Boundary Writing: An Exploration of Race, Culture, and Gender Binaries in Contemporary Australia [Illustrated] 0824830059, 9780824830052

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boundary writing

Writing Past Colonialism is the signature book series of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, based in Melbourne, Australia. By postcolonialism we mean modes of writing and artistic production that critically engage with and contest the legacy and continuing mindset and practices of colonialism, and inform debate about the processes of globalization. This perspective manifests itself in a concern with difference from the Euro-American, the global, and the norm. The series is also committed to publishing works that seek to make a difference, both within the academy and outside it. our hope is that books in the series will • engage with contemporary issues and problems relating to colonialism and postcolonialism • attempt to reach a broad constituency of readers • address the relation between theory and practice • be interdisciplinary in approach as well as subject matter • experiment with new modes of writing and methodology

INSTITUTE OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES | WRITING PAST COLONIALISM

Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African Auto/ biography Edited by Judith Lütge Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani Ngwenya, and Thomas Olver Boundary Writing: An Exploration of Race, Culture, and Gender Binaries in Contemporary Australia Edited by Lynette Russell Postcolonizing the International: Working to Change the Way We Are Edited by Phillip Darby

boundary writing AN EXPLORATION OF RACE, CULTURE, AND GENDER BINARIES IN CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIA

Edited by Lynette Russell

University of Hawai‘i Press

Honolulu

© 2006 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 11 10 09 08 07 06

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Boundary writing : an exploration of race, culture, and gender binaries in contemporary Australia / edited by Lynette Russell. p. cm. — (Writing past colonialism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8248-3005-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8248-3005-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8248-3048-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8248-3048-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ethnology—Australia. 2. Ethnic groups—Australia. 3. Minorities—Australia. 4. Group identity—Australia. 5. Pluralism (Social sciences)—Australia. 6. Australia—Race relations. 7. Australia—Ethnic relations. I. Russell, Lynette. II. Series: Writing past colonialism series. GN666.B65 2003 305.800994—dc22 2006012481

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources

Designed by Leslie Fitch Printed by The Maple -Vail Book Manufacturing Group

In memory of David Reimer, from whom we learned so much

C O NTE NTS

Chapter 1. Introduction Lynette Russell

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Chapter 2. From Beats to Cybersex: Australian Gay Male Appropriation of Public Spaces 18 Clive Moore Chapter 3. The Nonsurgical Option: Deciding Not to Decide about Gender Identity 43 Myfanwy McDonald Chapter 4. Non-Anglo and Non-Aboriginal Australian: Multiculturalism, the Third Side of the Black/ White Divide 66 Erez Cohen Chapter 5. Cultural Calculus: Cultural Translation and the Politics of Indigenous Cultural Property 86 Stephen Pritchard Chapter 6. “. . . different lives in different places”: A Space for Multiple White Identities through Aboriginal Rock Music 103 Liz Reed Chapter 7. Indigenous Rights and the Mutability of Cultures: Tradition, Change, and the Politics of Recognition 122 Bruno David Chapter 8. Beyond Orality and Literacy: Textuality, Modernity, and Representation in Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley 149 Michele Grossman Chapter 9. Rom and the Academy Repositioned: Binary Models in Yolŋu Intellectual Traditions and their Application to Wider Intercultural Dialogues 170 Aaron Corn and Neparrŋa Gumbula Contributors Index 203

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Introduction Lynette Russell

This book explores the desire to categorize individuals and collectivities into racial, ethnic, gender, and sexuality categories of black and white; men and women; gay and straight; and so on, which is a feature of most Western societies. At its core are the intersecting concepts of indigeneity, race, gender, and sex as seen from an Australian perspective. As the title alludes, it is the boundaries and edges of these categories and concepts that are under analysis. The chapters that follow reveal that such dichotomous either/or categories are often too restrictive. Through a series of case studies the contributors consider how these overlap, coincide, and at times conflict, and they will explore the tension between these classifications that in turn produce individual speaking positions. Many Australians (indigenous, Anglo-settler, recent migrants of diverse ethnic backgrounds, queer) occupy an “in-between position” that is neither one thing nor another, but both.1 It is often, however, an unstable position, strategically shifting with the social, political, and economic circumstances of the individual. From this initial overview, the reader will journey through the various complex permutations of identity and, in particular, the ways in which Indigeneity, race, sex, and gender interact with and even counteract one another. An oft-repeated contemporary concern is that, as a consequence of globalization and the emergence of virtual cultures, there will be a decrease in cultural diversity concomitant with increased homogenization or Americanization. This volume seeks to demonstrate that this oversimplification denies the reality that, within Australia (and elsewhere), there is greater space for cultural diversity than ever before. Ironically, access to information has seen growth in cultures and communities as diverse as indigenous groups; gays/lesbians; queers; transsex-

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uals/shemales; Goths (gothics); wiccans and pagans. This diversity is explored and consideration given to the categories imposed upon various identities while explicitly asking whether the rigidity of the labeling hampers our capacity to understand. Importantly and uniquely, many of the case studies have at their basis ethnographic research, all have at their core an exploration and analysis of binaries and how these function within Australia. A key aspect of this book is that cultural theorists, as well as advocates and activists, have contributed chapters. This enables the reader to explore intersecting issues of practice and intellectualism while simultaneously juxtaposing “politics” and “theory” to see where these overlap and how the tension between them in turn produces the experience of a third space.2 A cultural politics has emerged in contemporary Australia that is concentrated and contested around the binary opposition of the colonized indigenous (or more commonly Aboriginal) and the colonizing diasporic white newcomer or settler.3 Needless to say, this binary is both oversimplified and essentialized. These dichotomous categories alarmingly extended to “us/them” and “either/or” are increasingly used by both sides of the equation, at times resulting in an antagonistic polarization premised on exclusion and notions of purity. Such a polarity offers little hope to the conceptualization of indigenous/nonindigenous relationships where there can be a multitude of subject positions, desires, similarities, and differences developing out of ongoing interaction and exchange. For this reason Boundary Writing, has a far greater focus on indigenous issues than other markers of identity such as gender, sexuality, and so on. This is a reflection of the way in which Australian scholarship in this area has emerged. Australian identity studies are often positioned as considerations of native and nonnative engagements, yet by and large the Australian nation has failed to reconcile adequately the historical circumstances of European-colonialism. These ongoing interactions are at the core of contemporary debates, both within the academic and popular spheres, over the empirical content and meaning of Australian history. Historical matters taken as factual for generations, including that Aboriginal people were murdered and massacred, are now openly denied by many.4 There has been no reconciliation beyond authorized government discourse. Within Boundary Writing, an emphasis on indigenous issues is to be expected even though relationships and identities within contemporary Australia are influenced by various considerations, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, political persuasion, and geographic location (e.g., urban/rural). The following chapters develop more critical perspectives and offer reconceptualized assumptions about notions of identity moving from an

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“us/them” “either/or” duality to a common sense 5 of “both/and,” which acknowledges and negotiates difference, contestation, similarities, and affinity. Postcolonial scholar Homi K. Bhabha, in his influential book Location of Culture, explores the conceptual and theoretical possibilities of hybridity or third space.6 The third space is derived from the notion that there is a disjuncture between the “subject of a proposition” and “the subject of enunciation.” 7 He states, The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. . . . It is only when we understand that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in this contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation, that we begin to understand why hierarchical claims to the inherent originality or purity of cultures are untenable. 8

Historically hybridity, as both term and concept, has been a source of abuse and prejudice particularly as it was applied to people of mixed race heritage(s). It is permeated with images of eugenics and scientific or doctrinal racism.9 Drawing on the work of Bhabha, however, Australian scholar Nikos Papastergiadis suggests that this contentious past should not preclude the term’s contemporary use, arguing that the repossession, repositioning, and representation of negative terms can offer liberatory moments and spaces. He questions, “Should we use only words with a pure and inoffensive history, or should we challenge essentialist models of identity by taking on and then subverting their own vocabulary[?]” 10 Whether acknowledged or not, hybridity plays an important—if not central—role in Australian postcolonial discourse, identity studies, and notions of nationhood. For Bhabha, the third space is a type of dialogue; that is, a means for describing a productive, and not merely reflective, space or encounter. The potential for production means that this is an “interruptive, interrogative, and enunciative” space where new ways of being and innovative kinds of cultural meaning can be brought into existence. It is a productive space also, where there is of necessity a blurring of existing boundaries and binaristic identities. The usefulness of the concept of the third space should not be underestimated, because it enables

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the analysis of various forms of enunciation, rupture, transgression, and subversion of binaristic dualities, thus providing the opportunity to go beyond the realm of colonial dichotomies and oppositional posturings. The third space “initiates new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration and contestation.” 11 Within the third space, as Papastergiadis notes, is the potential for a hybrid identity to function as a “lubricant” for easing cultural friction.12 This book is an attempt to engage with the challenges of third spaces and hybridity within the geopolitical specificity of contemporary Australia. The settler-colony Australia presents an ideal locale in which to consider the issues of boundaries of race (especially Indigeneity), class, and gender and the possibilities of understanding these through the lens of Bhabha’s notion of a third space.13 There has been little attempt to move beyond the labeling and the binarisms of identity, because historically the Australian nation has struggled to understand and accommodate those who deviated from the imposed, colonially constructed normative position of white-Anglo-middle-class and male. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, white Australian society has been concerned to define and delimit what constitutes Australian-ness. It is frequently observed among Australians that, in stark contrast to Americans, there is a poorly developed sense of national identity; that is, it is impossible to describe what Australian-ness is in terms other than what it is not. As the chapters that follow demonstrate, however, the identity of a people or a nation is premised on, and constructed out of, the discourses of otherness, and within these discourses there is the possibility for third space(s). Australia prior to European contact was made up of some six hundred different indigenous groups—distinct entities that in the face of the onslaught of European dispossession simply became the oppositional Aborigines. Elsewhere I have written extensively on what I describe as the homogeneity paradigm in which the diverse cultures of indigenous Australia became interpolated by the colonizers to become the collective “Aborigines.” 14 The contemporary need to identify as indigenous—or in the most common vernacular as Koori, Murri, or Noongar—has no meaning except in the face of colonialism.15 Prior to colonization, Aboriginal people declared themselves to be members of their various tribes: Yorta Yorta, Wurundjeri, Wotjabaluk, Gunditjmara, Pitjantjatjara, Aranda, Tiwi, Eualyhi, or Badjitla, to name a few. The majority of the population of the modern Australian nation consists of people who arrived through the post– World War II emigration/immigration policies of successive governments (both conservative and progressive). Settler Australians make up 98 percent of the population with indigenous people relegated to the remainder. Contemporary Australian governments have instigated and politically enacted policies that

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build on unproblematic notions of “pluralism” and “multiculturalism.” Despite the political desire for Australia to be populated with people who are first and foremost Australian, people are routinely defined by ethnic or locational origins outside of the contemporary nation-state —Anglo-Australians, Italian-Australians, Turkish-Australians, and so on. Within the nation, however, there are those who do not define themselves with regard to an external location, but whose origins are occurring within the modern Australian geopolitical boundary. These are the First people, the original people, the indigenous peoples, the Aboriginal, and Torres Strait Islander peoples.16 Indigenous Australians stand apart from, but are contained within, Australia and generally define themselves as separate on the basis of shared history, culture, experience, and ethnicity. Unlike other Australians, they do not define themselves through hyphenated hybrid terms (with external referents), but rather through their tribal affiliation or simply as the generic terms Koori, Murri, or Noongar. These contemporary ascriptions of indigenous identity are generally constructed as binaristic; that is, they are constructed in conscious opposition to the identity of Euro-Australians, immigrants, colonizers, invaders, or newcomers. The sociopolitical complexity of the formulation and maintenance of a distinctly indigenous identity takes place within a framework where the status of Aboriginal people is determined to be a minority racial or ethnic group within the dominant colonial state.17 As such, Aboriginal identity forms through interaction with the dominant (hegemonic) Australian society, as well the individual’s personal immediate and familial Aboriginal cultural context. As is demonstrated in many of the chapters that follow, this acquired identity developed from each society’s conceptions and often emerged as conflicting and inconsistent. This has been exacerbated by the shifting nature of settler society’s government policies relating to indigenous people, for this has ensured that the identity offered by white society has been neither predictable nor stable. The colonizing group, throughout history, has required, imposed and authorized different and shifting identities for Aboriginal people. In the 1950s and 1960s, Aboriginal people were to assimilate into white society, thus becoming subjects with certain cultural and behavioral expectations determined by the white authorities. What appeared to be a more enlightened attitude developed in the 1970s and 1980s, when State and Federal governments articulated a concern for self-determination and self-management for Aboriginal people. As a result, there came a need to identify with “their own people,” which required indigenous Australians to construct quite a different set of attributes by which they could be claimed and identified as Aboriginal.

