a part of the solution. Emotions are not neutral, ­depoliticised actions: they ascribe value and thus rearrange our connections and interactions with the human and more than human (Waitt, 2014, p. 669). They shape perception and order values, identity and senses of belonging (Ahmed, 2014; Highmore, 2009; Probyn, 2005).

12  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging Emotions are a performance of the cultural politics of inhabitation or ‘world making’ (Ahmed, 2004, p. 12). In this sense, emotions construct the object, or are a way of apprehending the world, and are crucial to ­ motions the construction of an understanding of the self and social life. E draw one towards or away, or as Sara Ahmed identifies, involve reactions of ‘towardness’ or ‘awayness’ in relation to particular objects (2004, p. 8). Reflecting on my earlier example of the Indigenous academic, the expectation of inclusiveness and affirmation of an ethical belonging draws white women towards her. However, with her refusal to comply with settler desires, they move away or reject her. Notably, I have been moving between the terms emotion and affect. Let me draw some distinctions and outline my motivations. Arguably, the difference between affect and emotion turns on representability. Affect is the term that is given to visceral forces that are considered interpersonal and beneath or alongside conscious knowing (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010, p. 1). This approach to affect draws upon both Deleuze and Spinoza’s conceptualisation of the body, which is defined by its radical openness to other bodies; affect is not personal or interpersonal but transpersonal, drawing in many bodies. Affect, then, is both within and between bodies: it is prior to the representational translation of an affect into a knowable emotion. Affect does not reside in or is possessed by a subject (Anderson, 2006, p. 735). Thus, individual bodies are not of ­ethical or political interest, but interactions between bodies are (Pile, 2011, p. 11). Emotions tend to be understood as generated from the social and cultural. I more often refer to emotions and feelings rather than affect. Notably, however, for Lacan anxiety is not just an emotion, it is an affect (Harari, 2001). However, my approach follows scholars such as Elspeth Probyn, who writes: In terms of the conundrum of affect and emotion, I will hazard that affect tends to refer to a privileging of the bodily …. On the other hand, especially in the descriptions of emotion in sociology and cultural studies, what happens at a social and cultural level tends to be privileged …. For me it matters less that one can be pure in the use of emotion or affect than that one remain alive to the very different ideas that circulate about what is, in the end, intimately connected. (2004, p. 28) What is important to my understanding and deployment of the terms affect and emotion is that the body is conceptualised as productive, fluid and dynamic, yet there are enduring relations between components that define stable characteristics (Bignall, 2010). Although affect is less formed and structured than emotions, as Ngai observes, it is nonetheless not code-free or meaningless (2005, p. 28). My work is indebted to scholars who are questioning and intervening in depoliticised accounts

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  13 of affect as an unmediated relatedness (Stephens, 2015). As Berlant so eloquently writes, the ‘visceral response is a trained thing, not just autonomic activity’ (2011, p. 52). Settler anxiety is a cultural practice: an activity of self and social constitution. Anxiety also brings subjects undone. Anxiety interrupts a sense of self-mastery and disturbs the ­takenfor-grantedness of the world. For Heidegger, anxiety is significant because it brings us closer to an understanding of human existence. In our everyday lives, we are immersed and caught up in the world, ­absorbed by things and people. He refers to this as fleeing or falling into the world because we are confronted by nothingness. Thus, he makes a distinction between fear and anxiety: fear is present and knowable; anxiety is driven by meaninglessness. Fear is induced by an identifiable threat. While with anxiety, the trigger is unrecognisable. Heidegger’s point is that what is threatening is the feeling of indefiniteness: All things, and we with them, sink into indifference. But not in the sense that everything simply disappears. Rather, in the very drawing away from us as such, things turn toward us. This drawing away of everything in its totality, which in angst is happening all around us, haunts us. There is nothing to hold on to. The only thing that remains and comes over us – in this drawing away of everything – is this ‘nothingness.’ (1973, p. 2) Importantly, as Heidegger states, things do not simply disappear but rather have a strange, menacing, overbearing presence. He uses the ­example of the feeling of dread that overcomes one in the dark. We ­cannot see anything and therefore do not know what surrounds us and if we are in danger. He writes, ‘what threatens us is nowhere’ (1973, p.  231). The world turns into something remote and unfamiliar. A ­foreboding future consumes the present. Anxiety is an experience of the world as slipping or drawing away: one feels separate from the world. Again, as Ngai states, one suffers a ‘­powerful powerlessness’ (2005, p. 1). The world that is so familiar becomes uncanny and strange. We are threatened by the meaninglessness of our existence: the sense that one’s identity is under question (Harari, 2001). Heidegger argues we flee from the nothingness of the world by filling our lives with people and things (1973). My claim is that settlers’ normative emotional engagement with Indigeneity – the worry, pity, guilt – is a form of fleeing. After all we are enmeshed in the world through emotions and modes of care. Our everyday existence is interrupted, and there is no longer a common sense, self-evident world that we are caught up in. One is thrown back upon oneself, questioning the world and who am I (Heidegger, 1973). The moment before fleeing or falling back into

14  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging the world is when everything has disappeared, and I am alone. I am no longer attached to a particular understanding of the world or myself: [I]n anxiety there lies the possibility of a disclosure which is quite distinctive; for anxiety individualises. This individualisation brings Dasein back from its falling, and makes manifest to it that authenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities of its Being. (Heidegger, 1973, p. 235) Heidegger is not referring to an individual essence – essential self – but singularity. However, to be singular, according to Heidegger, is to not be at home in the world: to take up the choice to change my ordinary life. Following Heidegger, I propose that staying with anxiety is productive: the moment when the good white woman questions herself but does not flee into the familiar world of settler anxiety, but rather her role, her ability to perform normative ethical belonging is disturbed. I want to examine such ‘emptying’, ‘meaninglessness’ moments to understand how they might contribute to rearranging and disrupting colonial relations.

Witnessing, Guilt and the Shamed Nation It is easy to forget that over the last twenty to thirty years, ­Australia’s cultural memory has been fundamentally reconfigured. Indigenous memory and testimony, revisionist historiography, land rights and native title and the reconciliation movement, just to name a few, reformed the public sphere. The 1988 bicentennial was a celebration of the white nation and thus a highly political event, which Indigenous activists and supporters used as a platform to interrupt a triumphant national narrative and assert that Australia has a ‘black history’. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Indigenous public intellectuals, political activism, the arts and music produced both settler pride and turmoil. Multiple and contested alternative histories disrupted the dominant and benign narratives of Australian settlement and the white nation, which was the bedrock of national identity and foundation of white belonging (Butler, 2013, p. 4). It might seem strange now, but well into the 1990s, the statement that Australia was colonised was for many radical and divisive. With the handing down of the Deaths in Custody and Bringing Them Home ­Reports (Johnston, 1991; Wilson, 1997), and the proliferation of stories (novels, film, autobiography, public debate, academic work, media), a deeply unsettling image of white Australia came into frame. The ­Bringing Them Home Report, Whitlock proposes, became a transformative force. Bearing witness to the stories and trauma of the ­Stolen Generations overwhelmed and shamed settler Australians ‘more profoundly and publicly than any other single event of recent past’ (Whitlock, 2004, p. 243). The systematic violence of colonialism,

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  15 and most notably, the Protection and Assimilation eras, became public knowledge and it hurt. Mainstream Australians became witness to a history of institutional abuse of Indigenous people. Former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd’s ­National Apology to the Stolen Generations (and to a lesser extent but perhaps more remarkable for its time, Paul Keating’s Redfern Speech) was an act of collective witnessing of and response to, as Kelly Jean Butler discusses, Indigenous people’s testimony of historic injustices and suffering.11 The challenge of testimony to public figures, academics and ordinary citizens alike, as Butler explains is: to reimagine a vision of good citizenship against the revelation that Australia is not only a nation founded on dispossession, but also one which actively perpetuates the disadvantage of a range of ­sociocultural groups. (2013, p. 5) In opposition to former Prime Minister John Howard’s, and ­conservative commentators, refusal to apologise, Kevin Rudd understood reconciliation as a core Australian value – the fair go – and to borrow from Ahmed, the very ideal of civility (2005, p. 78). The act of bearing ­witness, ­affirming the voices of Indigenous people and empathising became the role and vision of good citizenship: the answer to the challenge posed by the revelation of the horrors of colonialism. Witnessing was yoked to notions of good citizenship (Butler, 2013, p. 2). The so-called core value of the ‘fair go’ is recuperated and repurposed ‘to forge a national community founded on respect for and attentiveness to the testimony of the socially and politically marginalized’ (Butler, 2013, p. 9). The ‘fair go’ as a style of care. Arguably, the vision (although not necessarily the practice) of the ‘fair go’ has always been associated with the downtrodden but what changed was the image of the dispossessed. In the public imagination, Indigenous people shifted from strangers in the modern nation to a vulnerable population – subjects of concern – who need to be enfolded within the now safe arms of settler Australia. Notably, it positions settlers as performing the welcoming embrace. The appeals to Australian values are a self-conscious formation of a newly imagined political community: witnessing became a civic virtue. Initially the reconciliation movement did not becalm progressive settler Australia with the sense that we now live in a reconciled nation, as Gooder and Jacobs demonstrate, but rather that the nation was improperly formed: it was born from violence (2004). The fantasy of settler colonial innocence and rightful possession was interrupted. What can I do to restore the nation and thus myself? Surely a country that is coming to terms with its own violent past, judged and found wanting, and has the capacity to witness the pain and suffering of those who have

16  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging been historically marginalised and injured, must be a good nation? In this scenario, injustice belongs to the past, and thus recognising historical violence and witnessing Indigenous’ suffering acts as a form of nation-building (Ahmed, 2005; Butler, 2013). The reconciliation movement sought a new moral order without rupturing the imagined politics of consensus. Settler guilt, shame and anxiety are bound together in this emotional economy: desires of redemption, accord and restoration of the good white nation (Edmonds, 2016). Witnessing has produced a subject of national shame, Ahmed argues, and declarations of shame work to ‘bring the “nation” into existence as a felt community’ (2005, p. 72). She explains: Those who witness the past injustice through feeling ‘national shame’ are aligned with each other as ‘well-meaning individuals’; if you feel shame, then you mean well … national recovery … our shame means that we mean well, and can work to reproduce the nation as an ideal. The transference of bad feeling to the subject of shame is only temporary, as the ‘transference’ itself becomes ­evidence of the restoration of an identity of which we can be proud. (2005, p. 77) The nation’s better self is revealed through good white people feeling bad. Thus, settler Australia becomes reconciled to its own history through witnessing Indigenous hurt (Ahmed, 2005, p. 77; Butler, 2013; ­Maddison, Clark, & de Costa, 2016). I would contend that it is a subject of anxiety, not shame, as in Ahmed’s configuration, which enables identity to be restored. However, I agree that Indigenous testimony, which was once so disturbing, now has the effect of renewing the good white nation and rescuing settler innocence (Macoun, 2016; Tuck & Yang, 2012). There remains a refusal to engage with Indigenous agency and political difference. Indigenous people are persistently characterised as vulnerable and in need of settler generosity and benevolence (Veracini, 2010, p. 108). However, there is very little engagement with, what Povinelli refers to as, the imperatives of Aboriginal testimony (2002, p. 42). Again, as ­Watson asks, ‘[i]s there no possibility of a political space to be heard on the ­concerns we hold as Aboriginal people?’ (2007, p. 36). There is strong support amongst many non-Indigenous people and public institutions for the processes of reconciliation, and arguably the new Recognition campaign (Clark, de Costa, & Maddison, 2016, p. 6).12 What appears to be a commitment to alleviating ongoing injustice and restoring Indigenous sovereignty is, as Povinelli illustrates, ‘inflected by the conditional’. As long as economic resources are not at stake, progressive settler ­sympathy and desire for reconciliation continue (2002, p. 17). Furthermore, as Damien Short states, the reconciliation process

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  17 ‘placed a “colonial ceiling” on Indigenous aspirations by emphasising nation-building and national unity over sovereignty or the negotiation of a treaty’ (cited in Clark et al., 2016, p. 4). This might be no more evident than in ­middle-class support for policies, which do not in any way impinge on their own lives. In no real sense do most progressives have to encounter Indigenous sovereignty. If Indigenous sovereignty is recognised at all, it is largely figured as impractical, impossible or ­dangerous (Nicoll, 2002, p. 9). The dominant voice, Watson asserts, ‘or the prevailing “reality” is that the sovereignty of Aboriginal laws is an impossibility’. If it exists at all, it belongs to the past; one sovereignty prevails and Aboriginal law is irrelevant. Yet, as she writes, Aboriginal law lives (2007, p. 24). There is little room for an engagement with incommensurability and Indigenous political will. Instead, the apology, and more generally the process of reconciliation and recognition, works to secure settlers’ sense of belonging, to borrow from Glen Coulthard, ‘by situating the harms of settler-colonialism in the past, and seeking to repair its injurious legacy by making Indigenous subjects the primary object of repair, not the colonial relationship’ (2014, p. 17). Since the 1990s to the present, there has been a shift in policy approaches, from redress to punitive remedialism, with the former focused upon the ­settler-Indigenous relationship. However, foundational to each approach is the desire to restore the settler nation, rather than decolonise. Good white people know that colonisation was violent, and that ­systemic injustice and cruelty reached well into the twentieth century and are saddened and shamed by the historical removal of children from their families and communities. Notably, the current removal and incarceration rates of Indigenous children and young people are extremely high (Productivity Commission, 2018), and yet governments continue to consider such interventions viable options, and seemingly this is of little concern to most Australians. Despite the plight of Indigenous people being a preoccupation in Australia, we remain immune to, and ­ignorant of, much of the ongoing colonial project. Reflecting upon the Stolen ­Generations, Henry Reynolds asked ‘why weren’t we told’ (2000). ­Meaghan Morris challenges and reframes his question by answering: Only in recent years, however, has some notion of the scale of the trauma and disruption that this policy created begun to filter through to the white Australians in whose idealised name it was practised. Or, rather than speaking of an ‘idea’ filtering through, I should say that only recently have we begun to develop the collective capacity to comprehend, to empathise, to imagine the trauma and disruption. This is also a matter of the politics of remembering. It is important to clarify that many (I would guess most) white ­Australians ‘were not “aware” of what was happening’ not because we did not know it was happening (we did) but because we were unable or did

18  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging not care to understand what we knew; we could not imagine how ­Aboriginal people felt. So we whites have not, ‘just found out’ about the lost children; rather, we are beginning to remember differently, to ­understand and care about what we knew. (2006, p. 107) It is a politics of remembering: Australians did not care enough to understand, to feel, to be moved. In the 1990s, revisionist history and activism created a discursive space in the public domain, which helped produce the conditions for white Australians to feel compassion. One could argue that developing ‘the collective capacity to comprehend, to empathise, to imagine the trauma and disruption’ moved Indigenous people from the socially dead to perceptible in the settler field of vision. Following Judith Butler, Ian Buchanan argues that the ‘frames’ in which our lives are situated condition ‘how we respond to the world, the kinds of moral and ethical choices we make’. Like Bourdieu’s habitus, Butler’s ‘frame’ is a social and cultural formation that subjects unconsciously internalise. The frame allocates recognisability of certain figures, in this case Indigenous people (Buchanan, 2012, p. 116). Now settlers can perceive Indigenous people, but what is being recognised? Brought into frame? Or as Buchanan asks, ‘what makes Indigenous people alive to settlers in their world?’ (2012, p. 116). My answer; for many settlers Indigenous people are victims of historical injustice or, what has also become prevalent, dysfunctional and failing to take responsibility for their lives. Aboriginal people are objects for mainstream Australia to worry about but not to take seriously. Good white people can see the gaps, the bad statistics, vulnerability and suffering; this is how Indigenous people come into frame for progressives. Indigenous life can be mourned, or rather a particular perception of Indigeneity is recognised and grieved: a life that evokes settler pity. However, it is not a ‘remembering’ that readily arouses remorse or mobilises political action. Rather it has become a style of benevolent remembering that works to secure good white people’s sense of innocence, belonging and as rightful heirs of Australia’s future. Collective witnessing demands of me to empathise with the pain of child removal, so graphically portrayed in the film Rabbit Proof Fence (Noyce, 2002) and captured in Rudd’s National Apology. Good white people listen to the pain and suffering of Indigenous people, against a crowded backdrop of ignorance and brutality. To be a good citizen one must contribute to the collective national project of confronting the past, which in turn should produce shame and guilt in the white subject ­(Butler, 2013, p. 43). Notably, everyday racism is often deflected onto socio-economically marginalised white people, who, however unspoken, are categorised as ‘bad white people’, who do not feel properly shamed by racism, colonial violence and ongoing injustice. The binary of good/

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  19 bad white people, however false, as if there are not complex, variations of position, circulates in Australian society, and limits public and personal conversations. It is imagined that the ‘bad white people’, with their racist views and thoughtlessness, continue to perpetuate racism and injustice in ‘our’ progressive society. Thus, guilt and shame authorise ‘good white people’ to distinguish themselves from ‘bad white people’ who lack the education and goodwill (Sullivan, 2014, p. 5; also see Hage & ­Zournazi, 2002). It is a model of the progressive liberal subject that is pitted against the uncultivated racist, who lacks the necessary self-awareness and worldliness to ‘know’ how to behave, or to care in the right way about Indigenous people, equality and social justice. Some white progressives, Macoun proposes, see the political challenge, and thus their duty, as being to educate non-Indigenous people about colonial violence and mobilise their good-will, turning them into allies in the struggle for equality and justice (2016, p. 86). The sign of a good white person is performances of understanding and compassion, which risks a self-satisfied moralising and reaffirming of one’s virtue. Bearing witness and empathising renews and remakes the subject position of the progressive Australian. Thus, the anxious white subject becomes a normative character on the stage of white Australia, so essential to the reproduction of power relations (Svirsky, 2014). Does she desire social justice or moral redemption, or both? Or must she forgo the luxury of ‘moral ­redemption’, in order to effectively contribute to social transformation?13 Good white women feel bad. She feels guilty about racism and her white privilege. To fix the problem of racial injustice, the good white women must work on herself, sympathise with ‘Indigenous issues’ and learn about colonial history and Indigenous culture: reason, care and moral conviction are imagined as the tools that will empower her to give up her privilege and recuperate the good self (Kruks, 2005; also see Macoun, 2016; Nicoll, 2000; Probyn, 2004). But to do so assumes that privilege is a personal possession, rather than historical and structural, and imagines one’s capacity to relinquish racial power is tied to one’s capacity for self-awareness, rather than social transformation. Audre Lorde (1984) and bell hooks (1989) warn, white guilt can function as a form of self-centredness, turning the white subject ‘back into’ herself: it is her feelings that matter (Ahmed, 2005, p. 82). Their concern is that this further blocks the capacity to hear the claims of others. For all the good intentions, one can be driven by unacknowledged self-interest, and perpetuate racism by attending to the values and aspirations of settlers (Dreher, 2009; Riggs, 2004). There is not a commitment to change, but instead what matters is a positive white identity and overcoming bad feelings (Ahmed, 2005, p. 82). Settler colonialism is driven by the logic of elimination, Wolfe argues, which seeks to permanently remove Indigenous people from their lands to enable settler possession (1999). Aboriginal people were of the past,

20  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging or more so, terra nullius ‘went one step further and denied Indigenous ­presence, even as past’ (Potter, 2014, p. 81). Thus, settler colonialism renders Indigenous people out of place: temporally and spatially. ­Veracini draws a strong distinction between colonial and settler colonial countries: colonialism is based upon exploitation and subordination of the colonised, while settler colonialism is shaped by the persistent need to disavow the presence of the Indigenous other, which he refers to as the settler colonial non-encounter (2010). The practices of dispossession and disavowal vary significantly, which includes attempts to physically eliminate, as Veracini demonstrates, to the erasure of cultural practices, assimilation and absorption into the wider population and forms of ­selective amnesia that enable settlers to maintain a stable and innocent version of the past, and arguably the future (2010). Settler colonialism cannot countenance Indigenous political difference. Audra Simpson explains: indigeneity (ex)poses a problem to the settler state in that the ‘Indian Problem’ is one of the existence of continued life (of any form) in the face of an acquisitional and territorial desire that then moves through time to become, in liberal parlance, the ‘problem’ of difference. (2014, p. 19) Settler colonialism is premised upon the elimination and replacement of Indigeneity, the disavowal of the violence of colonialism to affirm settler innocence and sovereignty: the non-encounter. Colonisation persists; however, I conceptualise settler colonialism not as a consistent, coherent and uniform structure or logic, but rather gaining its force, as Rifkin proposes, through ‘reiterative yet shifting formations, practices, and inclinations’ (2013, p. 326). The ‘problem’ is that Indigenous political life threatens settler territorial authority and integrity, and demands the sharing of sociopolitical space, which occasions a crisis (Wolfe, 2016, p. 14). Settler anxiety is provoked by the proximity and the demand to share sociopolitical space with Indigenous people. Racially constructing Indigenous people as a population in need of management, inclusion and punishment, as Jodi Byrd theorises, displaces place-based politics and legitimate claims to sovereignty (2011, p. xix). Settlers contain the ‘crisis’ by problematising Indigenous peoples, which enables the accommodation and engagement with Indigenous presence (Rifkin, 2014). Settler anxiety of dispossession is articulated most vehemently when the good white nation is perceived to be at risk (Ravenscroft, 2004). Again and again, settlers re-enact territorialisation by identifying as modern subjects – the present and future – thus justifying the right to claim possession, denying Indigenous sovereignty and governing for everyone. The country belongs to those who came after, the settler. ­Moreton-Robinson refers to this as white possessive logic (Moreton-Robinson, 2005, p. 22).

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  21 She develops her idea through Hage’s concept of governmental belonging: the nationalists understand themselves to be central to the nation, and others are objects that need to be managed (Hage, 2000, p. 45). In turn, she highlights that this mode of inhabitation – possessive logic – is not only the bastion of nationalist conservatives but also that of progressives. Indigenous people are managed and continue to be enfolded into a narrative of European progress, by being imagined as remedial subjects who are not yet ready for a management role, so to speak. Thus, good white people’s ‘responsibility’ is to acknowledge the damage colonialism wrought upon Indigenous people and support their ‘repair’. Settler ­colonialism maintains authority by attempting to destroy multiplicity, contestation, the contemporaneous heterogeneities of people, places, histories and knowledges and futures (Massey, 2005, p. 5). Colonialism limits possible worlds (Viveiros de Castro, 2013, p. 491). It is the loss of the diversity of life that settlers fail to grieve. The movement from personal to political responsibility requires settlers to grieve and bear responsibility for the colonial desire to reduce forms of existence.

Unsettling Home For many, Australia is an object of attachment. As scholars have ­emphasised, senses of national belonging are closely associated with the family home: albeit one without conflict (Caluya, 2011; Hage, 2000; Morley, 2000). The longing for stable emotional attachments to home, which are safe and secure, plays out in local and national desires for uniformity and demands for stability created and maintained by a ­caring, parental government. Being at home in the nation is too often sentimentalised and fetishised as closed and secure: a place of comfort and seamless belonging (Fortier, 2003, p. 119). The home is a place of an organic social order, which cannot be disturbed (Frow, 2012, p. 9). ­Gorman-Murray and Dowling identify: Home is powerful, emotive and multi-faceted. As a basic desire for many, home is saturated with the meanings, memories, emotions, experiences and relationships of everyday life. The idea and place of home is perhaps typically configured through a positive sense of attachment, as a place of belonging, intimacy, security, relationship and selfhood. (2007, p. np) Home or belonging is an emotional space, composed from a yearning for the subject to have a deep sense of security, affirmed and familiar to themselves and their community. Belonging, in this sense, is an emotional binding between subject and space, facilitating comfort, identity and becoming (Gorman-Murray, 2011, p. 211).

22  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging Belonging is an emotional territory of the self in the community. If there ever was such a thing as security of belonging, the globalised world of late capitalism makes such pleasures much less achievable (Hage, 2002, p. 150). Comfort and security are the motifs for a better life but in a world that has become insecure, Hage proposes, many seek a form of cultural belonging in the form of a political ethical existence: After all, communities are not just imagined; they are also so many bodies relating to each other. They are a practical ensemble of relations between people that one uses as a support in the pursuit of being. So being part of a community provides a very important objective and subjective gratification for people. That’s what feeling part of a community, as opposed to just imagining, can convey. It is objective in the sense that you want to be part of a community only if you feel you are capable of achieving more by being part of it than you can on your own – and subjective in that you kind of ‘take on’ the greatness of so many more people when you are living in a community. (2002, p. 162) One feels connected to and recognised by their ‘like-minded’ community: homeliness is a relationship between the self and collective (Hage, 2002, p. 162). Good white people desire to belong in a reconciled nation, a place where we have confronted the past and are self-consciously forging a just, equitable Australia. Freed from the burden of wrongdoing, our compassion towards another’s suffering provides a sense of proximity to what we desire: Indigenous people, and an ethical self and belonging. There is a lot of hope tied up in being a good white woman. She ­identifies with a particular ethical future: a hope that is shared by one’s community. But what is this future so desired, yet so dimly lit it ­induces such anxiety, even dread? Emma Kowal might respond, it is the fantasy space of postcolonial justice: ‘a future vision where Indigenous people are lifted out of disadvantage to participate fully in Australian society, statistically equal to but culturally distinct from other Australians’ (2011, p. 315). It is safe, secure home for all, a comforting image of a much more just Australia, in which so many progressives are deeply invested. Good Australia requires ‘ethical White subjectivities fit for the post-colony’ (Kowal, 2011, pp. 315–316). Yet Indigenous political will troubles the fantasy space of postcolonial justice. To be exposed as not good enough for the post-colony is dangerous. For good white people it’s a high-stakes game: Indigenous self-determination is a threat to one’s sense of self, belonging and a hoped for ethical future. One can critique or mock good white people, but my argument is this is a cultural dynamic that limits and prescribes progressives’ capacity to work in solidarity with ­I ndigenous people in their struggle to create a more just world.

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  23 For all the good intentions, ‘we’ cannot hear the hopes and demands of Indigenous people should it risk disturbing an emotional t­ erritory, where settlers are safe, at home. So, settlers continue to worry and fret, and focus their moral efforts on repairing the ‘broken ­Aborigine’, not transforming the foundations of settler colonialism. In the encounter with Indigenous political will, there is no good white woman. It is an impossible position to hold. The future disposition of the self or configuration of the world is the desired object and it is under threat (Ernest Bloch, cited in Ngai, 2005, p. 201). Many settlers find Indigenous political autonomy so disturbing and estranging that they avoid it by fleeing into anxiety, the concern, guilt and pity, which reaffirms one’s sense of ethical belonging and white authority. A state I call virtuous anxiety. White anxiety works to re-territorialise ­I ndigenous ­political will into the familiar, leaving colonial authority in place: a strange self-certainty. Settler anxiety is a practice, or perhaps more accurately an emotional genealogy, that neutralises the effects of Indigenous experiences, politics and sovereignty, and the legacies of colonialism to make settlers at home in post-reconciliation Australia. But the reprieve is short lived. Home is a site of an ongoing political struggle. Anxiety is future-orientated. It is a mode of waiting or ‘distressed anticipation’: the fear that something one dreads might come to pass, which threatens to fragment and decompose the self (Harari, 2001, p. xxxii; Ngai, 2005). Throughout this book, I want to illuminate the object of dread, which I understand to be settler displacement, and ultimately the prospect of acknowledging and living with Indigenous sovereignty. On an emotional level, this demands a reversal of the power relations that structure good white people’s sense of self, and thus is a constant existential threat. When settlers’ common-sense world is disrupted, the good white woman is lost. Thus, my second focus is encounters in which I­ ndigenous people refuse settler benevolence and the identity of historical victims, and instead settlers are confronted by the continued presence and v­ itality of Indigenous life and claims to sovereignty. Good white people’s everyday existence is interrupted, and they are thrown back upon themselves, questioning who they are, their style of inhabitation, the processes of reconciliation and recognition, and their understanding of ethical, ­anti-colonial future, and what it demands of them. The violent past is kept firmly alive in the present (Schlunke, 2009, p. 22). In the following ­chapters, I pause over and examine moments where settler anxiety threatens my subject’s sense of self and ethical belonging, but she stays with anxiety. At the very least, to take responsibility for one’s complicity in the colonial project, and to work towards decolonisation, requires settlers to bear uncertainty and anxiety: the strangeness, ­meaningless, loss of self and place (Mackey, 2014). Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism is both a critique of ­settler colonialism and an experiment in telling stories differently.

24  Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging I share Rifkin’s project in making visible and understanding how ­settler colonialism is composed and actualised in the everyday, through expectations, perceptions, experiences of belonging and emotions (Rifkin, 2014). Settler colonialism orientates, shapes and limits life, but it is not totalising and coherent. It is uneven, messy and shifting, thus allowing for disjuncture and power relations to be destablised. I fix upon when settlers are disorientated by Indigenous life, which is where new and unexpected relations and politics are made possible. I do so because I believe it is necessary to intervene in the public discourse in which worrying about Indigenous people is seemingly a national obsession, yet is this care? To take political responsibility and transform the colonial ­relationship require settlers giving up on managing Indigenous lives – ­governmental belonging – a sense of one’s benevolence and recognising how settler colonialism shapes good white people and actualises and limits their political action. The force of this book is driven by a desire to contribute to the collaborative struggle to transform political and social life.

Acknowledgements Parts of this chapter were originally published as ‘Questioning Care’, in A. Hickey (Ed.), The Pedagogies of Cultural Studies, (pp. 116–131), New York, NY: Routledge, 2016, and ‘Anxious Settler Belonging: A ­ ctualising the Potential for Making Resilient Postcolonial Subjects’, M/C Journal 16(5), 2013, np.

Notes 1 Prime Minister Turnbull has on several occasions quoted Aboriginal ­educationist and co-chairman of the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council, Professor Chris Sarra, who urged the PM to ensure ‘Governments do things with Aboriginal people, not do things to them’. 2 A Welcome to Country is when an Aboriginal custodian or elder from the ­local region welcomes people to their land. It is a demonstration of recognition and respect for the traditional owners of the land. It might be performed as a speech, song or dance or ceremony, and is performed at the beginning of many government, corporate, university and community events. 3 I wish to acknowledge Eve Vincent for drawing my attention to this point. 4 The Native Title Act (1993), passed by the Australian federal government, is a property right and national system of recognition of Indigenous people’s ongoing connection to land and its cultural significance. It provides protection of native title and can co-exist with other land interests (such pastoral leases). It overturned the founding myth of terra nullius. 5 The reconciliation era ran from approximately 1991 to the early 2000s. The formal process began as a result of the Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, 1991. The federal government formed the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, setting a ten-year timeframe to advance a national process of reconciliation between Indigenous and broader Australia. Significantly, in establishing the Council, the government

Introducing Anxieties of Settler Belonging  25 was acknowledging past and contemporary policy failures and the need for non-Indigenous Australians to become involved and develop a new ­understanding of Indigenous peoples, cultures and more broadly Australian history. The process was very successful at galvanising many Australians to organise community reconciliation groups. 6 The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and  ­Torres Strait Islander descent who were, largely, forcibly removed – approximately 1905–1970 – from their families by state and federal government agencies and church missions, under Protection and Assimilation Acts. In 1997, the Bringing Them Home: The ‘Stolen Children’ Report was handed down to federal parliament. See https://www.humanrights.gov.au /our-work/aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-social-justice/publications /bringing-them-home-stolen. 7 Notably, initially many of these groups formed as a result of the state-­ sanctioned reconciliation material that gave people a pathway to become involved. 8 I thank Eve Vincent for asking for me to clarify this policy shift. 9 Foucault writes, ‘techniques which permit one to determine the conduct of individuals, to impose certain wills on them, and to submit them to certain ends or objectives’ (2005, p. 213). 10 In writing this book (and in discussion with friends and colleagues), I have reflected upon if there is a particular white women’s pain at refusal or hurt. Note Peter Read in Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal ­Ownership (2000) writes of the angst that settlers encounter with ­I ndigenous ­Australia has produced. He is in crisis and cannot reconcile Indigenous and non-­I ndigenous senses of belonging. However, as he notes, white anxiety/ guilt is not shared by all. He questions if it is socio-economic: ‘Everyone I have quoted so far, so far as I know, is like me: university-educated, urban, ­middle-class and Anglo-Celtic. Perhaps it is only this group that feels itself to be trapped’ (p. 5). See also, Henry Reynolds (2000). 11 However as Buchanan points out, as welcome as the Apology was, Rudd’s ­eloquent and harrowing account of the removal of children from their ­families and communities, did not ‘confront the foundational crime: dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands (2012, p. 113). Mackey argues that the Canadian apology does not require Canadians to account for how the processes of land theft and cultural genocide are foundational to the modern nation state. Making the broader colonial process into something ‘containable’ and ‘apologizable’ (2013, p. 50). 12 The Recognise campaign was launched in 2012 by then Prime Minister ­Julia Gillard. It was a government-sponsored marketing campaign to build p ­ ublic support for constitutional reform to recognise Indigenous people. It was abandoned in mid-2017, and seen by many to focus on symbolic constitutional recognition, rather than substantive reform. 13 I thank Colleen McGloin for posing this question.

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2 Love and Complicity

My sense of belonging was deeply informed by my father. From him I learned a particular mode of inhabitation, what Aileen Moreton-­ Robinson conceptualises as white patriarchal sovereignty. Put simply, it’s white men’s unflinching ‘truth’ that the land belongs to them no ­matter what. It is an everyday knowledge about ownership of the ­nation, who has the right to manage, make decisions and govern ­Australia, and ­Australian identity, and thus whose history, experiences and values matter the most (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. xii). There is no doubt that my sense of connection to the country is composed of many things and there is much more to my father and our relationship, but as ­Moreton-Robinson’s identifies, ‘white possession moves and is performed in the everyday’ (2006, p. 222). I identified with my ­father’s ‘in placeness’ and freedom of movement: a settled unsettlement. From my father I absorbed a feeling for country, a mode of inhabitation that was made possible through dispossession of Aboriginal people ­(Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Rifkin, 2014). As noted, this book explores the feelings and sensations of everyday certainty, belonging and personhood that settler colonial legal and political structures give rise to and the questions that are suspended and made moot by an all-encompassing settler sovereignty (Rifkin, 2013, p. 322). In this chapter, I reflect upon the circulation, enculturation and enchantment of settler colonial structures of feelings within white farming families – or more so, pastoralist fathers and daughters. Settler certainty was all around me. Saturating the social, learned at school, passed on through idle chatter and gossip, everyday practices of care and indifference, carried in legends and myths, national monuments and mourning, property laws and social policies. But a child’s love for a parent and the desire to be recognised educates the heart in particular ways. When I was growing up, exclusive possession was the domain of men. As a farmer’s daughter, at best it might be mine by association. If one dared to ask, the men might say they earned it through hard work, ­enduring adversities, ‘natural’ intelligence and no shortage of rat ­cunning. But as a child watching from the sidelines, it felt like they took it as a God-given right, some form of mysterious inheritance, although

32  Love and Complicity they were adamant they got nothing for free. Subjects embody white possessive logic (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. xiii). It is a learned and received way of being in the world, a privilege, a taken-for-grantedness that nonetheless has to be defended, reaffirmed and reproduced over and over. Reflecting upon my childhood, it seems very apt to call it possessiveness. The men jealously guarded and held something too tight and it made them restless. Not the country itself that had the capacity to sooth and calm. To my child’s heart, such masculine confidence and entitlement was perplexing, intoxicating and gratifying. We always seemed on the precipice of loss and there they were acting like the world was theirs, not so much for the taking, but through steady, persistent toil and sheer bloody mindedness. I learned young that the experience of being a woman in rural Australia was to be diminished, but we were protected from the worst of it by being white and from a land-owning family. I have told many stories of growing up on the land and heard many more tales, some measured and laconic, others wild, verging on ­lunacy or fabricated for their audience’s amusement. I’ve read a lot about ­Australian belonging, or more so the desire to narrate and create a sense of belonging, to write one’s self into the country. From this I’ve learned that one can get lost in, or found by, narratives. The stories I’ve told and read have revealed and concealed, facilitated and hindered both my self-understanding and understanding of Australia. Narratives have the power to both sever one from the complexity and multiplicity of experiences and to forge connections, invigorating and adding to life. The men of my childhood I remember as authoritative and independent but not at home in the world of women and children, a commanding absent presence. Reading Kim Mahood’s Craft for a Dry Lake, her revisiting the outback Australia of her youth, I tumbled into a forgotten country, a place where my memories of swaggering, confident masculinity were made false (2000). The men were also doubtful, confused and sometimes in despair. It takes a lot of work to maintain white, possessive logic. It is both taken-for-granted and relentlessly reproduced and reaffirmed (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). In the gap between entitlement and the conditional, distrust, fear and anxiety can creep in – white ­Australia’s perennial fear of being dispossessed by racialised others. But uncertainty and trepidation do not have to produce hostility. It can interrupt self-mastery and settler common sense and open a space for diverse political engagements. More forcefully, Craft reminded me of the conditionality I felt as a child. Mahood writes of the outback that she sensed: always that my place in it was provisional, and there was another world in which I felt both exiled and seduced. So I loved it passionately, feeling always that I must prove my love, feeling always on the brink of betraying it. This has not changed. (2000, p. 250)

Love and Complicity  33 Books that capture us, like Craft did me, often do so because they hold up a mirror. In this chapter, I want to trace the fervency, possessiveness, exclusion and the temptation of betrayal. What does it make of young women who yearn to leave and stay? What forms of complicity does this concoction of forfeiture and entitlement produce? The men of my childhood – and most importantly my father – their estranged intimacy, the gender and racial politics and settler common sense constituted me as a subject; this subjectivity is inextricable from my sense of belonging. It’s a potent mix that produces intense emotions, allegiances and beliefs. If decolonisation is the aim, then such structures of feelings need to be taken very seriously (Mackey, 2014; also see Rifkin, 2014). In many ways, this chapter is about fathers and daughters, the inheritance of possessive logic, and encounters that disturb, dispossess and disorientate. It is a story of white women who left rural life, in a quest for a bigger life but also because they felt exiled, and the feelings that plague them. Mahood laments: I belong to an age whose experience is one of displacement and a kind of loss. The things lost will continue to haunt me, and the idea of loss will be located in a particular place. The loss is part of the myth. (2000, p. 257) It is a myth that is familiar to white Australia. This sense of loss, many argue, is intrinsic to Western modernity. However, this sorrowful myth acts to displace the dispossession of Indigenous people and the unease that Indigenous claims to land and deeply embodied relationship to country pose for settler Australia (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Tuck & Yang, 2012). I want to complicate the analysis of settler common sense with the confluence of race and gender. White male entitlement was not a given for a female child. In this chapter, I will analyse the racialised and gendered politics of place, the feeling of love, loss and longing and how these play out in the pursuit of belonging. Craft is tale of a white father and daughter but it ends with Aboriginal and settler women. Mahood’s father’s death drew her back to her childhood home, in the Australian Central Desert. His diaries and colonial maps guide her journey. Like an explorer’s narrative, at least for much of Craft, women rarely feature. However, it is the encounters with female traditional owners and the unavoidable presence and vitality of Aboriginal law and culture that exposes and disturbs Mahood’s settler common sense and ­reorientates her life. Overtly, it is a tale of mourning and a search for resolution with her father, but more so it is an encounter with Indigeneity: sovereign ­Aboriginal women and place-based politics. In this space, she comes face to face with the evasions and equivocations, dilemmas and contradictions of the urban, progressive, middle-class white Australian. To be

34  Love and Complicity clear, I am not trying to blow the whistle on Mahood, but rather it is a memoir of the anatomy of settler colonialism. The fragility of her settler certainty is exposed, but unbeknown to Mahood at the time, it was the beginning of an unsettled life and a cognitive shift, which renewed her relationships with the people and places of the Tanami region. She learned to live in an Australia that has an Aboriginal history, present and future.

Desert Country The vast majority of the population in Australia live along the east coast. The interior – the desert, the outback – has long held a collective fascination and fear. Nonetheless, for many Australians it is a blank space, imagined without detail, geographical features and contours. A screen upon which settler fantasies can be projected (Ryan cited in ­Bartlett, 2001, p. 119). The backdrop to this fantasy is the deceit of terra ­nullius, which erased Indigenous possession. The Australian ‘outback’ is inland, sparsely populated, a vast area extending across the continent north, south and west. It looms large in the Australian imagination. The desert is a sight of desire and the bush central to Australian cultural mythology and identity (Bartlett, 2001; Schaffer, 1988). The colonial writing of ­European explorers, settlers, pioneers and administers narrated ­Australian deserts as sites of discovery and exploration that needed to be penetrated, named and known. The threats to be mastered and controlled (Bartlett, 2001, p. 119). These dominant tropes of writing Australia were constituted from a particularly masculinised tradition of writing. In nationalist discourse and colonial literature, Australia was imagined as a place of contradictions and cunning, promise and menace, a place of spiritual quest and inspiration, of exile and salvation. It threatened ­madness and defeat (Schaffer, 1988). It was a place, as Schaffer identifies, ‘of fantastic hopes and harsh realities; a land of ancient secrets and modern discoveries; a land of crude, closed settlements and complex, expanding freedoms’ (1988, p. 1). A terrain upon which the dominant Australian character, a nationalist, masculinist tradition, played out, white, heterosexual, practical, fiercely independent, yet loyal to his mates, non-­elitist, unassuming, rough, hard living, anti-intellectual and unemotional. His character was tested and measured against the ­Australian outback (Schaffer, 1988, p. 52). It is a vision of personhood that imagines the self as independent of the state, nevertheless blind to his dependency upon settler colonialism. To borrow from Rifkin, the fantasy of the outback provides ‘him with a sense of his own autonomous embodiment and a related set of ethical resources that enable him to reject the demands’ of society (2013, p. 322). It is a rugged individualism that is totally reliant upon political and legal structures, which gives non-Indigenous people access to Aboriginal territories (Rifkin, 2014).

Love and Complicity  35 The colonial myths of the Australian desert continue to be invoked and replayed. The Tanami Desert is considered one of the most remote regions in ­Australia, with the Great Sandy Desert to the west and the Simpson ­Desert to the east. It is largely the ancestral lands of Warlpiri and ­extends ­ ustralian from central Northern Territory to just over the Western A border. The Tanami was one of Australia’s ‘final frontiers’. It was not charted and colonised until the early twentieth century, when the mining engineer and explorer, Allan Davidson (1893–1930), mapped the country when he led a party through Central Australia in search of gold. In his obituary, The News (Adelaide) praised Davidson: ‘It takes a man strong in willpower and body, thorough in organisation, and of determination to go out into the unknown, facing the privations of heat and thirst and lack of transport’ (Obituaries Australia). In 1962, Joe Mahood surveyed the Tanami to map a stock route to move cattle across Northern Australia to the ports on the west coast. This appears to be where our story begins, with a seemingly typical ‘outback’ character. A self-reliant young man, down-to-earth, suspicious of emotions, preferring his own company and a life far removed from the urbane. From a distance, he embodies the ‘national character’. Over thirty years later, Kim Mahood, Joe’s artist daughter, undertook a ­pilgrimage to her childhood home in the Tanami Desert, which led to her writing Craft for a Dry Lake. Near the close of the memoir, she ­reflects ‘he would hate this introspective tale of mine’ (2000, p. 232). Her confessional story was part of a broader national introspective turn. In this chapter, I want to reach back into the height of the reconciliation era when anxieties of settler colonial belonging were laid bare. Since publishing Craft, Mahood has worked as a teacher, writer and artist, in the Canberra district and spent six months of the year in ­Mulan, a tiny Walmajarri community in Western Australia. For over twenty years she has been returning to a ‘tract of country that extends across the Tanami Desert to the edge of the East Kimberley’ (Mahood, 2016, p. 3). What began as a pilgrimage to her childhood home in the Tanami, as an act of mourning the death of her father, has developed into enduring connections to people and place. Her art practice and writing have become interwoven with her friendships and working relationships in Central Desert and importantly with the custodians of the region. She writes that ‘[o]ver this period, I have become gradually enmeshed with the traditional owners of region’ (2016, p. 3). In 2004, she began to coordinate a large-scale project with the community and the numerous visitors to the country – archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, scientists, rangers and fellow artists – which maps the complex stories, sites of cultural significance, intersecting and competing knowledge systems and histories of the region. Her most recent book,

36  Love and Complicity ­ ahood Position Doubtful, charts and is anchored in mapping projects. M explains: I have made a number of maps with Aboriginal people, designed to reveal common ground between white and Aboriginal ways of representing and understanding country … The information marked on them is a mixture of Aboriginal knowledge – traditional camp sites, the birthplaces of individuals, the tracks of ancestors – s­ cientific information about ancient shorelines and archaeological investigations, and the template of bores and paddocks and tracks and boundaries that represent the cattle stations and stock routes of white settlement. They serve different purposes – aboriginal, scientific, testimonial, environmental – depending on when and where they are used. Often there is a mismatch between my interpretation and the Aboriginal interpretation of their purpose. (2016, p. 9) She works along a fault line to create a cross-cultural document that records the interplay between Aboriginal and Western scientific knowledges and is comprehensible to both Walmajarri and kartiya.1 Maps, as noted, play a central role in Mahood’s imaginary. Since Craft’s publication, her writing has unflinchingly examined and detailed white settlers’ relationships with Aboriginal people; the cultural d ­ ifferences, ­misunderstandings, contradictions and affections, and settlers’ ­‘doubtful position’. The title of her latest book is drawn from an aeronautical map that Mahood’s father used when he charted the stock route across the ­Tanami. The notation ‘Position Doubtful’ appeared regularly, and M ­ ahood borrows it as a metaphor for white Australia’s lack of ­understanding and substantial connection to the country, most especially remote Australia. Over the last few decades, she has come to appreciate the complicated relationship of black and white remote Australia in a way few could and from which she has developed a deep commitment to the life of the Central Desert. Early in Position Doubtful she explains, ‘[w]hat drives me is not a desire to help, to fix or change, but to understand something about my country’ (2016, p. 5). Her sense of belonging was hard won, at times world shattering. However, I would argue that the shock of unsettlement freed her to find a place in the T ­ anami. ­Returning to an analysis of Craft ­allows me to trace her ­trajectory from ­colonial complicity to relations of ­autonomy and interconnection (Jones & ­Jenkins, 2008).

The Travelling Memoir Craft for a Dry Lake is a telling memoir. In her unreliable yellow S­ uzuki ute, with her equally recalcitrant dog Sam as her companion and filled with trepidation, she heads north-west. Quoting Doris Lessing, ­Mahood

Love and Complicity  37 writes that ‘every writer has a myth country’ (2000, p. 94). Hers is ­Mongrel Downs, which during her childhood in the 1960s was her family home and the most remote pastoral lease in the country. Her father was a cattleman and her mother gave up her career as a journalist to raise the family and support her husband’s dream. When schooling allowed, Mahood and her siblings worked alongside their father and the stockmen. She was raised in her father’s world and deeply devoted to him and the country. After the death of her father, she needed to return to the Tanami Desert to break from him: to discover ‘what is me and what is him, and to separate them best I can’ (Mahood, 2000, p. 49). However, she returned to a country ‘almost changed beyond recognition’ (Mahood, 2000, p. 122). Land rights had given back the country to Warlpiri, the traditional owners. Despite her love and familiarity with the Tanami, it was a reluctant journey, a pilgrimage to lay her father to rest. She writes: It allowed me to locate my own story in the country, separately from the one so deeply associated with my father, and align myself with the stories that are being formulated now. The one that emerges most strongly, and that ran like a steady current through all the years when I was growing up, is the way in which landscape takes hold of and shapes the people who live in it. (2003, p. 125) Landscapes do shape us, but country is peopled, political and storied with multiple knowledges, histories and experiences. We are allied to and made by particular relationships, values and commitments. The ­Tanami is continuously recreated by Aboriginal law and culture. ­Despite their presence during her childhood, her family’s associations with ­Aboriginal people, and country, were forged through labour relations. She inhabited the landscape of settler colonialism. To align herself with the people and country as it is ‘now’, she must confront the myths of her childhood and the hold that her father and settler colonialism has over her. Few Australians ever travel to, let along live in Central Australia. Nonetheless, as Mahood writes of her return to the Tanami: It was also a journey into the heart of myth. No matter how often it is denigrated, deconstructed or sentimentalised, the journey into the desert remains a core myth for white Australians, maybe for Europeans in general. (2003, p. 124) The country of her childhood was one in which the myth of terra nullius prevailed and white men, through hard work and self-sacrifice, fought to ­ esire. tame the country and turn a profit. As noted, the desert is a sight of d

38  Love and Complicity To the colonial imaginary, it was an empty space, a place of ruin and redemption and freedom from the rule of law and restrictions of s­ ociety. In these racist times, Aboriginal people, at best, worked for white bosses at low or no wages: the men as stockmen, the women as housemaids. Their lives were highly regulated by the state, which included segregation, largely onto missions and reserves. Children of mixed descent were removed from their families and country and were given limited and rudimentary education, driven by the racist assumptions that Aboriginal people were only capable of menial labour. In the intervening years, in which time Mahood became an east-coast, urban artist, Australia underwent significant social and political changes. ­Despite this, she arrives encumbered by the myths, fantasies and racialised power relationships of her childhood home. Craft was written and published during a memoir boom. In the 1990s and early 2000s, as Whitlock identifies, the genre ‘was a readily available vehicle for thinking about the self in terms of larger historical processes of change’ (2004, p. 238). In response to Indigenous testimony, non-­I ndigenous Australians, many of whom were academics, wrote confessional, self-reflective accounts detailing their personal conflict when trying to reconcile their Australian identity and sense of belonging with the revelations of colonial violence and their commitment to social ­justice. Whitlock refers to such narratives as ‘white intellectual memoirs’, a genre, she proposes, in which whiteness is often presented as a ‘discovery’. The subject’s privileged racial identity is revealed to them, which they find deeply unsettling (2004, p. 237). Notably, as a child living in the Tanami, Mahood was aware of racial difference, although she does not disclose if she was cognisant of her racial privilege. Her memoir has the characteristic features of the genre: ‘confessions of estrangement and dislocation’, yet it does not share feelings of ­‘complicity, shame and guilt, and expressions of contrition and responsibility’ ­(Whitlock, 2004, p. 238). Or rather, at least not explicitly. There is no shortage of anxiety and ambivalence, despite Mahood’s insistence that she is wary of ­emotions. If there is shame, it is reserved for her female embodiment: alongside the rugged white masculinity too much woman, and the ­Aboriginal women, not enough. Her Tanami identity poses for her too many dilemmas and contractions (Mahood, 2000, p. 265). The most powerful and haunted styles of white memoir, Whitlock distinguishes, have emerged from settler colonies, where the settler is at ‘home’ and therefore cannot easily avoid a sense of complicity and historical privilege (2004, p. 239). However, it is the distress of not being at ‘home’ that produces settler anxiety. To build upon Whitlock’s observations, progressive settlers might not easily evade a sense of complicity and white privilege, but expressions of shame, guilt, contrition and pity can displace political responsibility. The question is how to mobilise these

Love and Complicity  39 unsettling feelings and confessions of estrangement to do more than feel bad? Craft begins as a biography of Mahood’s parents but she quickly turns it towards memoir. An intertextual road story that weaves together her reflections, family anecdotes, diary entries – her own travel journal, her father’s station diary and extracts from Davidson’s 1900 exploration of the region – and childhood memories that blur with the present. The landscape is both familiar and inexplicable. Some places are so alive with memory that she is again that child or adolescent and the country as if no time has lapsed. Although she is never physically lost on her journey, she writes ‘I was lost nearly all of the time psychically and emotionally’ (Mahood, 2003, p. 124). Travelling has long been equated with self-discovery and transformation. Craft explores these themes but what she uncovers threatens her identity. Mahood repeatedly loses sight of herself. She is disturbed by the changes that have taken place, her own contradictions and ambivalence, and attachment to a country where white men’s dominance went unquestioned. Craft, Elspeth Probyn proposes, is an ‘extended meditation on bodies that are out of place’ (2005, p. 66). I would add that Mahood is simultaneously in and out of place. It is this uncanny experience, the confronting estrangement of Aboriginal sociopolitical autonomy alongside the familiar comforts of home, that gives the book its complexity and makes it a revealing study of settler colonialism. The Tanami is no longer the place of her childhood, once imagined as ‘empty’ waiting to be ‘opened up’ by men of grit, ingenuity and determination, such as her father. It is, as it has always been, ­Aboriginal country. The state and broader Australia, however reluctantly and limitedly, have recognised prior ownership and ongoing connections to country. For all the respect and liking that had existed between my family and Aboriginal people who shared that place, and in spite of the fact that all my life I had been aware of the layers and patterns weaving through and under my own perceptions, I had no precedent for entering the Aboriginal world on its own terms. I felt uncertain of my ground, on the defensive, threatened as much by my own memory of attachment as by my present sense of displacement. (Mahood, 2003, p. 125) Craft’s style attests to her struggle to restore her relationship with the country in the face of the empowerment of the traditional owners and the subsequent relegation of white bosses and mission managers to colonial history. However, her childhood attachment to the Tanami is inseparable from the occupation of Aboriginal lands. Despite Mahood’s proclamation that her family always respected Aboriginal people and

40  Love and Complicity culture, she reinscribes the romantic myths of the rugged, resourceful, often eccentric but essentially harmless outback characters of ­Australian legend. She both challenges and endorses, as Martina Horáková discusses, well-established literary traditions such as accounts of earlier explorations of inland Australia, pastoralist’s heroic narratives of fortitude in the face of adversity and white women’s travel writing (2013, p. 213). Her settler common sense is animated and disturbed. However, it is not easily discarded when she hits the open road, tossed from the car ­window as the city lights recede in the rear-view mirror. Mahood shares with other women’s memoirs an attention to gender and space and a deeply affective experience of the landscape (Horáková, 2013, p. 214). Despite that she declares guilt a white urban thing and refuses to indulge, assertions of Aboriginal power and sovereignty provoke in her ‘an emotional and intellectual confrontation with the self’ (2000, p. 250). The significance of Craft is that she reveals this to her readers and we witness how disorientated she is by empowered ­Aboriginal women. White intellectual memoirs are often self-conscious engagements with the problematic of belonging in settler colonialism (Beudel, 2007, p. np). At least in the case of Craft, the problem is not abstract or intellectual, but rather it is raw and visceral, which makes it perhaps more candid and honest than self-conscious. Mahood grapples with her inability to reconcile the country of her childhood with ­Aboriginal self-­ determination. She confesses that ‘it was the [white] men’s lives that attracted me, their lives that lent validity to the Outback myth with which I identified’ (Mahood, 2000, p. 89). Mahood longs to inherit the ­colonial masculine world of her father. Craft was written at the height of the reconciliation era, and the political and ethical concerns of progressive settlers at the time demand a self-correction, but she cannot do it, or not yet. Instead, at the end of the memoir, she writes, she is not ready to face the dilemmas and contradictions. As she travels away from the country, she feels ‘a kind of tearing, something too deep to call grief. I have raised old ghosts, rather than laid them’. The loss of her father and the country of her childhood leave ‘[o]nly an emptiness, a lacuna in the soul’ (2000, p. 265). Her response to such grief and confusion is to attend to and document the singularity of her experiences. As much as the Mahood of the time might object, I read Craft as a narrative of white anxiety of belonging. Undoubtedly, the white confessional is a questionable endeavour in a colonised country: inward looking, prone to emotional indulgence and self-pity. However, the travelling memoir does not so much offer Mahood what she desires, a sense of belonging and resolution with her father, as disclose the inheritance she disavowed: colonial dispossession. It does not provide what she longs for, identifies with but is not hers to take, the outback myth of white masculinity. In its place, she is given the space to investigate her doubtful position.

Love and Complicity  41

Reckless, Fragile Lives Mahood tells of repeatedly reliving the sensation of a fall from a horse while riding. Until the ‘link breaks and my body flies away from the horse’, she is ‘raw energy, at the extremities of horse power’ (2000, p. 28). She is not she, but rather no one, pure force and potential. She ­recalls these moments as ‘less memory than an experience I have again and again’ (2000, p. 28). When I first read Craft, I experienced a strangely similar sensation. Reading the account of the men in her childhood was ‘more like an experience than memory’ of my early childhood. I e­ ntered a space, which had been closed by time and obscured by narratives and memories but opened like a secret door when the right words were spoken: There were men scattered through the country whose lives seemed forever on the verge of being over-taken by fate. Their business partners disappeared with the chequebook, their wages didn’t get paid, often there was a woman lurking in the background in a dangerous and unpredictable state. They seemed always to be injuring themselves. Bits of windmills fell on them, horses kicked them, bad food and too much rum poisoned them, minor extremities were torn off by ropes and machinery. They lost their swags and their dogs and their jobs. They got stranded in Queensland with no money and ­broken-down cars and pregnant girlfriends. They walked into brawls without looking and got charged with disturbing the peace. They got picked up by girls when they went to town and found themselves in compromising situations with fifteen year olds. Their lives ran along an edge that threatened constantly to cut them to pieces. They seemed unbearably foolish and fragile, and my child’s heart suffered torment that they seemed always in such danger. (Mahood, 2000, p. 86) Whenever I read this I laugh. These men are so familiar to me. The men, whom Mahood’s child heart suffered so much torment for, were both at home and strays in the country of my childhood. They were exciting and wretched but most of all they dominated, if not smothered, the life around them. However, until reading Craft, I had forgotten the sensation of being pulled into the undertow of their reckless, fragile lives. These men seemed impenetrable and vulnerable, in need of protection from themselves, in want of a teacher and unable to be taught. ­Mahood and I were not raised in the same country. Her childhood home was the vast, legendary world of a Northern Territory cattle station. A place, as she writes, ‘where the imagination cannot outstrip the strange ­chimerical creations of wind and light and space’ (2000, p. 33). I was brought up on the relatively populous, far north coast of New South

42  Love and Complicity Wales, on farms that bordered lush rainforest. What we do share, like so many women raised in rural Australia, is the experience of the weight of men’s lives. They mattered the most. Why and how eluded me as a child. Nonetheless, such momentum creates its own gravitational pull, which twists and wrenches everything around it. Mahood writes of being acutely aware that she was a white girl in predominantly male and Aboriginal cultures. In the country of my childhood, the Bunjalung people had been dispossessed of their land. The question of ownership had been settled and the methods of settlement erased from local, white folklore, which consisted of swaggering pioneer tales, bush legends and dull, stoic accounts of perseverance. I sensed an enforced silence. Clues were scattered throughout the country. ­Blackfellas lived on the old mission grounds or on the fringes of the remoter villages of Urbenville, Bonalbo and Woodenbong. Some people, usually men, were said to have a ‘touch of the tar brush’. I wondered but dared not ask. Women, black or white, made for good gossip but not mythology. I was acutely aware that it was a predominantly male culture. The men – probably barely beyond boyhood – were shy and awkward in the house, gulping down their tea and hurrying outside into their world that unfolded just past the garden gate, extending beyond the farm, across the ranges to places I longed to go – Bullock Mountain, Bonalbo, ­Tabulam, Beaudesert and the whole of Queensland. They rode off on their horses, drove off in their cars, trucks and tractors into their world. I occasionally glimpsed this world when I swapped my dresses for jeans and boots and recklessly threw myself into the tempest of their lives. Regardless of their tough exteriors – and they were tough, thrown from horses, bitten by dogs, kicked by cows, they just got back up again, swore, spat and continued – I was not always convinced by their performances of invincibility. They were strong, capable, resilient, easily angered and then as calm as a still day. Despite their low, slow strides, they were always on the run. Yet the country was, to their minds, unquestionably theirs. A place where their words could not be contested (Carter, 1992, p. 3). For all their strength, a force, which they refused to submit to, weakened them. Their own humanness and their need for and love of others. They could love a horse, a dog, sometimes even a cat, but tenderness towards their own kind nearly always alluded them, and for that they suffered, like mad King Lears, wanting, deranged in their own small kingdoms. They rehearsed, over and over again, the colonial anxiety of becoming enmeshed in other bodies, in the body of other lives. In a strange way, we kids needed them. Not in the manner we needed our mothers, and more generally women, who fed, sheltered and loved us, but the men’s lives, and more so, identities were so all-pervasive that it created a feeling of indispensability. Even if you have the capacity, you don’t destroy what you need, so we made do with ruffled hair and rough games. These men of my childhood were in so many ways ­cowboys and

Love and Complicity  43 for all the cultivation of the land, still frontier men. I drank their stories. There were so few others. These men demanded that they be seen in their own self-image. At the time, it seemed such a small gift: to turn a blind eye to their failings and, in so doing, prevent us all from falling. There was so little else they needed from us. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t abandon these men in the country of my childhood. I carry them with me. There are, however, many other stories, and if you care to look, the fables give way to a much more complex reality.

Managing Dislocation At its foundations, settler colonialism aims to force Indigenous people out of place, temporally and spatially. How we understand our self and our sense of belonging is forged from, amongst other things, foundational relationships to people, places, ideas and ideals. On her initial journey, Mahood does not resolve her enmeshment with her father. Rather the memories of her childhood, and the sense of loss, ambivalence and confusion she feels reveal that she is a child of settler colonialism. The girl child desires her father’s life. Desires to see the country as her father does and to be his closest companion. ‘They say fathers invent daughters and daughters invent fathers. The father I invented held my life in thrall for years. I felt my first loyalty must always be to him’ (Mahood, 2000, p. 248). Nonetheless, she needs to not only remake her relationship with her father but also seek ways of connecting to the multiplicity of places and living both on and with Aboriginal country, to difference and political autonomy, and disentangle herself from masculinist, colonial sensibilities. Just as her father’s place was secured by diminishing and silencing the authority of the Warlpiri, she needs to quieten the stories and ­influence of, and longing for, the colonial outback myth. Colonialism gave Mahood a home in the Tanami Desert. Her continuing sense of belonging to Mongrel Downs is sustained by a denial of the colonial violence necessary for the realisation of her father’s frontier dream. As Mahood observes: [p]robably the most difficult part of my initial journey was how to approach the reversals that had occurred in the time since I’d left the country. The place I considered my home, and in which my own sense of identity was deeply enmeshed, had been returned to its traditional owners. I had all the baggage of my earlier life to contend with. (2000, p. 125) One way that Mahood deals with her discomfort is by importing into the Tanami universal notions of myth that belong to no place or time (Kurtzer, 2004, p. 74). Scattered throughout Craft are italic sections, presumably from her travel journal, where she observes or refers to

44  Love and Complicity figures known as the ‘mapmaker’ and ‘mudmen’. These are written in the third person, and the figures are a protective presence over a ‘child’ or a ‘women’. When she steps into the silence of the country, she invites mythical figures to re-anchor her in the country of her childhood. ­Mahood is practical, like her father suspicious of emotions, and these otherworldly pieces of writing are at odds with much of the book’s tone. It is as if these irregular interventions are down-to-earth Mahood’s ­alter-ego, a longing for a guiding spirit who watches over the child adult, quietly directing and providing the tools she needs to find a way to ­belong in the Tanami, without dispensing with her father. The translocation of the mythical characters, Sonja Kurtzer argues, attests to Mahood’s ‘unbelonging’, and she criticises Mahood’s failure to acknowledge her white race privilege and to ‘politicise her theorising of belonging’ (2004, p. 74). It is notable that Mahood evades any discussion of issues such as the Stolen Generations, challenges to the racist practice of extremely low, or no, pay for Aboriginal workers, or the land rights movement. When she was writing Craft, these contestations were very much alive and no doubt resonated throughout her childhood and adolescence. Her inability to grapple with her white privilege, Horáková contends is ‘manifest in her failure to explore what happened to Aboriginal men and women who were exploited as station hands and domestic help’ (2013, p. 216). Mahood’s anxieties reveal not only her reluctance to confront the racialised inequalities and injustice that gave her family a home in the Tanami but also the relationship between self-possession and settler colonialism. The ‘mapmaker’ and ‘mudmen’ visitations occur when she is alone and work to secure her in a place ‘almost changed beyond recognition’ (Mahood, 2000, p. 122). They are unreliable ­talismans. A sign that if she doesn’t relinquish her attachment to her ‘father’s country’ she will remain unheimlich. Throughout her journey, Mahood carries two accounts of expeditions into the Tanami: Allan Arthur Davidson’s 1900 mapping of the country and her father’s in 1962 – to ‘open up the country’ for a pastoral lease and establish a stock route (Mahood, 2000, p. 124). These expeditions, and the maps they produced, frame Mahood’s interpretation of the country. They could be said to guide her encounter with the country and the people, both during her childhood and when she returns. They are the tracks she initially follows to find her way back into the Tanami and lay her father to rest. But they also lead her astray. At times, the maps bear little resemblance to the country in which she is travelling. Like the misleading European maps that Mahood carries on her ­inland journey, the reader might be ill-advised only to follow or listen to the clearly spoken and hence risk not hearing ‘the journey’s trajectory towards the thing that has not been said’ (2003, p. 121). Craft is as significant, Bernadette Brennan observes, for what is omitted as much as what is said (2006). For all of its problems – the absence of critical reflection

Love and Complicity  45 and reliance on the myth of unified subjectivity – ­autobiography can recall the details and desires that might otherwise go unadmitted to the public record. Mahood does not confront her own white, race privilege; however, Craft discloses how constitutive and foundational settler ­colonialism is to good white people. Mahood’s need to protect the memory of her father from accusations of colonial violence is telling of settler Australians’ inability to confront the pain (and gain) of history. Her disturbing ritualised scattering of her father’s ashes, in which she paints herself in red ochre, appears to be a way to resolve her own conflict. A belated attempt to indigenise her father, perhaps so she doesn’t have to abandon him in a muchchanged country? Or is she metaphorically indigenising herself?2 Settler appropriation acts to vanish Aboriginal people, which displaces placebased politics and legitimate claims to sovereignty (Byrd, 2011, p. xix). Through this ‘ritualising’ Mahood replaces her anxiety with a desire for otherness, or a manageable Indigeneity. She both claims and disclaims a Warlpiri skin name, Napurrula, received as a child (2000, p. 124). She is troubled by her need for, use and abuse of her skin name, disregarding it along the journey back east, writing: [s]omewhere along the track I divest myself of Napurrula. She can stay behind, where she belongs. One day, if I can face the dilemmas and contradictions she poses, I will come back. (2000, p. 265) Instead of separating with her father, she wants to rid herself of conflicts, ambiguity and anguish that have surfaced through re-entering her family history. Mahood’s memoir, as Kurtzer critiques, ‘seeks to determine and explain how non-Indigenous Australians come to have a sense of belonging to place in Australia’ (2004, p. 77). The limits of Craft are that ‘the subject fails to own both a violent colonial history and her position of privilege in relation to that history’ (Kurtzer, 2004, p. 77). Its success might be what is revealed: a tale of white belonging and the tenacity of colonial desire. Mahood’s being at home, and my own, developed and grew from an attachment to a masculine, settler culture. For Mahood and myself, to be at home in an Australia that has a ‘black history’ and ongoing Indigenous sovereignty calls upon us to know ourselves in relation to colonialism, race privilege, and the influence and weight of our fathers and white, male rural culture.

Country Girls There are girl children who don’t want to be like their mother or to live her life, or what little they know of her. In the rural Australia of my childhood, men appeared to have all the freedoms and excitement.