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Throughout the decades since the 1967 referendum there has been extensive public debate over the possibility of reconciliation between white and black Australia, which has acknowledged and incorporated issues such as the stolen generations and Aboriginal deaths in custody.18 Within these debates the meaning of indigeneity has received broad acceptance and widely divergent and different histories and experiences are accepted as part of the processes by which an Aboriginal person acquires and develops an Aboriginal identity. This is an inherently personal experience, individual and discrete. It is by allowing for this diversity of experience that the children removed from their families—and, by extension, their culture—as the result of government assimilation policies can be accommodated in discussions of Aboriginality. For the most part, however, the capacity to belong is contingent on choosing one or another identity rather than being allowed to live across the boundaries. This notion of discrete and separate identities was brought home to me when, in 1998, I attended a small symposium on indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing held at Deakin University. At the commencement of proceedings, the participants were seated around a table and, in turn, each spoke of his or her background, identity, and affiliations. An Aboriginal woman from Northern Victoria stated that she was Yorta Yorta and that along with this heritage she had other “unwelcome blood” in her. The ferocity of her assertion and the disgust she clearly held for her “white” ancestors was palpable. She went on to describe her settler ancestors as good but misguided men, unconscious thieves of her tribal lands and her grandmothers (both of whom were Aboriginal) as duped by believing that these newcomers offered a better way of life. My turn to speak followed, and the contrast could not have been greater. I stated that I was not an Aboriginal person per se, but I did have Aboriginal ancestors and I chose to celebrate all of my heritages and welcomed the mosaic of identities that this afforded me. The discussion that followed was fascinating and at times heated and ultimately led me on a journey through the literature of “race critical theory.” 19 For generations, Australia has been divided into Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal categories, even when both groups have existed within the one family. Historically mainstream white society almost universally assumed that these racial categories were intertwined with gender categories: with white men marrying Aboriginal women and the (at least popular) assumption was that the reverse rarely occurred.20 It is important to recognize that the political process of colonialism forced people with Aboriginal heritage to choose to be either one or the other and therefore by extension reject their other heritages. The difficulties of

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this required binarism has led many Aboriginal people to describe their white ancestors as their “unwanted blood.” The humanities and social sciences—including history, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, and gender studies—tend to be dominated with binaristic terminology including the apparently simple male and female, men and women, native and newcomer, settler and indigene, invader and traditional owner, victim and victor, and so on. These oppositional pairings seamlessly enable the development of interpretive paradigms within which the normative position (white/straight/male and so on) is unquestioned, unreflected, and— despite being invested with hegemony— invisible.21 Binaries and dichotomies are reassuring—they categorize the world into a black and white comprehendible pseudoreality, by simplifying and homogenizing complexity, variability, and uncertainty. One of the consequences of this is that those deemed to be other (e.g., gays, women, indigenous people) are always perceived to be reactionary; that is, they are reacting to colonial or hegemonic impositions and rarely as historically effective and active agents. Jacques Derrida reminds us there is an alternative to the either/or binarisms. Dichotomies are programmable and formalizable—to break free of their hold, we can opt for another view that of “undecidability.” 22 Undecidability refers to the (im)possibility of deciding between discrepant and often contradictory orders of meaning, and yet it should not be confused with indecision. In Derrida’s terms, historical actors can be either/or and simultaneously be neither/nor. The authors in this book suggest that binarisms fail to recognize the emergence of social formations born out of encounter that are much greater than the sum of their constituent elements. Since the advent of the great sociopolitical (and counterculture) movements that took hold in the 1960s, which included second-wave feminism, the indigenous-rights movement, and the “sexual revolution,” many people now occupy what can be regarded as the ambivalent third space. Here the third space is neither one nor another of these binaristic categories, but is often also both. Ambivalence in gender/sexuality studies is an important concept, particularly as the case studies of Moore (chapter 2) and McDonald (chapter 3) demonstrate. The theoretical constructions of gender and sexuality and concepts of race and indigeneity emerge as interconnected and interdependent. This should not come as a surprise, however, as Donna Haraway reminds us: Gender and race have never existed separately and never were about preformed subjects endowed with funny genitals and curious colors. Race and gender are

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about entwined barely analytically separable, highly protean, relational categories. Racial, class, sexual, and gender formations (not essences) were, from the start, dangerous and rickety machines for guarding the chief fictions and powers of European civil manhood. To be unmanly is to be uncivil, to be dark is to be unruly: These metaphors have mattered enormously in the constitution of what may count for knowledge.23

Gender as an analytical category has received significant attention within academic discourse over the past thirty years. Much of this material has grown out of the second wave of feminism and was underpinned by a concern with the role of women in society. Over the past few years, women’s studies departments in universities across the country have switched their focus to an interest in the way gender operates across society both historical and contemporary; changing their names to gender studies in the process. This shift is reflected in this volume, especially in chapters by Moore, McDonald, and Reed (chapter 6). The discussion of gender issues here is informed by the philosophical and historical work of Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Anne McClintock.24 It is important to note that gender is not used as a descriptive or prescriptive term for a series of binarisms with male being counterpoised against female. Within this volume gender is “always a relationship, not a preformed category of beings or a possession that one can have. Gender does not pertain more to women than men. Gender is the relation between variously constituted categories of men and women (and variously arrayed tropes), differentiated by nation, generation, class, lineage, color, and much else.” 25 Thus, it becomes clear that understanding gender and sexuality as cultural concepts cannot be based on an assumption of chromosomal sex, but on the social constructions of the categories male and female. As Sedgwick argues, “‘Sex’. . . [or] ‘chromosomal sex’— is seen as the relatively minimal raw material on which is then based the social construction of gender. Gender, then, is the far more elaborated, more fully and rigidly dichotomized social production and reproduction of male and female identities and behaviors—of male and female persons—in a cultural system for which ‘male/female’ functions as a primary and perhaps binary model . . . whose apparent connection to chromosomal sex will often be exiguous or nonexistent.” 26 Similar arguments, denying essentialism, can be and are made for the social construction of race or ethnicity, black and white, native and newcomer. The entangled nature of these categories is explicated by McClintock, who in avoiding the perpetuation of antagonistic or oppositional binarisms notes that “race, gender and class are not distinct realms

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of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other; nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like armatures of Lego. Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other—if in contradictory and conflictual ways.” 27 Understanding how these categories play out in the Australian settler nation provides a theoretical and discursive space to explore the limits and possibilities of binarisms and living undecided across the boundaries of race, class, and gender. The third space or hybrid space is shown to be a locale where binarisms are resisted and rejected. The research that emerges in this volume is enmeshed in and engaged with the theoretical writings of Derrida, Foucault, Spivak, and— perhaps most important—Bhabha, yet at all times the contributors are also keenly critical and seek alternate views that challenge and disrupt the idea that identities must be exclusionist, essentialized (pure), or dichotomous. Along with the rejection of binarisms and dichotomies, the authors offer new models that account for the complexities of identity be it class, race, gender, or sexual identity. In doing so, they provide nuanced understandings of the ambiguities of cross-cultural and cross-gender encounters and the unbounded identities that can emerge from them. Gender and sexuality are explored in the chapters by Clive Moore and Myfanwy McDonald. Moore, focusing on questions of sexuality, demonstrates that gay/lesbian and queer interactions no longer take place in what have traditionally been labeled private or public spaces (beats), but in new third spaces, of which the Internet offers a multitude of permutations. Moore’s third space is beyond mere geography but simultaneously conceptual, ethereal, and tangible. In her chapter, McDonald explores “the nonsurgical option” to what the medical profession pathologize as gender identity disorders and the condition known as ambivalent genitalia. She questions the relationship between biological sex, gender ascriptions, and transitive behaviors and rejects the binaries between male and female and extends this to a dismantling of the assumed connection between gender and sex. For McDonald, being born male does not determine gender; intelligible gender is chosen from an array of options. The dichotomy of male and female looks more like a continuum, with male and female merely the end points. In McDonald’s third space, the sociocultural and medical constructions of gender identity collide, sometimes passionately and violently. Read together Moore and McDonald’s contributions suggest that our understandings of sex, sexuality, gender, and gender identity provide an exciting arena within which to explore epistemological issues and constructions of knowledge. Liz Reed also examines issues of gender, including her own when she sit-

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uates herself as a raced, gendered, and classed researcher. Reed seeks to incorporate awareness of those multiple “identities” into her work as she explores how indigenous rock music (broadly defined, and recognized as such, by the researcher) can be responded to as if speaking to nonindigenous listeners, thereby creating a third space within which researchers can respond and interact. Engagement in this third space is neither easy nor comfortable, because the researcher is consistently negotiating her relationship to the producers of the music (and the colonizer other more generally). Embedded within this process, the researcher is also reconfiguring and reconceptualizing his or her own subject position. Through an analysis of the music of Aboriginal rock bands NoKTuRNAL, New Senate, Tiddas, and others, Reed explores, disentangles, and moves beyond the definitional (and ontological) limitations of the essentializing categories of race, gender, and class. Race and ethnicity are the key concerns of Erez Cohen’s work (chapter 4), in which he considers what he calls the third side of the black/white divide, the non-Anglo and non-Aboriginal Australians. Using as a case study a Latin American community living in the South Australian city of Adelaide, Cohen examines the relationship between the migratory experience and sense of (indigenous) belonging in Australia and asks how they contribute to the understanding of indigeneity in Australia. He is concerned particularly with the political motivations of such a relationship and the role played by left-wing politics. Furthermore, he contemplates how such affiliations are regarded in relation to the white/Aboriginal divide and attempts at recognition and reconciliation. Cohen’s work illustrates the complexity of contemporary Australia, where being simply designated as native or not is always useful or productive. Accordingly, the social relationships and political activities of left-wing Latin American immigrants and Aboriginal community members and activists testify that the epistemological categories of the “migrant,” “non-Anglo,” and nonindigenous are much less stable and absolute than popular discourse might suggest. Binaristic categories of knowledge and identity are explored and shattered in the chapter by Aaron Corn and Neparrŋa Gumbula (chapter 9). This chapter is an extension of the collaborative work between Gumbula, a scholarly Yolŋu elder and leader, and Corn, a musicologist and university-trained academic. This chapter not only deals effectively with binaries as these exist in Yolŋu intellectual traditions, but also is itself an intercultural dialogue that is not merely bicultural but biintellectual. Corn and Gumbula argue that self-consciously biintellectualist discourses such as theirs offers an undeniable advance both for indigenous peoples who strive to support and maintain the continuation of traditions and concomitantly for researchers and others who look for knowledgeable, accurate,