46  Love and Complicity Male gender privilege abounded and it seeped into the way I interpreted ­women’s lives. Before puberty, I was included occasionally, or at least not completely unwelcome, as a part of the ritual of being a country girl.3 It gave me a vantage point. On farms men do things, often dangerous, or at least unsafe things, which require strength beyond that of a child. I, or we, spent a lot of my outdoor life sitting high atop wooden fences observing, legs straddling the railings in readiness to jump to safety. And following. I remember a lot of following, sticking close by, reading jeans and boots for signs of whom to trail in the forest of legs. Fathers, I observed, don’t look out, turn back to see where you might be. Well not at least until a familiar name is called over the rodeo, show or cattle sale loud speaker, sparking his memory. Watching him from the cab of the truck, the back seat of a car, parked in the sun for far longer than, ‘I’ll just be a minute, got to see a man about a dog’, if he informed you at all. Still, you waited in the car with the dog and the radio as companions. They did things, men. So did women, but they were more difficult to observe because you did things with them, were immersed in their world, which seemed to be everyone else’s, even more than hers. Like so many female children who leave the land and relinquish a rural life, Mahood (and myself) feared being ordinary and living a dull, monotonous life without action, drama and adventure. A woman’s life, to my child’s mind, appeared to be one of confinement. Their duties, unlike men’s, were monotonous and uncreative. Men went out into the world, acting in and upon it as if they created the world. Mahood learned a particular style of belonging from her father and the white outback characters and desired the freedoms of colonial masculinity. Settler colonialism is inextricable from her relationship with the country. Her sense of herself as a woman was shaped through the highly gendered and racialised context of rural colonial Australia where labour was strictly demarcated according to gender, and where whiteness and masculinity were unquestioned markers of authority. The Warlpiri Tanami reads her back to herself as a white woman and no longer simply, and innocently, her father’s daughter. However inadvertently, she skids into a space that reorientated her trajectory: ‘the collision of a real event with the imagined one creates the kind of psychic rupture necessary to remake one’s understanding of the world’ (Mahood, 2000, p. 123). Returning as a white woman to the Warlpiri Tanami and the society of Aboriginal women produces in her a painful rupture. One of the most challenging events for Mahood is her participation in the ‘big women’s business ceremony’, held on the edge of Western Australia’s border with the Northern Territory. She asserts that the women’s business (significant cultural ceremony) is a sign of the measure of changes that have taken place in the years since she left: ‘I cannot imagine such an event in the years when I lived in the country. Then, the notion that Aboriginal

Love and Complicity  47 women had any sort of power would have been an absurdity’ (2000, p. 99). Women were erased from the writings of explorers, male anthropologists, bureaucrats and from her father’s journals. Aboriginal women were taken-for-granted and went unnoticed as housemaids and childminders and too commonly the violence inflicted upon them was accepted or ignored by the families they served. Even though Mahood’s earliest memories were of black bodies and the warmth and affection of the Aboriginal women who worked for her family, most of the women who helped raise her remain nameless. In contrast in the Tanami of the 1990s, the women’s ceremony is supported by government grants and white women coordinators, in belated recognition of Aboriginal women’s connection to country. Mahood was always aware of her difference, but at the ceremony, she is an awkward, out-of-place white woman. The ceremony reconfigures her sense of women’s roles in the desert, black and white, and fleetingly gives her a sense of an ethical engagement with the Tanami as Aboriginal country. But later she writes: Now, here, every idea I ever had seems irrelevant. The women’s ceremony has shaken me out of the notion that I have any real knowledge of, or relationship with Aborigines and their culture. The stories I have told to city friends, that have given my life a glamorous and exotic edge, seem like flimsy posturing. What is real is the discomfort, the black space, the awkwardness …. My relationship to the country belongs to the past. (2000, p. 210) Despite her protestations that white guilt is a city thing and her suspicion of emotions, here she acknowledges white anxiety. Rupture is vital to opening her to different ways of experiencing the Tanami and witnessing Aboriginal women’s connection to country and their strength of law and culture. The revelation that she knows nothing of Aboriginal people and culture allows her to come to a new understanding. It is ‘not my country, nor is it my father’s country. But my track, my story travels through it and as does his. They make up a part of the pattern of the country’ ­(Mahood, 2000, p. 258). Her white possessive logic is shaken. In her father’s country, the child Mahood ranged across a world made whole by childhood and the deceptions of colonialism; she experienced freedoms and intimacies that wove a relationship between her and the country. The Tanami Desert is a physical, social and imagined space, all of which intrudes upon and disrupts Mahood’s memories and identity. Again, as she wrote, ‘[p]robably the most difficult part of my initial journey was how to approach the reversals that had occurred in the time since I’d left the country’ (2000, p. 125). However, the most difficult part of the journey holds out the possibility of change, by not only relinquishing

48  Love and Complicity the illusion and desire for completeness, which ­colonialism perpetrates, but by living with the uneasiness and responsibility of ­colonial violence. The longing for undamaged space, Bird Rose assesses, insulates one from places, people and things (1996, p. 190). It is the uneasy memories, the discomfort of returning to an altered place, of confronting the relentlessness of her desires and her inability to be in Aboriginal country that marked the beginning of her exploration to understand the country. She admits the unsettlement and uncertainty, which Aboriginal presence and sovereignty invoke in her. In turn, she begins to create a sense of belonging amongst the plurality of stories, tracks and traces: the ­heterogeneity of places. Writing about ‘home’ does not so much reveal the country as the ­stories we tell to stay in place. Our childhood, Mahood’s and mine, for all the differences, share a settler colonial heritage. A world in which ­divisions abounded and the roles available to inhabit were limited. ­Stories have a hold over us and they cannot be easily discarded or simply replaced by good intentions, rather it is through rupture and forms of estrangement that their claims over us slacken and lose their force. The possibility of self and social transformation is generated from exposure, which can be a painful process. The myth of the ‘outback’ as a site of rugged masculinity, heroic explorers and pioneers surviving in an ­‘unforgiving’ land is offered a place in the country of Mahood’s childhood, but in her journey, the myth begins to unravel when she witnesses and is challenged by the Warlpiri women’s intimacy with the Tanami. Good white people need to feel how settler colonialism is lived in the everyday: ‘as the self-­evident conditions of possibility for (settler) being’ (Rifkin, 2013, p.  322). ­Memory, in Mahood’s narrative, is not solely nostalgia, but rather because it resides uncomfortably in this ‘new’ country, it can irritate, act as an abrasive quality that generates change. It is a poetic history, with ambivalence, fear and desire as her surest companions on her inland journey. In attempting to remake her sense of belonging and identity, both in the presence and absence of her father, Mahood creates new connections that hold the possibility of reorientating her exploration of ‘her father’s country’ towards Aboriginal geographies and self-determination (Rifkin, 2014). The path to decolonisation requires both a confrontation with one’s deep attachment to settler colonialism, whilst being guided by Indigenous political struggles.

Acknowledgements Parts of this chapter were originally published as ‘They were so ­Unbearably Fragile and Foolish: Apple Trees, Intimacy and the Strangeness of Possession’, in B. Holloway and J. Rutherford (Eds.), Halfway House: The Poetics of Australian Spaces (pp. 268–284), Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2010.

Love and Complicity  49

Notes 1 Kartiya is a term for white people. 2 I thank Colleen McGloin for this observation. 3 Again, I want to thank Colleen McGloin for her insights that helped me clarify this point.

Bibliography Bartlett, A. (2001, December). Desire in the desert: Exploring contemporary Australian desert narratives. Antipodes, 15(2), 119–123. Beudel, S. (2007). Kim Mahood’s evolving geographies. Australian Humanities Review, 42, np. Bird Rose, D. (1996). Rupture and the ethics of care in colonized space. In T.  Bonyhady & T. Griffiths (Eds.), Prehistory to politics: John Mulvaney, the humanities and the public intellectual (pp. 190–215). Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Brennan, B. (2006). Kim Mahood’s ‘Craft for a dry lake’: A work in progress. Southerly, 66(1), 91–105. Byrd, J. (2011). The transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. ­M inneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Carter, P. (1992). Living in a new country: History, travelling and language. London, England: Faber & Faber. Horáková, M. (2013). The poetics of ambivalence: A postcolonial reading of Kim Mahood’s Craft for a dry lake. Antipodes, 27(2), 213–218. Jones, A., & Jenkins, K. (2008). Rethinking collaboration: Working the ­I ndigene-colonizer hyphen. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. Tuhiwai Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical Indigenous methodologies (pp. 471–486). New York, NY: Sage. Kurtzer, S. (2004). Issues of belonging in Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Finding Ullagundahi Island and Kim Mahood’s Craft for a dry lake. In G. Pass & D. Woods (Eds.), Alchemies: Community exChanges (pp. 67–80). Perth, WA: Black Swan Press. Mackey, E. (2014). Unsettling expectations: (Un)Certainty, settler states of ­feeling, law, and decolonization. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 29(12), 235–252. Mahood, K. (2000). Craft for a dry lake. Sydney, NSW: Anchor. Mahood, K. (2003). A track winding back. Meanjin, 63(4), 121–125. Mahood, K. (2016). Position doubtful. Melbourne, VIC: Scribe. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2006). Afterword: How white possession moves: After the word. In T. Lea, E. Kowal, & G. Cowlishaw (Eds.), Moving anthropology: Critical Indigenous studies (pp. 219–232). Darwin, NT: Charles Darwin University. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and ­Indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Obituaries Australia. (2017, August 17). Allan Arthur Davidson (1873–1930). Retrieved from National Centre of Biography http://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/ davidson-allan-arthur-21568/text31820 Probyn, E. (2005). Blush: Faces of shame. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

50  Love and Complicity Rifkin, M. (2013). Settler common sense. Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3–4), 322–340. Rifkin, M. (2014). Settler common sense: Queerness and everyday colonialism in the American renaissance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Schaffer, K. (1988). Women and the bush: Forces of desire in the Australian cultural tradition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Tuck, E., & Yang, W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Whitlock, G. (2004). Becoming Migloo. In D. Carter (Ed.), The ideas market: An alternative take on Australia’s intellectual life (pp. 236–258). Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Publishing.

3 Desiring Belonging

Introduction When I first read Margaret Somerville’s Body/Landscape Journals (BLJ), I wanted her to stop.1 I kept reading. I remember thinking, ‘how can she do this to us’? What was the matter? It was the excruciating, self-­defeating anxiety, over exposure: raw, emotional pain. A white woman, educated, middle class, complaining about what she perceived ­Aboriginal women to have and she wanted. BLJ is an exploration and working through of Somerville’s desire to write an embodied sense of belonging in Australia. Readers are confronted with a white, privileged, academic historian in crisis because marginalised Aboriginal women have something she desires. Worse, she’s falling to pieces, really ill, can’t get out of bed, because she doesn’t have, what she refers to as, a body/ landscape connection. Again, I wanted her to stop. I read on. I was undertaking my PhD at the University of Sydney. Tucked away in a work cubicle, barely a metre wide, high front and sides. My head buried in this anxiety producing text. Hoping no one could detect what I was reading: a sort of self-help book for those who can’t help themselves. At times Somerville writes as if the world was going to swallow her whole: annihilate her. My body registered a disturbance and my impulse was to retreat, hide away. I feared contagion: affects leap from body to body (Gibbs, 2002, p. 65). Anxiety indicates interest: something that is both threatening and captivating. It felt like Somerville was exposing an embarrassing secret. Almost twenty years after it was published, I return to BLJ because I don’t think a book like it would be written now. Or rather she’d be a brave academic. It is easy to forget how important and confronting this book was at the time. In the 1990s, there was a surge of experimental, embodied writing by feminist scholars. They were works of self-exposure; the writer turned her analytical gaze back upon herself, in a gesture of revealing, in this case, white Australia to itself. Like fictional characters, the authors were caught up in events and could not secure a vantage point from which to observe the ‘other’ or themselves. Rather, they wrote of the challenges and crisis that ethically responding to difference

52  Desiring Belonging evoked in them. Some academics have sternly criticised such writing: the white writer unsettled by the postcolonial predicament disappears into the emotional register or appropriates an idealised Aboriginal spirituality to fill an imagined spiritually emptiness, thus refusing the political encounters that ­I ndigenous agency demands, and reasserting settler ­belonging (Gelder, 2005; Gelder & Jacobs, 1998; Gooder & Jacobs, 2000; ­Moreton-Robinson, 2009). These are significant issues that I do not want to underplay, and key concerns of this book. As I have discussed, in our political moment, post-reconciliation Australia, there is a retreat, a wariness to disclose settler’s, or more so, good white people’s, emotional responses to ­encountering Indigenous political will. To borrow from Fred Myers, there is a reluctance to reveal what ‘intercultural trafficking’ feels like (2002). Plainly I believe that we need to return to settler anxiety to help answer a crucial sociopolitical problem: despite good intentions, why do settlers flee political encounters that are necessary for creating just futures? Furthermore, if I were to reflect upon why BLJ induced such intellectual vertigo, I think it was because I share her attachment to country and was unnerved by her sense of loss. It is too easy to dismiss these feelings as the territory of conservatives, rednecks or, at the very least, the unsophisticated and naive. It is only too clear settlers risk being accused of appropriation if one articulates a desire for a deep association with Aboriginal people, culture and country. Yet many non-Indigenous Australians care about Indigenous well-being and political issues, and feel, or long for, a profound connection to the land. My concern is that there is an evasion, and an inability to articulate the effects of living in a colonised country. Importantly, how can good white settlers understand their desires if one only speaks of them once they have been made ­presentable – once the power and the passion have been extracted? BLJ is warts and all – the embarrassing secrets. BLJ emerges from a crisis, which bears, for this reader, an uncomfortable resemblance to hysteria. While Somerville was in the early stages of a collaborative book project with four Kamilaroi 2 women, Marie ­Dundas, May Mead, Janet Robinson and Maureen Sulter (1994), recording their oral histories of their connection to country, she suffered from what she calls ‘a crisis of the body’ (11). One of the practices of recovering from her illness was to keep a journal, which was the beginning of BLJ. Her ‘crisis of the body’ is an elusive illness that Somerville barely names, other than to say she was suffering from such severe exhaustion that she retreated from the world, took to her bed and found it impossible to continue to write. The catalyst for her crisis was the realisation that the Aboriginal women possessed what she terms a ‘body and body/place connection always already in the stories’ and that she ‘didn’t know how to do it for [herself]’ (12). However, in writing the particularity of her experiences and interpretations, Somerville is exposed

Desiring Belonging  53 to the unsettling and confronting problem that in generating a writing ­position for ­herself she risks marginalising other stories and subsuming the ­Aboriginal women, with whom she has collaborated, into her ­desires. As Somerville questions: What stories does mine make space for and which ones does it ­ isplace? There is still an overarching sense that all the landscape d is marked by Aboriginal stories and there has been no resolution to the questions whose land? and whose story can be told? Around the ­corner from the landscape of my walk there is a hill that Maisie Kelly (1998) tells me is where one of the Anaiwan brothers was killed during a fight. As far as I know that story isn’t written down. I have representational privilege – a computer, and a job that sometimes gives me time to write, space to go for a walk, access to publishers and I have been educated into the privileges of the world of writing. Does my story write out another story? Does it make room for multiple stories? Can your story be written in here? Is it a postcolonial space? (5) Somerville insists that her desire to develop a postcolonial practice ‘did not arise from working out ways to collaborate, but the collaborations had made obvious’, what she refers to as, a gap in her body/landscape connection. However, my interest is not in gaps or lack, but more so, disturbance. Her sense of home is disorientated by ‘her’ place being complicated by a multiplicity of stories. It makes her sick. Yet it is out of derangement that she seeks a renewed practice of, what she calls, ­postcolonial inhabitation.3 Somerville writes, citing Elizabeth Ferrier, that ‘colonisation is ­primarily a spatial conquest and postcolonial transformations require new ways of understanding and representing ourselves in space’ (5). She advocates that to generate postcolonial cultures it is necessary to transform the representational terrain, which in turn might reconfigure subjectivity. If there is a gap, I would argue it’s spatial. Disappearing space. In her book, For Space, Doreen Massey investigates the continuance of colonial spatial imaginary: a yearning, longing for spatial coherence, which she argues enables the existence of only one history, voice and speaking position (2005, p. 42). She calls this as an ‘unthought cosmology’ and proposes that we need to bring it into thought, and in this case understand how the colonial spatial imaginary produces, and circumscribes, settler desire for belonging. Massey’s political interest is in reinvesting space with its interruptive and dislocating consequences: space is crisscrossed with ‘stories’ (2005, p. 54). Somerville’s encounter with a diversity of stories is affectively registered as anxiety. Working along what she experiences as a fault line of belonging has sickening repercussions.

54  Desiring Belonging In her quest for a body/landscape connection, it is the confrontation with disparate and heterogeneous performances and ­narratives of ­belonging that drives Somerville’s project and is her undoing. I want to wager that BLJ is Somerville’s response to a particular conflict in the progressive settler colonial imaginary, which compels and immobilises ‘good white Australians’. In this chapter, I examine if Somerville’s friendships and working relationship with Aboriginal women disordered her colonial spatial imaginary. There is not a gap in her embodiment, as she insists, but rather her colonial spatial imaginary is disrupted: she is learning to be affected in and by the plurality of stories that coexist in shared spaces (Massey, 2005). Following John Law, I propose that ­Somerville’s sickness materialises ‘some very precise realities that are not enacted in other non-embodied ways’ (2004, p. 2). I am naming this ‘sickness’ of the body, anxiety. I want to trace what is being held in place, colonial order, and what new alliances, experiences and subjectivity are being created. My interest in BLJ is not that it is a successful example of the project of decolonisation – a cure, so to speak – but rather I want to stay with this disturbing text as a style of productive anxiety: the pain of self-creation, transformation through social encounter. She is also telling tales about the hold that colonial desire has on the good white woman. My intention is not to simply put Somerville under question, but rather to question what spatial imaginaries are operating, how do they work, and to what effect?

Writing Disorientation In her fear of displacing others’ stories and desire to generate a ­postcolonial writing practice, Somerville composes a hybrid text that ­employs many different modes of writing: poetry, history, oral storytelling, theory and self-conscious journal entries. It is an awkward text that risks alienating its readers through overexposing Somerville’s personal experiences, affronting them by toying with appropriating Aboriginal epistemology and then retreating into academic objectivity. Somerville assembles such disparate texts and styles that the reader might become overwhelmed by her anxiety and lose sight of the very project of generating a postcolonial writing practice. Arguably, her illness is manifesting in the text as too heterogeneous.4 Readers are spatially and temporally (dis)orientated by the plurality of images, ideas and voices. Her self-­ conscious, fragile narrative tone gives the impression that she is almost incapable, and unwilling, to direct readers. The effect of such profusion on herself is chaos, which is reproduced in the body of the text. To offer readers a feel for Somerville’s writing voice, I will quote at length: We arrive at our campsite at Angatja and are swarmed by wild straw-haired kids chattering in harsh gutteral voices. Ngalya kati! bring it here, they shout as swags are unloaded off the truck. I call

Desiring Belonging  55 back to them in their language and they fall about laughing at me. One bright skinny kid comes to help unpack, undoing toilet bag, putting on makeup, examining clothes and tape recorder. We  exchange names; Margaretta she says, adding her own rhythms. No adult appears until Nganyinytja wanders into our camp, bare feet, flowered skirt, and cardigan wrapped close against a chill wind. Palya, Ngalya-pitjala nyawa ngayaku ngura Welcome, come and visit my country, she greets us. Each day after that, she comes in the morning and again in the ­afternoon. Nyanyinytja cradles the whole experience in her life story. This is what she gives to us and what she holds us in. She remembers as a small child wandering through the vast stretches of country to the west of Angatja towards the border of Western Australia with her mother and father, before white man came to her country. She tells us how they saw the first white men come to Angatja on camels from the top of the same hill where we are camped. Their mothers had hidden all the children in the rocks on the hill, terrified of what might happen to them when the white men on camels arrived. Who is this small grey-haired woman who comes to us with white floured hands from making damper? I see her as a vision of the five black matriarchs from my work with Patsy Cohen on Ingelba; the embodiment of Mary Jane Cain of The Sun Dancin’, the woman who straddles two eras of history – the time before white settlement of this land and the time after. She moves between two worlds of such profound difference, and she gives her people the strength to move forward. We gotta make it good for ourselves to go forward, the people say. How can I move across this space between Nganyinytja and me? (47–48)

Somerville situates her narratorial self in a dangerous gap. In ­attempting to bring Aboriginal voices and knowledge into the public realm, she risks appropriating them for her own purposes and enacting neocolonialism. Her voice and actions appear to be framed by A ­ boriginal women’s stories, knowledge, reflections, concerns and common sense, yet Aboriginal voices and histories are counter-framed within her theoretical musings and obsessions. It is a precarious and serious game that she is playing. She risks deploying Indigeneity to right (write) herself. However, the ­narrative method is motivated as much, if not more, by lack of understanding and interpretative disjuncture, than by self-knowledge. Somerville envisions each chapter as a performance. The chapters are memory sites that she imaginatively re-enters in a process of rewriting formative events in her life from the shores of a future self. ­Paradoxically, she attempts to arrest the past in her textual frame to offer herself a secure

56  Desiring Belonging (enough) vantage point from which to infuse her memories with the c­ omplexity and plurality of living in a colonised country. Although each chapter is an exploration of a specific event or research project, S­ omerville annexes voices, critical theory, memories and seemingly random fragments into her text, so much so that the frame cannot hold the excess of her creative, intellectual play. At the close of the chapters, she shifts to a new memory site, abandoning the time and place, but taking with her the questions that were raised in the previous chapter. These questions cause her to rethink her critical explorations and writing practices.

Desiring Bodies The reader enters BLJ through Somerville’s detailed descriptions and affective responses to the landscape in which she takes her daily walk. Despite Somerville recognising that this place is ‘decidedly tatty’, not picturesque, and that there are other far more spectacular walks she could take, it is this ordinary space that she loves and calls ‘home’ (4). She attends to this straggly place with a poetic eye, offering its beauty to the reader through her intimate, embodied connection, like a lover enthralled by the beloved’s body, and in so doing revealing that it is a site of desire. Her belonging in this landscape is enmeshed in her desire for intimacy and union. Yet, as Somerville writes, this is a publicly accessible space, colonised by other land uses and narratives. Anybody can walk in this place she calls home and generate stories from it, which she fears could make it unrecognisable and uninhabitable for her. Throughout the text, the reader is returned to the quandary of stories displacing other stories. Home is sentimentalised as a place of comfort, security and not to be disturbed by others. Mine and mine alone. Her sense of belonging is put at risk by heterogeneity. Yet her postcolonial politics draws her to seek out relationships with Aboriginal custodians and reconfigure (if not disassemble) her colonial spatiality. Somerville’s quest for and questioning of belonging is driven by a ­passion for the landscape (6). She yearns for belonging and the text aches with an urgency to communicate, more so, perform her longing. Somerville narrates two stories in an effort to articulate the origins of her desire, and what has deeply informed her writing. Let me begin in the Central Desert. In the years before Somerville started her career as an oral historian, she lived with her young family in the remote ­Aboriginal township of Papunya (Northern Territory). She was not working but had access to a government vehicle in which she would drive a group of older Pintupi women to their dancing grounds in the Tanami D ­ esert. The ­Pintupi women and Somerville would spend their days singing, dancing and doing ceremonies (7). Despite that she knew very little Pintupi and the Aboriginal women little English, Somerville reveals that she felt deeply connected to the women and the country, and the experiences they shared

Desiring Belonging  57 transformed her life. She writes, ‘so our exchange around landscape and ceremony was non-verbal and profound. I saw women for the first time who had a place and knew their place in the Australian landscape’ (66). Her desire: to be a woman who knows and is known by country.5 Her experiences in the Tanami had a profound effect on Somerville. It changed her life. In a later interview with Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, ­Somerville again refers to the significance of her experiences with the Pintupi women and the Tanami Desert. She explains, in the Tanami, ‘[t]here I began a lifelong process of personal transformation in my relationships with the Australian landscape through my relationships with Aboriginal people’ (Probyn-Rapsey & Somerville, 2004, p. 65). The experience, she proposes, was sensory, rather than conceptual. She could be accused of, what Trihn T Mihn-Ha calls, ideological tourism (1989). Again, these are substantial issues, but for the moment I want to stay with the assemblage of her body, the Tanami and the Pintupi women. It is this sensory, embodied way of knowing the country and her sense of belonging that drives, and fractures, BLJ. She wants to imaginatively return to the Tanami and find words to describe her experiences of, what she calls, embodied knowing and put the body back into ‘disembodied place knowing’ (Probyn-Rapsey & Somerville, 2004, p. 58). She is longing for an alternative mode of inhabitation, which she witnessed and experienced with the Pintupi women, but it conflicts with other deeply held desires. What is she unwilling or unable to relinquish? Somerville yearns to feel connected to the country, like the Pintupi women, indeed to be moved and animated by forces that are other to settler colonialism. It would be easy to dismiss this as a form of appropriation, one in which the spiritually empty white women journeys into the desert and returns fulfilled and fully belonging (Gelder, 2005). This is certainly a legitimate interpretation; however, it does not provide us with a richer analysis of the good white woman’s conflict or, what, if at all, changed. To do so, I want to extend our understanding of the body, so we can move beyond the limiting mind/body split that Somerville struggles with throughout BLJ. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I understand the body as constituted and defined by its relations. Simone Bignall writes: On their [Deleuze and Guattari] view, a body is not a discreet entity defined by stable boundaries and a set of fixed characteristics; rather, it is an assemblage of components bound into a coherent form, but this bodily consistency is only ever temporary and is always shifting. (2010, p. 83) Deleuze and Guattari argue that a body is a ‘composition of relations ­between parts’ (as cited in Bignall, 2010, p. 83). Entering into new ­relations can transform the body. Hence, a social encounter ‘can only be adequately understood with reference to the complex natures of

58  Desiring Belonging the ­bodies involved in the meeting’ (Bignall, 2010, p. 83). A body is a ­collection of relations: some are internal to the body and others external relations to other bodies. Throughout this book, I am arguing that people, and particular bodily relations, are produced within a cultural realm, a social assemblage, which has enduring or stable characteristics, and produces normative ways of being affected (Bignall, 2010, p. 84). My continuing interest in BLJ is that it, rather fearlessly, exposes the workings of particular enduring social assemblages – settler c­ olonialism – and as Bignall insists, we need to understand the complex bodies ­involved in these encounters. Somerville’s days singing, dancing and doing ceremony reassemble her. In the Pintupi Tanami, Somerville enters into new relations that are transformational. To dance is to animate country, or rather the country animates you. Somerville longs for the sensual, sensory desert encounter to manifest in her writing. Writing as performance, not representation. But, as Clif Evers identifies, bodies learn as they assemble in the field (2006, p. 234). Again, let me restate, there is not a gap in her embodiment, as Somerville configures, but rather her desire for body/landscape connection, and her embodied writing, is driven by what she experiences in Pintupi country. In the ‘field’, her desire is reassembled; that is to say, her desires are transformed by and through her participating in an alternative spatial, cultural assemblage. Or, alternative practices of inhabitation. Pintupi country is sentient: it has agency and is living and interacting with the human and non-human (Myers, 1991). This particular Aboriginal ontology of dwelling lies in contrast to Western ontology whereby the mind is separate from ‘nature’ and to engage with the world, one must first have grasped it conceptually and then act. I am not suggesting that Aboriginal people are ‘at one’ with their environment, in the sense of some colonial romance, but rather that these are different ways of apprehending the world (Ingold, 2000, p. 42). When she asserts that there is a gap in her embodiment, which must be filled to fully belong, Somerville returns to the notion of settler lack, with all of its risks of appropriation, rather than grapple with a colonial problematic. The Pintupi women’s agency is derived from their relationality and entanglement in the world; settler colonial action is made possible through detachment. There is an alternative practice of inhabitation or belonging that is ­operating or actualising, appearing and disappearing, throughout BLJ and is made manifest through her ‘sickness’. In her interview with ­Somerville, Probyn-Rapsey speculates: The image of you ‘com[ing] to feminism in the desert landscape with Aboriginal women’ is a very powerful one because it articulates something which is sometimes overlooked, that an interest in feminism might follow another kind of bodily/political awareness. (2004, p. 57)

Desiring Belonging  59 It is this other kind of bodily/political awareness that has my a­ ttention. Somerville is moved, affected, put into motion through and by her work and friendships with Aboriginal women. She says in the desert her body was ‘awakened’: in contrast, I want to say she entered into new ­relations – Pintupi women, culture and country – new bodily f­ ormations. Throughout BLJ there are multiple, sliding concepts of the body. But by focusing on the body, in the sense of the material body, as Bruno Latour illustrates, one is directed to what the body has become aware of, what it is made sensitive to, registering (2004). Drawing on William James, Latour explains: to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated’, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or nonhumans. If  you are not engaged in this learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead. (2004, p. 206) I am arguing that in the Tanami, Somerville experiences her body as affected by many more elements (Latour, 2004). In this sociocultural assemblage, her body, herself, is receptive to the Pintupi Tanami and thus more sensitised to the multiplicity of relations in a place, the ­Tanami Desert, she might have previously perceived as empty. It is this ­relationship between herself and the country – embodied place knowing – that she wants to carry with her when she leaves the desert. To practice ­excolonial6 modes of inhabitation, I propose, she needs to not only learn to be affected by, and highly receptive to, multiplicity but also relinquish settler colonial authority. What happens when she exits this particular spatial field? After leaving the Tanami Somerville writes, ‘the image of the women dancing grew in me and asked many questions. The women were powerful, dignified and in command of their place in the landscape’ (8). When she returned to the east and began to work with Aboriginal women in Armidale, New South Wales, she noticed that although these women did not have access to traditional ceremonial sites, it did not undermine their cultural strength.7 The Aboriginal women, who were from vastly dissimilar areas of Australia and who enacted their Aboriginality very differently, shared the capacity to articulate their connection to country. They knew and were known by their country. Somerville wants this for herself: she hungers to perform an embodied relationship to place. By entering into new relations, she is realigned. As discussed, a body is a ‘composition of relations between parts’ (Bignall, 2010, p. 83). However, as much as relations are dynamic and ever changing, there are enduring relations between components that define more stable characteristics of a body: a sociocultural assemblage. When she returns to eastern ­Australia, she is in a spatial field dominated by settler colonialism.

60  Desiring Belonging To further develop my discussion of the enduring characteristics of settler colonialism, let me return to the second story that has deeply informed her work: an ‘untold’ family tale. The story is of Wee Davy, a child from her grandfather’s first marriage, whom he left behind with his family in Scotland when he and his second wife immigrated to Australia. He never informed his second wife of the child. When his second wife (Somerville’s grandmother) returned to Scotland to give birth to their first child she ‘discovered’ Wee Davy and brought him back with her to Australia. Somerville writes: When she arrived with the boy, Papa was furious and there was ‘trouble’. Wee Davy was placed in the Barnados Homes, never to be heard of again. He was only three. This story is a kind of promise of connection that is lost. It represents all the loss and, for me, a generational cycle of erasure and repression of connection to place. In Australia, there is a double displacement: no Celtic indigenous to return to and, as a third generation migrant, I still bear the burden of guilt for loss of indigenous here. So there is no choice, I have to flesh out a connection to place here because it is the only place I can; I have to make sense of that. (6) This story positions Somerville, despite being a third-generation ­Australian, as enacting a perpetual migration: forever in search of a homeland. The promise of Scotland as home is held captive in family stories that needed to remain a secret to allow her grandfather to begin afresh in the ‘new world’. Somerville’s family’s ability to settle in A ­ ustralia, to have the right to call Australia home and to name ­Australia, is tied to the need to erase their, or to be more accurate, her grandfather’s neglect of his social obligation – abandoning of his own child – which is replaced by the settler desire to ‘start again’. Due to the burden of the white settler guilt she feels towards the dispossession of Indigenous people, she is unable to belong here. Notably, her sense of double displacement is shrouded in silence. Both the story of Wee Davy and narratives of the dispossession of Indigenous people cannot be spoken without ­unsettling the good name of the, predominately white, male settlers: without disrupting the good name of the white family and the white nation. In narrating the tale of Wee Davy, Somerville speaks a familiar Australian story of an infantile sense of loss and abandonment. They cannot return to the motherland of their forefathers and cannot fully identify with Australia as home because it lacks something that is promised in the migrant imaginary of the lost mother country: an imaginary site in which the desire for a pre-Oedipal plenitude is enacted and never resolved. Somerville cannot speak as a citizen sovereign to Scotland and, due to her postcolonial politics, her belonging in Australia is under question. Yet she yearns for a place to call home and to be at home in

Desiring Belonging  61 Australia. To imagine belonging as an infantile plenitude is dangerous. It connects one’s desire for a home and sense of being at home with a place in which meaning goes uncontested. Alterity becomes a direct threat to a settler’s sovereignty because it interrupts and interferes with the interpretation that one’s belonging is without lack. Therefore, difference must be subsumed, cast out or obliterated. A good white settler is then trapped in a form of claustrophobia, which prevents one from creatively participating in the remaking of oneself and the nation, and disallows any dialogue with difference, enclosing one in a dangerous monologue of belonging (Carter, 1992, p. 1). If she gets stuck here, she will oscillate between settler anxiety and nostalgia for a ‘foreign’ homeland, alienating her from new experiences, alignments, creativity and reinvention.

Fear of Falling Throughout the heterogeneous textual topography that is BLJ, Somerville attempts to represent, indeed perform, her embodied relationship to place. Collaborative and intimate working processes have seemingly realigned Somerville’s desires towards ‘Aboriginality’. Yet, the genesis for the work is Somerville’s shock, a form of dissolving, that she cannot bring her alternative body/landscape connections into representation. Her concern is that the difficulties of learning to represent oneself and one’s place of belonging are compounded by places being inhabited by more than one subject: an excess of narratives competes for a place for their speakers to inhabit and call home. Somerville insists that BLJ was not written to work out problems with collaboration but rather to work through her own body/landscape connection. However, as she notes in BLJ, it is earlier, during the writing of a collaborative book The Sun Dancin’, that she feels unable to ‘represent myself and the landscape’, which she shares with the Aboriginal women (4). The problem might be encountering or entering into new relations. Michele Grossman insists that too often the textual strategy in the production of collaborative work reproduces a politics of restraint, control and containment, reflecting a wider ‘material politics of A ­ boriginal “boundedness” within an oppressive political and cultural environment’ (2001, p. 160). This tendency in the editing and collaborative process, Grossman argues, rehearses ambivalences and anxieties that characteristically mark the colonial impulse in its treatment of the other (2001, p. 156). The white writer or editor, like the colonial subject, fears becoming entrapped in another’s desires and experiences. Entanglement in another’s life disorders one’s ability to name and know oneself, hence induces a sense of loss of sovereignty over the self. Perhaps even more significant here is the colonial anxiety of becoming enmeshed in other bodies, in the body of other lives, the liminal site in which the ‘property

62  Desiring Belonging of selfhood falls into doubt’ (Carter, 1992, p. 3). To maintain one’s self-authority, the white writer or editor imposes a textual authority, which excludes Aboriginal agency. Grossman associates this white textual authority with the forestalling of the colonial anxiety of the threat of entrapment by the colonial other. She concludes: This escape from an implied threat of entrapment by the text of the ‘other’ rehearses a key element in imperial discourse: the best frontiersman, after all, is not the one who penetrates furthest into the wilderness, but the one who emerges most intact and unscathed to tell the tale. (2001, p. 160) Her collaborative work, textual competence and academic authority enable Somerville to fabricate a sovereign writing subject. Her concern is that it is at the expense of bringing her empathetic relationship with the Aboriginal women into representation and disables her capacity to register her body at the scene of writing. She wants to create a postcolonial writing practice, which reveals the affective entanglement of bodies. Her settler colonial belonging, ontological security, is disturbed by a multiplicity of stories in shared places (Massey, 2005). Somerville’s ‘sickening’ response to her inability to write her body/landscape connection indicates that the politics of restraint, control and containment of Aboriginal voices have ensnared her. What I am identifying is a conflict in the good white woman’s ­imaginary. As a woman she has experienced the effects of marginalisation and fears being entrapped within masculinist social desires. But she also fears abandoning the comforts and certainty of academic ­authority for, what she refers to as, the liminal, which I want to call a new ­sociocultural assemblage. For those who have felt dominated by another’s reason, to willingly situate one’s self within a marginalised space feels very ­precarious. Her inhabitation of this country is also constituted from Western cultural norms that instruct, interpolate, the settler subject not to lose oneself within the landscape of the other’s desire. Her subjectivity is rendered by a settler colonial spatial imaginary: the colonial fear of enmeshment in other bodies, the body of other life. Yet belonging is imagined as a form of intimacy and safe haven. Concurrently, the progressive settler wants to enact a decolonialising politics by being with, and for, Aboriginal life, in all its diversity. In so doing, one risks being drawn into, moved, affected by the other bodies and unsettling one’s ontological security. Somerville might wish to be able to represent her body/ landscape connection, but she cannot wish away her subjectivity that is engendered from Western rationalism’s insistent dualisms. The ground beneath Australian feet is a colonised space that shapes and ­orientates subjectivities. For Somerville returning intact from ‘forays on the other

Desiring Belonging  63 side of the frontier’ might offer her a form of sovereignty – recognition of power and privilege – but not the modes of belonging or inhabitation she longs for. Her anxiety, ‘crisis of the body’, registers the pervasiveness of the settler colonial spatial imaginary. Somerville understands herself as ‘bear[ing] the burden of guilt for the loss of indigenous here’ (6), indicating that she is caught within a matrix of silence: white settler guilt, abandonment and being a woman. Her initial response to this deafening silence is to collapse, to fold within herself and lose all sense of agency and vitality.

Making It Good to Go Forward I am naming her ‘crisis of the body’, white anxiety. During her recovery from her ‘crisis’, Somerville experiences ‘an excess’ of language: ‘there is such a proliferation of ideas coming from, and going in, all directions at once, a spilling, an excess that I can no longer write it all down. It’s like being on the edge …’ (151). She fears she is going mad. ­I mportantly, Somerville reveals to her readers that during this process she became unrecognisable to herself; she gets lost. Somerville, like other good white women, identifies with and is invested in a particular ethical future. Anxiety is experienced in the face of something indefinite: it is a deep uncertainty about one’s world. She is committed to becoming postcolonial, which she envisions as transforming how she understands and represents herself in space. The Aboriginal women she has worked with have, what she believes is, a sensory embodied way of knowing the county. She fears not being able to do this for herself, and thus risks failing to recreate herself as a postcolonial subject. It is intolerable: a potential threat to her sense of self, cultural belonging and an imagined ethical future. Somerville is struggling against non-being. Not simply a threat of death but more so, meaningless. There are alternatives to being overwhelmed and risking madness or retreating into habitual settler anxiety to try to maintain authority and security. BLJ as a ‘postcolonial writing practice’ (212) attempts to explore existing in ‘new’ ways and establish an endurable zone, in which to confront things or, in the words of Marie Dundas, ‘[make] it good for ourselves to go forward’ (212). Here, I am reminded of Deleuze, borrowing from Foucault: ‘[t]here’s no subject, but a production of subjectivity: subjectivity has to be produced, when its time arrives, precisely because there is no subject’ (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 113–114). He theorises that we need to establish an ‘endurable zone in which to install ourselves, confront things, take hold, breathe – in short, think’. We can avoid death and madness if we make existing into ‘new’ ways, an ‘art’ (Deleuze, 1990, p. 111). Somerville needs to create an endurable zone, where she is not immobilised, goes mad or retreats into a familiar cure: the comforts and containment of settler colonial homeliness or anxiety. In so doing,

64  Desiring Belonging the radical self-alienation of her illness might yield a subjectivity fit for the post-colony (Kowal, 2011, pp. 315–316). There is a need for new subjectivities that can live in this place: not a future perfect but a here and now where there are multiple, dissonant narratives and ways of being. ­ ediators. To work through her ‘crisis of the body’, Somerville creates m For guides and sustenance in her search for a postcolonial feminist writing practice, she aligns herself with the Aboriginal women she has worked with and feminist theorists of embodiment. Notably, Somerville undergoes a process of retreat that allows her a space for self-­reflection, without feeling the pressures of dominant discourses, which she has felt subsumed by and made invisible. These sections of the book are highly individualised and internalised, and she enacts a confessional self. However, I want to concentrate on what I think is a much more productive strategy or techné8: how she creates an endurable zone to enter into new forms of sociality. Her ‘self’ is no longer a project that must be kept unified as she enters new territories, but a site for forging new connections and potentially challenging the subjectivity of the good white woman. Following leading feminists such as Elizabeth Grosz, she wants to privilege the body as the primary way of knowing. In a later interview, Somerville said, ‘[m]y strategy is to centre the body, my body, at the scene of writing’ (Probyn-Rapsey & Somerville, 2004, p. 52). To create a body/place connection, Somerville takes Grosz’s cue: putting the body at the centre of our notion of subjectivity ­transforms the way we think about knowledge, about power, about desire … and this entails the possibility of forming other kinds of knowledge, other kinds of social interrelations, other forms of ethics, other systems of representation based on different interests, not only those of women, but those of cultural others …whose bodies are inscribed in different forms and therefore whose subjectivities and intellectual frameworks are different. (as cited in Somerville, 1999, p. 219) Furthermore, Somerville attempts to place her differently experienced selves in dialogue. As discussed earlier, each chapter is envisioned as a performative memory site, which Somerville imaginatively re-enters in a process of rewriting formative events. It is as if she wants to return to these sites, with her postcolonial, feminist politics and praxis and ­revision or re-embody her past and writing practice. Somerville longs for new ways of representing herself in space. ­However, representation is an activity, an embedded engagement in the world of which she is part. Thus she needs to experiment with how she inhabits, is in, the world – ‘think and practice space differently’ (Massey, 2005, p. 28). She cannot just write about it, she has to do it, which is likely to be both exhilarating and threatening. Let me push this a little

Desiring Belonging  65 further and, with the benefit of hindsight, run a bit of interference on BLJ. Notably, Somerville argues that her work should be read as a continuum. Here it is helpful to be reminded of Massey’s conceptualisation that the spatial: crucially, is the realm of the configuration of potentially dissonant (or concordant) narratives. Places, rather than being locations of ­coherence, become the foci of the meeting and the non-meeting of the previously unrelated and thus integral to the generation of ­novelty. The spatial in its role of bringing distinct temporalities into new configuration sets off new social processes. (Massey, 2005, p. 58) The spatial is an interconnected world, and following feminist philosophers such as Gatens and Lloyd, Massey is arguing that there is a ‘political argument for understanding identity/subjectivity in a more strongly relational manner’ (Massey, 2005, p. 71). The subject is ­socially and relationally constructed: ‘For if experience is not an internalised succession of sensations (pure temporality) but a multiplicity of things and relations, then its spatiality is as significant as its temporal ­dimension’ (Massey, 2005, p. 58). Massey is advocating for releasing our imaginations to a more open attitude of being: outward looking practices of subjectivity. For imaginative leaps, as Bergson wrote, jumping into memory, the past and sense making. Following Grosz, she then asks can one ‘throw oneself into spatiality’ (Massey, 2005, p. 58)? I want to test the idea of a ‘spatial leap’ by suggesting that in the memory sites – each chapter of BLJ – Somerville is throwing herself into space. My point is that Somerville maintains that she is privileging the body; however, as discussed earlier, bodies are assemblages that are immersed in spatial fields. Throughout her life, she encounters styles of belonging, practices of inhabitation – enters new spatial fields – that change her life. But transformation is not without pain. To return to the Tanami Desert: Through her work and relationship with Aboriginal women Somerville is affected, moved, put into motion, her body ‘awakened’ by her time in the desert. I am arguing that her sense of self was reassembled in the spatial field, which in turn transforms her practices of inhabitation. Or perhaps more accurately, her desires: she wants an immersive engagement in the world. However inadvertently, she was experimenting, throwing herself into alternative or anti-colonial spatiality. As Massey proposes, a relational construction of space as multiplicity is produced: through practices of material engagement. If time unfolds as change then space unfolds as interaction. In that sense space is the social dimension. Not in the sense of exclusively human sociability, but in

66  Desiring Belonging the sense of engagement within a multiplicity. It is the sphere of the continuous production and reconfiguration of heterogeneity in all its forms – diversity, subordination, conflicting interests. (2005, p. 61) One can feel the effects of an encounter with other stories or plurality. As I have theorised, anxiety is the registering of the interruptive and dislocating consequences of engaging with difference, which not only disturbs settler belonging but also holds the potential for new relations and realignments of previously disparate stories (Grosz, cited in Massey, 2005, p. 59). Above I wagered that what is operating in BLJ is a conflict in the progressive settler colonial imaginary, which compels and ­immobilises ‘good white Australians’. There is not a gap in her embodiment, as she insists, but rather her colonial spatial imaginary is disrupted: she is learning to be affected by ‘space as a sphere of coexisting multiplicity, space as simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (Massey, 2005, p. 54). She wants to dismantle the power and privilege of disembodied, displaced knowledge, but her subjectivity is produced from white authority and privilege. If the time has arrived, as I’d argue it well and truly has, to produce subjectivity fit for the post-colony, then it will hurt (Kowal, 2011). ­Bearing ontological pain is one of the costs that good white settlers need to ­endure to participate in the creation of more just futures.

Postscript I want to end with the potential for investing space with its ­dislocating qualities. My intellectual curiosity is snagged on an event that ‘in her mind’ Somerville returns to over and over again. As noted, all the ­chapters in BLJ are performative spaces, dynamic sites, which situate the reader in encounters that arrest their interpretative processes. I would parallel ­ osition in relation to Somerville’s positioning of the reader with her own p this particular story. When Somerville was ­working with Patsy ­Cohen on ­ atriarchs (1990), their co-authored book, Ingelba and the Five Black M she met an elderly Aboriginal woman, Emily, with whom she remained friends until Emily’s death. Emily asked Somerville to help her visit the burial grounds of the Old Queen, an important Aboriginal Elder. The significant site had been inaccessible to Emily because it is on private property, and in difficult terrain that required a 4WD. After lengthy delays, they finally visit the site. Emily pokes around in the grass with her walking stick to locate the grave and says ‘[t]he graves have not been swept clean’ (79) but offers Somerville no more information on the importance of the Old Queen to her. She is convinced that there is a connection between Emily’s ‘performance’ and her ability to make sense of and story her own experiences. Somerville, the historian, does not know how to interpret Emily’s performance. She does not have access to the i­mportance of the

Desiring Belonging  67 Old Queen to Emily, yet it is to this scene that she repeatedly returns to in her attempt to create paths out of her ‘crisis of the body’. On top of the mountain – a site of contested meaning and ­ownership – Emily continues a story, a history which is present but unknown and unnoticed by most people. Without over-interpreting the scene, I want to highlight two main points. Emily’s performance allows her to clear a space, in the face of the continuing dominance of colonial spatial ­practices and the deafening white settler narratives of sovereignty and belonging, in which she can articulate for herself her connection to country and alternative histories, and in so doing continue the story of the Old Queen. Somerville cannot belong in the landscape of this story, but she can encounter the plurality of country: feel the effects of other stories. In so doing, she confronts ‘the disruptions of space, the coming upon difference’? (Massey, 2005, p. 111). Emily’s practice alerts ­Somerville to possibilities of an anti-colonial or, in her terms, postcolonial mode of belonging and intercultural relationship, in which she does not need to appropriate Aboriginal knowledge and cultural practices. The story of the Old Queen was always there. It is co-present with the pastoralist and colonial stories. It is not lost in time or memory, buried under the weight of colonial history, but Emily enters that space and knows that story, and activates the history. Somerville can learn to be ­affected by other stories through co-presence: an alertness to the multiplicity of space. However, her sense of belonging becomes unmoored from Aboriginal women. They cannot provide her with a fantasy of postcolonial belonging in which all is reconciled, comfortable and ­secure. The importance of E ­ mily’s performance to Somerville is that she, Somerville, is exposed to her inability to institute meaning, and she experiences anxiety without falling into an abyss of unreason and meaninglessness. In fact, I would conclude that it is being alive to the liveliness of places that might be a way out of a masculinist, colonial mode of inhabitation. Somerville’s imaginative leaps into spatiality enable her to establish an endurable zone in which to install herself, ‘confront things, take hold, breathe - in short, think’.

Acknowledgements Parts of this chapter were originally published as ‘Intimate ­Australia: Body/Landscape Journals and the Paradox of Belonging’, Cultural ­Studies Review 13(1), 2007, 74–89.

Notes 1 Margaret Somerville, Body/Landscape Journals, Melbourne, VIC: Spinifex Press, 1999. Further references are included within the text. 2 The Kamilaroi nation is vast, stretching from the Hunter Valley, ­Northern New South Wales, west to Warrumbungle Mountains near C ­ oonabarabran

68  Desiring Belonging and into southern Queensland. The oral history is based in the C ­ oonabarabran region. See: https://kamilaroianationsidentity.weebly.com/location.html. 3 In line with Somerville, I will use the term postcolonial when referring to her use and conceptualisation. 4 I thank Catherine Phillips for this insight. 5 Yet, as often happens in this blinding white desire, the Pintupi women are marginalised from mainstream Australian society and for this they suffer material impoverishment. 6 Here I draw upon Simone Bignall’s work where she introduces the term ­‘excolonial’ (‘exit-from-colonialism’) to designate an ideally decolonised form of future community that is (perpetually) ‘yet to come’ (2014, p. 341). 7 This area is known as the New England Tablelands, and the Aboriginal ­language groups whose traditional lands lie in this region include the ­A naiwan (the area around Armidale) and the Kwaimbul in the north and the Banbai peoples’ country is around Ben Lomond and Mt Mitchell. ­Bundjalung lands are to the north-eastern side and Ngarrabul people’s lands are located from Glencoe, north to Bolivia then slightly east to the Bundjalung border and west. The area around Kingsplains, Wellingrove and Strathbogie stations has also been home to the Ngarrabul. See: http://aiatsis.gov.au/. 8 As McGushin writes, ‘One of the key features of techné is its bodily ­character: it is acquired through embodied activities, situated and concrete investigations and experiments. Techné is embodied or bodily knowledge’ (2011, p. 142).

Bibliography Bignall, S. (2010). Postcolonial agency: Critique and constructivism. ­E dinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press. Bignall, S. (2014). The collaborative struggle for excolonialism. Settler Colonial Studies, 4(4), 340–356. Carter, P. (1992). Living in a new country: History, travelling and language. London, England: Faber & Faber. Deleuze, G. (1990). Negotiations (M. Joughin, Trans.). New York, NY: ­Columbia University Press. Evers, C. (2006). How to Surf. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 30(3), 229–243. Gelder, K. (2005, December). Notes on the research future of Australian literary studies. Australian Humanities Review, (37), np. Gelder, K., & Jacobs, J. (1998). Uncanny Australia. Melbourne, VIC: M ­ elbourne University Publishing. Gibbs, A. (2002). Disaffected. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 16(3), 335–341. Gooder, H., & Jacobs, J. (2000). ‘On the border of the unsayable’: The apology in postcolonizing Australia. Interventions 2(2), 229–247. Grossman, M. (2001). Bad Aboriginal writing: Editing, Aboriginality, ­textuality. Meanjin, 3, 152–165. Ingold, T. (2000). The perception of the environment: Essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. London, England: Routledge. Kowal, E. (2011). The stigma of white privilege. Cultural Studies, 25(3), 313–333.

Desiring Belonging  69 Latour, B. (2004). How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies. Body & Society, 10(2–3), 205–229. Law, J. (2004). Matter-ing, or how might STS contribute? Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University. Retrieved from http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ sociology/papers/law-matter-ing.pdf Massey, D. (2005). For space. London, England: Sage. McGushin, E. (2011). Foucault’s theory and practices of subjectivity. In D. T ­ aylor (Ed.), Foucault: Key concepts (pp. 127–142). London, England: Routledge. Minh-Ha, T. T. (1989). Woman, native, other: Writing postcoloniality and ­feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2009). Critical Indigenous theory. Cultural Studies ­Review, 15(2), 11–12. Myers, F. (1991). Pintupi country, Pintupi self: Sentiment, place, and politics among Western Desert Aborigines. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Myers, F. (2002). Painting culture: The making of Aboriginal high art. Durham, England: Duke University Press. Probyn-Rapsey, F., & Somerville, M. (2004). Towards ‘a postcolonial practice of writing’. Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation, 30(1), 56–71. Somerville, M. (1999). Body/landscape journals. Melbourne, VIC: Spinifex Press. Somerville, M., & Cohen, P. (1990). Ingelba and the five black matriarchs. ­Sydney, NSW: Allan and Unwin. Somerville, M., Dundas, M., Mead, M., Robinson, J., & Salter, M. (1994). The sun dancin’: People and place in Coonabarabran. Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press.

4 Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility

Introduction After Truganini there were no Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Or so ­generations of Australians learned in school, through film and public discourse. Tasmania, considered by many to be a dark and haunted place, arguably carries the horror of colonialism and the penal colony for the rest of the country. The sparsely populated island state is 240 km south of mainland Australia and encompasses hundreds of small islands. Truganini, of the Nuenone people, died in 1876 in Hobart. Her passing ushered in the myth of the imminent extinction of all Aboriginal people. As Andrys ­Onsman writes, ‘her death began long before her final breath’ (2004, p. 2). The Black War (approximately 1828–1832) was a time of mass ­killings by the colonists and came close to annihilating the ­Tasmanian Aboriginal people (Onsman, 2004; Ryan, 1996). The Black Line, ­Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur’s initiative of forming a human chain of able-bodied male colonists to herd Aboriginal people onto the Tasman Peninsula, might have failed, but it succeeded in galvanising the settlers and sending a message to the Aboriginal people that the colonial force was intent on dispossession and destruction (Onsman, 2004). The nineteenth-century scientific conviction that Tasmanian Aboriginals were a doomed race persists. Palawa1 Elder, Jim Everett, recalls: We always knew we were blackfellas because we were treated like blackfellas at school and in public and stuff. But we didn’t know what kind because my parents and grandparents wouldn’t talk about where our roots as black people come from. And I always suspected, although we’re at school, we’re being taught there are no Tasmanian Aboriginals. So what the devil are we. When I got back here and met our mob on Flinders Island, I knew straight away. It was like a lightning strike. I knew we were Tasmanian Aboriginal although they say we’re not. (Thornley, 2008) ‘For Aborigines in Tasmanian’, Greg Lehman proposes, ‘the period [over the last two centuries] has been about defending a place called home, and

Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility  71 then, following profound displacement, reclaiming that place’ (2004, p. 1). The enduring figure of the vanishing ‘Aborigine’ does the insidious cultural work of reaffirming the settler imaginary of a time before when there were ‘real’ Indigenous people. As Everett reflects, his Aboriginality was both imposed upon him through discrimination and disavowed: for the colonisers, he was neither Aboriginal nor white enough. When good white people mourn the brutality of colonialism without engaging with ongoing Aboriginal presence and claims to sovereignty, dispossession of Indigenous peoples, settler property rights and political belonging are normalised and reaffirmed (Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Rifkin, 2014). Truganini was not the last of her people. Most non-Indigenous Australians do not consider Aboriginal law and sovereignty as relevant to the modern nation. Yet settler colonial ­belonging is dependent upon occupation. ‘In the struggle for ­Aboriginal sovereignty’, Irene Watson writes, ‘…the prevailing “reality” is that the sovereignty of Aboriginal laws is an impossibility …. Yet for many ­Aboriginal people, Aboriginal laws, or sovereignty, simply exist … ­Aboriginal laws live’ (2007a, p. 24). Progressive settlers advocate for social justice, equality and recognition of cultural difference and heritage, including a share of the country’s resources wealth. However, for most Australians the existence of Indigenous sovereignties proves to be unthinkable. I would suggest it is not always because the notion is outwardly rejected, but rather because it is something that cannot be thought: in the words of Derrida, the thinking is impossible ­(Patton & Smith, 2001). Western ontology grasps Indigenous sovereignty through appropriation – generalising it as the same or similar – or dismissing it as non-­sensible or not modern. It is outside of how ‘I’ make sense of the world. It is not common sense; more so Indigenous sovereignty troubles and disturbs settlers’ sense of belonging and ethical self. Following Derrida, ­Watson advocates for our thinking to begin on the ground of impossibility. ­Settler Australians need to test the (im)possibility of recognising ­Aboriginal sovereignty and law in order to take responsibility for creating an anti-colonial future. As Watson asks, ‘what makes the sovereignty of Aboriginal law impossible’? (2007a, p. 26). How can good white people comprehend ongoing Indigenous sovereignty? In this chapter, I analyse Jeni Thornley’s autobiographical film, Island Home Country (2008) as an engagement with Palawa sovereignty, political agency and colonial violence. What happens when she steps onto the ground of impossibility? How do good white people become responsible to Aboriginal law?

Island Home There is a photo of Truganini with cropped hair and wearing a shell necklace, her intense gaze meeting the viewers’ eyes, defying the ­colonial fantasy of her own or her people’s passing. Her gaze demands a response

72  Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility (Onsman, 2004, p. 10). Thornley’s poetic filmic essay, Island Home Country (2008), could be thought of as one such response, albeit belated. Thornley is driven by the question, how can she connect the war against Aboriginal people with her peaceful family memories of growing up in Tasmania? As a non-Indigenous documentary maker, she undertakes a filmic journey to learn about what she seemingly didn’t know: the disturbing history of colonial Tasmania, erased during her own 1950s childhood. Thornley is confounded by how to ethically and affectively negotiate all that she has come to learn about her childhood home and Aboriginal protocols. Nearing the end of the film, Palawa Elder Jim ­Everett asks and answers, ‘Well, how do you become responsible’? Well it’s simple. It’s like the old traditions where one Aboriginal group visited another, they waited at the borderline, the boundary of that cultural country, until they were invited in. (Thornley, 2010, p. 247) I want to begin at the end, with waiting as a practice of responsibility and ethics. Waiting at the border is dependent upon recognition of another country and sovereignty. The moment of ‘impossibility’ of recognising the sovereignty of Aboriginal law, Watson argues, provides Australians with an opportunity to take responsibility and create an opening to a future that has not existed before (2007a, p. 26). What clues might Thornley’s stepping onto the ground of impossibility offer up for ­settlers becoming responsible? Engaging with the ‘impossibility’ of Palawa s­ overeignty, Thornley says, ‘I lose my thread, the film is dissolving’. Is dissolving different, and more ethically productive than white anxiety? I want to examine if ‘dissolving’ might be a way to unlearn and reinvent new models for settlers knowing ‘our’ place, and in so doing forging decolonising modes of coexistence. Thornley’s impulse to take responsibility is shared by many, yet practiced by few. ‘I am white, born on a stolen island. This is a story of my journey’. So, begins Thornley’s film. Throughout the making of the film she wrestled with how to name herself and arrived at what became the film’s opening. Her voice is haunting, brimming with earnest responsibility, and it sets the tone: it is a serious pursuit to uncover silences, which causes her anguish and to deeply question of her family history. The two central ­Elders, Jim Everett and Aunty Phyllis Pitchford, then individually address the camera. Both speak with gentle determination. Everett emphasises what he believes is the most important principle of being Aboriginal: ‘The country is us, as much as we are it’. If this is lost, he laments, the ­colonial construct will take an even greater hold. Pitchford recites her poem of loss, ‘Sad Memories’ (Thornley, 2008). Their concerns and passions ­order and determine the film’s themes: Indigenous sovereignty and ethical living in and on country and the ongoing agony of colonial violence.

Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility  73 ‘Growing up here, I knew nothing about colonisation’, ­T hornley tells her viewers. She wonders if making a film will allow her to reckon with colonial amnesia. In an attempt to un-forget and ‘shed her colonial skin’, she returns to Tasmania to film with her family – sister, aunt and cousin – who reflect upon their memories, silences and (lack of) understanding of Aboriginal Tasmania. She says, ‘white ­Australian history haunted me’, which she represents with a ghostly figure of a girl running through the bush (Thornley, 2008). Taking up the Murri 2 poet, Sam Watson’s counsel to ‘use Aboriginal sources as primary sources’, the film pursues, and becomes deeply informed by, the ­creative work, voices and questioning of Palawa writers and artists: Everett, Aunty Phyllis Pitchford, Julie Gough and PennyX Saxon. Thornley explains: [a]longside this creative force, were works of cultural recovery and continuity … which expressed the resilience of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community culturally and their fundamental relationship to country. (2010, p. 259) Sovereign Palawa confronts the filmmaker with her own ‘possessive whiteness’ and blindness and complicity in neocolonialism. Near the close of the film, Jim Everett and Aunty Phyllis Pitchford remind Thornley that the film was to be about her, not them. The turning of the gaze upon herself and negotiating Aboriginal protocols are deeply unsettling for her and the viewer. It causes her to ‘experience un-possession’ (Thornley, 2010, p. 258). She is no longer able to hold the film in her mind. The film’s dissolving is represented stylistically as montage – juxtaposition of images, where multiple voices, interruptions and reflections, and past and present, coexist. Her idea of home, history and self is ruptured. Her taken-for-granted world disappears. The impetus for the film was the work of Tasmanian historians such as Cassandra Pybus and Lyndall Ryan. It is from their work that Thornley initially learned of the attempted genocide of Palawa: the removal of Aboriginal people to make way for the ‘peaceful pastoral idyll’ of her childhood. Pybus’ call for settlers to ‘do a reckoning’ – to learn of and take responsibility for colonial violence – led Thornley to undertake her own reckoning. She outlines: I wanted to penetrate the ‘silence’ around my childhood ­imaginary of this island, and then connect it, somehow, to the reality of ­colonization – the attempted genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people – and the community’s resilient and dynamic struggle to re-establish sovereignty of their country. (2010, p. 248)

74  Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility Although early in the film, she says, ‘[g]rowing up here I knew nothing of colonisation’, her central concern is not ‘not knowing’ but amnesia, forgetfulness. To reckon with settler amnesia she returns to Tasmania, to question her ‘idea of a peaceful island’ (Thornley, 2010, p. 249). The Australian ‘history wars’ and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s ­National Apology to Indigenous people, on the 13th of February 2008, framed the making of the film. 3 This period – of approximately a ­decade – proved a rich time for settler Australians to remember colonial violence and seek forms of reconciliation and redemption. However, settler remembering is routinely interrupted by a habit of forgetting ­I ndigenous presence and colonial violence. The habit persistently troubles ­Australian scholars, cultural producers and public alike. The renowned historian Henry Reynolds famously named his memoir on growing up in ‘peaceful’ Tasmania, Why Weren’t We Told (2000). Despite all evidence to the contrary, most especially Aboriginal people’s protests and proclamations against injustice, be it through political organisation and resistance, song or story, settler Australia continues to claim ignorance about the extent and impact of colonial violence and ongoing occupation. What drives the succession of settler Australians’ remembering and forgetting?

Remembering and Forgetting A key concern of Chris Healy’s book, Forgetting Aborigines, is the cycle of forgetting and remembering of ‘Aborigines’ in Australian public culture (2008). Taking his cue from Marcia Langton, he argues that mainstream perceptions of ‘Aborigines’ and Aboriginality have little to nothing to do with experiences of historical or contemporary Indigenous peoples, but rather he is referring to a particular cultural assemblage and intercultural space that is the product of stories inherited from colonists and colonialism (2008, pp. 4–5). The dominance of the assemblage ‘Aborigine’ enables the forgetting of contemporary, everyday Indigenous people and Australia’s troubling history. He explores this paradox of remembering and forgetting, arguing: Non-indigenous Australians imagine again and again that they have only just learned about indigenous disadvantage – mortality rates, poverty, poor health, housing and educational opportunities, high imprisonment rates, substance abuse or sexual assault, take your pick – as if for the first time. These endless (re)discoveries of, and about, Aborigines are only possible because non-indigenous ­Australians forget their own forgetting. (2008, p. 204) What we experience in Australia is periodic ‘dramatic remembering’. However, consistently there is a failure to recall Indigenous sovereignty.

Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility  75 Healy is not arguing that there is a need to replace forgetting with r­ emembering or more knowledge about Aboriginal people, history and culture, but rather that settlers need to remember their own forgetting. Non-Indigenous Australians habitually forget contemporary Indigenous poverty and social distress, and more so political agency, shared present and sovereignty, because the cultural memory of primitivism, extinction and strangers in modernity persists. It is not simple forgetting but rather an epistemology that constitutes settler subjectivity, political belonging and place, and thus produces emotional responses to Australia and ­Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage and empowerment. Like Healy, my concern is not individual memories, but remembering as a shared cultural process or performance (2008, p. 9). When non-­ Indigenous people (like those in Thornley’s film) say that in their growing up they did not learn about colonial history, the violent removal of Palawa, assimilation policies and practices, or that they have little awareness of ongoing Aboriginal presence, they aren’t necessarily lying, being disingenuous or absent minded. It is instead much more telling of a shared culture: inheritances that produce social rules, practices and boundaries. ‘Under the guidance of law and its regulatory moral and disciplinary mechanisms’, Roslyn Diprose argues, ‘bodies are trained to repeat what are considered good acts and to discard the undesirable’ (2002, p. 63). The repetition of acts forms habits, or what Rifkin might refer to as common sense (2014). The self does not have an identity except through action, which Diprose refers to as body-identity: ‘the deed, act or performance is the self actualized’ (2002, p. 61). Styles of interactions with people, places and things define one socially and culturally and cultivate subjectivity. We know who we are and where we belong through consistent and like-minded (bodied) performances that are inclusive of particular emotional responses. As Healy posits, memory is not an individual invention, but rather collective. To belong to a particular culture, I am beholden to certain styles, habits, of remembering and forgetting. It holds me in place, makes me at home and constructs my subjectivity. I am arguing that there is a particular settler colonial memory-making culture, and as I have argued in Chapter 1, emotional genealogy. Healy advocates for learning to forget the race thinking of the term ‘Aborigine’, and instead remember our entangled histories (2008, p. 215). I agree; ­ ustralians cannot remember however, I want to suggest that settler A our entangled histories because boundaries and uniformity are essential to the consistency and integrity of settler subjectivity, which in turn produces a habit of forgetting, or only remembering ‘Aborigines’ that enable one to recognise one’s good self and a hoped for ethical future. The suffering, pitiable ‘Aborigine’ can be remembered; good white people and their sense of belonging are reaffirmed. To forget is also to not feel or be affected by something that could disturb. How then to feel the force of ongoing colonial violence, structural inequality and Aboriginal

76  Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility sovereignty and not be overwhelmed by settler colonial anxiety and flee into the relentless worrying about, and desire to rescue, Aboriginal people? Settlers need to forget race thinking, remember our entangled histories and bring into critical focus the cultivation and normalisation of settler occupation and place making, and hence belonging.

Colonial Racial Logic In the age of Imperialism and prior to the acceptance of Darwinism, one of the dominant race theories was based upon the notion that ­racial groups were distinct, and that they evolved from their environment. It was believed that the environment determined racial characteristics. Race as a discursive construction was used to denote discrete biological types that determined the various capacities for civilisation. Warwick Anderson suggests: ‘[e]ach colour decreed a way of life and a capacity for civilisation, with whites at the top and African blacks at the bottom of the hierarchy’ (2002, p. 171). There were various hierarchies, including some that placed Australian Aboriginal people at the very bottom ­(Anderson, 2002). The marker of territorial possession was bodily harmony with the environment. The marker of European civilisation, and therefore racial superiority, was the ability to thrive and prosper in the ‘new world’ – to inhabit a place with propriety (Anderson, 2002, p. 5). European bodies, the repositories of civilisation, which were understood to have, over centuries, evolved from and acclimatised to a particular environment, were displaced into foreign territories. It could be argued that the very act of acclimatisation to a foreign environment potentially dispossesses the colonisers of the shared characteristics integral to ­Europe’s constitution of humanity and racial superiority. The Imperial era’s discursive construction of race as distinct and evolving from a particular environment was not therefore consistent with colonial expansion. As Anderson posits, in the ‘struggle for material possession they [the colonisers] could be dispossessed’ (2002, p. 40). Colonisation changed the Australian landscape and it was expected that Indigenous people would die out. According to race theories, reconfigured due to colonialism, the distinct Indigenous racial group could not survive outside of their pristine, original environment, or in contact with ‘superior’ races and cultures. To limit the effects of what was understood to be the chaos of nature, settlers cultivated the land and built settlements. In the colonial imaginary, Australia was a vast, unsettled land, and the boundary between cultivation and ‘savage’ nature was very thin. The frontiers, which arguably were much, if not all, of Australia, made apparent the vulnerability of the European body in this foreign environment, and hence the vulnerability of its ‘natural’ sovereignty. What the colonisers were recognising, even in their fear and prejudice, was that the land is a site that shapes bodies and perceptions, forms knowledge

Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility  77 and informs senses of aesthetics (Mohanram, 1999). The frontier was a dangerous environment as it was a site in which the British might be dispossessed of their ‘civility’, and hence the body politic would become reconfigured. Australia was claimed as for white British subjects and with this whiteness was made sovereign. Thornley recalls her family’s attachment to England: her Grandmother’s tears at the death of Queen Victoria and a home movie of her first visit to England (2008). ‘The signs of the British colony are everywhere’, she says – place names, monuments to Captain Cook and the monarchy, cobbled streets and colonial sandstone buildings. Racial logic connected Australia to the ‘mother country’ and separated us from our near northern neighbours. Australia was not a part of Asia, despite the geographical closeness and hundreds of years of networks and flows between the peoples of these diverse islands. One thinks of the Macassans, trepangers from Sulawesi, who for hundreds of years traded with Yolngu peoples from Arnhem Land, Northern Australia. Until in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the imposition of customs duties and policies to protect Australia’s ‘territorial integrity’ brought an end to the regional exchange (see Stephenson, 2007). Racial boundaries marked and demarcated territorial boundaries, severed regional connections and affirmed the white diaspora as British. Perera theorises that: The island will operate as a ‘plot’ that organizes bodies and histories within its boundaries into a narrative that serves the ends of nations. The plotting of Australia as an insular formation both expels the ­‘foreign’ bodies around its edges and encloses Indigenous peoples more closely within clearly demarcated national borders. … ­transborder and cross-regional relations are abruptly terminated and ­Indigenous bodies secured within the new national unit in ways that increase their subjection to it and suppress their links to other places. The inauguration of this new geography confers a new territorial as well as racial corporeality on the geo-body of the island-continent. (2009, p. 27) Racial corporeality of the insular island is never made so apparent than with, what was known as, the White Australia policy: the founding statutes that restricted non-white immigration to Australia and the removal of ‘prohibited’ immigrants, which lead to, in particular, Pacific Islanders, Chinese and Japanese workers being deported. Colonial racial logic categorised and condemned Indigenous people as savage, enforced through frontier violence and policies from elimination and segregation to assimilation. The nation was imagined as for white people, and as Perera critiques, excluded ‘bodies that compromised the project of the white island’ (2009, p. 29). The marker of territorial possession is bodily

78  Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility integrity with one’s environment. Racialised bodies threaten t­ erritorial possession; thus, they are a threat to self-possession, which in turn shapes what might be called a social geography. The geo-body of the insular island continent is a plot that organises social bodies and cultural memory. Historically, to be a good white Australian, one cannot associate with non-white bodies on equal terms or as fellow citizens. The country is not shared and national memory is the providence of white bodies. Exclusion and forgetting become second nature. To only remember, keep in mind, a Eurocentric Australian history produces a colonial emotional territory. A sense of belonging and deep attachment to a nation imagined as made from the grit, courage and visions of ‘our’ white forebears determined to make something of themselves in this mysterious place at the end of the world. The sway of emotions, affect and desire is a site of chaos for colonising Europe as they are resistant to colonialism’s desire to manage and control. This resistance was politically threatening because Europe’s insistence on its ability to govern and regulate the world was the basis of its claimed right to expansion. As Bauman argues: Agencies are sovereign in as far as they claim and successfully ­defend the right to manage and administer existence: the right to define ­order and, by implication, lay aside chaos, as the left-over that ­escapes definition. (1991, pp. 286–287) The body, especially the black body, became (and continues to be) ­ urdened as a site upon which the colonisers, determined to maintain b sovereignty, play out their desire to define order. Eugenics and the subsequent practices of child removal were just one historical manifestation of the management of existence. So was the frontier violence of the Black Line, and the dispossession and removal of Palawa people to Flinders Island. The colonisers focused their fears and anxieties onto the black body, which bore the burden of the colonisers’ fears of being engulfed by the strangeness that Imperial conquest engenders (McClintock, 1995, p. 24). Indigenous people, and the foreignness of the country, posed a direct threat to the coloniser’s self-recognition as the rightful heirs of modernity and civilisation. Coming too close to strangers, being pulled into the body of other lives, one can easily lose a sense of self-possession; the world becomes unfamiliar and indefinite and with it the self a little unrecognisable. A response is to institute order, boundaries, by clearing places of interference and difference: to live, as Thornley says, as if ­behind a hedge, keeping history and ambiguity out (2008). Settler colonialism is a conquering, containment and control of and over Indigenous people and land but is it not a complete system. ­Scholars’ insistence of the systemic quality of settler colonialism, as Rifkin proposes,

Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility  79 and its enduring and pervasive qualities emphasise the ­centrality of the right to claim Indigenous land to non-Indigenous modes of governance, sociality and identity. However, it also produces an account in which settler colonialism appears ‘fully integrated whole operating in smooth, consistent, and intentional ways across the ­socio-spatial terrain it encompasses’ (Rifkin, 2013, p. 322). I share Rifkin’s ­concern that such a systematic account risks displacing ‘how settlement’s histories, brutalities, effacements, and interests become quotidian and common-­sensical’ (2013, p. 324). The shifting and uneven terrain of ­settler governance provides ‘orientation, inclination, and momentum for non-Native experiences of the everyday’ and is thus central to settler subjectivity and place making but it is not a logical, complete order (Rifkin, 2013, p. 322). Importantly, understanding settler colonialism less as a system than as part of everyday experience pluralises its potentials and the possibility of destabilisation. Rifkin insists that settler colonial governance is not ontological but a form of crisis management (2013; also see Byrd, 2011). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples claim to ownership of land returns settlers to the burden of colonial violence, its ongoing injuries and injustice and their illegitimacy. Settler sense of belonging, as Moreton-­ Robinson has long argued, ‘continues to be tormented by its pathological  relationship to Indigenous sovereignty’ (2008, p. 95). In turn this induces an anxiety that settlers will be dispossessed. Good white people’s worrying about the ‘Indigenous problems’ permits an Indigenous presence without complete disruption. It contains and manages the threat Indigenous sovereignty poses to settler belonging. It supplies, in Rifkin’s language, an ‘affective anchorage’, which enables an accommodation whilst maintaining the ongoing process of making ‘unreal’ Native sovereignties (2013, p. 332). Settler anxiety is both a denial and acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty. Thornley’s intention to encounter Palawa sovereignty produces anxiety that disorders and destabilises her settler certainty and the good white woman, which pluralises her potential. She is orientated by settler colonialism, and thus can be reorientated by Palawa.