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and authorized information about them. This chapter makes extensive use of the visual primers that Gumbula has developed for teaching purposes. Stephen Pritchard (chapter 6) is also concerned with issues of authority in “Cultural Property and Exchange in Contemporary-Indigenous Art.” Pritchard explores contemporary indigenous art and cultural property and examines the relationship between the construction of indigenous culture in ethnographic and art theory discourses. Pritchard sees that notions of cultural production and issues of authority, ownership, and self-determination are key aspects of this space of enunciation. The central concern is with the characterization of cultural exchange, negotiation, and contestation of the traditional binaries indigenous/ settler and indigenous/“Western” and the naming of “indigenous” in “nontraditional” and “contemporary” contexts. Bruno David is similarly concerned with issues of authenticity, authority, ownership, and rights (chapter 7). According to David, to be an Aboriginal person or Torres Strait Islander with legitimate indigenous rights to places and resources means that one is largely measured by a contemporary Australia that recognizes the authenticity of eighteenth- to early twentieth-century cultural practices at the expense of contemporary ones. That is, the recognition is based on the survival of land ownership legitimated by clan-based ceremonies and totemic rituals. This desire to categorize indigeneity through the binarism of being or not being of the past—being or not being “traditional”—is effectively a public, political, and judicial resistance to the recognition of an authentic indigeneity and of authentic indigenous rights outside the frame of the historically situated primitivist constructions of unchanging Aborigines. This functions as a tool for maintaining the status quo, in which indigenous people are disadvantaged and disempowered. Within this paradigm, indigeneity is recognized only to the degree that Aboriginal Islander peoples can change of their own accord, unaided or uninfluenced by the presence of newcomers. This chapter traces preEuropean culture change in Aboriginal Australia, to argue that Aboriginal cultures have always changed and developed in response to new influences. Recognition of the historicity of indigenous societies should ensure that indigenous rights are not affected by virtue of the fact that Aboriginal culture has changed under colonialism. David demonstrates the inappropriateness of constructing notions of contemporary indigeneity around the binarism of being or not being of the essential cultural past. Michele Grossman describes a distinction between the past and present, traditional and contemporary ways of being and expressing Aboriginality in her essay (chapter 8). Grossman considers the history of binary distinctions between “orality” and “literacy” that have set up and been authorized by social anthro-

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pology. She explores the cultural and political consequences of the “great divide theory” that has characterized this area. The chapter then reflects on a range of collaboratively produced indigenous texts that confront this divide. These constructions first challenge and destabilize and then reform knowledge of both orality and writing in the process. To investigate both the understandings and formations, Grossman examines the collaborative work of Aboriginal narrator Paddy Roe and postcolonial theorist Stephen Muecke. She examines the limits and possibilities brought into play by Muecke’s use of Deleuze and Guattari in his attempt to undermine the text/talk binarism and create a third space, a productive place of indigenous textual production. Boundary Writing offers a new look at the roles that race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender play in contemporary Australian identity. There is a distinct desire to blur the boundaries and write in ways that engage with and perpetuate the tensions that surround these competing forms of identification. Each of the contributing authors work with an explicit subject position, often from within a defined third space, which is recognized to be simultaneously both liberating and limiting. Binaries, such as black and white, male and female, gay and straight are shown to be overly restrictive. Throughout the volume, it is clear that there exists a desire for fluidity, for labels to be removed. In so doing, the conceptual frameworks offered to us by notions of hybridity and third space contribute to the dismantling of binaries and facilitates the theorization of inclusionary (rather than exclusionary) and multifaceted (rather than dualistic) models of cultural interaction. Acknowledgments

In compiling and editing this collection, I have incurred significant debts. First, to each of the contributors who were set a vague task to explore binaries and think about third space in an Australian context. It is testament to their great intellect and talent that they produced such fine pieces out of such minimal instruction. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for feedback and engagement. Special thanks to Phillip Darby, of the Institute for Postcolonial Studies, for the opportunity to put the collection to the editorial committee and Anne Maxwell, who was charged with seeing it to production. My appreciation also to Melissa Castan, Marcia Langton, Zane Ma Rhea, Ian McNiven, Tim Russell-Cook, Myles Russell-Cook, and Patrick Wolfe, for intellectual and personal sustenance and helping me disentangle my ideas. The use of “Indigenous,” with an uppercase I is commonplace practice in Australia. In deference to the University of Hawai‘i Press’ standard style, the lowercase is used in this book.

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Notes 1. My interest in binaries is both personal and professional. Elsewhere I have discussed at length how establishing my own Aboriginal heritage created a new and entirely uncertain identity. This is an identity that states emphatically I am neither one thing nor another. For me, the binaries of indigenous/nonindigenous, native/newcomer are meaningless. Instead, I have found myself reaching for the possibility of another space or, perhaps, two (or more) spaces, each mutually occupying the same locale. This question of binaries as these relate to identity was further developed a number of years ago when I attended a family funeral and met my father’s cousins. Like my father, these men were of Aboriginal and European descent; their maternal great-grandmother was a Pallawah (Aboriginal Tasmanian) woman who lived on the Bass Strait Islands and undertook sealing activities with her European “husband.” I was quick to characterize her as a victim of the colonial encounter, a virtual slave. This, however, was not the view of her descendants, who pointed out that such a characterization disempowered her and ascribed the moniker of slave owner to their great-grandfather. For further discussion, see my Savage Imaginings: Historical and Contemporary Constructions of Australian Aboriginalities (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishers, 2001); also see “Introduction,” in Lynette Russell, ed., Colonial Frontiers: Cross Cultural Interactions in Settler Colonies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); and Lynette Russell, “The Instrument Brings on Voices: Life Story Narratives and Family History,” Meanjin, Vol. 3 (2001): 145–152, and A Little Bird Told Me: Family Secrets, Necessary Lies (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2002). The position I articulate, which draws extensively on the work of Homi K. Bhabha and others, has received mixed responses. I have encountered scholars who embrace and celebrate the liberatory nature of such a position and others who condemn it. For example, Mark Minchinton, in a paper delivered at the Dialogues across Cultures conference, November 2004, discussed his web-based writing project, Void: Kellerberrin Walking, and stated that he shared my concerns about labeling identity, and, consequently, he too was neither Aboriginal nor non-Aboriginal. Using the either/or, neither/nor framework Minchinton noted he was also both. A quite different view, though, was generated by white academic Jennifer Jones in her review article “Indigenous Life Stories,” Life Writing, Vol. 2 (2004). Jones inexplicably considered my concern for this particular way of framing my subject position to be an implicit statement of loss rather than an assertion of recovery. 2. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). 3. The use of the term white here is not intended to exclude the many immigrants to Australia who are not white per se. The term is instead used as a referent

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to whiteness studies in which the (ongoing) privileged position of nonnative peoples within the Australian Nation is examined and critiqued. For example, see Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s “Duggaibah, or “place of whiteness”: Australian feminists and race,” in Belinda McKay, ed., Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation (St. Lucia: Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University, Nathan, 2000), and see also her monograph, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000). 4. The most prominent proponent of this conservative view of Australian history is Keith Windschuttle. See his privately published work, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Vol. 1: Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002). For a comprehensive and damning critique of Windschuttle’s politically motivated version of history, see Robert Manne, ed., Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne: Black, 2003). 5. I use common sense here, very deliberately, because I mean common sense in terms that such concepts must be mutual (shared) and popular as well as commonsense, because this is both a rational and logical way forward for race relations and identity studies. 6. The term “postcolonial” is quite contentious within Australia, especially among indigenous activists who do not regard the period of colonialism to have ended. My use of the term “postcolonial” does not assume that colonialism is over, but rather that Australia is composed of diasporic settlers who are here to stay (and in many instances are embedded within indigenous communities); therefore, there exists an imperative for negotiation. On this matter, I have been influenced by the definitional challenges proposed by Christine Sylvester and Phillip Darby. See Christine Sylvester, “Development Studies and Postcolonial Studies: Desperate Tales of the ‘Third World,’” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 20, no. 4 (1999): 703–721, and Phillip Darby, The Fiction of Imperialism: Reading between International Relations and Postcolonialism (London: Cassell, 1998). 7. Bhabha, Location, pp. 36–39. 8. Bhabha, Location, p. 37. 9. See Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995). 10. Nikos Papastergiadis, Tracing Hybridity in Theory: Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-Cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-Racism (London: Zed Books, 1997), p. 258. 11. Bhabha, Location, p. 1. 12. Papastergiadis, Tracing, p. 251. Although I have stopped short of terming my own subjectivity (the either/or, neither/nor proposition) a hybrid identity, careful consideration leads me to suppose that my reluctance to use the word hybrid is based on

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the term’s history. Although I am not yet in a position to reclaim and subvert its meaning, like Papastergiadis I am enthusiastic about the potential for the hybrid identity to function as an articulation (lubricant) between cultural groups. 13. Australia is both colony and colonizer. As a British settlement, and member of the British Commonwealth, Australia is indeed a colony; however, it is also colonizer as the dispossession of the original inhabitants was a key feature of British occupation after 1788. 14. See my Savage Imaginings, which owes a significant debt to the influential work of Bain Attwood, who has similarly observed that this homogenization of Aboriginal culture was both a conceptual and pragmatic shift. Accordingly, Attwood argues that this was both a factor of European colonization and a responses by Aboriginal people engaged in the process of “making themselves.” See Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), and also his “Making History: Imagining Aborigines and Australia,” in Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths, eds, Prehistory to Politics: John Mulvaney, the Humanities, and the Public Intellectual (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1997). Also see Bain Attwood, “The Paradox of Australian Aboriginal History,” Thesis Eleven, Vol. 38 (1994): 118–137, especially pp. 126–127. Writing from an indigenous perspective, anthropologist Marcia Langton and writer Mudrooroo have described the (colonial) need for Aboriginal people to be seen (and perceive themselves) as belonging to the “one mob.” See Marcia Langton, Well I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television (Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993), p. 32, and Mudrooroo, Us Mob: History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1995), p. 2. 15. Koori, Murri, and Noongar are regionally specific terms used by contemporary indigenous people to describe their ethnic identity. 16. Aboriginal people occupy the Australian mainland, Tasmania, and adjacent islands and seas. Torres Strait Islanders inhabit many of the islands and surrounding waters between mainland Australia and Papua New Guinea. They collectively claim a culturally and historically distinct identity belonging to particular islands and island groupings (e.g., Badulgal, Goemulgal, and so on). 17. Under the conservative coalition Federal governments of the past decade indigenous affairs has been subsumed within the government’s Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. Perhaps no action in the history of Australia more aptly captures what is regarded as the normative position of white/Anglo Australia, as this conglomerate office is responsible for all people who deviate from this norm (i.e., immigrants; those who acknowledge their cultural or ethnic diversity; and Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders). 18. From the 1950s onward, there was increased interest and concern with

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regard to Aboriginal peoples’ rights. A key player in this area was the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), which was founded in 1958. FCAATSI played a significant role in raising awareness of social justice issues. It also provided an important opportunity for indigenous and settler-Australian people to work together with the common goal of resolving prejudice and racism and publicizing the injustices that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians continued to experience. FCAATSI was dedicated to obtaining full Australian citizenship for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. As a result of FCAATSI’s activism, in 1967 the Commonwealth government held a referendum to include Aborigines in the census and enable the federal government to control and legislate on indigenous matters. The referendum did not, as many believe, give Aboriginal people the vote. Enfranchisement occurred at various times in different states. See Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, in collaboration with Dale Edwards and Kath Schilling, The 1967 Referendum; or, When Aborigines Didn’t Get the Vote (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1997). 19. I have found particularly useful the works contained in David Theo Goldberg and Philomena Essed’s edited collection Race Critical Theories (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) and the edited collections of Maria P. P. Root. See also M. P. P. Root, The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), and Racially Mixed People in America (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1992). 20. Race is a contentious and much abused term. Over the past ten to twenty years, physical and social anthropologists have argued over whether “race” has a physical (measurable) basis. The emergent position has been that race is a social construction, a category invented to explain what are otherwise trivial differences. This position, most famously espoused by Stephen Jay Gould, has been seriously reexamined by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele in Race: The Reality of Human Differences (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 2002). For the purposes of my argument, the existence (or otherwise) of race is immaterial. I use the term “race”— and, by extension, racism — in its vernacular sense. Race therefore is equated with blood, lineage, and memory in myriad complex ways. For an interesting discussion of this, see the concluding chapter to Chadwick Allen’s Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002). 21. See Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997). 22. See Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: In Conversation with John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), and also “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, translated, with an introduction and additional notes by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

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23. Donna Haraway, Primate Vision: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Verso, 1989). See also Donna Haraway, Modest Witness@ Second Millennium. FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997). 24. See, especially, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990); Haraway, Primate Vision and Modest Witness; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (London: Penguin Books, 1990); and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995). 25. Haraway, Modest Witness, p. 28 (my emphasis). 26. Sedgwick, Epistemology, pp. 27–28. 27. McClintock, Imperial Leather, p. 5.