Corporeal Generosity Thornley sets out to undertake her own reckoning: to penetrate the ­silence around her childhood memories and understand the reality of historical and contemporary Aboriginal Tasmania. But she cannot do so on her own. It required filming with her family and Tasmanian ­Aboriginal community, which involved negotiating ethics and protocols. The ‘­ethical encounter’, she writes, with Aboriginal protocols deeply ­affected the filmmaking process and the film itself (2008, p. 249). ­Following European filmmakers who examined Nazism, as well as ­Australian scholars Ross Gibson and Bain Attwood, Thornley considered the potential of her film

80  Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility to be a ‘work of mourning’ (2010, pp. 249–250). She was searching for a way to take responsibility. This was just the beginning of the project, and ‘what the film was doing and why’ was radically rethought through the process of negotiating Aboriginal protocols. This involved developing relationships, trust, a dialogic and self-reflexive process and valuing the agency of Aboriginal participants and their ownership of cultural heritage. Thornley’s notion that her film could be a work of mourning received short shrift. Presenting her ideas at a Hobart-based conference, she was confronted with: ‘What makes you think you’re welcome at our mourning sites’ (Thornley, 2010, p. 258). For all of her good intentions, rather than reckoning with colonial violence, she risks appropriating Palawa mourning and suffering. Her desire to mourn – an overwhelming emotional state – is an evasion of the political. Rather than encounter Palawa protocols, sovereignty and efficacy, and colonial history, and be forced to confront her own privilege and sense of uselessness, initially she attempts to flee into familiar emotional territory. However good her intentions and desire to stand in solidarity with Palawa grief and loss, to attempt to represent their mourning sites is appropriation. Arguably, it continues the cycle of remembering and forgetting, or is an anxious, careless, remembering. Throughout the filmmaking process, she was repeatedly challenged, which led her to examine her own assumptions and her ‘possessive whiteness’, settler Australians’ ownership of the country, and the ‘innate’ understanding of what is good for the nation and its people (see Moreton-Robinson, 2006). Thornley wants to shed her colonial skin. By learning about colonial history and connecting with Palawa people, she wishes to see with different eyes. This is a very familiar pursuit of good white Australians. It appears she wants to see as Palawa do. But this is not possible. Rather she can learn to re-see how settler life is based upon the dispossession of Aboriginal people and colonial violence. There is no short cut. Otherwise such a quest risks being driven by a desire to overcome bad feelings and displace the political struggle. Then there is the question: can one shed their colonial skin? Maybe it could happen over a very long time, but first one needs to understand one’s ‘colonial skin’ or subjectivity. Working with Aboriginal protocols required Thornley to ‘let go of control of the project into a process of negotiation and dialogue’. She writes that the ‘protocols … really pushed me to question my motives, further de-centering my control. I had to learn to wait for negotiations to unfold in their own time’ (Thornley, 2010, p. 253). She questioned if the film would get made. When Palawa artist Julie Gough was undertaking a critique of the film’s first edit, a breakthrough came. Gough suggested Thornley return to Tasmania to work closer with the Aboriginal community. In the following year, when watching revised edits, Jim Everett said: ‘I think the storyline should be more yours – looks too much like our story’. She writes that his observation triggered her telling a story of

Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility  81 white unsettlement. She turns the gaze back on herself: ‘onto the interior space of my own colonized-colonising mind’ (Thornley, 2010, p. 255). Who is she when she isn’t in control of the narrative? She explains: In this contested site, as if in the midst of the ‘politics of sovereignty’, I was no longer able to hold the film in my mind. It was slipping away into quicksand. It was not that it was becoming an Aboriginal film; it was the challenge of whose story is being told here, and who is the storyteller? (2010, p. 254) Initially, she takes shelter in a well-rehearsed settler emotional response of hardship and suffering (Thornley, 2010, p. 268). Her story is of the anxious white filmmaker, made to suffer while undertaking the good deeds of civilising and cultivating Australia’s bad history and race relations. But this is an evasion and resistance to an ethical encounter, a falling back into a protective subjective position that assures the ego of one’s own goodness, innocence and selflessness. It blocks being put into question and as Diprose argues, ‘being-in-question amounts to responsibility for the other’. In Diprose’s terms benevolence, pity for the ­other’s suffering (and self-pity) are not practices of responsibility, but rather ‘one’s truth must be contested and one’s affirmation of ourselves and our confidence in our culture must be questioned’ (2002, p. 164). The more Thornley engages with Palawa protocols, the more her ‘Tasmanian idyll is breaking down’. The film, and arguably the filmmaker dissolve: she was ‘no longer able to hold the film in [her] mind.’, the film itself ‘was slipping away into quicksand’ (2010, p. 259). Thornley’s becoming responsible begins with dissolving, but dissolution is not enough. She is no longer assured by a self-evident world, but she needs to harness her unsettlement to question her colonial complicity. Watson proposes that what is needed is for settlers to be in a place that allows for uncomfortable conversations but questions if this is even possible? There is a need to stay with the bad feelings, rather than to take refuge in virtuous anxiety. To fall back into being overwhelmed, the self-pity, worry, guilt and desire to manage or fix Aboriginal people, rather than attend to the deeper challenge of transforming the foundations of settler colonialism (Alfred, 2005, p. 180). Watson asks, can ‘we move from places where whitefellas feel truly uncomfortable into what I call “a meditation on discomfort” – to places where the settler society is made to answer these questions: what brings them to a place of ­lawfulness?’ (2007b, p. 30). What might allow settlers to stay in places of discomfort and be responsive and answerable? As the filmmaking progresses, Thornley experiences ‘race relations within my own skin’ (Nicoll cited in Thornley, 2010, p. 260). Neocolonialism is not out there, held and exercised by those bad white Australians, nor something that

82  Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility can, with the right intentions, be easily shed. It is embodied in the everyday and mundane. One’s response to another, Diprose discusses, is saturated with the cultural–historical. It has my body and directs my response, is written into my body and makes me consistent (2002, p. 192). One such response is to care in particular ways such as feeling pity and seeing only vulnerability, suffering and victims of colonisation. However, in the face of political agency, such forms of care can evaporate, replaced by indignation or self-pity. A more productive response is to feel remorse for the historical crimes that continue to plague contemporary Australia and then actively work to make change. There is a particularly compelling scene where Thornley’s sister, Jan, puzzles over her inability to feel the reality of the death and destruction and the continuance of Aboriginal sovereignty. Grappling for the right words, she says: ‘I can hardly … it is like it was a dream, even reading in the books. I haven’t been to those places where I can feel it is actually real. Seeing Truganini’s memorial up there on the hill, it didn’t seem real. It is hard to imagine. There are sites, we are on Aboriginal land’ (2008). It is unusual to witness such honesty about an inability to empathise, to feel sorrow and remorse. It is an important scene for thinking through Diprose’s idea that the cultural–historical has our body. Feeling race ­relations ‘within one’s own skin’ commonly produces anxiety and confusion, and often there is a refusal to stay with this discomfort, as Jan does. Remembering colonial violence can lead to questioning one’s cultural inheritance, a sense of estrangement and revulsion, and empathy draws one into the life of another, which threatens one’s body-­identity. To maintain one’s settler body-identity, ‘I’ cannot remember and ‘I’ cannot become enmeshed in another body. ‘I’ can stand in the place of violence and am numb. Emotions provide consistency and steady the good white woman. I set forth a rather gloomy predicament: how do ‘we’ decolonise if settler Australians are bound to colonial modes of encounter? How can different possibilities for existence be opened? (Diprose, 2002, p. 23). Again, the scene with Thornley’s sister is instructive. When Jan revisits Truganini’s memorial, she weeps, is touched. Something shifts and she feels the colonial landscape. Thornley says, ‘she cries my sister’ and suggests it is not out of guilt but sadness. What allows this opening? Her idea of peaceful Tasmania is ruptured. Could it be that Jan’s troubling over her inability to feel for Truganini’s life and death, and the devastation that the memorial bears witness to, enables her, however fleetingly, to own her contradictions, complicity and moral ambiguity? She is not lost in anxiety and worrying about her own lack of ‘goodness’ nor does she repress these ‘bad feelings’ but is gently disordered by feeling her own carelessness. The imaginary has the body but my body is not finished and thus is open to others (Diprose, 2002, p. 193). Jan is disturbed, affected and animated by other bodies (human and non-human), the

Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility  83 sentient landscape, Truganini and bodies of history. Momentarily, she is not beholden to the certainties of settler colonialism that limit and prescribe emotional responses and thus she is reoriented. Jan’s response holds the possibility of a new form of belonging and sense of home, and it is suggestive of Diprose’s notion of corporeal generosity. Generosity, Diprose argues, is essential for social justice, and I would add anti-colonial or decolonialising modes of sociality. However, for her generosity is not based upon an economy of exchange, social contract or duty between sovereign individuals. It does not enhance one’s virtue or make one a more magnanimous or morally worthy person. Such claims undermine generosity by serving self-interest. Corporeal generosity, Diprose conceptualises: is an openness to others that not only precedes and establishes communal relations but constitutes the self as open to otherness. Primordially, generosity is not the expenditure of one’s possessions but the dispossession of oneself, the being-given to others that undercuts self-possession. Moreover, generosity, so understood, happens at a prereflective level, at the level of corporeality and sensibility, and so eschews the calculation characteristic of an economy of exchange. Generosity is being given to others without deliberation in a field of intercorporeality, a being given that constitutes the self as affective and being affected, that constitutes social relations and that which is given in relation. (2002, pp. 4–5) Generosity is a disposition of the self. Diprose’s analysis troubles the ­ osition of the ‘good white woman’ who believes herself to be progresp sive and good by practicing benevolence or kindness or by following the perceived correct moral paths (see also Hawkins, 2006, pp. 113–115). In the uneven exchange of charity, the white subject is recognised and valued as the source of goodness. Obligation or magnanimity leads one to forget that Aboriginal people have been dispossessed from their sovereign lands and of their ongoing injustice. Rather Diprose theorises generosity as a dispossession of the self: being given to ‘intercorporeal relations that are open to difference, that are affective, and that overcome self-­sovereignty and the egotism that underpins it’ (Hawkins, 2006, p.  114). In this case, Palawa history, law and political efficacy disturb and disorder – get ­under Thornley’s skin – and charge her to perform herself differently. What most unsettles Thornley is not just learning about colonial ­violence – ‘the remembering’ that reveals the lie of the idea of the peaceful island home – but importantly, in her attempt to create intercultural engagements, she and her ‘ethical’ project come under question. What do the encounters with Palawa protocols make of her? If,

84  Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility as I argue, the good white settler is given to a habit of securing an identity of rightful heir of modernity and civilization – and to do so one practices careless remembering and forgetting – then Thornley’s engagement with how Palawa experience their own lives, history and settlers creates new r­ elations and practices. Waiting at the border she is exposed: ‘learning to listen, stay open and pass through “anxious whiteness”’ (Thornley, 2010, p. 270). Here might lurk a model for decolonising sociality: the emergence of more ethical forms of care and responsibility.

Waiting At the close of the film, Thornley heeds Jim Everett’s advice: ‘For now I  am waiting at the border’ (2008). She is learning how to enter ­Aboriginal country and she waits to be invited in. But how does she wait? What orientation does she bring to her waiting? (Cordner, 2009, p. 176). I can only guess at an answer (the film ends here) and say her willingness to wait demonstrates she understands herself as answerable to Palawa people and country. It is a mode, or orientation, of responsibility and negotiation and hence relationality. She must not only remember Aboriginal sovereignty but also observe, defer to it. Yet if Aboriginal sovereignty is an impossibility – settler Australia cannot recognise it on its own terms – then she needs to wait for it to be revealed to her. To turn her attention to signs she cannot yet see. Crucially, waiting on others, Monica Minnegal identifies ‘confers on them agency and subjectivity equivalent to one’s own, recognising the need to wait for them to reveal themselves rather than presuming to know what they are’ (2009, p. 92). She must forget what she thinks she knows and intensely engage with the present. Be responsive to the human and non-human world that she waits upon. One never waits alone. It is always already a co-performance. Initially, it is the writing of settler historians that leads her to want a reckoning with colonial history, to respond to colonial violence, Aboriginal sovereignty and settler amnesia. Then, she responds to Sam Watson’s call for Aboriginal sources to be one’s primary sources. The work of Tasmanian Aboriginal writers, poets and artists ‘rush in’ and affect her, and she puts aside settler academic research (Thornley, 2010, p.  259). Palawa experiences expose her to the pain of racist policies and practices and ­importantly ongoing Aboriginal sovereignty and its attendant responsibilities. She is moved by their work and her way of seeing and engaging with the country shifts. The force of these works animate and disturb her, prising open a space for her to begin to connect with Jim ­Everett’s appeal to move ‘beyond the colonial construct’ (Thornley, 2010). ­I mportantly, working with Palawa people and cultural material, she encounters ­Aboriginal sovereignty and protocols and has to wait for

Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility  85 things to unfold in their own time. Waiting reorientates Thornley. She ceases to want a reckoning with or to learn about colonial history. The film is no longer an individual creative endeavour to fulfil her moral ­obligation or release her from colonial complicity. She is not made a better person through the process, but rather is left waiting, wondering and deeply uncomfortable. What is Thornley’s story? She names herself as ‘white, born on a s­ tolen ­ alawa island’. She is put into question and puts herself under question. P Elders and artists respond to Thornley’s desire for a reckoning by claiming and forging a creative space for dialogue and experimentation. The anxious white filmmaker takes a back seat to negotiating A ­ boriginal sovereignty and she (and her peaceful island home) is made strange. ­Aboriginal protocols involve ‘communication, negotiation and relatedness’ (Thornley, 2010, p. 253). For all her difficulty with the process, protocols bring her into a decolonising relationship. I am not suggesting that protocols ensure success, but rather what they demand are the very things that colonialism refuses, relatedness and a respectful encounter with difference. Palawa are not ‘native informants’ but have agency and equivalence to Thornley. Taking seriously Aboriginal protocols impels a new disposition and practice of the self. She is open to Palawa history, law and sovereignty and is touched, moved by the body of other lives. Those who have been excluded, and even more so their very existence denied, become central to her documentary. Palawa history, knowledge and law shift from non-recognition – forgetfulness – to fundamental to her understanding of Tasmania – her childhood home, hence herself. She is indebted to Aboriginal sovereignty. Even if as a settler Australian she cannot know Aboriginal sovereignty, she registers the trace of it in herself (Diprose, 2002). I would argue that registering the affective force of encountering Palawa sovereignty and the pain of colonial violence is the beginning of responsibility and generosity. It is not responsibility in and of itself but inhabiting that space and exposing oneself to questioning without taking shelter in pity, virtuous anxiety or resentment is, in the words of Watson, a ‘meditation on discomfort’. Thornley is neither in a place of white comfort nor guilt, but rather a space of upheaval and reflection where conversations about the lawfulness of settler sovereignty might begin to be had (2007b, p. 30). She waits on the ground of impossibility.

Acknowledgements Parts of this chapter were originally published as ‘Waiting at the Border: White Filmmaking on the Ground of Aboriginal Sovereignty’, in B.  ­Neumeier and K. Schaffer (Eds.), Decolonizing the Landscape: Indigenous Cultures in Australia, (pp. 129–147), Amsterdam, Rodopi [­Koninklijke Brill], 2014.

86  Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility

Notes 1 Palawa are the Aboriginal people of the island state of Tasmania, Australia. 2 Murri is the term used for Aboriginal people from Queensland and Northern New South Wales. 3 The black armband or history wars were particularly prevalent in the 1990s and early 2000s and were a debate over the interpretation of the violence of the British colonisation of Australia, most especially the damage and destruction of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander peoples, culture and sovereignty. In particular, the debate centred around historians (and political leaders and commenters) arguing if colonialisation was a minor conflict and whether British intent was largely humane or systematic invasion, or warfare involving massacres and genocide. Notably, very few Indigenous people entered the debate (see in particular Macintyre & Clark, 2004).

Bibliography Alfred, T. (2005). Wasase: Indigenous pathways to action. Peterborough, ­England: Broadview Press. Anderson, W. (2002). The cultivation of whiteness. Melbourne, VIC: M ­ elbourne University Press. Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and ambivalence. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Byrd, J. (2011). The transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. ­M inneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Cordner, C. (2009). Waiting, patience and love. In G. Hage (Ed.), Waiting (pp. 169–183). Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Publishing. Diprose, R. (2002). Corporeal generosity: On giving with Nietzche, ­Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Albany, NY: SUNY. Hawkins, G. (2006). The ethics of waste: How we relate to rubbish. Sydney, NSW: UNSW Press. Healy, C. (2008). Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney, NSW: University of New South Wales Press. Lehman, G. (2004). Editorial. Island, 96, 1–4. Macintyre, S., & Clark, A. (2004). The history wars. Melbourne, VIC: ­Melbourne University Press. McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the ­colonial context. New York, NY: Routledge. Minnegal, M. (2009). The time is right: Waiting, reciprocity and sociality. In G. Hage (Ed.), Waiting (pp. 89–96). Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Publishing. Mohanram, R. (1999). Black body: Women, colonialism and space. St ­L eonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2006). Towards a new reserach agenda?: Foucault, whiteness and Indigenous sovereignty. Journal of Sociology, 42(4), 383–395. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2008). Writing off treaties: White possession in the United States critical whiteness literature. In A. Moreton-Robinson, M. ­Casey, & F. Nicoll (Eds.), Transnational whiteness matters (pp. 81–96). New York, NY: Rowan & Littlefield.

Waiting on the Ground of Impossibility  87 Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Property, power, and ­Indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Onsman, A. (2004). Truganini’s funeral. Island, 96, 1–12. Patton, P., & Smith T. (Eds.). Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction engaged: The Sydney seminars. Sydney, NSW: Power Publications. Perera, S. (2009). Australia and the insular imagination. New York, NY: ­Palgrave Macmillian. Reynolds, H. (2000). Why weren’t we told?: A personal search for the truth about our history. Ringwood, VIC: Viking. Rifkin, M. (2013). Settler common sense. Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3–4), 322–340. Rifkin, M. (2014). Settler common sense: Queerness and everyday colonialism in the American renaissance. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Ryan, L. (1996). The Aboriginal Tasmanians. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Stephenson, P. (2007). The outsiders within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian story. Sydney, NSW: UNSW Press. Thornley, J. (Writer). (2008). Island home country [DVD]. Australia: Anandi Films. Thornley, J. (2010). Island home country: Working with Aboriginal protocols in a documentary film about colonisation and growing up white in T ­ asmania. In F. Peters-Little, A. Curthoys, & J. Docker (Eds.), Passionate histories: Myth memory and Indigenous Australia (pp. 247–278). Canberra, ACT: ANU E Press. Watson, I. (2007a). Aboriginal sovereignities: Past, present and future (­im)possibilities. In S. Perera (Ed.), Our patch (pp. 23–44). Curtin, WA: Network Books. Watson, I. (2007b). Settled and unsettled spaces: Are we free to roam? In A. Moreton-Robinson (Ed.), Sovereign subjects: Indigenous sovereignty matters (pp. 15–32). Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

5 This Is Not a Gift

Introduction In 2007, I was undertaking fieldwork at Garma Festival as part of a project examining the significance of cultural festivals for improving ­I ndigenous sociocultural well-being (Phipps & Slater, 2010). Garma is an initiative of Yolngu, the traditional owners of north-east Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. It is a five-day event, held yearly on their ancestral lands, Gulkula, atop an escarpment in a stringy bark forest that overlooks the Gulf of Carpentaria, near the remote mining town of ­N hulunbuy, Gove Peninsula. Garma is cultural diplomacy at work. ­Yolngu invite government and non-government agencies, academics and political leaders onto country to consider issues determined by ­Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander agendas. Approximately 2,000 people – ­Yolngu and visitors – camp on site. Unlike many other ­Australian ­I ndigenous cultural festivals, Garma is directly pedagogical in its format. It is orientated around the Key Forum that brings academics, service providers, policymakers, politicians, business leaders, cultural workers and media together to discuss major issues affecting Indigenous Australia. Since Garma’s inception in 1999, the Key Forum has become highly influential. Politicians and business leaders alike camp, queue for food and listen to Indigenous leaders discussing community programs and aspirations for their futures. Despite the high profile and bush glamour, Garma is an extension of Yolngu processes of educating and engaging settler Australians, through observation and participation, in their ambitions and concepts of reciprocity and balance. Significantly, co-presence and sharing is a strategy orchestrated to emotionally capture Balanda1 and bring ‘us’ into relationships of care and equality, with the aim of social and personal transformation (Brigg & Murphy, 2008). Alongside the main event, the Garma Key Forum, there were a ­series of other initiatives, one of which was a women’s cultural tourism ­program. At the time, it was very much separate and aimed at tourists, rather than professionals engaged in Indigenous issues. In the crowded women’s shelter on the edge of the Bungul (dance) grounds, Yolngu women were teaching Balanda women about their kinship systems and

This Is Not a Gift  89 responsibilities. Notably, those in the cultural tourism program and the ‘bush conference’ were in many ways participating in different events. The Forum was explicitly a political event. However, arguably cultural tourism is also a political encounter. I sat in on a few of the sessions that were open to all women attending Garma and became fascinated and deterred by the earnestness, demands and anxiety, all very much in contrast with the Key Forum. The latter was emotionally contained with occasional bursts of righteous anger and the former emotionally vulnerable, white women vying for Yolngu attention. The tourists appeared desperate to understand, to unburden their sense of guilt and to assert their goodness and anti-racist credentials. Since this time, I have reflected upon this scene and indeed it is one of the catalysts for this book. The Yolngu women, or more generally Aboriginal people, appeared to provoke in the settler women virtuous anxiety. Within this white drama, Yolngu are not the central players. In this chapter, my attention is upon Balanda disquiet. Focusing upon white women’s emotional responses to Aboriginal people and politics is uncomfortable, to say the least. However, the path to decolonisation requires staying with discomfort (Watson, 2007). In 2010, I was back at Garma Festival as a participant in the ­women’s cultural tourism program. In the intervening years, I had become ­increasingly curious about it. It felt like a strange mix of warmth, ­affection and a clawing desire to be close to Yolngu women. ­I ntercultural spaces such as these, with all their raw, unbridled emotion are scary and compelling, shameful and illuminating. I wanted to be in that program, to experience whatever it was that was happening there. So, when I received an opportunity to attend and found it to be still, gentle and as one of the participants said, prayerful, I wondered if I had got it all wrong. Or in previous years had I simply happened upon the turbulent moments in largely a sea of calm? But by day three there was rupture. In this chapter, I explore the ease and turmoil of that event. The cultural tourism program provides an opportunity to closely observe settler anxiety and the other emotions and reactions triggered when the white women confront Yolngu difference and political autonomy. My aim is not simply to expose good white people’s colonial desires but to notice when the social practice of reproducing ‘self-evident’ settler sovereignty is disrupted. Under what conditions is settler anxiety – the fleeing into the self-certainty of problematising Indigenous people or romanticising culture – displaced and what, if anything, takes its place? What are ‘we’ left with? The Balanda women’s emotions are examples of what Lauren Berlant and others have termed ‘public feelings’ (2004). As discussed in ­Chapter 1, personal or private sensations are part of shared and communal ­experiences (Stephens, 2015). A key question of this book is what embodied histories or emotional territories are brought to intercultural

90  This Is Not a Gift encounters? In this chapter, I want to examine if W.E.H. Stanner’s now famous ­pronouncement on the great Australian silence still holds true? He claimed that within the first five years of colonial contact, indifference towards Indigenous people developed and subsequently formed a ‘part of the continuing anatomy of Australian life’ (1968, p. 7). If so, indifference is embodied, as much as body of laws, like a fence line that demarcates one property from another. ‘What may well have begun’ as a simple forgetting of other possible views, ‘turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale’ (Stanner, 1968, p. 25). The habit persists. But is it a failure of memory, the linage ‘simple forgetting’?

Cultural Politics Yolngu are renowned for their art, music and fierce commitment to cultural survival and renewal. Most famously, the band Yothu Yindi brought Yolngu music and politics and the pursuit of bicultural balance to broad national and international audiences (Corn, 2014). In the 1990s, at clubs, pubs and parties, people were loudly singing ‘Treaty yeah, Treaty Now’. For three and a half minutes, we were ‘dreaming of a brighter day’ when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty would finally be recognised and we could get on with working out how to live together in difference. As a white Australian perhaps too aware of the discomfort that many non-Indigenous people have with Indigenous politics, it struck me as strange and exhilarating that the T word – Treaty – was being shouted back at ‘all those talking politicians’ and reverberating across the country. One assumes that many of those who sang along did not know that the band lived in the ex-mission town of Yirrkala, one of the largest Yolngu communities, approximately 1,000 km from Darwin. For a population of about 5,000, comprised of different and diverse clan groups, spread across approximately 100,000 km 2 of a remote corner of Australia, Yolngu have developed rich and diverse strategies to engage mainstream Australia in the struggle for Indigenous rights. Yolngu have a long history of political interventions to assert their sovereignty, autonomy and continued ownership of land and sea ­country. 2 The sharing of culture, including sacred objects, paintings and ceremony, has been a key Yolngu strategy for teaching outsiders the significance and value of their knowledge and importantly drawing Balanda into ­relationships of equality, respect and reciprocity (Brigg & M ­ urphy, 2008; Corn, 2005; Wright, Suchet-Pearson, Lloyd, Burarrwanga, & ­Burarrwanga, 2009). In 1963, Yolngu leaders from Yirrkala came to national attention when they sent a petition to the Australian House of Representatives to try to stop the government excising 300 km 2 of land from the Arnhem Land reserve for bauxite mining. It became

This Is Not a Gift  91 known as the Bark Petition, and these were the first petitions to combine bark painting with typed text in English and Gumatj3 and the first ­traditional documents recognised by the Commonwealth Parliament. When ­Yolngu were unsuccessful in their attempt for recognition of their rights to their ancestral lands, they took their case to the Northern Territory ­Supreme Court, known as Gove Land Rights Case (Milirrpum v Nabalco, 1971). Although the case failed, it was a watershed moment in the land rights movement (­Williams, 1986). The cultural politics driving ­Yolngu ­initiatives – from bark paintings, to rock bands to festivals – is the maintenance of traditional knowledge, cultural practices, identity and ­governance, and a determination to transform settler–Indigenous relations. One such initiative is the Garma Festival. The word Garma distils multiple, but related meanings, as Rosita Henry identifies, ‘conceptually it is a kind of social relationship or moral principle of how people should relate to one another, a place, a type of ceremony, and a level of knowledge’ (2008, p. 60). A guiding principle of the festival is the Yolngu concept of ganma. The esteemed and now deceased Yolngu leader Dr Marika wrote: Ganma is firstly a place; it is an area within the mangrove where salt water coming in from the sea meets the water coming down from the stream. Ganma is the still lagoon. The water circulates silently underneath … The swelling and retreating of the tides and the wet season floods can be seen in the two bodies of water …. [it] is a process of knowledge production where we have two different cultures, Balanda and Yolngu working together. Both cultures need to be presented in a way where each one is preserved and respected. This theory is Yirrija. (1999) Or, in the words of another prominent Yolngu leader, Galarrwuy ­Yunupingu, ganma is two different waters doing two different things, arriving at a boundary that leaves something new, yet breaking clean, and enabling both to relate to one another.4 Implicitly, Yolngu censure settler amorality: the continued failure to abide by the principles of reciprocity and balance and respect cultural difference. Yolngu intercultural initiatives draw Balanda into affective social relationships and towards a promise of exchange and mutuality. The guest/host relationship is clearly established and maintained within the cultural tourism program. Balanda are students under the guidance of Yolngu, and on their country and under their law. For the first time, in 2010, the cultural tourism program was run by the Yolngu tourism enterprise, Bawaka Cultural Experiences (BCE), which is owned and managed by Djawa Timmy Burarrwanga, Laklak Burarrwanga and family.5 Laklak and her son Djawa are the Directors of BCE, which is

92  This Is Not a Gift an Indigenous-owned and -operated tourism enterprise, operating since 2006.6 In contrast to Garma, usually the Burarrwanga family invites visitors onto their homeland, Bawaka, in the remote Port Bradshaw area in north-east Arnhem Land (a few hours four-wheel drive from the mining town of Nhulunbuy). They run day tours, largely for the Rio Tinto mine workforce, and specialised two- or three-day tours for a diverse range of tourists (Barwaka, 2012). As Wright et al. observe: While economic aspects are important, these are valued as a form of self-determination – economic independence – that is entirely interwoven with social and cultural aspects. In the case of BCE, this includes attention to the way members of the Burarrwanga family use their engagements with tourists to assert their political and ­economic autonomy and ownership of country. (2009, p. 507) The Burarrwangas are well versed in Balanda expectations, desires and anxieties and practiced at sculpting and directing tourists’ experiences away from a mainstream orientation and towards Yolngu ontology. Tourism at Bawaka, Wright et al. continue: is an invitation to re-imagine western ontologies and ways of knowing and being. Family members of BCE seek to transform and enthrall tourists with a differently experienced, known and lived world. (2009, pp. 508–509) The Garma cultural tourism program is not held at Bawaka, but on the festival site. Importantly, however, it is set apart from the Key F ­ orum, and is a specifically tailored program with limited numbers, approximately fifty to sixty men and women. Undoubtedly it would be a ­significantly different experience to be on Bawaka country. I can only assume that the beauty, tranquility and remoteness of the homeland and being on the family’s country further separate Balanda from their mainstream lives. Nonetheless, the Garma program was immersive and the Burarrwanga family is committed to promoting cultural understanding, reasserting their sovereignty and intervening in the power imbalances of settler–Indigenous relations.

Wanting What of the Balanda who want an Indigenous experience? (Putting aside for the moment, the vexed question of what an Indigenous experience is?) To want is to desire, crave, long, yearn, ache; it is an urge that lodges in the body. It can be construed or felt as a lack, need or absence. To

This Is Not a Gift  93 fall short, to be found wanting, to be deprived. Want is both individual and collective. One is never alone with one’s desires. A  ­subject is ­constructed by social and cultural beliefs and expectations, discourses and ­experiences. What drives settlers’ or specifically good white women’s desire for a particular ‘Indigenous experience’? And how do their motives inform their encounter with the materiality of ­I ndigenous life and thus their experience of the cultural tourism program, their understanding of Indigeneity and their ethical selves? Settler anxiety, as I argued in Chapter 1, is not simply an individual response to a specific encounter with Indigeneity, but rather a historical subjectivity. It is a social practice, an activity through which the subject is constituted and knows who they are in relation to Indigenous issues and intercultural relations. I am not arguing that desiring a relationship, a sense of connection, with Indigenous people is in itself a problem. But rather my interest is with how the taken-for-grantedness of settler sovereignty plays out in a tourism program, such as at Garma, in which settlers are wanting to engage with and learn about ‘traditional’ Aboriginal culture. I am asking what emotional histories, imaginaries, desires and habits flew into Gove Airport on QF1943 with the cultural tourists who were chasing an Indigenous experience. I asked a few of the women why and how they came to be in the c­ ultural tourism program. Most of the women’s answers were vague, their reasoning shadowy. One of the women, who I’ll call Melissa – inner city, urbane and well educated – tells me a friend had been to Garma and recommended it to her, and she thought it would be a good experience for herself and a friend to share. She was studying Global Indigeneity in an undergraduate degree and she thought the trip would help inform her assessments. Another woman, Liz, also told me that a friend had suggested it to her and she wanted to be educated about Aboriginal culture from Aboriginal people. Notably, most of the people I spoke to expressed, however tentatively, a desire to learn from and be with Yolngu. Their caution indicated a self-consciousness about ‘wanting an Indigenous experience’. All of the tourists were a long way from home, in a relatively remote part of Australia, hanging out with strangers, camping and eating refectory like food, having spent considerable time and money to get to Arnhem Land. Most Balanda do not have to leave or go too far from home to be in the vicinity of Indigenous people, especially given that the highest population live in NSW, in western Sydney. It is a particular experience of Indigeneity that is wanted. The Sydney suburbs of Redfern or Mt Druitt are yet to take off as cultural tourism sites, despite the number of Aboriginal people who live in these areas. Only one participant gave me a more substantial answer: ‘I’ve always wanted to be friends with Aboriginal people’. The comment made me recoil. It is riven with everyday racism and colonial desire. Yet my sense was that other participants shared her longing, albeit with wary self-reflection and restraint. In the

94  This Is Not a Gift tourism program, as elsewhere, ­Balanda were pursuing more than an understanding of Aboriginal ­culture. Could it be a ­yearning for a simple connection, perhaps, in the face of misunderstandings, political antagonism, guilt and the remoteness of settlers’ lives from most Indigenous peoples’ everyday life? Such a quest can make the politically engaged very uneasy, including some of the cultural tourists: middle-class white people receiving a skin name, taking their ‘knowledge’ of traditional cultural back home like a trinket or talisman to ward off the despair of ‘not knowing what to do’ about the ‘problem’ of Indigenous disadvantage. Importantly, the longing for connection does however admit a lack of relationship and a desire for something else more meaningful. The question is what makes it meaningful for good white people? What fulfillment are they seeking? If the deeper challenge is to transform the foundations of settler ­colonialism (Alfred, 2005, p. 180), then good white people need to reflect upon how colonial relations are reproduced through the desire for ‘traditional’ or ‘authentic’ Indigeneity. As discussed in Chapter 1, the revelations of colonial violence and Indigenous people’s pursuit of political, economic and cultural autonomy and land rights left many settler Australians lost and bewildered, unsure of their place in contemporary Australia or angered by Indigenous claims to their country and history. For some, the haunting knowledge of Australia’s colonial past and ongoing white privilege produces a sense of illegitimacy and guilt. The weakening of settler identity and sense of belonging, as analysed by Gelder and Jacobs, can result in resentment towards Indigenous people: ‘they claim too much’. Or alternatively, what they refer to as postcolonial sympathy, an embracing of Indigenous culture and spirituality and the processes of reconciliation (Gelder & Jacobs, 1998; also see Tuck & Yang, 2012). More recently, Gelder has stated that it is commonplace to observe that the postcolonial predicament has unsettled settler ­Australians, however, much less so to notice that the same unsettling conditions are enabling settlers’ ‘relation to the country to become, paradoxically perhaps, more secure than ever before’ (2006, p. 163). So-called unsettled Australians imagine themselves as spiritually empty, which prevents ‘us’ fully belonging in and to Australia. The Aboriginal sacred becomes the means of filling ‘our’ lack and thus ensuring one is a complete Australian. In this fantasy, the Aboriginal sacred is de-materialised, treated as if it is without cultural politics and ‘Aboriginality’ is available to everyone (2006, p. 167). The Aboriginal sacred is reaffirmed as a white possession at the service of settler Australia. Strangely, settlers’ sense of spiritual lack is like a curtain, a fabrication, which conceals the colonial power relation and their own complicity. Similarly, in a critique of settler Australians’ desire for an apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders for the injustices of colonialism and assimilation policies,7 Gooder and Jacobs illustrate that the

This Is Not a Gift  95 apology was conceived as a way of restoring order. Settler Australians experience themselves as lacking in relation to the moral positivity and fullness of Indigenous people and to return the settler to ‘proper belonging’ and wholeness, they require the forgiveness of Indigenous people. Good white Australians need good Aborigines to perform acts of kindness and absolution. Settlers appeal to Indigenous Australians to affirm how they would like to be seen: worthy of love and properly belonging (Gooder & Jacobs, 2004). Aboriginal people (or more precisely a representation of Indigeneity) are utilised (again) to fulfil settler Australians’ incompleteness. The goodness of the settler subject is reaffirmed, and thus they take up their rightful place in the secure nation. The insistence that settlers are burdened with incomplete belonging denies not only the materiality of the Aboriginal sacred but also Indigenous agency and that they have their own life projects. Sociality, politics and history, the very thickness of life, are refused or displaced for the good of good white nation. In this configuration, Aboriginal people are not taken seriously nor their autonomy respected. It is to say, you are not my peer. You are for me. If, however, I imaginatively returned myself to Garma and stood before the Balanda tourists, I could not accuse them of such pure self-interest. Not out of politeness but to do so, I would need to overlook genuine connection, moments of self-reflexivity and realignments and interruptions to settler self-certainty, or white possessive logic, that occurred when faced with the Burarrwanga’s hospitality, political will and efficacy. Yes, a few people displayed self-righteousness, the self-effacing of the guilt ridden or clamoured for the attention of the Yolngu women. And many of us probably wanted to please our hosts, which does make for ‘nice’, if not sycophantic, tourists. But better to be a good guest than a bad one. Like Yolngu, I think that Balanda entered the space with ethical intentions, a genuine commitment to recognise Yolngu and create mutually respectful relationships. Nonetheless, we did so lugging our emotional histories and ethos. Most settlers do not have social relationships with Indigenous Australians (although the reverse is not true); thus, there are few opportunities to transform racialised imaginaries.

What Happens When Salt Water Meets Fresh? The cultural tourism program is on the southern escarpment, set apart from Garma’s central business. Tents, stringy bark trees and 4WDs hide our camp, affording us peace and seclusion. Like a windbreak, our tents fan out around ‘our’ demarcated area. At either end are the women and men’s shelters, separated by a meeting ground and fire, where we come together to listen, share, dance and talk. The program begins with a smoking ceremony to cleanse and purify and to introduce and welcome us onto country. Now we are safe, no

96  This Is Not a Gift longer strangers. The country is aware and welcoming of our presence. We are encouraged to leave behind our worries, bad feelings and hurts. The precepts of Garma are invoked: balance and reciprocity. The following morning the Burarrwanga family teaches us, what they refer to as, ‘Yolngu for beginners’, with good humor and lightness to ease our discomfort. From the body language – serious faced and stiff bodied – it is clear that most Balanda, although enthusiastic, have a sense of trepidation and caution, perhaps more directed at the other tourists. We are taught and incorporated into the basics of the kinship system, language, including body language and bush medicines. Most of the morning program could be considered being ‘tuned in’ to Yolngu ethos. We are being taught how to behave appropriately on country, which for most Balanda is strange, if not estranging. Importantly, the emotional tone is set (Highmore, 2009, p. 13). Different ways of being, perceiving and relating to the sentient world are performed, in which the non-human world has agency. The tourists will not acquire bits and pieces of ‘culture’ to take back home, or that will grant us belonging. This is not on offer. We are on shaky ground, wanting to get it right not knowing what it is. Balanda attentiveness borders on reverence. Too much clutching to know and understand leaves us empty and out of place. It is an ethos that we sense but cannot grasp. I feel awkward, ­exposed and vulnerable. To discuss Yolngu and Balanda ethos, I abstract and generalise, but as Highmore reminds, there are many concrete performances of a cultural ethos that one recognises, or perhaps more often in intercultural settings, misrecognises. Women are encouraged to wear long skirts, to not sit like a man, asking a direct question rarely gets one an answer, and although I am almost a stranger, the older Yolngu women and children sit close, touch my skin and stroke my hair. There are cultural rules but most go unspoken. Due to its complexity, ethos might be best approached as ‘something like a tonality, or a feeling’ (Highmore, 2009, p. 13). A feeling that gathers or disperses. The smoking ceremony is an explicit ritual to induct Balanda into a Yolngu ethos. It is a performance orchestrated to still and draw individuals into the collective. Balanda are being tuned into a Yolngu ethos, but we do not simply leave behind or jettison our own. Cultural ethos has a hold over us and it cannot be rationalised or desired away (Highmore, 2009). To elaborate his notion of ethos, Highmore borrows Jacques Rancière’s concept of the ‘distribution of the sensible’: ‘the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience’ (Highmore, 2009, p. 13; Rancière, 2004). A sensible order is a form of common sense, when things, identities and experiences are in place and are not brought into question. There is no challenge to what is sensed or understood as logical, and as such ‘the sensible’ orientates, organises and interlaces our perceptions, sentiments and emotions. Ethos is a form

This Is Not a Gift  97 of knowledge about, or how one comes to know, the world. Perception and emotions are interconnected. Highmore explains: Ethos allows you to see why and how a particular style of washing matters; it links the perception of cleanliness and dirt, or purity and impurity, to orchestrations of shame and comfort, to resonances to other sensual worlds, and on to the social understanding of human bodies. (2009, p. 15) Tracing an ethos or sensible order enables an understanding of why, ­despite good intentions, one cannot easily take on another cultural ethos, and more so why intercultural encounters can provoke strong emotions.

Tuning In We sit cross-legged under the shelters and are taught to weave. The ­lesson might be much more one of patience, or more so, instruction on appropriate behavior for women. The Balanda women who regularly knit or crochet take with ease to weaving. They are accustomed to the rhythm of the hands, confident working with the material and relax into conversation, while I fumble and forget the instructions. Intermittently, Laklak Burarrwanga asks me how I’m doing and takes the weaving from me. I watch as she weaves. She returns it and I continue. Eventually my hands take charge, it is loose but it’s the stitch. I am delighted. Most of the first afternoon is spent weaving. Before Bungul, we have dancing lessons. The men are making spears and are not to watch. ‘To read fiction at all is to lend our body to alien affects’, Anna Gibbs proposes, ‘and allow ourselves to be possessed by them’ (2010, p. np). When Balanda are learning Yolnu dances, we are lending our bodies to alien affects. The steps and gestures are initially peculiar and estranging, but one must be in the movement, give over, to learn. Toes flick sand over each foot, the step is small and the action emanates from the legs, not the hips. Our gyrating hips bemuse the Y ­ olngu women. Laklak reproaches us, but we can’t seem to keep them still. ­Feelings, ethos, circulate, but by being in the movement, we encounter or rub up against, as Isabelle Stengers might say, one another and our discomfort is tempered by humour and joy (Stengers & Zournazi, 2002). We don’t so much learn the dance but feel an alliance with our Yolngu hosts. There is quietness here, one of the woman participants tells me, a calm. The stillness is an effect of Yolngu working to tune us into their ethos. But is it also a Balanda ethos, or common sense, which perceives and responds to the bush and Aboriginality as securing an attachment to nature, unencumbered from the state, politics and the troubling question of sovereignty (Rifkin, 2014)? Acts of collective stillness can be

98  This Is Not a Gift experienced as bodies in agreement (Cocker, 2009, p. np). As another female tourist reflected: I wasn’t expecting the subtleness of the experience, the connection. Just sit and do and be included. I wasn’t ready for this and I don’t know how to express the lightness of the experience. Other women concur. One says, ‘[t]here is an ease. I feel immersed and in a different world’. Lightness, subtlety and immersion are experienced as togetherness and connection, which in turn engenders a sense of community. The cessation of movement, as David Bissell discusses, seems to enable the body to open up to registers of life that are inaccessible when one is engaged in activity (Bissell, 2011). Stillness could be considered as a form of attunement, whereby perception is heightened and one is aware of oneself being alternatively networked into the world (Bissell & Fuller, 2011). The quality of stillness I am drawing readers’ attention to is, as Bissell theorises: [n]ot the stillness that comes laden with the demand for cerebral reflective thought, but a qualitatively different kind of stillness that comes with the momentary ceasefire of activity. (2011, p. 2653) In Australia, non-Aboriginal engagements with Indigeneity (be they real or imagined) are spaces of heightened emotions and too often arrive overdetermined, sometimes laden with surety, conviction and self-righteous opinion and others angst, unease and doubt. As I have theorised, settler anxiety – worrying about ‘vulnerable’ Aboriginal people, coupled with the desire to manage and fix – is a form of fleeing from the unrecognised threat posed by Indigenous autonomy. At the camp, there is a ceasefire of activity. Balanda are not bombarded by the internal and external noise, such as white guilt, relentless critique of Indigeneity, the need to find solutions to ‘Indigenous problems’ and agonising over whether they are behaving correctly, relating well: getting it. They come to rest, but is their ease grounded in the given of settler territoriality? (Rifkin, 2014). The tourists are drawn into respectful, trusting relationships with Yolngu and each other. Balanda discomfort and uncertainty, and the circulation of stereotypes about Aboriginal people, are interrupted, which in turn creates a ‘space of possibility in which to imagine or affirm an alternative mode of being’ together (Cocker, 2009, p. np). This lends itself to a participant saying: Our Yolngu hosts are so generous and patient and so respectful with one another and white people. I’m a bit overwhelmed by everything – the connection and learning. I can feel the spirit of the place.

This Is Not a Gift  99 The stillness and togetherness, created by the Burarrwanga family, suspend the past and the future feels open, abundant with potential (Cocker, 2009, p. np). Fleetingly, the present is not burdened with white guilt and the shame of being the beneficiaries of colonialism. Stillness or a space for self-reflexivity is a necessary component for reorienting Balanda away from settler anxiety and towards reciprocity and Indigenous self-­ determination. However, to borrow from Gelder, it could be an example of the dematerialisation of the Aboriginal sacred – ‘I can feel the spirit of the place’ – and the unsettling experience of encountering Yolngu cultural practices and autonomy are re-territorialised (2006). Balanda are restored to a sense of belonging. Stillness can also work to affirm for the Balanda a depoliticised future, a settler common sense.

Emotional Politics But what happens when bodies are not compatible? When two passionate cultures collide? Arguably, reconciliation discourse, or the desire to be a good Australian, heavily relies upon the rational, reasoning self, but as Highmore points out, in a very different context, ‘the rational argument misunderstands the hold that ethos has over each and everyone of us’ (2009, p. 33). If ethos has no recourse to forms of rational persuasion, then how is ethos negotiated in highly emotional intercultural encounters? On Monday, Djawa tells us that three brothers from Mutajulu (Uluru) would like to address us. The fire has burned down to coals, but still smokes. We take our now familiar place in a large circle. Three Anangu8 men enter, acknowledging Yolngu with handshakes and hugs, and stand shoulder to shoulder inside the circle of Balanda and Yolngu. Their backs are to me. The youngest is a big man, his shoulders stretching broad as if in deference to the rock, Uluru. He says his uncle will speak. His uncle wears a Stetson hat, beige longhorn jeans and thongs. Attire unfamiliar in east Arnhem Land but that holds the memory of Aboriginal stockmen on the cattle stations across desert country. As he turns, his face is etched with deep lines made by sun, dust and hard living. They are sad. An ache ripples through our collective body. He speaks passionately of the hurt that the Northern Territory Intervention9 has caused his people. He is strident, detailing his community’s shame and frustration. Army trucks and cavalry of southern bureaucrats in their shiny new Toyotas sprayed red dust in their wake, dismissing the Land Rights Act, suspending the Racial Discrimination Act, disempowering countrymen by taking over the running of organisations, replacing local initiatives with what – nothing – to be told they all neglect their children, every Aboriginal man a suspected pedophile and wife basher. Aboriginal people cannot be trusted to feed their children so without question and consultation, incomes are quarantined. He is old enough to have known the mission day, dog tags days … Aboriginal rights were hard

100  This Is Not a Gift won. Gone. Where were we, he questions? Why did the rest of Australia stand by and let this happen? I feel it first in my chest, a constriction, my heart is solid, clay, not an organ that pumps vital life. A contagion of discomfort, then agitation, ripples across, through the white bodies. Shame? For him? Shhh. Stop speaking. Don’t speak like that. There is no need for it. We don’t shuffle our feet but we want to. Push it away from us. Our collective body is brittle, our hearts wary, distrusting. No one can see but our hearts are pursed, sniffing at this distasteful scene. We are indignant but won’t tell anyone. The collective disassembles; returning to ‘I’. Crude, badly drawn, white body burning in the sun, sluggish with guilt. The sand is too hot underfoot. I am shrunken, weak and unyielding. He finishes. There is applause. They leave. Later in the afternoon, I ask one of the Balanda women what she thought happened. She agrees that the atmosphere changed dramatically, and those she spoke to felt the same. People are not here for politics or accusations. We don’t want to feel guilty, she continues, but just want to learn to be in the space. Everyone wants gentleness and ease, she says. There is consensus amongst those I talk to: conflict and politics is out, harmony is in. I want to gather around this ‘bad feeling’. My strong sense was that the men were invited to speak on behalf of not only our Yolngu hosts but the pain and frustration of many Aboriginal people subject to the Intervention. The Anangu men explicitly performed an Aboriginal political will, a distinct Indigenous conatus. What does it do to good white people? What does it mean to want to learn to be in ‘the space’? Or more so how is ‘the space’ imagined? Anxiety circulated amongst the cultural tourists. It was palpable. The ‘political talk’ was interpreted as out of place or unwanted, a threat to newly forming relationships, belonging and self-understanding. The space was imagined, or hoped for, as without political struggle. The pedagogic agents (the policing agents of ethos), Highmore proposes, are distain and disgust, and their affective actions are humiliation and shame (2009, p. 36). However, I am arguing ­ boriginal that the taken-for-grantedness of settlers’ right to manage A people and places – white possessive logic – circumvents shame, remorse or listening. In this case, deflects the Anangu men’s claims. The political talk made Balanda feel out of place, and distain and rejection are automatic reflexes. If I know myself to be a progressive, to care for peoples’ rights and cultural difference, how can I stand accused of injustice? You threaten my ‘bodily’ integrity and thus must be rejected. For self-­ preservation, Balanda feel ‘forced’ to break with their Yolngu hosts, who welcomed in the ‘politics’, which produces bitterness. You make me less generous. Because of the way you address me, you make me feel like an ‘uncaring’ white women. I withhold my good feelings; I withhold feeling with you.

This Is Not a Gift  101 ­ isembodiment, I am lost to others. It is an experience of alienation and d yet I feel locked in my own body, severed from the collective. My body is only possible through encountering other bodies, as Ahmed identifies, embodiment is the social experience of dwelling with other bodies (2000, p. 47). Rather than stay attached and part of the tour group, and importantly the guests of the Burarrwanga family and Yolngu, on their country and subject to their ethos, I detach. But I feel expelled, ‘cast out’. One only wants to be part of a community, as Hage states, ‘if you feel you are capable of achieving more by being a part of it then you can on your own’ (Hage & Zournazi, 2002, p. 162). By withdrawing from the collective, I am separated from encountering other bodies, and from where new thought, feeling and experimentation emerge (Stengers & Zournazi, 2002, p. 257). I will not risk my pursuit, cultivation, of an ethical self, who rightly belongs in a future where Aboriginal people are freed from disadvantage and inequality yet remain culturally distinct. Or perhaps more so where I am freed from the burden of colonial history and political conflict, and together we create a reconciled, just nation.

Generous Encounters When one is disconnected from social relations, not committed to being a part of the communal, the ability to listen, bear difference and agonism is diminished. As discussed earlier, scholars have accused white settlers of only recognising and thus engaging with dematerialised Indigeneity (see for e.g. Ahmed, 2000; Gelder & Jacobs, 1998; Povinelli, 2002). For example, Indigenous cultural practices such as dance are perceived to be accessible, consumable and for the enjoyment of non-Indigenous people, and thus unencumbered by cultural politics. The fetishisation of Aboriginal people and culture dematerialises intercultural encounters too, and therefore good white people, or more broadly settler colonials, are not compelled to cultivate an ethical self who willingly and explicitly engages with the imperatives of Aboriginal testimony. The Burarrwanga family and the Anangu men created a political space to be heard on the concerns they hold as Aboriginal people. Settler anxiety shut it down. Critiquing the dematerialisation of the black body, Ahmed argues: [w]hat is at stake is the ‘cutting off’ of figures from the social and the material which over determines their existence, and the consequent perception that such figures have a life of their own. (2000, p. 5) I thoroughly agree with her critique, but I want to add, in abstracting Aboriginal people from their materiality, refusing to engage with the politics of the encounter, Balanda too are cut off from the social and material. Or they perform themselves as ‘good white people’, rather

102  This Is Not a Gift than being singular, and thus capable of taking up the opportunity to ­question oneself and their take-for-granted world. To be clear, in the two scenarios, there remains a significant power imbalance. In the scene I am recounting, the tourists, including myself, are overdetermined by settler colonialism, a need for surety, innocence and approval, and are less available to reciprocity and creativity. Seemingly we cannot bear Yolngu political autonomy, that they ‘have a life of their own’. We fear not being perceived in our own self-image. To maintain the fantasy of the good white settler, colonial violence is figured as in the distant past. Political contestations and the complexity of settler–Indigenous relations are rejected and we refuse to hear Yolngu censor settler immorality. Any failings of history can be rectified and goodness restored by embracing the dematerialised Indigene. In doing so, settlers misrecognise Yolngu and themselves: Balanda are incomplete and Yolngu block my completeness. I am arguing that settlers, as Stanner proposes, do not only have a habit of forgetting Aboriginal people, or rather Indigeneity, but also have a tendency for detachment and negation. Or perhaps, more accurately, the ground upon which settler sovereignty and inhabitation gains its legitimacy – the legal and political – is denied. It is a habit or a practice of not being implicated and accountable, which is part of our violent inheritance. Withdrawing from the social, historical and political relationships that produce our present is a form of not belonging to contemporary Australia. For the cultural tourists, it produced a sense of alienation and loneliness. If I am not implicated here, where am I? What might be a generous encounter? Ahmed asks. How do we face up to others, which allows something to give, to open rather than shut down (Ahmed, 2000, p. 154). To live ethically and with integrity requires attachment. Balanda experienced Anangu ‘political talk’ as out of place and a threat to settler completeness and belonging. Yet as Stengers proposes, there is a strong relation between being able to take risks and belonging: ‘If the risks you take are not related to what attached you, they turn into the abstract power of “deconstructing” everything, which is a kind of addiction’ (Stengers & Zournazi, 2002, pp. 270–271). The question might then be, what are you attached to? What is desired and taken-forgranted? To answer my own question: an ethical self and ­future, belonging and settler sovereignty. As much as it might not feel like it, there is no unmediated attachment to places. The capacity to suspend questions of sovereignty enables settlers’ experience of a deep sense of belonging to places, whether it be on Yolngu land or indeed anywhere in Australia. This is to be at home in a settler ethos. Therefore, it seems to me that a generous encounter is to expose oneself to the hazard of unsettlement and to employ disorientation to reorient oneself towards the ongoing political struggle of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The ‘political event’ I recalled is dissensus: not simply a conflict ­between two different cultures but rather a ‘conflict between one sensible order

This Is Not a Gift  103 ­ uestioned and another’ (Rancière, 2007, p. 560). The Anangu men q ­settler common sense. They destablised, what is for Balanda, the proper distribution of places, identities, roles and competencies. Thus, dissensus, Rancière continues, creates new common sense or indeterminate possibilities by changing or challenging relations and what is known as right and sound reason (2007, p. 561). Politics is the discordant understanding. There can only be a political exchange when there is not a pre-established agreement, and thus according to Rancière, the political rests on the nonsensical statement (2007, p. 563). Poetic invention is necessary for political exchange, Rancière deduces, to invent the scene upon which spoken words may be audible and objects visible, and individuals themselves might be recognised (Panagia & Rancière, 2000, p. 116). Settler anxiety registers a political encounter that elicits a falling back into predetermined relationship, or more accurately non-relation, with Indigenous people, which impedes the possibility of invention and experimentation. The consensus and harmony Balanda so desire are a suppression of the political and thus of innovation, creativity, connection and justice. If we were to think of justice as making visible and inventing ways of thinking and saying that which has been unsayable and seeking to recognise people on their own terms, then it necessitates disagreement. I am proposing that the ‘Anangu scene’, facilitated by the Burarrwanga family, holds the potential for a poetics of politics if one gives over to it in a spirit of ganma. If one stays connected, implicated in the political and appreciate that peoples, places and cultures are trying to preserve and flourish, then something new will be produced. Just as the tide goes out, the tide comes back in. The cultural ­tourism program is not a gift in the commonplace understanding, but rather a form of reciprocity in which the political intent is to challenge and change social relations. Balanda are being urged to take with fair r­ eturn. I will end with a thought experiment. I suggested that during the dancing Balanda leant our bodies. What if when the Anangu men came to address us about the Northern Territory Intervention, like when we danced, we continued to lend our bodies, to give over to their convictions, experiences and politics? I am arguing that if good white people are genuinely committed to social transformation and want justice and equality, then they need to stay in the movement, not to withdraw when one’s self-­understanding comes under threat. Surely, middle-class, progressive settler Australians should feel secure enough to risk giving over at least a little to another’s passions. Intercultural exchanges, such as the cultural tourism program, can produce a sense of estrangement and unease, and virtuous anxiety is a means of managing the disruption, and of stabilising and renewing settler authority. Indigenous political will trigger Balanda disquiet. However, anxiety also interrupts and disturbs the self-evident, the given, and thus can be politically potent if it is harnessed to question how my feelings, reactions and attachments

104  This Is Not a Gift reflect and replicate colonial dynamics. In general, my experience of the cultural tourism program was that shame, pain, resentment and anxiety circulated and encountered hope, trust and care, which shifted Balanda towards more complex styles of attachment and relating (Stengers & Zournazi, 2002). The Burarrwanga family created a space that invites poetic politics.

Notes 1 Balanda is Yolngu term for non-Indigenous people. 2 Including winning a significant sea rights claim, the Blue Mud Bay Case. On 31 July 2008, Australia's High Court decided that it was illegal for the Northern Territory Fisheries Act to allow licenses to be issued for fishing in waters that fell within the boundaries of land covered by The Aboriginal Land Rights (NT) Act, which extends from the low water mark and the tidal waters. The implications are that the NT government does not have the right to allow commercial fishers entry to tidal waters over Aboriginal-owned land. 3 Gumatj is one of the Yolngu languages. 4 Galarrwuy Yunupingu made this statement in his opening address at the 2005 Garma Festival. 5 In 2007, the program was administered by the Yothu Yindi Foundation that employed Balanda women to work with Yolngu to run the workshops. 6 I wish to thank Djawa Burarrwanga for his permission to write about the cultural tourism program. 7 This critique was made in the 2000s, when the conservative Howard government was in power, and before the National Apology by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008. 8 Anangu are the traditional owners of Uluru-Kata Tjuta and the surrounding lands, in Central Australia. 9 In 2007, the then conservative federal government introduced the N ­ orthern Territory National Emergency Response into Aboriginal communities (NTER). It included changes to welfare provision, law enforcement, land tenure and suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act as the measures were only imposed upon Aboriginal people. The ‘national emergency’, as the Howard government claimed, was advanced as a response to the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse Report, Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: ‘Little Children are Sacred’ (Wild & Anderson, 2007). For more detail, see Chapter 6.

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This Is Not a Gift  105 Brigg, M., & Murphy, L. (2008). Mawul rom project: Openness, obligation and reconciliation. Australian Aboriginal Studies, (2), 3–15. Cocker, E. (2009). From passivity to potentiality: The communitas of stillness. M/C Journal, 12(1), np. Corn, A. (2005). When the waters will be one: Hereditary performance t­ raditions and the Yolηu re-invention of post-Barunga intercultural discourses. Journal of Australian Studies, 28(84), 23–34. Corn, A. (2014). Agent of bicultural balance: Ganma, Yothu Yindi and the ­legacy of Mandawuy Yunupiηu. Journal of World Popular Music, 1(1), 12–45. Gelder, K. (2006). When the imaginary Australian is not uncanny: Nation, ­psyche and belonging in recent Australian cultural criticism and history. ­Journal of Australian Studies, 86, 163–173. Gelder, K., & Jacobs, J. M. (1998). Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and identity in a postcolonial nation. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Gibbs, A. (2010). At the time of writing: Sedgwick’s queer temporalities. ­Australian Humanities Review, 48, np. Gooder, H., & Jacobs, J. (2004). Belonging and non-belonging: The a­ pology in a reconciling nation. In A. Blunt & C. McEwan (Eds.), Postcolonial ­geographies (pp. 200–213). London, England: Continuum. Hage, G., & Zournazi, M. (2002). ‘On the side of life’: Joy and the ­capacity for being. In M. Zournazi (Ed.), Hope: New philosophies for change. ­A nnandale, MN: Pluto Press. Henry, R. (2008). Engaging with history by performing tradition: The poetic politics of Indigenous Australian festivals. In J. Kapfler (Ed.), The state and the arts: Articulating power and subversion (pp. 52–69). New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Highmore, B. (2009). A passion for cultural studies. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Marika, R. (1999). 1998 Wentworth lecture. Australian Aboriginal Studies, 1, 3–9. Panagia, D., & Rancière, J. (2000). Dissenting words: A conversation with Jacques Rancière. Diacritics, 30(2), 113–126. Phipps, P., & Slater, L. (2010). Indigenous cultural festivals: Evaluating impact on community health and wellbeing. Melbourne, VIC: Globalism Research Centre. Povinelli, E. (2002). The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham, England: Duke University Press. Rancière, J. (2004). The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible (G. Rockhill, Trans.). London, England: Continuum. Rancière, J. (2007). What does it mean to be un? Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 21(4), 559–569. Rifkin, M. (2014). Settler common sense: Queerness and everyday colonialism in the American renaissance. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Stanner, W. E. H. (1968). After the dreaming: Black and white Australia – An anthropologist’s view. Sydney, NSW: The Australian Broadcasting Commission. Stengers, I., & Zournazi, M. (2002). A ‘cosmo-politics’ – Risk, hope and change. In M. Zournazi (Ed.), Hope: New philosophies for change (pp. 244–272). Annandale, MN: Pluto Press.

106  This Is Not a Gift Stephens, E. (2015). Bad feelings. Australian Feminist Studies, 30(85), 273–282. Tuck, E., & Yang, W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. ­Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Watson, I. (2007). Aboriginal sovereignities: Past, present and future (­im)possibilities. In S. Perera (Ed.), Our patch (pp. 23–44). Curtin, WA: Network Books. Wild, R., & Anderson, P. (2007). Ampe akelyernemane meke mekarle: ‘Little children are sacred’. Darwin, NT: Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse. Williams. N. M. (1986). The Yolngu and their land: A system of land tenure and the fight for its recognition. Canberra, ACT: Australian Institute of ­Aboriginal Studies. Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., Lloyd, K., Burarrwanga, L., & Burarrwanga, D. (2009). ‘This means the fish are fat’: Sharing experiences of animals through Indigenous-owned tourism. Current Issues in Tourism, 12(5–6), 505–527.

6 Not Caring Like the State

Introduction Even in a tumultuous week in Australian politics, Indigenous issues make headlines. A week in which the former Prime Minister Tony ­Abbott’s leadership was under serious threat, his back bench in revolt, ready to toss him from office, the annual Close the Gap: Progress and Priorities Report 2015 was handed down. A disappointing read, said the conservative PM. One might expect it to disappear off the political radar. After all, a stormy week for the government is gold for political commentators: airtime is filled with frenzied analysis and ardent fortune-telling, and the public is on the edge of their seats. But despite the high drama, there was a pause in the fracas as parliament, the media, and broader Australia were sobered by yet another report detailing the lack of progress in improving the health and social outcomes of ­Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. In our current political climate, Closing the Gap (CtG) is one of the few policy programs that receives bipartisan support. There might be little to no improvement, or worse, in the lives of Indigenous people; however, as I have argued, there has been a dramatic shift in the role Indigeneity is playing in Australian public culture. Worrying about Indigenous people’s well-­ being has become a mark of civility, for politicians and the public alike. Each year the Prime Minister responds to the Report. In his address to parliament, Abbott said: For so many of us in this place, few things matter more than the lot of Indigenous people. For so many of us this is personal – not political. So we speak and act not in the service of party, but in the service of country. We know that until Indigenous people fully participate in the life of our country, all of us are diminished. On days such as this, we should acknowledge where we have failed. (2015)

108  Not Caring Like the State He pronounces that the quest for health and socio-economic equality is not political. Yet he likens it to a form of national service. ­Remedying Indigenous inequality, Abbott continued, is a ‘vital but difficult journey’ and we must persevere. Despite the 2015 Report detailing profound ­failings – there was little improvement and some areas, such as incarceration rates, went backwards. – the overall sentiment was that we ­cannot give up hope and must continue the good work. Notwithstanding ­criticisms of the government’s funding cuts, the Leader of the Opposition, Bill Shorten, shared the government’s commitment to CtG (2015). The course is sure: many Indigenous lives are envisioned as in need of intervention, which will facilitate their incorporation into the healthy, progressive nation. CtG operates as the state’s primary mode of care for a disadvantaged Indigenous population. Fundamentally, this book is an account of settler colonial care. In this chapter, I coalesce around state structures, specifically the current ­Indigenous Affairs strategy, CtG, which aims to reduce disadvantage among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in regard to life expectancy, child mortality, access to early childhood education, educational achievement and employment outcomes. Care in this form appears to be talking about people but then quickly changes to population data. Statistics are biopolitical instruments that render subjects visible to the state. The methods through which one comes to recognise a population generate particular relations to those people, and thus can direct for what, and how, one cares. CtG is an epistemological practice through which Indigeneity comes to be ‘known’ in comparison with an idealised healthy population. Statistics supply the ‘facts’ needed to demonstrate the extent of the problems. Good health and well-being are identifiable and knowable; treated as common sense, universal and boldly cast onto the Indigenous population as an achievable reality. Thus, caring about Indigenous disadvantage and inequality becomes a set of managerial problems for governments to deal with: what I refer to as the management of care.1 Importantly, practices of care describe particular kinds of social relations (Berlant, 2004, p. 9). Is CtG a set of activities that reproduce colonial relations? I will examine how the management of care orientates non-Indigenous people’s perceptions of Indigeneity, their sense of obligation and responsibilities and limits good white people’s political engagement with issues of structural inequality. Seemingly, CtG makes minimal demands upon the broader population, other than on occasion to enact concern and worry. Governments need to ‘fix the problem’ and Indigenous people to ‘fix’ themselves. To borrow from Abbott, all we collectively need to do is persevere. The backdrop to CtG is an all too familiar good white Australian story: Aboriginal people are vulnerable and ‘they’ need ‘our’ help. To care is to distinguish oneself from ‘bad white people’ and affirm a commitment to a hoped for ethical future. After all, compassion or care is a technology of belonging (Berlant, 2004, p. 5). There is another f­ amiliar

Not Caring Like the State  109 Australian story, and that is of Aboriginal people as an ever-present national ­problem. We know this story. It is an old tale told a thousand times, in a thousand different and indifferent ways. As Gillian ­Cowlishaw discusses the colonial project, ‘a one-way system of teaching others how to live’ continues thinly veiled by ever-changing policy and programs designed to ameliorate inequality (2013, p. 244). Concerned settlers are often struck, and feel debilitated, by the enormity of the problems in Indigenous Australia, and ask what can we do? This is a familiar question, if not lament. Like Cowlishaw, my unease is that the ‘little pronoun “we” has the effect of sweeping us all into a governmental project of finding, or rather conceiving, overarching solutions to what some segment of the nation takes to be a problem’ (2013, p. 245). Like many Australians, I too am alarmed by the high incarceration rates, ill health, marginalisation and impoverishment. However, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders, scholars and community have repeatedly expressed that they are not being heard and have little influence on key public policies and programs that significantly affect their lives (Davis, 2016; Dodson, 2014; National Constitutional Convention, 2017). Only too well documented is the ­socio-economic, health and well-being inequalities faced by too many Indigenous Australians – a crisis – but what of the ‘crisis of hearing’ that besets government and broader Australia alike (Biddle, 2016)? As I have argued throughout this book, a distinct element of settler colonialism is to worry about Indigenous people. In this chapter, I want to consider how virtuous anxiety – the concern, pity, fretting – is enrolled in and perpetuates settler colonial power relations. To be clear, my motivation is not to simply point out those who care and those who don’t, or bad care. Rather than the good white settler asking, what can ‘we’ do? I think the question should be, what have ‘we’ been caring for? Care, like compassion, feels good. There is no doubt that care is ­vital. It provides a source of moral thinking and social belonging, as Abbott attests, and has substantial material and personal consequences (­ Berlant, 2004, p. 9). We need to recognise the power relationships in care. How health or vulnerability is imagined and who is categorised accordingly, differently configures the capacities of citizens and political voices (Tronto, 2006, p. 3). Social norms are perpetuated through care, or indeed can be transformed. Feminist scholars have long advocated that we need to re-politicise care. It should not be conceived of as the benevolent toil of the good or kind, or conflated with positive feeling, ­morality, and political and social good. They have demonstrated how care, rescue and liberation are intertwined in histories of racism, class privilege, colonialism and capitalism (Ahmed, 2012; Arvin, Tuck, & Morrill, 2013; Murphy, 2015). Care is enmeshed in the logics of settler ­colonialism. I share Murphy’s commitment to grapple with the ‘non-innocent histories in which the politics of care already circulates’ and unsettle care by challenging and disrupting non-innocent narratives of belonging and the

110  Not Caring Like the State epistemology that underpins practices of care, value and progress (2015, p. 717). Unsettling, as Murphy theorises, is the ‘purposeful undoing and troubling of particular arrangements so that they might be acknowledged and remade in better, less violent, more liveable ways.’ (2015, p. 722). My concern is that settler Australians who genuinely care and want social justice for Indigenous people continue to reproduce colonial relationships of authority and vulnerability. My conjecture is that ‘we’ care like the state. Thus, I am arguing for the importance of unsettling care and drawing upon alternative genealogies and archives of care for generating new political practices and relations (Berlant, 2004).