C HAPTE R 2

From Beats to Cybersex Australian Gay Male Appropriation of Public Spaces

Clive Moore

Homosexuality and Private /Public Spaces

Steadily since the 1970s, gay male and lesbian relationships have been normalized in Australian state legislation. First, male homosexuality was decriminalized, and more recently legislation has been revised to equate homosexual partners with de facto heterosexual partners, in situations where relationships break down or employee rights, bereavement, and inheritance are involved. Campaigns by the gay political movement during the past thirty years have stressed the normality of gay sexuality and relationships, placing emphasis on long-term partnerships and the need to safeguard the rights of individuals. The emphasis in legislative reforms and social acceptance of homosexuality, however, relates to consensual sexual acts in private and equality between homosexual and other types of human relationships. The reforms do not safeguard public expressions of same-sex activities or consider queer concepts that override sexual binaries. Homosexuality has been accepted by more liberal sections of the Christian church, and a generation of Australians has come to acknowledge the presence of homosexuals in their community. Millions have watched the Sydney Mardi Gras on television with no more thought than they would give to tuning in to a football grand final. However commendable and extraordinary— in light of the homophobic nature of Australia in the past—this may be, the emphasis is on normalizing homosexuality in the private sphere, accepting a distinction between private/public, which denies homosexuality equal access to, and legitimacy within, the public sphere. Even Mardi Gras is really liminal space—a sus-

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pension of normality for a short time, which in the long term only reinforces the limits of homosexual access to the public sphere. The argument proposed in this chapter is that liberal legal reforms and moral attitudes aside, male-to-male sexuality has no permanent legitimate space within the Western social system. The state legislates to authorize the limits of sexual citizenship but uses predominantly heterosexual principles. The structural hegemony of heterosexuality restricts alternative sexualities. The construction and dynamics of sexuality under capitalism and the modern state inhibits homosexual male freedoms, allowing their expression only through use of third space, the location of nonconformist gender roles and sexual practices. More accurately, to extend the concept suggested by Homi K. Bhabha, third space should be third spaces, which more adequately reflects the reality of sexual experience and use of space. Legalizing homosexuality as a private act does not alter the outsider nature of this form of sexuality. Sexual citizenship is primarily about heterosexuality. Male homosexuality has always existed in Western society, but within third spaces outside the public and private spaces controlled by heterosexuality. No amount of decriminalization or medical and social normalization enables maleto-male sexual activity—a hybrid of Western culture—to fit comfortably within the bounds of hegemonic patriarchal heterosexuality. I would argue that most gay or queer men, although they have no wish to be persecuted for their sexual choices, or dealt with unfairly by government regulations—also do not wish to be totally incorporated into a heterosexual-dominated culture that does not accept public aspects of their lives. Further, there are elements of male homosexuality that totally defy absorption into mainstream heterosexual society. They remain illegal and challenge the entire notion of public and private spheres and sexual citizenship.1 Examined historically, one must conclude that male-to-male sexuality exhibits some characteristics that seem to be very different from heterosexual and female-to-female sexuality, particularly in relation to use of public spaces. Homosexual males continue to operate outside of the system through their use of public spaces as private spaces, in a manner not envisaged by liberal reformers, urban planners, or the creators of electronic virtual public spheres. These space-use patterns remain largely invisible to the general public coexisting in the same spaces. This is partly because of long-developed defense mechanisms that allow homosexuals to be invisible while living within the mainstream, using reserved public spaces, both physical and intellectual, in a subversive way. But it is more than this. Even the most mundane normalized

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sexual activity exists on the borders of culture and the outer fringe of what we regard as controlled, “civilized,” acceptable behavior, which marks humans off from animals. Physical sex is always capable of taking humans past the limits of acceptable social behavior and beyond into realms of ecstasy that know few limits. The questions that concern historians are how far back into the past can we trace this erotic subversion of public spheres and are recent electronic developments an extension of earlier patterns? Homosexual codes of dress, language, and demeanor have existed in Australia since convict days, allowing men to negotiate public spaces to meet likeminded men for sexual purposes. Male-to-male sexual activity—designated private—has also continued to subvert public spaces long after laws changed or the medical profession realized the error of regarding homosexuality as a disease. The rapid commercialization of the gay scene has not altered the alternative nature of gay culture. The advent of gay newspaper and now Internet classified sections and electronic chat lines has intensified and extended gay use of public spaces. In recent years, gay men have taken to the Internet with avidity, incorporating the new form of communication into much older forms of contact. Although this is not the sole province of homosexuals (consider for instance the place of heterosexual prostitution within public spaces or equivalent heterosexual use of virtual public spaces), the indications are that there is historical continuity in the way public spaces are subverted for what the mainstream culture regards as private homosexual purposes. As Alan McKee suggests, public spheres are not only physical spaces: they are a way of organizing information.2 Heterosexual culture controls the organization of public spaces and information, but minorities who operate in third spaces within the dominant paradigm subvert this. Perhaps we would be wiser, as McKee suggests, to use terms such as “queer public sphere,” “queer nations,” and “queer citizens,” rather than homosexual third space or spaces, to signify the movement away from state-based communities toward other ways of organizing information and groups. Homosexuality as Third Spaces

Homi K. Bhabha, in The Location of Cultures, first enunciated the concept of a third space as part of rethinking social marginality, time, and space. In discussing Marshall Sahlins’s attempts to define differences within Western bourgeois culture, Bhabha suggests that the “intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process” destroys the “mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code.” The third space, says

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Bhabha, is disruptive and “challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force.” 3 Once challenged and deconstructed, the “purity” of cultures is not sustainable. The third space, whether it is created through cultural and political change or as sexual spaces, is the element ensuring that symbols of authority never achieve fixity. Bhabha calls these third space people “bearers of a hybrid identity” who “negotiate and translate their cultural imposition in a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference.” 4 It is this hybrid in-between space that is the cutting edge of culture, ultimately carrying the true meaning of the culture. Bhabha suggests that by exploring this third space we may “emerge as the others of our selves.” 5 This chapter will probe areas of male homosexual behavior, loosely using Bhabha’s third space and hybridity arguments and exploring the relationship between the sexual citizen and the state. The human body is a site of resistance and power through both self-regulation and imposed disciplinary procedures. Throughout the post-1788 years of settlement in Australia, homosexuality has always been perceived as a social threat to be controlled through instituting a hegemonic framework of authorities and institutions, enforced particularly in relation to sexual activities in public spaces. The legal and social reforms of recent decades are the gift of liberalized heterosexual authority, not a radical realization of nonnormative values as encapsulated in queer theory or an acceptance of what McKee dubbed as “queerspace.” 6 Our understanding of sexual, emotional, and long-term relationships between men in Australia has been fragmented by their positioning within legal, religious, and moral discourses emanating from state and wider community attitudes that are at best liberal, but never radical. Sexuality and gender, along with race, are socially constructed categories closely related to the type of society in which they operate, constrained, ordered, and reordered by power relations over time. The spaces available for homosexual activity have slowly altered and expanded over recent centuries, rapidly so over the past fifty years, although this expansion of homosexual legitimacy largely has been the gift of the dominant culture and also serendipitously gained through technological advances, not an independent achievement by queer men. In colonial Australia, homosexuality was governed by late eighteenthcentury concepts as well as the ideologies that drove nineteenth-century capitalism and its application to settler societies. Western thought came to recognize a linked system of binary opposites: two biological sexes, male and female, two genders, masculine and feminine, and two sexual orientations, heterosexual and homosexual, although world ethnographic and historical studies offer no support for such dichotomous notions. Recent research suggests that the paradigm

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of two genders based on biological sexes only began to emerge in Western culture in the early eighteenth century as a result of modernizing societies in northwestern Europe. Scholars such as Randolph Trumbach and Anthony Fletcher argue that over several hundred years, up until the seventeenth century, the English recognized two genders but three biological sexes: men, women, and hermaphrodites.7 It was presumed that an individual had sexual relations only with the opposite gender, and only in marriage, in line with Christian teaching, limiting sexual relations to procreation. Gender transgressions were countenanced as long as patriarchal domination was not overturned. Any act of penetration of women or youths had to be by men. There was no loss of gender status for men who had sex with youths, as long as they maintained a dominant role. Around the 1690s and into the early eighteenth century, the old system began to alter rapidly, resulting in the pattern that we recognize today. A new gendered order was created in which masculinity was defined in opposition to femininity and institutionalized in the economy and state. Modern masculinity emerged, legitimized by patriarchy, capitalism, and overseas empire. A quite distinct familial, sexual, and gender system was created. Heterosexual relationships became more egalitarian, with marriages based more on mutual love and respect, and divorce slowly became more common. Although in theory there was equality, the two major gender roles were presumed to exist in separate spheres. From early in the eighteenth century, illegitimate gender roles (adult males and females who desired members of their same biological sex) began to find a permanent place in Western society, particularly in large urban centers. Trumbach’s and Rictor Norton’s studies of London’s gay subculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provide the best accounts of the “molly houses,” flaunted effeminacy, “sodomites’ walks,” use of “maiden names,” and homosexual slang that developed—precursors of the gay subculture that was eventually established in Australia.8 Although still unstable, gender boundaries became much clearer by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The reconstruction that took place between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was so effective that it has survived reasonably intact into the twenty-first century. Continuity in modern masculinity revolves around the polarity of manhood and effeminacy, together with male superiority in control of the emotions. The modern construction of masculinity narrowed gender discourse to a dualistic system, maintaining masculine dominance by subordinating femininity and homosexuality.9 Europeans first settled Australia and New Zealand in the late eighteenth century, at the end of this quite radical transition in gender and sexual forms. Evidence of male homosexuality in post-1788 Australia is clear and appears to

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have been a constant feature of the convict era (1788–1868). Robert Hughes and others have researched homosexuality in convict Australia, leaving little doubt of the pervasive nature of the practice in this overly male community.10 Indeed, one memorable statement, from the superintendent of the convict barracks in Sydney in the 1830s, was that sodomy was more prevalent in New South Wales than anywhere else in the civilized world.11 The authorities condemned and punished the practice, which caused secrecy to surround homosexual relationships, but, in view of the time period—on the cusp of changing sexual categories—there is every likelihood that homosexual partnerships and casual sexual release were widespread. During the period of free migration, which began in earnest in the 1830s, male-to-male relations were partly shaped by preexisting British patterns among the majority of the colonists and also by the high levels of male migration and disproportionate male dominance on the pastoral and mining frontiers. This enabled a male homosocial ethos to develop in the form of “mateship,” which became an important characteristic of Australian culture. Even accepting that long-term celibacy was more likely in the nineteenth century than today, and that the majority of single males were happy in the platonic company of their mates, or found satisfactory solace in alcohol and religion, many men must also have found sexual comfort with other males. Even though their activities had no legitimate place in society, and most often occurred unrecorded in totally private surroundings, sufficient evidence remains of male-to-male sexual activity. These men operated in third spaces, hybrid spaces that were both private and public. Privacy was at a premium in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Men shared accommodation at places of work or in boarding houses and hotels, seeking sexual pleasures on the fringes of heterosexual-dominated public spaces. Use of public spaces for sexual procurement and activities was at the foundation of the gay subculture than emerged late in the nineteenth century, just as occurred in Europe and in other settler societies. Evidence from America, Europe, and Australia suggests that the evolution of modern sexual and gender identities has been uneven and very class- and ethnicity-based.12 In Australia, a small but discernable gay and lesbian subculture emerged, which was well established in urban areas by the 1920s and 1930s. This subculture was the public face of what was already a substantial private activity. Despite mainstream disapproval, this subculture became more socially active in the 1940s and 1950s, and politically active onward from the 1970s. Today, there is a fast-growing and very public gay/queer commercial and media network. The changes in public acceptability over the last hundred years, particularly the last fifty years, have been enormous, yet alongside this public face is a continuing gay use of physi-