The Bureaucratic Imagination Over the last fifteen years, Indigenous Affairs has changed markedly. In 2007, the then conservative federal government, led by former Prime Minister John Howard, introduced the Northern Territory National Emergency Response into Aboriginal communities (NTER). It included changes to welfare provision, law enforcement, land tenure and suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act, as the measures were only imposed upon Aboriginal people. The ‘national emergency’, as the H ­ oward government claimed, was advanced as a response to the N ­ orthern ­Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse Report, Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle, ‘­Little Children are Sacred’ (Wild & Anderson, 2007). The Intervention, as it became known, is no longer policy; however, it marked a decisive shift in Indigenous Affairs, which is now prevalent nationally and profoundly reformed the way Indigenous policy problems are understood and approached (Strakosch, 2015, p. 4). Indigenous health, housing and education were mainstreamed into existing policy departments, under a ‘whole-of-government’ approach. Most notably, NTER signalled the transformation of Indigenous Affairs from collective to individual rights and responsibilities, focused on reforming Indigenous behaviour and economic participation in mainstream employment. The new arrangement in Indigenous Affairs displaced the earlier bipartisan government approach of self-determination, which aimed to secure Indigenous collective rights, support self-government and work towards Indigenous and non-Indigenous reconciliation, which had been the broad government consensus for over forty years (Lea, 2012a; Strakosch, 2015). The Howard government was resolute that self-determination had failed and further marginalised and impoverished Indigenous people, and a more practical approach was required. As Rowse discusses: Policy in Australian Aboriginal affairs has yielded to a pragmatic orientation to social outcomes, driven by the engines of the ‘new welfare’ including service-led community development, ‘reciprocal

Not Caring Like the State  111 obligation’ and a growing list of national benchmarks … In this world, Aboriginal societies are communities, but societies no longer. They are increasingly defined, not by distinctive cultures and social processes, but by their need for partnership with government to deal with symptoms of dysfunction and social failure. (2012, p. 135) The language of cultural and historical difference has been abandoned. Instead ‘Indigenous issues’ are addressed as problems to be solved by communities working with government so they too can enjoy the benefits of living in a (depoliticised and de-historicised) wealthy, Western nation. Indigeneity becomes a disadvantaged population in need of state intervention, not distinct peoples with distinct cultures. In November 2008, National Indigenous Reform Agreement (­ Closing the Gap) was adopted by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) ­ ustralians’ as its overarching reform agenda for improving Indigenous A lives: a raft of programs to achieve health and socio-­economic equality (Altman, 2009, p. 3). COAG set specific and ambitious targets for ­‘Closing the Gap’ such as to close the life-expectancy gap within a generation and halve the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a decade (Australian ­Government, 2010). As Strakosch observes: Yet as the impact and political currency of the intervention wanes, closing the gap in statistical disadvantage is now the dominant way of framing the relationship between Indigenous and settler ­Australia, and of directing our efforts to change this relationship. It is, in effect, our national Indigenous policy. (2014, p. np) Indigeneity is largely understood through comparisons with non-­Indigenous population data across a range of socio-economic indicators such as health status, education and employment levels, income and housing, resulting in remedial policies designed to ‘capacitate’ Indigenous people (Kowal, 2015; Lea, 2015). These contrasts and comparisons are the imaginative norm through which Indigenous life is governed by the state. What influence does this social policy have on how non-­Indigenous Australians understand the problems and solutions? Notably, even though Indigenous Australians are only 3% of the Australian population and are not an electoral force, as Rowse argues, ‘they occupy a large space within the nation’s sense of its own moral constitution’ (2010, p. 81). Despite their small numbers, Indigenous people have long been the focus of government and settler concern. The current Turnbull government refers to CtG as a national report card that measures how we are meeting our responsibilities for improving

112  Not Caring Like the State outcomes for Indigenous Australians (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2017, p. 6). It is an important snapshot, to use the government’s language, ‘of where progress is being made and where further efforts are needed’ (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2017, p. 6). This suggests that the nation, not Indigenous Australians, is being assessed. The 2017 report is significant because four out of the seven ­targets – child mortality rates, school attendance, employment and reading, writing and numeracy – are set to be achieved by 2018. 2 When the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, presented the 9th Closing the Gap report to parliament, he stated: While we celebrate the successes, we cannot shy away from the stark reality that we are not seeing sufficient national progress on the Closing the Gap targets. While many successes are being achieved locally, as a nation, we are only on track to meet one of the seven Closing the Gap targets this year. Although we are not on track to meet the ambitious targets we have set, we must stay the course. (Turnbull, 2017)3 The 2017 report avoids the language of failure and instead focuses on areas for improvement and local success stories. CtG acts to remind Australians of not only inequality but also importantly other significant differences between the Indigenous and general population. Eighty per cent of Indigenous Australians live in regional and ­metropolitan areas and only 14% live in very remote Australia; however, Indigenous people comprise up to 45% of Australians living in these scarcely populated regions. Notably, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population is growing at a far greater rate than the general population and is considerably younger. In 2011, 36% of Indigenous Australians were under fourteen compared to 18% of non-Indigenous Australians. Somewhat surprisingly, the Indigenous population is getting older and by 2026, the proportion of the population aged over 65 is projected to almost double that of 2011 (2017, p. 6). Undoubtedly, these statistics are important. Governments and service providers need to know the demographics, and the percentage of urban dwelling Indigenous people works to break the spell of who is, or what it means to be, Indigenous. CtG is driven by statistics too often rehearsed, appalling Indigenous health and socio-economic statistics. To Australian’s great shame, and much anxiety, across virtually all the indicators of the 2017 CtG ­Report, there are wide gaps in outcomes between Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous Australians. The oft-repeated gap between Indigenous and non-­I ndigenous life expectancy at birth is somewhat better than generally thought. The most recent life expectancy figures that were published in 2013 reveal a gap of 10.6 years for males and 9.5 for females (however, these gaps are significantly higher for Indigenous people living in

Not Caring Like the State  113 remote Australia). Notably, the Indigenous mortality rate from chronic disease has declined significantly (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2017, p.  82). Some of the numbers that I find most haunting are that Indigenous suicide rates are double that of the general population and from 2011 to 2015, 71% of Indigenous suicides were male (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2017, p. 85). In some parts of Australia, for example the Kimberley, Western Australia, the suicide rates are considerably higher. Indigenous cancer rates are rising, and the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians dying of cancer is widening (2017, p. 82). Data from June 2013 to June 2015 indicates that Indigenous Australians were hospitalised for assault at 14 times the rate of non-Indigenous Australians. In 2014–2015, Aboriginal and ­Torres Strait Islander women were 32 times more likely to be hospitalised due to family violence-related assaults than other women, and children under 17 were 6.7 times as likely to be the subject of substantiated child protection notifications as non-Indigenous children (­Australian ­Government, 2016). As the 2017 CtG report makes clear, the problems are complex and ­intergenerational (Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2017, p. 95). Notably, these statistics are generalised across the country; when examined at a regional level, the contrasts are particularly stark in remote areas. The 2017 report did not mention incarceration rates. According to the 2016 Overcoming Disadvantage Report, the ‘adult imprisonment rate increased 77% between 2000 and 2015, and whilst the juvenile detention rate has decreased it is still 24 times the rate for non-Indigenous youth’ (Australian Government, 2016). While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are only 3% of the general population, they represent over 28% of the prison population. Again, in Northern Australia, these statistics are much higher. It is ten years since Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd offered the National Apology to the Stolen Generations. During the 2016 federal election campaign, a manifesto was released, spearheaded by the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples and other prominent Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations, appealing for significant changes across a range of policy areas, including health, education, justice and family violence. The Redfern Statement, as it is known, was an ‘urgent call for a more just approach to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs’. It stated: When the ground-breaking Bringing Them Home report into the Stolen Generations was released in 1997, nearly 20 years ago, mainstream Australia was shocked to learn that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children represented one in every five children living in out-of-home care. Now, in 2016, they are one in every three. Despite numerous legal and policy frameworks protecting the rights of Indigenous

114  Not Caring Like the State children, the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care is almost ten times that of other children, and continues to grow. The rate of over-representation has escalated by 65 per cent since the 2008 Apology, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children currently representing over 35 per cent of all children in out-of-home care in Australia. (National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, 2016, p. 5) The removal of children, incarceration and suicide rates continue to climb. This is despite broader Australia’s reckoning with colonial history, Indigenous testimony – from protest, film, song, scholarship to the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody and Bringing Them Home Report – the inclusion of Indigenous people into the wider polity and the rise of Indigenous professionals. There is a pressing need for resources. There is also a critical need to reframe or decolonise how government and broader Australia relate to, and perceive of, Indigenous people. Bad statistics make for a compelling argument for urgent intervention. But what else do these accounts tell us about the problems with settler ­colonial care? To be clear, I am not suggesting that the state is rational, coherent, ­autonomous or monolithic but rather it emerges in practices.4 The broader public know it through bureaucracies, policy and programs, largely mediated and delivered in sound bites. Policy programs, as Lea identifies, are often conceptualised as if they are linear, logical processes, entirely driven by people that produce a bundle of goods and services, which neatly leads to the resolution of a problem (2012b). Rather they are an entanglement of ideologies, relationships, emotions and all manner of the non-human, all situated in time and place. In other words, bureaucracies have a social life and are brought to life by social beings (Lea, 2008, p. 235). In our political moment, bureaucratic life is animated by an interventionist logic. The culture of remedialism is driven by the rhetoric of failure, whether it be past policies or a particular population or community who have been let down by bad governance or their own ‘mismanaged’ lives. Policies hold out the promise of a bright future, the allure of progress corrected of the imperfections of the past. The belief in the magic capacities of policy formulations is sustained by an artifice of truth, authority and reason, but also the disavowal of policies’ social life, all assisted by the hopes of the general public that they will be the beneficiaries (Lea, 2012b, p. np). CtG is produced within bureaucracies that have their own cultures, which are imbedded in and replicate settler liberalism. The irresistibility and credibility of interventionary logic, Lea proposes, is dependent upon the absorption of its innumerable forms. The broader public and government functionaries alike inhabit this culture, and thus, she deduces that most of us think

Not Caring Like the State  115 like and with the state (2012b, p. 17; see also Scott, 1998). My concern is that ‘we’ care like the state. The state is not monolithic; however, it is frequently enacted as ­hegemonic through certain epistemic practices. Statistics create the ­artifice of reasoned knowledge and progress and foreclose on other epistemologies. Thus, some of CtG’s allure is not only because it prefigures, however abstract, a strong, healthy future for all and the path to get there, but in the ‘crisis’, it appears to many to be the only hope. For my purposes, I am interested in how policy formulations frame and influence non-Indigenous perceptions of Indigeneity. Notably, the regulation and control of Indigenous life through policy are, as Strakosch identifies, ‘among the most successful performances of routine, everyday settler authority over Indigenous lands and lives’ (2015, p. 8). She explains: That the jurisdiction of the state bureaucracy over Indigenous lives is rarely questioned by non-Indigenous Australians is in itself a significant naturalisation of colonial authority, and is built on a claim about the political incorporation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait ­Islander peoples. (2015, p. 9) Intrusive government policy and the bureaucratic imagination work to control and order Indigenous life. It seems a straightforward public good that governments of a prosperous nation are focused upon achieving equality. Yet, the social policy framework, as Strakosch critiques, ‘intricately reworked the ‘appropriate’ relationships between citizen, state and society in a liberal state’ (2015, p. 11). It is arguably the most ­ubiquitous and influential representations of Indigeneity and thus overly determines how settler Australians understand and relate to Indigenous people. To borrow from Audra Simpson cultures of bureaucracy enacts ‘the production of settler public sensibility’ (2016, p. 4). One of the benefits of CtG is not only the ‘production’ of an identifiable disadvantaged Indigenous subject, but supporting such policies helps one to identify oneself as a good, progressive citizen.

Seeing a Crisis Intervention requires that subjects are imagined and known in ­particular ways (Lattas & Morris, 2010, p. 76). As much as statistics are helpful for highlighting inequality, they also tell a story of what, and how, life is valued. Health and socio-economic statistics allow complex worlds to be rendered intelligible. They order and abstract life and, in this case, identify those lives that require government mediation and correction. In turn, certain narratives overshadow difference and diversity and produce and circulate a version of Aboriginal life that becomes the reality upon

116  Not Caring Like the State which the state operates. Discussing the bad statistics that ­dominate the media, Lea proposes: These inarguable headlines come with a specific frame of reference: improvements will come from restructuring in line with socio-­ technical development categories—from early childhood programs, to education, to training, to work, to aspirations of home-­ownership and home-improvement. Training in school links to jobs in the mine. With the help of academic advice and consultancies, statistical collections, business management models, financial flows, and omnipresent common-sensical public sector orderings, the psychic, behavioural and economic determinants of Western cultural subjects are reductively simplified and confidently projected as universal models for meaning and worth in a life, presuming the categories through which such worthiness is engineered. (2012b, p. np) Notably, in policy and public debates, the focus is the unquestionable presentation of Indigenous people needing to be capacitated: ensure children get to school, attend training programs, be law abiding, employed (Lea, 2012b). It is Indigenous people who are required to change not the state or the broader population. The problems of settler colonialism are displaced by the ‘Indigenous problem’. The tools of remedialism are the classic biopolitical strategies: surveys, census, intervention studies and evaluations that are mobilised to detect inequality and monitor efforts to reduce it (Kowal, 2010, p. 190). These transcendental critiques have their value; as Lea notes, they might allow analysts to distinguish if a policy is working (2012b). However, a drive to capacitate people is also an argument that people don’t have capacity. A necessary condition of intervention is the conviction that the subjects are lacking in something essential and with ‘tutelage’ can be improved. Indigenous people are presented as being in exceptional need (Lattas & Morris, 2010, p. 79), as they ‘lack’ not only good health, education, and housing, but also essential Western liberal qualities, values and ambitions. This is a familiar colonial relation, assuming the guise of humanist intervention. Thus, policy and programs are naturalised and depoliticised as practical technical measures that engage a world of material necessities that secure the basic conditions of life, which in turn conceals the cultural politics of policy (Lattas & Morris, 2010, p. 79). If the story is that people need capacitating, then it becomes clear that a good government’s role is to intervene and provide such opportunities. Furthermore, such policy formulations fail to imagine that Indigenous people authorise themselves and have their own political and sociocultural life (Simpson, 2016, p. 6). Statistics are tricky. They arrange the world into neat demarcations and omit co-dependencies and entanglements. CtG abstracts, orders and

Not Caring Like the State  117 prioritises (indeed valorises) particular versions of life. Importantly, it ­separates Indigenous people out from the broader population. Again, doing so highlights inequality and can direct resources towards ameliorating disadvantage. However, CtG reproduces the colonial binary of colonised and coloniser. Drawing upon Said’s scholarship, Leela Gandhi identifies: colonialism was a hierarchically aligned system of division or ­ inary opposite designed, in the main and through the discourse b of ­‘orientalism’, to sequester the West from the psychic contagion of the non-western alterity. (2006, p. 2) Notably, the project of division and separation failed, she continues, largely on account of the leakiness of imperial boundaries (2006, p. 2). Nonetheless, settler Australia continues to imagine that Indigenous ­people do not share the same social realm. Indigenous Australians are readily viewed through a lens of exceptionalism, as Cowlishaw explains, where Aboriginal social life is not viewed as an organic part of ­ ustralian society. Rather than life worlds of all residents being seen A as elements of one set of social relations, and dealt with in equivalent terms, Aboriginal residents are always given their own conceptual framing …. (2010, p. 54) The focus then becomes Indigenous people rather than the interactions and co-locations of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and ­colonial histories and power relations. Furthermore, if social realms are imagined as separate and good white people know themselves as  well meaning, progressive and ‘healthy’, then chaos and dysfunction is ­assigned to those deemed vulnerable and disadvantaged. High mortality rates, suicide, poverty, low education and employment provide evidence that Indigenous people are subjects in exceptional need. Thus, capacitating Aboriginal people becomes the solution to the problem that settlers have identified and provides the frame to interpret Indigenous life and a meaningful role for the state, and more broadly non-Indigenous Australians. By worrying about Indigenous people and expecting government intervention, progressive Australians become implicated in the desire to improve Indigenous people. The relentless bad headlines and revelations of chaos, violence and misery invigorate a ­cultural desire for remedialism. As Kowal conceptualises: Remedialism is a version of liberalism, the broad political ­movement that subscribes to individualism, equality, a universal sense of morality, and a belief that our lives can be improved through good

118  Not Caring Like the State government. The remedialism that drives postcolonial logic is the belief that the lives of Indigenous people, so badly affected by colonisation, can be improved through reasoned intervention. It entails a set of assumptions about ‘the good life’ that presume that functional housing, western education, employment opportunities, and freedom from addiction and illness are among the most important of life’s goals. (2010, pp. 189–190) Remedialism aims to reduce inequality by changing Indigenous people, capacitating them modelled on a very specific set of bourgeois settler values. Furthermore, remedialism renders Aboriginal life in negative terms (Cowlishaw, 2013, p. 242). Like Kowal, my intention is not to demean anti-racists, or in my case good white people, but rather to understand them as a ‘cultural group who are shaped by settler-colonial histories and contemporary political discourse’ (2010, p. 186). I share her interest in the affective reality of white anti-racist or progressives’ commitment to improving the lives of Indigenous people (2010, p. 187). The discourse of remedialism and positioning oneself as caring about Indigenous well-being and an advocate of social justice, as Kowal and others argue, do ‘identity-work’ for anti-racists and good white people (2010, p. 188; Land, 2015). It produces and maintains an ethical white subjectivity in a history of violence and in a settler state that increasingly appears instrumental, heartless and reactionary.

Mobilisation and Intelligibility These relentless ‘bad statistics’ should trouble all Australians. But what do statistics bring to the fore and what do they hide? What worlds do they imagine and make? Notably, as scholars have argued, settler colonial categories are not also Indigenous categories (Arabena, 2005; Coulthard, 2014; Povinelli, 2011). What Aboriginal people make of ‘western modernity’, as Lea poses, and whether they configure their own lives in these terms, remains largely unexplored (2012a). Yet, CtG makes comparisons as if there are no differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people’s values, aspirations, life worlds and measures of what it is to be human and invested in healthy futures. The sociopolitical landscape of contemporary settler Australia disappears behind a veil of statistics. How has CtG become such a dominant way of framing the relationship between Indigenous and settler Australia, which overshadows other stories of Indigenous life? What makes it so compelling and powerful? To borrow from Bruno Latour: If you wish to go out of your way and come back heavily equipped so to force others to go out of their way, the main problem to solve is that of mobilisation. You have to go and come back with the

Not Caring Like the State  119 ‘things’ if your moves are not to be wasted. But the ‘things’ have to be able to withstand the return trip without withering away. Further requirements: the ‘things’ you gathered and displaced have to be presentable all at once to those you want to convince and who did not go there. In sum, you have to invent objects which have the properties of being mobile but also immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another. (1990, p. 26; author’s italics) Statistics are a specific mechanism, mobile objects, that helps sum up a ‘group’. Or in this case, a population (not a people). To broader ­Australia, they make sense, are easily interpretable and memorable. More so they appear to provide a deeper understanding of the ‘group’: sturdy ­evidence, better still, facts. As noted, statistics are biopolitical instruments that make ‘facts’ visible – you doubt what I say, I can prove it – and are devices that supply governments with the ‘facts’ needed to manage the Indigenous population in particular ways. Statistics render subjects visible to the state and the general public. Thus, statistics are mobile, and thus can be mobilised to do particular work. The complex site of collection, with all of its intercultural entanglements and incommensurability, is transformed into something that is readable and presentable, which then circulates to administrative centres to inform the bureaucratic imagination. The ‘field’ is nameable and knowable, and thus a reality is proffered, which calls upon ‘good’ government to act in particular ways (Bennett, 2010). Close the Gap or Overcoming Disadvantage reports portray a population in exceptional need. These ‘facts’ return to local communities as government policy and programs designed to intervene in, normalise and thus improve people’s lives. ­Statistics sort populations into those who need capacitating, correction or mending and those who don’t. Bad statistics make powerful allies for a compelling argument for ­crisis. Counting the number of unemployed, illiterate, sick or imprisoned Indigenous people makes disadvantage visible, but it also is a critical element in mustering the support of settlers faithful to liberal progress (Latour, 1990). In turn, statistics can render invisible non-Western knowledge, sociality, alternative understandings of ‘health’ and futurity. It makes from those bodies a particular story – at high risk to themselves and others – from which an emergency, coercive state intervention is a justifiable and rational response to a people and social order in crisis and disarray (Altman & Hinkson, 2007). Notably, Indigenous Affairs is highly politicised, yet the radical Northern Territory Intervention had bipartisan and broader public support. Following Latour, I want to reflect upon what are the aspects that summon, grow, align and ensure the fidelity of new allies. His point is that imperialism, or neocolonialism, isn’t enough to assert power. Brute force will never be enough to

120  Not Caring Like the State rally and win over new and unexpected allies. You need to gather and present the ‘facts’ in a language that mainstream Australia identifies as reasoned and authoritative. However, bad statistics, and all manner of ‘facts’, will not compel good white people to accept a particular ideology (or importantly to not see ideology) (Latour, 1990, pp. 24–25). Other attributes are needed, as I will go on to argue, that include the settler colonial imaginary and its associated style of concern and care that entrust governments to manage and administer the Indigenous population or ‘problem’. Good white people’s role is to worry about Indigenous people and occasionally demand government action. Or at the very least, leave it to the state, which is an abnegation of responsibility. There is a long history of denying the diversity of Indigenous ­people to make them knowable and governable. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been subject to a form of colonial capture, which inscribes Indigenous people in a scientific–governmental assemblage (Patton, 2000). Tony Bennett supplies a very generative example for thinking through how ‘Aboriginal culture’ is made intelligible to ­colonial administration, which in turn engenders a ‘field’ of governmentality. Writing on the role and influence Baldwin Spencer’s photography played, he illustrates: By bringing things together from diverse locations, combining these in ways, simplifying and condensing them by subjecting them to further processes of inscription, Spencer produced something that had not existed before: Aboriginal culture not as a set of autochthonous realities that preceded his inquiries but as a new pan-tribal and pan-national surface of connection between white and black ­Australia, a surface that organised new sets of governmental and administrative interfaces through which the former might act on the latter. (2010, pp. 194–195) Borrowing from Foucault, Bennett refers to this surface as a t­ ransactional reality: the mediation of relations between governed and governing (2010, p. 191). Foucault’s focus was the role of transactional realities in ‘liberal governmentality’. Although they have an historical truth, transactional realities are ‘born precisely from the interplay of relations of power and everything which constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 297). Different versions of ‘Aboriginal culture’ have played a significant role in organising the complex ‘transactional realities’ that have informed ­‘Indigenous governmentality’ and accompanied the twentieth-century project of Australian state formation. Spencer’s photography produced and circulated a version of Aboriginal culture – ‘grids of intelligibility’ – not for the purpose of initiating dialogue with Aboriginal people but as a part

Not Caring Like the State  121 of the management of Aboriginal bodies, which increasingly determined relationships between white and black Australia in the early twentieth century (Bennett, 2011, p. 191). CtG is a grid of intelligibility, which is another form of colonial capture of Indigenous people. It also captures concerned citizens’ compassion and orientates it towards the settler state’s interventionist logic. CtG is a mode of governing and managing difference, designed to compel behavioural change, to normalise and incorporate Indigenous people into a ‘healthy’ setter future. Statistics and bad headlines are compelling and emotional. They ­organise concern. Or rather they revitalise a readily available social ­desire. As discussed, a characteristic of settler identity is to worry about Aboriginal people. CtG is a particular transactional reality that not only mediates relations between the state and Indigenous people but also shapes broader Australia’s perceptions of Indigeneity. However, CtG needs much more than bad statistics to win over good white people as allies in the fight for health and socio-economic equality. It requires affective, symbolic and material attributes to do its work. What I am referring to the management of care receives its force from diverse attributes, which is inclusive of settler colonial anxiety. One needs a strong and powerful story to evoke care and concern for people who are at a considerable distance from one’s own life. The persistent story of Indigenous vulnerability and settler benevolence holds an affective force; it is reasoned and passionate. To make things better, as Lea contends, we need to bring back into view the conditions of possibility that are not easily identified in Indigenous Affairs policy (2012b). Settler anxiety is a fundamental component in the shared cultural realm in which CtG is produced. In the din of abject headlines and policy formulation, what largely goes un-critiqued is the simplified and idealised Western subject who then performs as a universal model for meaningful and worthy life. The art of caring for others has been simplified, generalised and confidently projected as if unencumbered by history, epistemology and cultural politics (Lea, 2012b, p. np). It is riven by sociocultural ideals of how life should be organised and valued. The drive for statistical equivalence is compelling and haunting; it organises care and thus settler anxiety: who and what to worry or not worry about. Arguably, the state has co-opted ‘progressive’ political discourse. CtG is an example of settler common sense, a common care, that displaces alternative archives of care.

Conclusion Settler care is imagined as intervention and improvement. The progressive’s plaintive cry, ‘but what can we do’, suggests that one’s role is to do something – to fix – which, as discussed, enrols settlers into a governmental project of finding solutions to problems as identified by the state

122  Not Caring Like the State (Cowlishaw, 2013). The answer then becomes clear, assist I­ ndigenous people to develop the capacities to share in ‘our’ good life. Caring like the state becomes valuing liberal progress and taking it for granted that it can secure the basic conditions of life or set ‘the disadvantaged’ on the path to betterment. Care is supplanted by a set of activities that detect inequality and monitor efforts to reduce it in the Indigenous population, who through mechanisms such as statistics are rendered knowable and comparable to an abstract healthy mainstream population. CtG creates certain facts, while obscuring others. Primarily, the very self-perceptions and life projects of the people one professes to care for and support (Eickelkamp, 2011, p. 132). In so doing, Indigeneity is displaced. The management of care obscures how settler colonialism is reproduced in the everyday. It contains the threat of Indigenous presence, makes constant settler sovereignty and masks the absence of care (Rifkin, 2014). CtG is another mode in which Indigenous people are brought into an already imagined future. How then to not care like the state? Settler anxiety enlivens policy programs such as CtG. Indigeneity, as scholars have long observed, makes settlers anxious. The claim to land is a sharp reminder that the colonial project is incomplete and settlers are the beneficiaries of its ongoing violence (Byrd, 2011; Fanon, 1963; Tuck & Yang, 2012). It is also a sharp reminder of Indigenous presence and place-based politics. Indigenous sovereignty has not been ceded and is animated by different forces than Western liberalism. To return to the good white settler’s question, what can we do? The question exposes an anxiety about not knowing what to do. If settlers imagine themselves to claim the future and anxiety is a dread that something meaningful will not come to pass (a projected future, an imagined ethical self or belonging), which, as I have argued, interrupts a taken-for-grantedness, then anxiety can be recruited to unsettle and reimagine practices of care. Anxiety disrupts the common sense, self-evident world that we are enmeshed in and from which one derives identity, moral order and importantly an understanding of, and commitment to, what a good life is and how it is achieved. It is worth remembering that care is a technology of belonging (Berlant, 2004, p. 5). CtG is based upon the assumption of a universal, or more so an idealised, very particular middle-class subject. The Indigenous body is being incorporated into a normative body politic. Anxiety potentially interrupts the settler’s sense of ethics, politics and values and notions of well-being, health and what makes for a good life. To care is to relate. To create a just and sustainable world we need to relate differently. The methods through which one comes to know produce particular relations to things, as discussed above, and can direct ‘for what’ and ‘how’ we care. Questioning care allows a little bit of room to open up in which one is not so firmly embedded within settler common sense and there is space for alternative knowledge, experiences and claims on life. Creating new

Not Caring Like the State  123 political practices and remaking relations of care require attentiveness to multiple associations, epistemologies, ontologies and inhabitation. How does one practice care in a multi-realist world? Let me think through this question with another recent report focused on Indigenous well-being. There have been numerous inquiries, reports written, and recommendations made, that aim to address the crisis of Aboriginal youth suicide. Of course, there have been even more enquiries, reports, policies and significant amounts of government funds expended on programs, services and, perhaps more so, bureaucracy to try to tackle the health, education and socio-economic disparity between Aboriginal and mainstream Australia. But youth suicide, especially the very young, is especially painful and confusing. In 2014, a report was released, The ­Elders’ Report into Preventing Indigenous Self-Harm and Youth ­Suicide, by Elders from across Northern Australia who have ‘witnessed firsthand the grief and despair that youth suicide inflicts on families and communities’ (2014, p. 8). It is a transcription of interviews with Elders and community leaders, from affected communities, who want to speak publically about the causes of and solutions to youth suicide. How could one not care? In his forward to the report, the Chair Max Harrison writes: ‘It was developed in response to a massive and unprecedented increase in Indigenous youth self-harm and suicide that has occurred over the past twenty years across Australia’s Top End’ (2014, p. 8). The Kimberley region of Western Australia has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. The Elders assert the important role of Aboriginal and Torres Strait ­Islander cultures for creating a life in which young people want to live. In response to the question, why is self-harm and suicide happening, ­Harrison notes that there was a ‘high level of agreement between the speakers about the role culture and loss of cultural connection plays in making young people vulnerable to self-harm’ (2014, p. 8). There is nothing new in this argument. Indigenous people have been saying it for a long time. In fact, one could probably ask many progressive settler Australians and they would offer up an apparently similar solution: keep culture strong and the importance of cultural continuity. This is in no way to undermine the report. It is timely and significant, and I am amazed that ­Elders have the energy and resilience to keep speaking in the face of such devastation and impediments to change. Again, as ­Harrison writes, over the last twenty-year period, the ‘incidence of youth suicide in these communities went from being extremely rare phenomenon, to one where the rate of Indigenous youth suicide is the ­highest in the world’ (2014, p. 8). It is a matter of urgency. To intellectualise care, to scrap over knowledge politics in the face of an unremitting crisis could be understandably interpreted as, at the very least, glib. To question the work of statistics, the very language that provokes the state, and broader Australia, to see, hear and be moved to

124  Not Caring Like the State respond could be considered impractical nonsense. Notably, however, the community leaders are not asking the government agencies to respond by fixing the problem (so to speak) or to intervene but to support community-­centred approaches led by Elders to reconnect young people to culture and country (The Elders, 2014, pp. 10–11). By referring to culture and country, the Elders are drawing upon sociocultural practices and a lived reality that are very unfamiliar to most non-Indigenous people (Eickelkamp, 2011, p. 132). Here is where the question of care and not caring like the state becomes significant. To care is to create social relations. Simply put, The Elders Report is affirming and drawing upon a genealogy of care that is very distinctive from, what I call, the management of care, or indeed other genuine practices of care that are evidenced across Australia. Thus, the Elders are making an alternative claim on what it is to be healthy, a good life and a differently shared future. Some might ask, where are these alternative archives of care? ­Everywhere. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been speaking, writing, creating and sharing their life projects with non-­ Indigenous people since and before colonisation. To be clear, by drawing upon The Elders Report, I do not want to reduce and conflate the diversity of contemporary Indigenous experiences with, what is often considered, traditionalist connections to country and culture. It is worth remembering how the acceptance and institutionalisation of the centrality of territorial connections have worked to effectively dispossess many Aboriginal people (Merlan, 2009, p. 306; also see Povinelli, 2002). ­Decolonising care requires deep reflection upon the genealogy of settler practices of care. Indeed, to question if it is care or instead the management of bodies, the containment of the threat of cultural difference? A renewed ethics of care demands settlers address Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in their singularity as political agents and sovereign peoples who have their own life projects. As I have argued, this makes good white people anxious and ‘we’ rush to displace anxiety with readily available solutions – the comforts of intervention and ­remedialism – which forecloses upon productive debates about co-­ existence, belonging and alternative understandings of humanness, life and viable forms of existence (Hage, 2015; Lea, 2012a; Povinelli, 2011; Strakosch, 2015). When anxiety intrudes, however momentarily, it suspends settler common sense, it is deeply unsettling, but a political space opens up in which to ask what futures are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ­peoples trying to make possible? What worlds do you care for?

Notes 1 I would like to thank Andrew Whelan for these and other insights. 2 The 2018 CtG report was released without fanfare. The latest data indicates that three of the seven targets are on track to be met: child mortality, early childhood education and year 12 attainment. After ten years as the national

Not Caring Like the State  125 framework for ameliorating Indigenous disadvantage, in 2018, the g­ overnment launched Close the Gap Refresh. They remain ­committed – ‘staying the course’ to CtG; however, they are seeking feedback from the wider community, reviewing and realigning the CtG agenda. https://­closingthegaprefresh. pmc.gov.au/about. 3 In the 2017 report, of the seven targets, only one was on track: rate of ­attaining year 12 schooling (finishing high school). 4 I would like to thank Andrew Whelan and Michaela Spencer for seeking clarification here.