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cal public space for sexual purposes and a diversification of this phenomena into cyberspace, which has gone largely unnoticed. Some gay commentators deliberately choose to downplay public aspects of male homosexuality, whereas others almost take this clandestine sexuality for granted. Most “straight” analysts have no real appreciation of how dominant casual sexual encounters remain in the gay male world or how men use public spaces to advantage. This occupancy of third spaces and their relationship to the dominant culture will be the subject of the remainder of this chapter, concentrating on beats and public sexual activity, use of magazine and newspaper classified advertisements to organize liaisons in the 1970s–1990s, and the ever-increasing use of the Internet in recent years. Gay Beats: Private Use of Public Spaces Brisbane, 2003 The man walked into the playground under the big trees, inhabited by children by day and gay men by night. There is only one other man there, who saw him enter the dark space under the banyan trees. Wasting no time, the waiting man walked up, his jeans unbuttoned to his hips, penis erect. The other man’s shorts were similarly at half-mast and mutual masturbation began, with no word uttered. One stripped entirely and both enjoyed the freedom of naked high-octane sex. Ten minutes of exploratory ecstasy ended when the waiting man ejaculated, safe sex style, between the legs of the newcomer. The other man then masturbated, and both uttered quick thanks before walking away. The total time lapse was ten minutes. On another night, in the half darkness a man wearing a suit lay back into the darkness of a tree, his head obscured, his trousers down and his underpants hitched up over his penis, exposing half his genitals. Drunk, he lay immobile for half an hour, waiting for gropes and action that did not come. He was observed with perplexed amusement by passing men, who accept the odd behaviour but were not interested in finding out what he wanted.13

Users of the same Brisbane park during daytime would be horrified to know what was happening under the trees at night in a children’s playground. Nor would they comprehend that the same type of private sexual activity had been going on there nightly for decades, as well as in other parks, toilet blocks, secluded urban spaces, and beaches all over Australia since the early years of the nineteenth century. Reforms of the laws relating to homosexuality do not alter the partly illegal nature of gay use of beats. Though meeting sexual partners in

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public places is not illegal, performing sexual acts in public places is illegal for everyone, regardless of sexual orientation. As explained above, a homosexual subculture was established in the larger European cities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which relied on using public meeting places. In the British Isles, subculture users came from a large range of occupations and had established slang terminology for each other —“mollies,” “Madge culls,” and “fluters.” Men seeking out men could be found in certain ale-houses and cruising around well-known parks, fields, and public latrines.14 In Australia, the sexual imbalance during the colonial years certainly encouraged some men, who might never have indulged back in Europe, to participate in “situational” homosexuality. But there are also hints of the existence of a limited homosexual subculture in Sydney as early as the 1830s, based around waterfront hotels and theaters.15 Since the 1850s, Sydney’s Hyde Park, with its drinking fountains and manicured lawns and paths, has been associated with prostitution and other illicit sexual pickups, but there is not clear evidence of homosexual beats until newspaper references in the 1890s.16 More concrete evidence comes from Walter Fogarty’s research into the New South Wales criminal justice records, which suggests that in the 1860s and 1870s charges of indecent exposure and indecent assault were being used by the police to control male-to-male sex in public places and in accommodation such as boarding houses. Arrests at Hyde Park in the 1880s show that this public space was an established beat and that police knew its location and had staked it out.17 The most substantial Australian evidence of nineteenth-century homosexual use of public space comes from research into the Queensland court records.18 One Brisbane case concerned a river ferry terminal in 1864; another occurred on Townsville’s Strand in 1870.19 In the 1890s there is evidence of a beat in a shop toilet in Brisbane, where homosexual slang was being used, and another case involved sexual activity in Bundaberg’s botanic gardens. The pattern that emerges from historical records is centered on inner-city parklands, underdeveloped urban areas, and transport systems. Yorick Smaal’s detailed research into homosexual offenses between 1890 and 1914 supports Fogarty’s and my own conclusions that indecent assault and indecent exposure charges were being used by police in an attempt to control the emerging subculture.20 The court evidence shows that the banks of Brisbane River and surrounding bridges and ferry terminals were used as beats as far back as the 1860s and remained in use for more than a century until the riverside freeway was constructed in the 1970s. The North Quay toilet block and the stairs leading down to the riverbank seem to have been central to this beat area, although men looking for men also prom-

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enaded along the bridge and frequented the riverbank. Beats also existed in other city parks and public spaces. City street cruising while window-shopping or walking about was popular and still occurs today, although the modern focus is more likely to be shopping centers.21 The court cases that ensued contain graphic evidence of sex in public places. Richard Dyer, the detective involved in the 1870 Townsville case, in his eagerness to obtain a conviction, claimed to have been almost a participant, although perjury seems a more likely explanation: I saw the prisoner Boyd about the centre of the gorge. He was on the top of the prisoner Reilly. I could see him at the distance I was then. They were both lying down. The prisoner Reilly was lying on his belly on the ground and the prisoner Boyd was laying on him. I could hear the prisoner Reilly grunting or moaning. . . . The prisoner John Boyd was moving. He was raising his fundament up and down on the other man. I stole up cautiously behind them; when I got closer to the prisoner John Boyd I caught him by the back of the neck while lying on the prisoner William Reilly as I have already described. It was by the left hand I caught him by the neck, with my right hand I shoved down between the privates of the prisoner John Boyd and the fundamental of the prisoner William Reilly I then found the prisoner John Boyd’s penis was quite rigid and inserted in the prisoner William Reilly’s fundamental. The prisoner John Boyd’s penis was quite greasy and wet. I then got John Boyd on to his legs and a struggle between him and I took place. The prisoner William Reilly meanwhile slinked by me with his trousers down and ran off.22

In a Brisbane case six years later, a night watchman at the ASN company wharf witnessed public sexual activity. One moonlit night, James Macbeth saw something lying against the fence at the foot of Margaret Street in the inner city, close to a pedestrian area. He jumped the fence and heard James Robinson say: “You haven’t got a fuck in you.” His casual sexual partner, James Kelly, was flat on his back with his arms around Robinson. Macbeth saw Kelly kiss Robinson on both cheeks. “There now I have kissed you. Now you fuck me.” In Macbeth’s evidence, Kelly took hold of Robinson’s “person,” masturbating him before he had anal sex with Kelly.23 Incident after incident could be reported constantly through until today, and this sexual use of public spaces is not always limited to urban areas. Once cars became common, highway parks and isolated beaches such as Byron Bay’s King’s Beach in New South Wales or The Spit on Queensland’s Gold Coast

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became cruising zones where sex blended with the natural environment. Without becoming too licentious, the point is made that there is continuity in public male-to-male sexual activity over the last century and a half. Before gay venues became well established, including saunas and cruise-clubs, public space beats were the most common sexual meeting places for homosexual activity. This is not a uniquely Australian phenomenon. Since Laud Humphreys’ 1970 classic study of beats in America,24 male sexual use of public spaces has become part of academic study of the gay subculture, although there is still a reticence to acknowledge fully its significance and pervasiveness. Geographers and architects in particular have begun to research sexual cruising in public places.25 The findings suggest several characteristics of beats. First, sex is easily available and free. The users are often “Mr. Average,” ranging over a broad spectrum of ages, appearances, and occupations, of masculine appearance and not particularly gay-identified men. Sue Joseph’s study of beats in New South Wales and Jay Corzine, Richard Kirby, and John Hollister’s research into highway sexual encounters in the United States confirm the sexual duality of many outwardly heterosexual users of homosexual third spaces.26 There is an established etiquette in encounters, in the timing of use of public spaces as third spaces (usually but not always at different times from “straight” users), and in the expectation of anonymity and lack of verbal communication. Although friendships can be struck up on beats, the connection is more usually brief and through physical nonverbal communication. Eye contact, body language, and physical actions are the keys to communication on beats. There are gamelike aspects to this cruising. The element of raw danger and the thrill of the hunt can be more important than the successful outcome. Toilets are likely to be at the center of any beat, because it is there that men are purposefully exposed and able to make quick assignations.27 Humphreys’ study found “watch queens” (voyeuristic lookouts who watched and guarded), but this phenomenon does not seem to be universal and is not typical of Australian beats.28 Public space sexual activity in the age of HIV-AIDS is less likely to be penetrative and more usually involves frottage, oral sex, and masturbation.29 Richard Tewksbury’s 1992 study of gay beats in America’s Midwest replicates the Australian situation. As he concludes, “Even the naïve, inexperienced cruiser can expect to engage a willing sexual partner,” although subcultural knowledge may be needed to negotiate “successful and safe encounters.” 30 Mark McLennand’s research into Internet information available on gay urban cruising areas in Japan supports the American and Australian evidence, although in Japan one aspect of necessary subcultural knowledge is different. Dealing with police surveillance and sometimes direct entrapment on beats is mostly not part

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of Japanese beat culture, because homosexuality was never illegal and public obscenity laws apply irrespective of gender or the number of participants.31 Entrapment was for decades, however, a standard police tactic to gain arrests on Australian, American, and British beats, justified on the grounds of the illegality and public nature of sexual activity, and sometimes to guard gay beat-users from the violence of gay bashers. Even nonbeat gay use of public space in Australia is policed in a way that does not apply to “straight” use of similar public areas for romantic meetings. A “straight” couple amorously involved in the front seat of a car in a park or at a beach is less likely to be disturbed by police than a gay couple. There is a degree of sameness about gay public cruising worldwide, even in distinctly different cultures, as illustrated by comparing the American and Australian examples above with those McLennand provides for Japan. “Glory holes” (holes drilled in toilet walls), graffiti, ways of dressing, coded language, and the etiquette of gay public sex seem remarkably similar all over the world. Beats of the world are best listed in the gay traveler’s bible, Spartacus International Gay Guide, revised annually as a reference to accommodation, commercial venues, and cruising areas around the world.32 Men can also access information on beats through the web site “Cruisingforsex.com.” Through international tourism, marketed via global capitalism, Australians can partake of sex in global third spaces, in cities such as Amsterdam or San Francisco, or the back alleys and parks of a multitude of cities around the world. As Tewksbury suggests, some subcultural knowledge is often needed, but at another level men can and do participate without any prior understanding of the etiquette. Not without a touch of inadvertent irony, the Australian government provides a web site of public toilets all around the nation, albeit not for gay cruising purposes but nevertheless circulated on gay networks to provide beat information. Beat use is not only a long-term part of the Australian homosexual subculture, but also a global male activity, which suggests that this type of behavior not only predates reforms to legal, medical, and social attitudes to homosexuality, but may well survive present-day concepts of gay liberation and queer identity. Although gay liberation concentrated on freeing men from legal limits relating to private homosexual activity, the political movement did not initiate and was not responsible for creating the public male-to-male sexual behavior pattern. The Gay Press: Public Advertisements for Private Acts

Alongside the gay liberation movement there was a parallel growth in commercialization of the gay scene through venues, the media, and marketing, aimed directly at gay males. Once being gay was no longer a crime, hotels and