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Afterword

Throughout Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism, I have ­argued that to meaningfully address the legacies of colonialism, we need to take into account emotional politics. Social worlds are dense, knotty and intricate, and the personal equally so. There is not a simple binary – I­ ndigenous and non-Indigenous – but there is a politics of racialised identities and public discourse that powerfully shape and orientate settler imaginaries (Kowal, 2015). Nonetheless, I have risked generalising so I could speak clearly and analyse settler anxiety as a subjectivity: an emotional territory that reproduces colonial relations, thus deeply affecting the materiality of Indigenous lives. To overcome the ­simplification – the false dichotomies – that too readily attend interpretations of Indigenous and settler interactions, Martin Nakata proposes that the ‘lived space’ is better understood as a broad, multilayered, multidimensional ‘space of dynamic relations’ (2007, p. 199). If I have oversimplified good white women, I did so to complicate the story and create new accounts of settler–Indigenous relations, in the hope of making room for more ­substantial and transformative political encounters. To reiterate, anxiety calls attention to a ‘real social experience and ­certain kinds of historical truth’ (Ngai, 2005, p. 5). The social experience and historical truth that I want readers to consider is settler ­Australia’s inability to engage with, and take seriously, Indigenous political will and autonomy. In a way, reflecting upon anxiety is a form of truth telling. I say this with some caution and an awareness that the Uluru Statement, and years of Indigenous activism, calls for broader Australia to take responsibility for ongoing colonial violence. However, my point is that emotions are cultural and thus ‘we’ are collectively accountable. Anxiety is a public feeling. It is learned and circulated through social practices. I have analysed the work that settler anxiety does to maintain and reaffirm colonial authority. Indigenous sovereignty, agency and self-­ determination are incomprehensible to many settler Australians, and ­ eople. made so by the national pastime of worrying about Indigenous p Or made worse. Relentless concern for Indigenous people, together with the embracing of forms of Indigenous culture, displaces the political encounter, conceals ongoing colonialism and injustice, and makes, yet

130 Afterword again, Indigenous people responsible for ‘their problems’. The settler fantasy of benevolence and a reconciled, perfect future is repeatedly re-enacted when good white people fail to understand how they are implicated in maintaining colonial power relationships. This is a settler problem. Settler anxiety is a fleeing from the imperatives of Indigenous testimony, and thus taking political responsibility. It is a cultural dynamic that reproduces the anxious white subject who, in feeling bad, can feel good and reassert their ethical belonging to a reconciled, just nation. A central argument of this book is that critiquing settler anxiety is not enough. We need to respond to the deeper challenge of transforming the foundations of settler colonialism (Alfred, 2005, p. 180). To do so, I have zeroed in on moments when settler possessive logic is disrupted. When the taken-for-grantedness of settler authority and belonging is on shaky ground. Let me return to the example of Chapter 3. Initially, Somerville’s project is to create what she refers to as practices of postcolonial inhabitation. She wants to transform how she understands and represents her connections to space, divergent histories and Indigenous knowledge. Her working relationships and friendships with Aboriginal women leave her feeling out of place. The Aboriginal women have what she conceptualises as a body/landscape connection, a deep, embodied relationship with country, which she wants for herself. A sense of loss and desire for an idealised sense of home blinds her to how settler belonging is secured through legal and political structures. Notably, ­despite her awareness of white privilege, colonisation and the fraught history of white feminist engagements with Indigenous politics, in the face of Aboriginal possession, she experiences dispossession: the deep settler colonial fear of being a body out of place. There is a cultural ­pathology that Indigenous sovereignty is at the cost of settler homeliness – an embittering binary. The struggle over land is the foundation of settler colonialism, and thus drives the ongoing political and affective conflicts between Indigenous and white Australia. Settler colonialism is premised upon the elimination and replacement of Indigeneity, the disavowal of the violence of colonialism to affirm settlers’ legitimacy. It is a persistent need to disavow Indigenous presence (Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 1999) or a particular form of Indigeneity, land-based politics, and unassimilable, unmanageable difference. Settler anxiety is provoked by the proximity and the demand to share sociopolitical space with Indigenous people. The worrying, the pity, the guilt are modes of containing the ‘crisis’ induced by Indigeneity, which permits the accommodation and engagement with I­ ndigenous difference (Rifkin, 2014). Decolonisation requires, at the very least, sharing sociopolitical space and territoriality. Not containing the crisis. Thus, settlers need to stay with discomfort, lean into the political, and together ­ ustralia. ­Decolonisation in difference creatively reimagine unsettled A is unsettling, as Tuck and Yang propose, because it brings about the

Afterword  131 repatriation of Indigenous land and life. It is not a metaphor for addressing disadvantage, racism or improving society and institutional processes (2012, p. 35). White Australians cannot comfortably belong in and to settler colonialism; nonetheless, we need to work to understand how we are constituted by it. My protagonists, however inadvertently, skidded into spaces in which they had to confront the presence and vitality of Indigenous life and sovereignty. Their common sense world was interrupted. Where they might have wanted to reckon with colonial history, find release from colonial complicity, understand Indigenous culture or renew their sense of ethical belonging, they were met with political agency. The path to flee into virtuous anxiety was blocked. There was no part for the good white women to play. Anxiety is both a shock and a pause in the fracas. It undermines and reveals the conceit of settler pride, innocence and certainty. A political space was prised open in which these women questioned themselves and their taken-for-granted world, without taking shelter in pity, worry or resentment. In these moments, settlers are made answerable to Indigenous people. It is not simply a matter of recalling colonial violence but remembering Indigenous sovereignty and seeking ways to respect and defer to it. As I have proposed, this is the beginning of taking responsibility and a renewed mode of relationality. Although my case studies are focused on direct encounters, I am not suggesting that the intercultural is limited to particular ‘contact zones’ or spaces in which there are interactions between Indigenous and settler peoples. Nor am I saying that transformation can only happen through personal encounters. Given that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are only 3% of the population, it is an impossibility. It would once again deflect responsibility onto Indigenous people, to say nothing of being completely exhausting. Everyday life is saturated with cultural and political differences, divergence and relatedness, even when there is no evident exchange between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. It is in the ‘thickness’ of everyday life that people navigate, however unaware, the effects of power-laden relational processes, be they familial, local, regional, national or global. The givenness of settler authority organises experiences of and attachments to ‘home’, subjectivity and relationships to people, place and history (Rifkin, 2014). Social transformation requires reimagining modes of belonging, a differently shared future and living with uncertainty. Indigenous sovereignty is incommensurable with settler colonialism, as Tuck and Yang identify, and therefore decolonisation requires an ethics of incommensurability. Driven by an uneasy solidarity, this acknowledges the unbridgeable, the distinct and overall un-commonality. In their words, ‘decolonisation is not an ‘and’. It is an elsewhere’ (2012, p. 36). As I wrote in the Preface, what motivated this project is a desire to ­expand our capacity to understand settler–Indigenous relations, invest in

132 Afterword the plurality and diversity of places, peoples, histories and knowledges, and grow our imaginative life to create more just futures. Settler anxiety matters. It plays a substantial role in maintaining colonial relations and potentially dissembling settler authority and recreating the sociopolitical order. Good white people were deeply affected by the post-1970s Indigenous rights movements, the reconciliation era and, more so, Indigenous testimony and revelations of colonial violence. Perhaps overall, they were most profoundly affected by the Stolen Generations and subsequent abuse of Indigenous children – I am not doubting the genuineness of their care. If settler colonialism orientates, shapes and limits life, but it is not totalising and coherent, then there is room for disjuncture and the subversion of power relations (Rifkin, 2014). Feeling states can be shifted, reoriented. Indeed, I would argue, they must be. Good white people demonstrate that they are seriously affected by the legacies of colonialism and are committed to social justice. Thus, they or we can be moved by Indigenous self-determination and political will. The problem is not good intentions but rather the felt experience of settler belonging. Self-possession is tied to territorial possession. One’s sense of certainty and decency cannot be the measure of one’s capacity to engage and, more so, the value of another. We need to reimagine ethical belonging as developing the capacity to live in and amongst multiplicity, difference and dissensus. To do so, ‘we’ need to give up on goodness. This is not the end, the answer, but rather another beginning. History tells us we need to remain steadfast. The Uluru Statement, treaty negotiations and a history of political activism point us towards an elsewhere. As I finalised this book, I began to wonder what political moment we are in now? Hindsight is a great thing. One can look back across ­Australian history and see when broader Australia, or at least large sections of the population, galvanised to support Indigenous people’s ­demands for equality and recognition that Australia has a black history, present and future. I’m thinking of times such as the Apology to the ­Stolen Generations, the hundreds of thousands of Australians who walked for ­ ustralia has a reconciliation in 2000, or the 1967 referendum. Settler A cultural habit of cyclically remembering colonial violence, celebrating aspects of Indigenous culture, backing calls for justice, and then moving on. Moments that are the beginning of social transformation are treated like the end. The goal in and of itself. Undoubtedly, there has been significant social change and quiet individual shifts; however, all contained enough to not rupture the political order. If good white people genuinely desire social justice, then we need to commit to sharing the responsibility to stop the cycle and to see changes through. Anxieties of Belonging in Settler Colonialism was written in the wake of the Northern Territory Intervention and the subsequent changes to or reversals of Indigenous Affairs. Policy programs that once supported forms of self-governance have been replaced with mainstreaming

Afterword  133 of services. Routinely, community-based services and organisations are ­defunded, and there are harsher, punitive responses to I­ ndigenous ­disadvantage. Where there was once the talk of Indigenous self-­ determination, now the common language is bad statistics. Colonialism has been relegated to history, seen as the bad old past and rarely publically discussed. The neoliberal favourite of personal responsibility is in ascension. There are steep penalties for being black, poor and socially marginalised. Paul Keating’s historic Redfern Speech, in which he rallied Australia to ­acknowledge that, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians…. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. (1992) These words seem to belong not only to a different time but also place. He was calling upon settler Australia to, amongst other things, renew our imaginary life. Thankfully, in our contemporary moment, there ­continue to be noble exceptions. The states of Victoria and South Australia1 have been collaborating with Indigenous leaders and communities to advance treaty processes. On 28 March 2018, the Victorian government introduced legislation into parliament that is the basis for negotiating a treaty with Indigenous people. The Aboriginal Victorians Bill 2018, as it is known, would establish a representative body of thirty people from six different voting areas across Victoria who will determine the negotiation framework and administer the funds that will resource groups to enter into treaties (2018). Then of course in May 2017, the historic Uluru Statement from the Heart was released, which called for the establishment of a ‘First Nations Voice’ in the Australian Constitution and a ‘Makarrata Commission’ to supervise a process of agreement-making and truth-­ telling between governments and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (National Constitutional Convention, 2017). Importantly, the Uluru Statement was the outcome of extensive consultations that were commissioned and funded by the federal government to determine what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples wanted from the constitutional recognition process. The overwhelming majority of the Indigenous people involved in the regional dialogues and those who attended the three-day national convention at Uluru in May rejected ‘symbolic’ recognition. Instead, they appealed for substantial constitutional and social reform: truthfully address colonial and ongoing structural violence and empowering Indigenous people to be truly self-determining. It took several months for Prime Minister Turnbull to respond. When he did, he

134 Afterword dismissed the Indigenous voice to parliament, saying it is neither ‘desirable or capable of winning acceptance at referendum’ (Wahlquist, 2017). Despite that initially the broader population fell silent on the Uluru Statement, a subsequent survey suggests that the Australian people support constitutional recognition and the Uluru Statement. 2 Indigenous Australians are not backing down and a long history of political struggle has armed activists, leaders, organisations and community with p ­ lentiful intergenerational experience, strength, momentum and resilience. We need to hold governments to account. The Uluru Statement invites broader Australia to walk with First Nations people, together to demand significant social and structural reforms. Australians are once again being asked to transform the foundations of settler colonialism, to belong to a different decolonising nation. However, as I have argued, this necessitates substantial changes to settler subjectivity. For good white people, anxiety is ordinary, a commonplace response to Indigenous self-­ determination and land-based politics, which limits the collective capacity to intervene in and transform setter colonialism. Thus, ‘we’ need to create new subjectivities that are constituted by historical ‘truth-telling’, reorientated by Indigenous testimony, political agency, vitality, sovereignty and a culture of agreement making – to invent new models of knowing who ‘we’ are in relation to Indigeneity. I am not suggesting that these settler Australians are not already amongst us. Rather, my argument is that to make substantial sociopolitical changes requires that such practices are ordinary, everyday – a new common sense.

Notes 1 On 17 March 2018, there was a change of government in South Australia. The Liberal Party won the election and is on the record for not supporting the treaty processes. 2 See https://app.secure.griffith.edu.au/news/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ Griffith-University-U NSW-Australian-Constitutional-Values-Survey -Sept-2017-Results-2.pdf.

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Afterword  135 Parliament of Victoria. (2018). Advancing the treaty process with Aboriginal Victorians Bill 2018. Melbourne, VIC: Parliament of Victoria. Rifkin, M. (2014). Settler common sense: Queerness and everyday ­colonialism in the American renaissance. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Tuck, E., & Yang, W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. ­Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Veracini, L. (2010). Settler colonialism: A theoretical overview. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Wahlquist, C. (2017, October 26). Indigenous voice proposal ‘not desirable’, says Turnbull. Guardian Australia. Surrey Hills, NSW. Wolfe, P. (1999). Settler colonialism and the transformation of anthropology: The politics and poetics of an ethnographic event. London, England: Bloomsbury.

Index

abandonment: by family 43, 45, 60; of security 56, 62–3; by state xi, 25n12, 111 Abbott, Tony 2, 107–8, 109 Aboriginal: law 17, 33, 37, 47, 71, 72, 83, 85, 91; protocols 72–3, 79–81, 83–5; sacred 90, 94–5, 99; see also ceremony Aboriginal Victorians Bill (2018) 133 accountability 1, 6, 129, 134; lack of 25n11, 102 activism: feminist 10–11, 130; Indigenous vii, viii, 6, 7, 14, 74, 114, 129, 134; in solidarity 1, 5, 8, 14, 18–19, 24, 71, 121, 132; see also Indigenous agency; Indigenous autonomy; Indigenous self-­­determination affect(s): alien 97, 101–2; and bodily relations 51, 58–9, 62, 65; emotion and 3, 11–13; land and sovereignty 40, 56, 72, 78–9, 85, 130; multiplicity and 53–4, 59, 66–7; and social relationships 83, 91, 100, 118, 121 Ahmed, Sara 12, 15–16, 101–2 Aly, Waleed xii–xiii amnesia: settler 20, 73–4, 84; see also forgetting Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle, ‘Little Children are Sacred’ 104n9, 110 Anangu viii, 99–103 Anderson, Warwick 76 Angatja 54–5 anger: male xiii–xiv, 42; settler 89, 94 anti-­racism viii–ix, 89, 118; see also activism anxiety (settler/good white woman) 2–14; care and 112, 121–2, 124;

and Indigenous agency viii–ix, xv, 2–3, 8, 10, 16, 20, 32, 52, 61–2, 79, 98–9, 100–1, 129–30, 134; to reconcile/belong xiv, 5, 38, 40, 63, 66, 76, 79; as sickness 51, 54, 58, 62; staying with x, xvii, 4, 14, 23, 54, 82; as subjectivity 8–9, 93, 129, 134; virtuous 3–4, 22–3, 81, 85, 89, 103, 109, 131; see also crisis; dissolving; feeling(s); fleeing; guilt; shame; worrying apology 17, 25n11, 94–5 Apology, National 6, 15, 18, 74, 104n7, 113–14 Appin Massacre x appropriation 45, 52, 54–5, 57, 58, 67, 71, 80 Arnhem Land 77, 90, 93, 99; north-­ east xvii, 88, 92; see also Yolngu assimilation xii, 15, 20, 25n6, 75, 77, 94 Australia Day vii; see also Change the Date autobiography xv, 14, 45, 71 bad white people 18–19, 81, 108 Balanda 88–104 Baldwin Spencer, Walter 120 Bark Petition 91 Bawaka Cultural Experiences (BCE) 91–2 belonging (settler): anxieties of xiv, xv–vi, 2, 6, 8, 12, 22–3, 35, 60–3, 100, 124, 130–1; everyday/national xi, 14, 16–18, 20–1, 24, 31–3, 38, 40, 78; problematics of 38, 40, 43–6, 51–4, 56–8, 67, 71–2, 75–6, 79, 94–6, 108–9; reimagining/ ethical 4–5, 8–9, 11, 14, 36, 48, 65–7, 83, 99, 102, 122, 131–2; see also home; sovereignty, Indigenous

138 Index Bennett, Tony 120 Berlant, Lauren 11, 13, 89 Birch, Tony 2 Bird Rose, Deborah 48 Bissell, David 98 black armband 86n3 Black Line 70, 78 Black War 70, 72 body: as assemblage 42, 57–9, 65–6, 85; collective 22, 99–101, 103; ‘crisis of the’ 52, 63–4, 67; emotion and 1, 12, 51, 92, 96–8; -identity 75, 82; /landscape connection 51, 53–4, 58, 61–2, 130; racial 47, 39, 76–8, 101, 119, 121, 122, 124; see also affect(s); anxiety; embodiment Body/Landscape Journals (BLJ) (1999) xv, 51–66 Bringing Them Home 6, 14, 113–14 Buchanan, Ian 18, 25n11 Bungul 88, 97; see also dancing Burarrwanga family 91–2, 95–6, 97, 99, 101, 103–4 Butler, Judith 18 Butler, Kelly Jean 15 Byrd, Jodi 20 care: ethical relationships of 84, 88, 104, 108–10, 122–3, 123–4; settler colonial ix, xv, xvi, 2–3, 15, 24, 31, 108–9, 114–15, 120–2, 124; settler subjectivity and 8–9, 13, 18–19, 31, 52, 82, 100, 132 Central Desert 33, 35, 36, 56 ceremony 24n2; Appin Massacre memorial x; women’s 46–7, 57, 58; Yolngu 90–1, 95–6 Change the Date vii–viii, 6, 8 child removal policies 8, 17, 18, 25n11, 78, 114 see also Stolen Generations childhood: home/country of xi–iv, 31–33, 35, 37–44, 48, 72–3; men xiii, 32–3, 41–3, 45–7 Close the Gap: Progress and Priorities Report 2015 107 Closing the Gap (CtG) xvi, 107–8, 111–15, 116–19, 121–2, 125 Cohen, Patsy 55, 66 colonial: anti-­23, 65, 67, 71, 83; authority and vulnerability xiii, 3,

5, 8–9, 18, 76, 82, 109–10, 121; racial logic 76–7; skin 73, 80, 81–2, 83; spatial imaginary 38, 53–4, 62–3, 66 common sense 55, 71, 96, 108, 116, 131; disrupted/new 13, 23, 32–3, 40, 99, 103, 122, 124, 134; settler xi, xiii, 33, 75, 79, 97, 121 Constitution, the 133; reform of viii, 25n12, 133–4 Coomaditchie x Coulthard, Glen 17 Council of Australian Governments (COAG) 111 country: Aboriginal English definition xiv; Indigenous 33, 39, 47–8, 52–5, 58–9, 67, 72–3, 84, 88, 90–2, 96, 124, 130; settler connection to 31, 36, 39, 46, 48, 52, 56–7, 94; Welcome to 4, 95; see also body, / landscape connection; childhood Cowlishaw, Gillian 109, 117 Craft for a Dry Lake (2000) xv, 32–3, 35–41, 43–5 crisis: in Indigenous Australia 7, 20, 109, 123; management 79, 115, 119; of settler belonging 25n10, 51–2, 63–4, 67, 130 dancing 101; as ceremony 24n2; experiencing Pintupi 56, 58–9; experiencing Yolngu 88, 95, 97, 103; see also country Deaths in Custody 14, 24n5, 114 decolonisation 17, 54, 62, 68n6, 72, 82–3, 85; as unsettling 89, 130, 131; work towards 23, 33, 48, 84, 114, 124, 134; see also dissolving Deleuze, Giles 12, 57, 63 Derrida, Jacques 71 Dharawal x Diprose, Roslyn 75, 81–3 discomfort xvi, 1, 3, 43, 47–8, 90, 96–8, 100; meditation on ix, 4, 81, 85; staying with ix, 4, 54, 81–2, 89, 130 dispossession: as colonial strategy vii, xi, 15, 20, 31, 34, 40, 70–1, 78; mourning Indigenous 60, 80; settler 10, 20, 33, 83, 130 dissolving 61, 72–3, 81 Dowling, Robyn 21

Index  139 Elders’ Report into Preventing Indigenous Self-­Harm and Youth Suicide, The 123–4 embodiment: dis-­57, 66, 101; and relationship to place xvii, 33, 51, 54, 56–9, 61, 63, 130; of settler common sense xi, xiii, 34–5, 38, 82, 89–90; see also body, ‘crisis of the’ emotions: awkward/negative xiv, 3, 16; and belonging/home xi, 21–4, 33, 39, 75, 78; and Indigeneity ix, 2, 5, 8, 11, 13, 40, 51–2, 80–3, 88–9, 93, 95, 98–9, 129; suspicion of 35, 38, 44, 47; understanding xvi, 11–12, 96–7, 114; see also anxiety empathy xiv, xvii, 6, 82 encounter(s): ethical 79–85, 95, 101–2; intercultural 47, 61, 79, 89–90, 93, 97; refusing the political ix, xv, 2, 4–5, 12, 17, 20, 23, 52, 80, 101, 103; transformative x, xv–vii, 3, 33, 54, 57–8, 65–7, 88, 99, 103–4, 129, 131 endurable zone 63–4, 67 equality: advocating for 19, 71, 103, 132; governing for socio-­economic 7, 108, 111, 115, 117, 121; relationships of 88, 90 ethical: belonging xvi, 5, 8, 12, 14, 22–3, 71, 122, 130–2; futures 5, 22–3, 52, 63–4, 66, 75, 99, 101–2, 108; settler-­Indigenous relations xvii, 5, 18, 47, 51, 72, 79, 81, 83–4, 93, 95, 118; see also care; encounter(s) ethos xvi, 95–7, 99–101, 102 eugenics xii, 78 Everett, Jim 70–1, 72–3, 80, 84 exchange: Indigenous-­settler 57, 83, 91, 131; political 103 fair go 15 fathers and daughters xi–xii, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39–40, 43–8 feeling(s) 12–13, 109; bad 2, 16, 19, 38–9, 80–2, 96, 100, 130; of belonging xi–xiii, 22, 31–3, 52, 75; new 97–9, 101, 103, 132; public 11, 14–15, 18, 89, 129; ugly 3, 5; see also anxiety; emotions feminism 109; and embodiment 58, 64–5; race and 10–11, 130; and writing xvi, 51, 64

First Nations viii, 133–4 fleeing 4, 13–14, 23, 52, 76, 80, 89, 98, 130, 131 Foley, Gary viii, forgetting 78, 83–5; habit of 74–5, 84, 90, 102, 132; remembering and 6, 8, 73–6, 80, 84; see also recognition Foucault, Michel 9, 63, 120 futures: Indigenous ix, xi, 8, 34, 88, 121, 124, 132; predetermined 9–10, 18, 20–1, 114–15, 118, 122, 130; unfamiliar 13, 23; see also ethical, futures Gandhi, Leela 117 Garma 88–9, 91–3, 95–6 Gelder, Ken 4, 8, 94, 99 gender: rural living and xiii, 31, 40, 42, 46; in settler common sense xiv, xvi, 33; see also feminism generosity: corporeal 83, 85; and encounter 102; settler 16, 101; Yolngu 98–99 genocide xii, 25n11, 73, 86n3 good intentions ix, xvi, 19, 23, 48, 52, 80, 97, 132 Gooder, Haydie 15, 94 goodness 2, 81, 82–3, 89, 95, 102, 132 Gorman-­Murray, Andrew 21 Gove Land Rights Case (Milirrpum v Nabalco 1971) 91 governmentality xvi, 24, 109; and transactional realities 120–1 grief xiv, 40, 80, 123 Grossman, Michele 61–2 Grosz, Elizabeth 64–5 Guattari, Félix 57 guilt: displacing responsibility ix, 8, 13, 23, 38, 40, 81; space outside of 82, 85, 98–9; white settler xiv, 9, 16, 18–19, 60, 63, 89, 94–5, 100, 130; see also emotions Hage, Ghassan 21–2, 101 Healy, Chris 4, 74–5 Heidegger, Martin 13–14 Highmore, Ben 11, 96–7, 99, 100 history wars 74 home 11, 14, 21–2; childhood xi–xii, 32–3, 35, 37–41, 72–3; Indigenous 70, 92; made strange 8, 73, 85;

140 Index multiple inhabitations of x, 53, 56, 61; in the nation xvi–vii, 21, 45, 60–1; settlers at 23, 38, 43–4, 48, 63, 75, 102, 130–1; see also anxiety; belonging; country; emotions; inhabitation hooks, bell 19 hope 22–3, 75, 100, 104, 108, 115, 129 Horáková, Martina 40, 44 Howard, John 15, 104n7, 104n9, 110 impossibility: of good white subject 23, 84; grounds of 17, 71–2, 85 Indigeneity: encountering ix, 3, 11, 13, 18, 33, 98, 134; displacing 2, 20, 122, 130; framing 4, 45, 55, 93–5, 107–8, 111, 115, 121 Indigenous: presence 4, 20, 23, 33, 37, 48, 71, 74, 75, 79, 122, 130–1; resilience 73, 123, 134; testimony xv, 6, 8, 10, 14–16, 38, 101, 114, 130, 132, 134; well-­being 3, 7, 52, 88, 107–9, 118 Indigenous Affairs 108, 110, 119, 121, 132; see also Closing the Gap Indigenous agency 58, 96, 131, 134; engaging with xvii, 71, 80, 82, 84–5; settler anxiety and viii–ix, 2–3, 8, 16, 52, 62, 75, 95, 129 Indigenous autonomy 4, 90, 92; desire to respect xvi, 36, 43, 99; as unsettling 2, 23, 39, 89, 94–5, 98, 102, 129; see also anxiety Indigenous health ix, 119, 124; government policies for 107–13, 117, 121, 123; worrying about 1, 2, 5, 74, 109; see also care; Closing the Gap; statistics Indigenous self-­determination viii, ix, xv, 4, 5, 22, 40, 48, 92, 99, 110, 129, 132–4 inequality: government approaches to 7, 108–9, 111–12, 115–18, 122; troubled by 2, 11, 75, 101 inhabitation: alternative/postcolonial 53, 56–9, 61, 63–5, 67, 123, 130; settler/colonial 21, 23, 31, 37, 62, 76, 102, 114; through emotion 11–12, 85; see also belonging; home Intervention, the (Northern Territory) 99, 100, 103, 110, 119, 132

Invasion/Survival Day see Change the Date Island Home Country (2008) xv, 71–2 Jacobs, Jane 8, 15, 94 Keating, Paul 15, 133 Key Forum 88–9, 92; see also Garma Kowal, Emma 22, 117–18 Kurtzer, Sonja 44, 45 Lacan, Jacques 12 Land, Clare 6 land rights 6, 14, 37, 44, 91, 94 Land Rights Act 99 Langton Marcia 74 Latour, Bruno 59, 119 Lea, Tess 5, 114, 116, 118, 121 lightness 96, 98 listening 8, 18, 84, 88, 95; not ix, 1, 100–1 Lorde, Audre 19 McKinnon, Gemma viii Mahood, Kim 32–42, 43–8 maps 33, 35–6, 44 Massey, Doreen 53, 65 memoir xv, xvi, 34, 36, 38–40, 74 memory: belonging and 39, 41, 45; cultural 14, 75, 78, 90, 99; Indigenous 14, 67; sites 48, 55–6, 64, 65 Minefield, The vii–viii, x Moreton-­Robinson, Aileen 10–11, 20, 31, 79 Morris, Meaghan 17 mourning vii, 18, 31, 33, 35, 71, 80 Murphy, Michelle 109–10 Myers, Fred 52 Nakata, Martin 129 National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples 113–14 National Indigenous Reform Agreement (Closing the Gap) 111 native title 6, 14 Native Title Act (1993) 6, 8 neo-­colonialism 55, 73, 81, 119 Ngai, Sianne 3, 12, 13 Northern Territory National Emergency Response (NTER) 104n9, 110; see also Intervention, the

Index  141 Onsman, Andrys 70 outback: myth of 32, 34–5, 40, 43, 46, 48 Overcoming Disadvantage Report 113, 119 pain 3, 11; of colonial violence vii, 15, 18, 45, 84–5, 100, 123; disrupted sense of self 2, 46, 48, 65–6, 104; settler xiv, 25n10, 51, 54 Palawa 71–3, 75, 78–85 pastoralists 31, 40, 67 perceptions: of belonging 24, 39, 76, 98; and emotions 11, 96–7; of Indigeneity 4, 18, 74, 101, 108, 115, 121 Perera, Suvendrini 77 performance: of belonging 12, 15, 31, 42, 54, 59, 61, 75, 83–4; of good white subject 9, 12, 14, 19, 101; Indigenous 24n2, 66–7, 95–6, 100; of settler authority 115, 121; writing as 55–6, 58, 64, 66 Pintupi 56–9 Pitchford, Phyllis 72–3 place: out of xii, xiii–iv, xvii, 5, 8, 20, 39, 43, 47, 96, 100, 130; politics of 33, 45, 57, 59–60, 65, 72, 75–9, 81, 114, 122; stories in xi, 43, 48, 53, 61–2, 67; see also belonging; home Position Doubtful 36 possession: self-­44, 78, 83, 132; settler 15, 19, 20, 31, 76, 77–8, 94; un-­73; see also dispossession postcolonial: belonging 8, 22, 67, 94; politics/practice 4, 52–4, 56, 60, 62–4, 66, 130 Povinelli, Elizabeth 16 Probyn, Elspeth 12, 39 Probyn-­Rapsey Fiona 57, 58 Protection era 15, 25n6 quiet: dis-­89, 103; keeping xiii, 1–2, 43; and stillness 89, 97–9 Racial Discrimination Act 99, 110 racism 2–3, 8, 10, 18–19, 93, 109, 131 Rancière, Jacques 96, 103 Read, Peter 25n10 reciprocity 88, 90–1, 96, 99, 102–3 reckoning: with colonial history xiv, 6, 73–4, 79–80, 84–5, 114, 131

recognition xvii; for being a good white 5, 7, 22, 75, 83; impossibility of 71–2, 84; Indigenous claims for 8, 25n4, 90, 98, 132; of Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy 16–18, 95, 98, 101, 103; mis-­96, 102; state viii, 39, 47, 91, 133–4; of white modes of belonging 23–4, 63, 78, 85; sovereignty, Indigenous; Welcome to Country reconciliation viii, xiv, 3, 22–3, 94, 99, 101, 110, 130; era/movement xv, 6, 8, 14–17, 35, 40, 74, 132; postxvii, 6–7, 8, 23, 52, 67 redemption 9, 16, 19, 38, 74 Redfern Speech 15, 133 Redfern Statement, The 113 referendum, 1967 132 remedialism xi, 8, 17, 114, 116, 117–18; see also statistics; Indigenous health remembering 82–3, 131, 132; and forgetting 6, 8, 73–6, 80, 84; politics of 17–18, 82 remorse 18, 82, 100 resentment 3, 6, 85, 94, 104, 131 responsibility: failure to take 18, 38, 120, 130; management and 108, 110–11; neoliberal x, 7, 133; as personal xi, xiii, 9, 21, 81; taking political 21, 23–4, 38, 48, 71–3, 80, 84–5, 129, 131–2 Reynolds, Henry 17, 74 Rifkin, Mark xi, 20, 24, 34, 75, 78–9 Rowse, Tim 110, 111 Rudd, Kevin 15, 18, 74, 104n7, 113 rupture 89, 132; in sense of home 46–8, 73, 82 Scott, Kim xii sensible, the 96–7, 102 see also ethos settler, white: benevolence 1, 2, 4, 9, 16, 23–4, 81, 83, 121, 130; displacement 4, 23, 33, 39, 60; haunting xii, 33, 38, 70, 73, 94; imaginaries 71, 73, 76, 93, 95, 120, 129, 133; innocence 2, 15–16, 18, 20, 81, 102; masculinity 32, 38, 40, 46, 48; subjectivity xv, 5, 8–11, 22, 33, 45, 53–4, 62–6, 75, 79–81, 118, 129, 131, 134

142 Index shame: being with 89, 97, 104; Indigenous 99–100; settler 14, 16, 17, 18–19, 38, 100, 112; see also ethos; guilt Shorten, Bill 108 silence xiv, 42, 44, 60, 63; great Australian 6, 90; on Uluru Statement viii, 8; uncovering 72–3, 79; see also quiet Simpson, Audra 20, 115 solidarity vii, xiv, 5; lack of 7, 8; problematic 4, 10, 22, 80, 131 Somerville, Margaret xv, 51–67, 130 sovereignty: Indigenous viii, xi, xvi, 1, 3, 4–5, 8, 16–17, 20, 23, 33, 40, 45, 48, 74–6, 79, 122, 124, 129–31, 134; Palawa 71–3, 79–81, 82, 83–5; self- viii, 61–2, 83; settler xi, 20, 31, 60–1, 63, 67, 76–8, 89, 93, 97, 102, 122; Yolngu 90, 92, 97 space: of encounter ix, 6, 11, 16, 18, 20, 32, 47, 55, 62–3, 84–5, 89, 95–104; multiplicity of x, 21, 33, 53–4, 64–7, 74, 122, 129–32; stories in 41, 53–4, 56 Spinoza 12 Stanner, W.E.H 90, 102 statistics 108, 112–13, 115, 122, 123; bad 18, 114, 116, 118–21, 133; see also Closing the Gap Stolen Generations 6, 14–15, 17, 44, 113, 132 Strakosch, Elizabeth 111, 115 suffering: Indigenous 8, 15, 18, 22, 75, 80, 82; settler 52, 81 Tanami (Desert) 34, 35–9, 43–4, 47–8; Pintupi 56–9; Warlpiri 46 Tasmanian Aboriginals see Palawa terra nullius 20, 24n4, 34, 37 Thornley, Jeni xv, 71–4, 77, 78–85 Throsby, Charles x tourism 57; cultural xv, xvi, 88–96, 98, 100, 102–4 transformation: Indigenous initiatives for settler viii, 88, 91–2, 94–5; of Indigenous Affairs 110, 119; pain of 19, 48, 54, 65, 103–4; personal

9, 39, 53, 57–8, 63–5, 88; of public sphere 6, 14; of settler colonialism 23–4, 81, 109, 129–32, 134 treaty processes 17, 90, 132, 133 Truganini 70–1, 82–3 truth(s): historical/cultural 3, 9–10, 31, 81, 114, 120, 129; -telling viii, 129, 133–4 Turnbull, Malcolm 24n1, 111–12, 133 Uluru viii, 99, 133 Uluru Statement viii, 8, 129, 132, 133–4 Veracini, Lorenzo 20 violence, colonial 77–8; beneficiaries of 2, 122; disavowal of 20, 43, 45, 130; and good white settler 9, 18–19, 75, 82, 102; Indigenous testimony 6, 8, 47, 84; ongoing 72, 113, 117, 122, 129, 133; responsibility for 48, 71, 73–4, 79–80, 85, 131; revelations of xiii, xv, 14–16, 38, 74, 83, 94, 132; see also reckoning Walmajarri 35–6 Warlpiri 35, 37, 43, 45, 46, 48 Watson, Irene ix, 4, 16–17, 71–2, 81, 85 Watson, Sam 73, 84 Welcome to Country 4, 95 white possessive logic 20–1, 32–3, 47, 73, 80, 95, 100, 130 white privilege xiv, 5, 10–11, 32, 38, 45, 66, 94 Williams, Raymond xi witness 47–8, 57; bearing 14–16, 18–19, 82 Wolfe, Patrick 19 worrying: and CtG xvi, 107–8, 121; about Indigenous people viii, ix, xv, 2–6, 8, 13, 18, 23, 24, 76, 79, 81–2, 98, 109, 117, 120–1, 129, 130–1 Yirrkala 90 Yolngu xvi, 77, 88–92, 93, 95–6, 97–102 Yothu Yindi: band 90; Foundation 104n5