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clubs came out of their commercial closets and permanent venues developed in all of the capital cities and some other major cities. A gay press also sprang up. The first gay magazines appeared in the 1970s, William and John (1972–1973), Gayzette/Stallion (1973–1974), and Campaign (1975–1979), all rather primitive affairs in black and white with little advertising and a clientele that often still demanded postal delivery in unmarked envelopes. Eventually, two major monthly magazines developed that were sold all over Australia via mail order and some newsagents: Campaign (revived in 1983) and Gay Community News (begun in 1980), the first attempt at an activist news-magazine, renamed Outrage in 1984. As described by Graham Willett, these magazines “all offered a similar mix of news, men in various stages of undress, bar photos and gossip, political manifestos, venue and action group listings, polemic, classifieds, advertisements, book and film reviews and celebrity profiles.” 33 The key area of content that really made them different from other special interest group magazines was the steadily growing number of personal classified advertisements published each year. For instance, Outrage published approximately 50,000 of these advertisements between 1984 and 1999, averaging at 3,000–5,000 per year, or around 200–500 per month during the 1990s.34 Weekly, bimonthly, or monthly newspapers such as the Sydney Star Observer or Brisbane’s Queensland Pride also grew up alongside and have survived the monthly gay magazines. Less pictorial and carrying more local news, they too once earned a substantial income from publishing hundreds of gay personal advertisements in each issue. Advertisements were free, though limited in length, but replies cost a few dollars each, earning handsome profits for the proprietors. The number of readers of these gay magazines and newspapers is huge but difficult to quantify. Smaal calculated that the Outrage annual circulation figures between 1989 and 1994 were around 25,000 copies, declining to an average of 10,000 copies per year over the next five years.35 In light of the fact that each copy usually had multiple readers, that the classifieds were probably read more than the rest of the magazine and that Campaign and the regional gay newspapers also carried large numbers of similar personal advertisements, the number of advertisers and readers was huge. Graham Willett estimated that circulation figures in the late 1990s for each of the major capital city gay newspapers was around 10,000–20,000, with Sydney Star Observer the largest, at 27,000.36 In 2003, after the Internet personal services had taken over most of the advertisements, Queensland Pride still carried about a hundred personal advertisements each fortnight and Sydney Star Observer around fifty. Exactly who the users were and are is difficult to know. Certainly the classified pages were not the sole domains of the desperate and dateless. I am inclined

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to agree with the comment of a personals user published in Campaign in 1998: “Jonathan disagrees adamantly with people who condemn the personals as ‘tacky’ or ‘desperate.’ I think those people aren’t telling the truth. I mean, the first thing I do when I open up the paper or a magazine like Campaign is turn to the classifieds. I find reading them really enjoyable. I think that people who call them tacky are hiding something from themselves. I reckon everybody has either read a personal or even replied to one. Guys who protest that they’ve never done so are full of bullshit. Everyone has to experience it sooner or later.” 37 Writing a personal advertisement is a challenge rather like a thirty-fiveword crossword puzzle clue. The end result has to be interesting and intriguing enough to elicit replies. Outrage was produced in Melbourne, which presumably explains the Victorian bias in its advertisements, even though Sydney is clearly the gay capital of Australia. A survey of 1995 advertisements shows that 50 percent came from Victoria, 20 percent from New South Wales, and 16 percent from Queensland. Melbourne dominated Victoria (91 percent), and Sydney was supreme in New South Wales (80 percent), but the other capital cities were not as significant in their states. Brisbane was the home of 57 percent of Queensland’s advertisers, with the other 43 percent ranging mainly through the state’s coastal cities. Gay personal advertisers from other states were insignificant. This may relate to sales figures, but in Adelaide (where homosexuality was decriminalized between 1972 and 1975) and Canberra (where the law changed in 1976), substantial numbers of gay personal advertisements were carried in the local papers, which may mean that the national magazines were not needed.38 In the 40 percent of the capital city advertisements that specify suburbs, gay male advertisers were living in recognizable gay residential areas. In Melbourne these were the inner ring of older terrace house and apartment suburbs such as Prahran, Carlton, Brunswick, St. Kilda, and South Yarra. Sydney, not unexpectedly, showed Surry Hills, Newtown, and the North Shore as favored areas. Beyond the gay ghettos there was a surprising diversity of locations, perhaps suggesting that there were an increasing number of nonghetto gays who had sought out less-expensive housing in outer suburbs and smaller towns. The availability of gay magazines and newspapers enable gay men to be occasionally and vicariously part of the gay scene without actually living in the inner-city suburbs. Gay space was spread around Australia, linked by monthly or weekly contacts via magazines and newspapers. The occupiers of this 1990s classified space ranged from inexperienced beginners wanting guidance through a first gay experience to policemen wanting to meet other disciplined services personnel, bears (hairy men) seeking cubs

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after a winter hibernation, or just Mr. Average from the suburbs who was forty years old and wanted to watch a blue video and have a beer and whatever eventuated with a masculine guy a few years younger. Many of the advertisers were involved in the gay scene, specifying that they wanted a partner of similar age and interests for clubbing, movies, and “hanging-out” together: 22yo gorgeous blue-eyed disco boy wants his own Dirk Diggler to boogie with. If you think you’ve got what it takes come and strut your stuff with me. Mail replies only, please. (Outrage, 1998, 287843)

Nonscene advertisers were also numerous, including those who had grown sick of the sleaze, noise, and smoke of venues and wanted a new start in life. Advertisements were often quite straightforward and wholesome: 35yr professional, good looking with firm body. Interested in the arts, fitness and out-doors. Seeks potential partner, under 40yo who is attractive, fit, genuine, happy and affectionate. (Outrage 1995, 11831)

Occasionally the advertisement is sad and desperate, although more usually the seeker puts on a cheerful face: 38yr Leo, chubby. Looking for non-scene companion for f/ship. Not interested in r/ship yet. Have been hurt once too often. Age and physical appearance don’t matter. Disabled, migrant, HIV+ all can apply. Send photo. (Outrage, 1995, 458414)

As occurs on gay beats, the advertisers were mainly looking for sexual gratification first, with the dream of meeting the perfect man much less important. Requests for hot sexual encounters were often quite explicit and specified likes and dislikes. Advertisers placed far more emphasis on physical appearance, images, race, fetishes, and social interests than on work or education. There was a constant repetition of terms such as “gym-fit” or “swimmers’” bodies. Beards were totally out of fashion unless the advertiser was a bear, and few advertisers admitted to being more than forty-five years of age. Gay male sexuality was almost always expressed on a one-to-one basis, with the occasional ménage à trois and jack-off session for extra diversion. Many men used the classifieds for very blunt carnal advertising of their desires. In Smaal’s 1998–1999 data sample from Outrage, some men who advertised highlighted that they were “passive” or “bottoms” or that they were “active” or “versatile.” Gay men were also con-

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cerned with penis size and thickness and whether the organ was “cut” (circumcised) or “uncut” (uncircumcised).39 Cute 29yo American boy, brown hair, 5'8", 72kg. Seeks white guy to 35yo, slim or muscular to fuck me long & hard. Age sex, no complications. Your place. Hung or a blond a plus. Written replies only with photo. (Outrage, 1998, 332818) I want to suck Ethnic, Greek or Italian uncut big cocks with my versatile hot tongue and lips. Your pleasure will be my pleasure. (Outrage, 1995, 277409)

Fetishes were indulged: Circumcised guy, 35yo, totally turned on by being circumcised seeks others who feel the same—18–35yo. Maybe have group meetings. Love to hear from round-heads with their knobs permanently exposed. Ringed dick letters only thanks. (Outrage, 1999, 314909) I’m a biker without a bike looking for a woman without a vagina but who has a penis. Me hairy, tattoos. You soft and fluffy. I’m a barbarian waiting to enter your city walls. Age 35. (Outrage, 1999, 263923) 23yo Asian sensible guy seeks voyeuristic situations—peepholes, showers, change rooms, toilets, outdoors, anything. Will watch exhibitionists masturbate, male to 35yo. Discretion and cleanliness assured and expected. ALA with photo and phone numbers. (Outrage, 1999, 313939)

The directness of the gay beat was extended to the columns of newspapers, making use of the media to procure physical sexual experiences. The gay media has made picking up men easier, enabling gay men to find like-minded partners seeking quick contacts that could be just as anonymous as procuring sex in public places. Generally there is a greater safety margin and selectivity in procurement via the classifieds, although the process is slower and less immediate. Research suggests that gay beats attract married men and those who for various reasons are not willing to come out of the “closet.” A reasonable proportion of the advertisers fitted into this category. Twenty years ago, their only outlet would have been sex in a public place like a park or a toilet block. In the 1980s and early 1990s, telephone services were advertised alongside the magazine and newspaper classifieds. For an ever-escalating cost, listeners

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could call services such as Pink Link or Man Line and hear prerecorded messages similar to the print classifieds. These services still exist but have been largely superseded by the Internet and chat lines. Some newspaper and magazine personal advertisements also have telephone access for messages, to speed up the meeting process. Recorded sexual fantasies were also available for men interested in “shower sex sessions,” “elevator erections,” “pure oral,” or “polishing helmets.” For those still not satisfied, the magazines also published pages of gay masseur and escort services, where “masculine blond muscle boy,” “tall fit blue-eyed spunk, manly, uncut, talented,” or “27 yo, horny, very versatile, easygoing, 24 hrs anytime” were all available and waiting. Porn videos, sex toys, and amyl-nitrate were advertised alongside the personal and escort advertisements, to provide enhancement for any experience. Although searching for companionship through media advertisements is not a peculiarly male homosexual trait, gay men are more physical and carnal than other advertisers. Kay Deaux and Randel Hanna’s study of United States personal advertisements concluded that homosexual men place a greater importance on physical characteristics than lesbians or heterosexuals of either sex: “For the heterosexual man, both personality offered and personality sought are of considerable importance, compared to physical factors. For homosexual men, only age, race, and physical attractiveness, and specific physical characteristics are mentioned with greater regularity, suggesting a more superficial basis of encounter.” 40 Australian research supports this conclusion. Another American study, of mainly heterosexual advertisements in daily papers, argues that personal advertisements are a use of mass media and consumer activity to find partners in an age when traditional methods of meeting social and sexual needs have declined.41 Though not denying this aspect of the classifieds, the argument presented in this chapter asserts that the use of gay public spaces for sexual and relationship advertising during the 1980s and 1990s was an extension of using third spaces for homosexual casual sexual encounters that has existed in Australia since colonial times. Less invisible and more assertive than beat-centered use of public spaces, the personal advertisements in the gay print media and the phone contact systems flourished at the same time as gay sexuality became legal. Although the space was public, the niche market of gay publications ensured that few heterosexuals ever read the advertisements, which provided a degree of privacy lacking in heterosexual advertisements in daily newspapers. The decline that occurred at the end of the 1990s was nothing to do with lack of desire. If anything, the use of public spaces for private dalliance arrangements increased once use of virtual spaces became widespread.

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Virtual Space and Gay Sexuality

As personal computers became easily affordable and were found in most Australian homes, there was a distinct change toward use of virtual space as the preferred medium for contact. The gay newspapers have survived and flourish as purveyors of more immediate local and international gay news, although their classified sections have declined to a very basic form. The magazines were reshaped into glossy, art house formats centered on beautiful color images of the male body, alongside clever, often lightweight interviews and lifestyle texts. In its last year, Outrage gave up its classifieds and tried to alter to a glossy format before it finally went under in 2000. Blue magazine is the best of these new glossies, now supplemented by several clones searching for a similar market. The immediate future for gay personal advertisements lies with the Internet, an ever-expanding and technically sophisticated communication network. Between its beginning in September 1995 and December 2002, Pinkboard, Australia’s main gay Internet service, received four million “hits” (searches into individual advertisements). The volume of traffic is staggering. The available categories vary from accommodation, jobs, and employment to a range of relationship areas: men seeking men for long-term partnerships or casual sex, women seeking women for the same purposes, threesomes and groups, transvestites, transsexuals, and transgenders, HIV-positive people, B&D (bondage and discipline), D&S (dominant and submissive), S&M (sadism and masochism), and fetishists. By far the most popular category is advertisers seeking male-to-male casual sexual contact. During February 2003 there were 815 such advertisers, although a close reading suggests that some are using multiple e-mail addresses to extend the service beyond the weekly frequency allowed for advertisements. There were also 465 men seeking relationships and friendships, which also often involved sex, and 131 adult classifieds for massages, escorts, and various fetishes involving financial remuneration. By comparison, only thirteen women advertised for casual sexual partners, and eighteen were seeking relationships. Particularly in the male-to-male casual sex category, the most attractive advertisements receive several hundred “hits.” An analysis of the 815 male advertisers for casual sex is interesting in comparison with the similar sample of 1995 Outrage classified advertisers. Access to Pinkboard is controlled only by the availability of computers and should provide a better picture of the geographic spread of the gay male population in Australia. In the 2003 Pinkboard sample, 36 percent of the advertisers lived in New South Wales, 31 percent in the Sydney metropolitan area, and the remainder in other cities or rural towns. Twenty-seven percent lived in Victoria and 23 percent

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within Melbourne. Queensland had the largest number of small city and town advertisers (5.5 percent) with another 18 percent in the Brisbane–Gold Coast area. Perth produced only thirty-eight (4.6 percent) of the total advertisers. Canberra scored eighteen advertisers, Adelaide sixteen, Hobart three, and Darwin two. The advantages of moving personal advertisements into cyberspace are many. Speed of contact is fast: one can place an advertisement and receive an answer a few hours later. These services are free at a basic level (users can pay for extra access), and the Internet also allows two more aspects that were missing from the print media. The advertisers became more blatantly sexual in their descriptions and requests, and attached photos make decision making easier. Because the initial interest has to be created with a few words in a heading, to entice browsers to enter the advertisement the titles are short and direct:

· Gold Coast: 45yo Bi bottom Guy needs a Big cock Top asap · Melbourne: Big Bear and Cub Visiting Melbourne · Surry Hills: dirty horny top looking for service · Melbourne: Visiting Sucker · Perth: blow and go fun · Melbourne: Naked Exhibitionists Often the photos are remarkably explicit, aided by the spread in availability of digital cameras and scanners. No longer do advertisers merely state they are “well-hung”: they attach an image of the penis in question, or indeed of any other part of the body that is central to their sexual desires. One included a wonderfully round pot gut as guidance to the shape of man desired. Regardless that there is no proof that the photo is a true depiction of the advertiser, this immediacy and intimacy could never be possible with the censorship that exists in the print media. Gay chat channels, which provide interactive contact via instant messaging or web-camera links, are now a huge method of contacting prospective partners. The two main gay channels accessed in Australia are www.gay.com and www .gaydar.com.au, the first primarily a chat channel and the second strongly focused on personal advertisements. Both channels are worldwide, allowing linking to any area of the globe, although some nations have constructed Internet “firewalls” to limit access. Some users are only there to chat and clearly signal that they do not want any physical involvement. Others leave their Internet link open for hours, perhaps replacing watching television with spasmodic interactive sexual and social chat, or they just stay online until they meet a man who takes their fancy. Face-to-face sexual and social meetings can be arranged in rel-

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atively short times, in private or public spaces, even on beats. An interface exists between real-space locations and independent virtual space. There are also other variations. Cruisingforsex.com has a special chat room for “straight” men who want contact with gay men but are not expected to be reciprocal in any way. “Straight” men can integrate gay sex into their married lives, obtaining a sense of immediacy yet preserving distance and anonymity. Several programs can be downloaded off the Internet, facilitating gay chat channels and enabling web-camera users to chat and make visual contact worldwide. Most gay men using web cameras are seeking carnal pleasures, engaging in what could be termed “interactive pornography,” where they watch each other masturbate or play with sexual toys. The site has both clean-chat and adult-chat channels and fetish sites such as “dads,” “pisspigs,” or “cbt” (cock and ball torture), with some sites permitting more than one-on-one video chats. Users can also have multiple windows open on their computer screen, thus engaging in a “virtual” orgy. The technology also extends to microphones, allowing users to speak to each other at the same time as watching and using web cameras. Subcultural codes and abbreviations are fairly uniformly used for descriptions, which act in a similar way to gay slang and visual signifiers in physical situations. ISO (in search of ), LTR (long-term relationship), NS (non-smoker), GWM (gay white male), or BD (bondage and discipline) are reassurances to users that they are dealing with like-minded men, who understand the nature of the communication, not outsiders who have stumbled onto the web site. The users also use short pseudonyms rather than real names. Communication might be between “Straight8” and “tradesmanlover,” or “bikey” and “cityqueen.” As Anna Livia argues in her analysis of pseudonyms on the Mintel, the French information Intranet, the names adopted usually contain “an erotic charge of the clandestine,” and the codes add an element of secrecy and tension. Abbreviated codes developed in newspaper advertisements because space was short. Their continued use on the Internet, where there is no word limit, indicates that there is a subcultural continuity in coded use in public space, supporting the argument that gay spaces are third spaces.42 The Internet has increased enormously the scope for male-to-male sexual encounters, in cyberspace and the physical world, and not only between gayidentified men. A product of modern military technology, capitalism, and the communications revolution, the Internet inadvertently further liberated human sexuality. Gay men, a minority within the heterosexual mainstream, which has always restricted interpersonal contact, have adopted the Internet as part of their search for sexual activities and relationships. The Internet can, like beats, lead to friendships, not just one-night stands. For instance, Mark McLelland has

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described how his virtual “ethnographic” sexual relationships with Japanese men have led to friendships, and gay men who once might have admitted to meeting their life partner on a beat now are more likely to own up to making first contact via the Internet.43 Cyberspace has been liberating, yet, although it is a new medium, there are also continuities with gay print classified advertisements and beat-focused use of public spaces. Conclusion

This chapter has been centered on men who have physical sex with men, regardless of their individual sexual identities. Many users of homosexual public spaces are not gay-identified. They visit beats, but have wives and families. They reply to newspaper advertisers who have available a private space of their own. Or they may be locked securely in their office at home using web cameras on chat lines, while their families inhabit other areas of the same house. Gayand queer-identified men are also major users of these methods of meeting other men, even though they have the alternative of socializing freely at commercial venues and through a variety of social groups. AIDS has certainly changed the parameters of public sex over the past twenty years, with health campaigns now targeting gay promiscuity and safe sexual practices, in doing so pushing at long-accepted divisions between private and public spaces. Although many American bathhouses closed when AIDS arrived, Australia gay saunas still do a flourishing trade. Rather than condemning all public sexuality, state-based AIDS councils emphasize safe practices. Beat outreach also became an important aspect of AIDS councils’ work, and during the second half of 2002 the Queensland AIDS Council trialed a web site (www.sexinqueerplaces.com) designed to combine cyberspace with safe sex education. The user could surf through the “suckatorium,” backrooms, and beats, meeting such characters as “cybersub,” “barebacker,” “wantsitnow,” “slingboy,” “builtbygym,” and “lipoman” as they pass through fake chat rooms and a variety of sexual encounters. The educational message is not that any particular sexual activity is bad, but that it must be safe. Unfortunately, the Queensland government did not share the council’s enthusiasms and, as has occurred on several occasions in the past with HIV education materials in Queensland, the web site was banned in December 2002 and is now available only on CD-ROMs. The message about safe sex in public places collided with dominant attitudes that would prefer homosexual activity to be private not public and that refuse to acknowledge cyberspace as a legitimate site for sexual activity. Queerspace is much larger than has been argued in this chapter and further challenges definitions of public and private spaces. The queer concept includes

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all nonnormative heterosexual activities—including the Hellfire Clubs that have sprung up in Australian cities, providing venues for a broad range of people wanting to indulge their fetishes—as well as lesbians, transgender, and transsexual individuals. Society has become accepting of many forms of adult sexuality, drawing the limit only at pedophilia and other nonconsensual sexual relations. Queerspace is not bound by the nation-state and transcends geographic boundaries. The queer citizen is indeed a citizen of the world, not just of the nation shown in his or her passport. In his analysis of sexuality, citizenship, and space, David Bell reminds us of the various tensions involved when “dissident sexual citizens can and do push against the regulating, constraining limits of their spaces of sexual citizenship.” 44 For sexual dissidents, these tensions are manifest in the structuring of all elements of what might be termed a “sex life” in its broadest sense — not just sexual acts, but the whole of the life lived as a sexual (and particularly as a sexually “perverse” being). For these dissidents, entry into the public realm is very difficult: they are clearly excluded at present by the prevailing senses of what expressions of sexuality are permissible in public space, and any publicization that their sex lives is likely to attract condemnation or worse.45

The largest of the dissident sexual communities, the gay/lesbian and now queer culture, is best described as operating neither in private or public spaces, or in both, but in third spaces that defy constraints. Although there is good sense in reclaiming use of public spaces and refusing to be forced into totally private spaces, ultimately, as Bhabha suggests, the hybridity and subversive nature of third spaces carry with them the “true meaning of the culture.” Bhabha’s ideas have begun to be applied to the radical queering of public spaces, which are subversive and exist well beyond the confines of public/private dichotomy embedded in the nation-state.46 Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Alan McKee, Yorick Smaal, and Mark McLelland, for help with references and ideas, and to Yorick Smaal, for sharing his knowledge of gay web sites.

Notes 1. Barbara Baird, “Sexual Citizenship in Tasmania: Stories of Gay Law Reform,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 17, no. 1 (2003): 3–18.

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2. Alan McKee, “Alan McKee, ‘Putting the “Public” into “Public Toilets,”’” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 11, no. 3 (1997): 91. 3. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 37. 4. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 38. 5. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 39. 6. McKee, “Putting the ‘Public,’” p. 92. 7. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995); Randolph Trumbach, “London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behaviour and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 11 (1977): 1–33, and “England,” in Wayne R. Dynes, ed., Encyclopedia of Homosexuality, Vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1990), pp. 354–358. 8. Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1800 (London: GMP Publishers, 1992); Randolph Trumbach, Sex and Gender Revolution: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and “London,” in David Higgs, ed., Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories since 1600 (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 89–111; see also Mark W. Turner, “Cruising in Queer Street: Streetwalking Men in Late-Victorian London,” in Kate Chedgzoy, Emma Francis, and Murray Pratt, eds., In a Queer Place: Sexuality and Belonging in British and European Contexts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 89–109. 9. Clive Moore, “Australian Masculinities,” in Clive Moore and Kay Saunders, eds., Australian Masculinities: Men and Their Histories, special issue Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 56 (1998): 1–16. 10. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 (London: Collins/Harvall, 1987), pp. 264–272, 529–532, 536–538; Michael Sturma, Vice in a Vicious Society: Crime and Convicts in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New South Wales (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1983), p. 98; Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts: Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 48–49, 69–70; Libby Connors, “Two Opposed Traditions: Male Popular Culture and the Criminal Justice System in Early Queensland,” in Robert Aldrich, ed., Gay Perspectives II: More Essays in Australian Gay Culture (Sydney: Department of Economic History and the Australian Centre for Gay and Lesbian Research, University of Sydney, 1993), pp. 83–114. 11. J. B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983), p. 20. 12. Lesbians, unlike gay males, were never under threat of criminal prosecution. In many ways, however, they faced something of a double penalty: first for being women in a substantially male-oriented culture; and second for being women in a

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rampantly masculinist capitalist society. At the end of the nineteenth century, there is some evidence of the emergence of a lesbian side to the subculture. In Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1991), I argue that women, because they achieved their gender status primarily through their relationships with men, were slower to reach the newer independent status now designated as lesbian, which emerged early in the twentieth century. I agree with Elizabeth Kennedy, Madeline Davis, and George Chauncey that the nature of capitalism and patriarchy meant that there are class and ethnic differences in the timing of the development of different sections of the male/female homosexual subculture. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 13. Interview with a beat-user (Brisbane, February 2003). 14. Turner, “Cruising in Queer Street,” pp. 89–109. 15. Garry Wotherspoon, “A Sodom in the South Pacific: Male Homosexuality in Sydney, 1788–1809,” in Graeme Aplin, ed., A Difficult Infant: Sydney before Macquarie (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1988), pp. 91–101. 16. Clive Farro with Garry Wotherspoon, Street Seen: A History of Oxford Street (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000), pp. 102–104. 17. Walter J. Foharty, “‘Certain Habits’: The Development of a Concept of the Male Homosexual in New South Wales Law, 1788–1900,” in Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon, eds., Gay Perspectives: Essays in Australian Gay Culture (Sydney: Department of Economic History, University of Sydney, 1992), pp. 59–76. 18. These records are used throughout most of Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows, and are further examined in Clive Moore, “‘Feloniously, Wickedly and against the Order of Nature’: A Research Agenda for Gay Studies in Queensland,” Hecate, Vol. 20, no. 1 (1994): 139–159; and Clive Moore and Bryan Jamison, “The Queensland Criminal Justice System and Homosexual Offences, 1860–1954,” presented at the Australia and New Zealand Law and History Conference, Brisbane, July 10–11, 2003. 19. This case and another from the 1970s in the same place are detailed in Clive Moore, “‘Poofs in the Park’: Documenting Gay ‘Beats’ in Queensland, Australia,” GLQ, Vol. 2 (1995): 319–339. 20. Yorick Smaal, “More than Mates: Masculinity, Homosexuality, and the Formation of an Embryonic Subculture in Queensland.” Master’s thesis, University of Queensland (2004). 21. Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows, pp. 30–31, 69–71; Moore, “‘Poofs in the Park,’” pp. 320–328. 22. JUS S2; CCT 7/N30, Townsville 1870, Queensland State Archives (QSA).

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23. JUS S1; CCT/CC4; SCT/CC31, Brisbane 1876, QSA. 24. Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1970); and a more recent piece by Humphreys, “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places,” in L. Leap, ed., Public Sex, Gay Space (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 31–54. 25. Michael P. Brown, “Producing the Closet in Urban Space: Spatiality, Sexuality, and Capitalism,” in Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 54–87; Frank Browning, A Queer Geography: Journeys towards a Sexual Self, rev. ed. (New York: Noonday, 1998); Higgs, ed., Queer Sites; Philip Hubbard, Sex and the City: Geographies of Prostitution in the Urban West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillette, and Yolanda Retter, eds., Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites of Resistance (Washington, D.C.: Bay Press, 1997); Leap, ed., Public Sex, Gay Space; Joel Sanders, ed., Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); Gill Valentine and David Bell, eds., Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995). 26. Sue Joseph, She’s My Wife. He’s Just Sex (Sydney: Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, University of Technology, 1997); Jay Corzine and Richard Kirby, “Cruising the Truckers: Sexual Encounters in a Highway Rest Area,” Urban Life, Vol. 6, no. 2 (1977): 171–192; John Hollister, “A Highway Rest Area as a Socially Reproducible Site,” in Leap, ed., Public Sex, Gay Space, pp. 5–70. 27. Lee Edelman, “Men’s Room,” in Sanders, ed., Stud, pp. 152–161. 28. See, for instance, Steven Maynard, “Through a Hole in a Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890–1930,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 5, no. 2 (1994): 207–242; Lee Edelman, “Tearooms and Sympathy; or, the Epistemology of the Water Closet,” in Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 553–574; and Dharman Jeyasingham, “‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’: Location, Gender, and the Dynamics of Public Sex,” in Chedgzoy, Francis, and Pratt, eds., In a Queer Place, pp. 73–88. 29. Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows, pp. 66–71, 101–104, 108–114, 149–155; Kevin Markwell, “Making It ‘Our Town’ Too: Novocastrian Gay Men and Their Leisure,” in Jim Wafer, Erica Southgate, and Lyndall Coan, eds., Out in the Valley: Hunter Gay and Lesbian Histories, Newcastle History monograph no. 15 (Newcastle: Newcastle Region Library, 2000), pp. 310–328. 30. Richard Tewksbury, “Cruising for Sex in Public Places: The Structure and Language of Men’s Hidden, Erotic Worlds,” Deviant Behavior: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 17 (1995): 5. 31. Mark McLennand, “Private Acts/Public Spaces: Cruising for Gay Sex on the

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Japanese Internet,” in Nanette Gottlieb and Mark McLelland, eds., Japanese Cybercultures (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 141–155. 32. Briand Bedford and Robin Rauch, Spartacus International Gay Guide, 2000–2001, 29th ed. (Berlin: Bruno Gmünder, 2001). 33. Graham Willett, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000), p. 207. 34. Clive Moore, “Behaving Outrageously: Contemporary Gay Masculinity,” in Moore and Saunders, eds., Australian Masculinities, p. 161; Yorick J. Smaal, “Body Politic to Body Beautiful: Constructing and Imaging Gay Male Identity in 1990s Australia.” Bachelor of arts, history, honors thesis, University of Queensland, 2001, p. 11. 35. Smaal has drawn these figures from two sources: 1989–1994 from Outrage and 1994–1999 from Australian Bureau of Circulation Audits. Smaal, “Body Politic to Body Beautiful,” pp. 7–8. 36. Willett, Living Out Loud, p. 212. 37. Kayt Arthur, “The Secret Appeal of the Personal Ads: The Media as Matchmaker,” Campaign, Vol. 226 (May 1998): 44. 38. Moore, “Behaving Outrageously,” pp. 161–162, 39. Smaal, “Body Politic to Body Beautiful,” p. 33. 40. Kay Deaux and Randel Hanna, “Courtship in the Personals Column: The Influence of Gender and Sexual Orientation,” Sex Roles, Vol. 11, nos. 5/6 (1984): 374–375. 41. Debra L. Merskin and Mara Huberlie, “Companionship in the Classifieds: The Adoption of Personal Advertisements by Daily Newspapers,” Journalism and Mass Communication, Vol. 73, nos. 1–2 (1996): 219–229. 42. Anna Livia, “Public and Clandestine: Gay Men’s Pseudonyms on the French Minitel,” Sexualities, Vol. 5, no. 2 (2002): 2201–2217. 43. Mark J. McLelland, “Virtual Ethnography: Using the Internet to Study Gay Culture in Japan,” Sexualities, Vol. 5, no. 4 (2002): 387–406. 44. David Bell, “Pleasure and Danger: The Paradoxical Spaces of Sexual Citizenship,” Political Geography, Vol. 14, no. 2 (1995): 139. 45. Bell, “Pleasure and Danger,” p. 140. 46. Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Pre- and Postmodern (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999), esp. “Introduction,” pp. 1–54.

C HAPTE R 3

The Nonsurgical Option Deciding Not to Decide about Gender Identity

Myfanwy McDonald

This chapter is concerned with gender identity, in particular what Judith Halberstam labels gender transitivity: “a refusal of perfection and a willingness to inhabit a transitive state.” 1 The notion of transgender is based upon and simultaneously resists the limited and limiting influence of the sexual/gender binaries such as male/female, man/ woman, masculine/feminine, and so on. Transitoriness is a challenge to binaries that, by their very nature, demand settlement in one location or the other. Halberstam’s conceptual framework also provides the opportunity to challenge otherwise underexplored and rarely theorized binaries such as transsexual/nontranssexual and preoperative transsexual/postoperative transsexual. I am interested in comparing this definition of transgender to the management and treatment of gender identity disorders and intersex conditions in medicine to explore (1) the viability and possibility of inhabiting a gender-transitive state and (2) the way in which a gender-transitive state is represented in medical discourse. I begin my argument by exploring the status of transgender politics and transgender theory, especially in relation to medical institutions and then compare two specific instances, in a medical context—one from Australia and one from the United States—where the concept of a gender-transitive state emerges. This comparative perspective is not used to make a statement on different national approaches to the concept of gender transitivity; rather, it serves as a snapshot of the commonalities between Western health-care institutions regarding their approach to these issues. Throughout the chapter, I will return to the concept of “a decision” in relation to gender identity, and consider what investments medical institutions might have and how conflicts surrounding these decisions highlight the prob43

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lematic nature of the concept of intelligible gender identity. To begin to explore these issues, I will first consider the concept of the decision as it relates to gender identity and how this expands our understandings of the simplistic binaries of male/female and man/woman. Deciding about gender identity is, in many contexts, a moot concept. Despite the common view of gender as a construction, gender is not widely understood as being based upon a specific decision by any single or group of individuals. As Judith Butler points out, gender identity seems to be constructed without a “human constructor.” 2 Even the construction of a gender identity that “contradicts” biological sex (the individual, born male, who identifies as a woman; the individual, born female, who identifies as a man) is not simply the decision of an individual but one which also involves a range of medical, legal, and institutional processes (changing one’s passport, birth certificate for instance) for that decision to be officially recognized. In a medical context, however, in relation to some specific conditions, there is a human constructor (or constructors) deciding about gender identity. Babies born with what is commonly described as ambiguous genitalia (genitalia that is neither clearly male or female) and children or adults with gender identity disorders all present to the institution of medicine, opportunities and significant difficulties regarding the complex, contested sphere of decisions about gender identity.3 In this chapter, I am focusing on the management and treatment of gender identity disorders in childhood and intersex conditions in infancy. Gender identity disorder in childhood was officially listed in 1980 as a disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders. The disorder is characterized by (1) strong and persistent cross-gender identification and (2) persistent discomfort about one’s assigned sex or a sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex. There are a number of behavioral characteristics that are recognized as signals of a possible gender identity disorder in a child, such as an “intense desire to participate in the stereotypical games and pastimes of the other sex” or an assertion that one’s genitals will grow into the genitals of the opposite sex.4 The vast majority of the literature addressing gender identity disorder in childhood emerges from North America. The management and treatment of the condition is extremely controversial and, as such, has generated a number of valid critiques. The pathologization of atypical gender identification in childhood is seen as problematic not only because it potentially limits the scope of a child’s expression in the interest of social and cultural norms, but also because it is linked with the persistence of an underlying pathologization of homosexuality in some sectors of institutional medicine. This pathologization emerges from the binary whereby heterosexuality is the normative position and

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traditionally signifies health and proper development counterpoised against homosexuality, which signifies ill health and improper development. Hence, homosexuality needs to be treated. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, “The associated therapeutic strategies and institutions are not about invasive violence. What they are about is . . . lies. The overarching lie is the lie that they are predicated on anything but the therapists’ disavowed desire for a non-gay outcome.” 5 The management and treatment of intersex conditions is also controversial, albeit for different reasons. The category “intersex” includes a range of conditions such as Klinefelter’s syndrome, where the chromosomal makeup of the individual is XXY; and congenital adrenal hypoplasia, which causes an overproduction of a male hormone so a biologically female baby (XX) is born with masculinized genitalia.6 In general terms, an intersex condition is one in which some types of atypical sexed characteristics are present—such as an atypical chromosomal makeup, ambiguous genitalia, and so on. The controversy surrounding intersex conditions centers upon the surgical intervention carried out on infants with ambiguous genitalia. In this chapter, the commonalities between childhood gender identity disorder and intersex conditions do not relate to the treatment used (respectively, psychotherapy and mainly surgery/hormonal treatment), but rather to the fact that both “conditions” exist in contested sites—sites where the naturalness or inevitability of intelligible gender is challenged. It is important to emphasize that I am not advocating for or against the surgical intervention of intersex infants. This is a debate that I believe can be adequately addressed, on a case-by-case basis, by those individuals and their families who have faced those issues as a consequence of personal experience. I do not know what it would be like to be aware of the fact that I had been assigned (or reassigned) a gender at birth via surgical intervention or, indeed, to only find out about it at adulthood. Nor do I know what it would be like to be the parent of a baby who is diagnosed as ambiguously gendered. The treatment and management of gender identity disorders in childhood is complex; however, I argue that the relationship between the treatment of gender identity disorders in childhood and the pathologization of homosexuality allows and requires a more direct form of critique, especially from researchers who consider themselves members of the gay and lesbian community. Despite the fact that I am not intersex, nor was I treated for gender identity disorder as a child, my qualifications to write on this topic do not come solely from the fact that I identify as a member of the gay and lesbian community, but from what I would consider to be a type of gender transitivity. For some time I have considered undergoing gender reassignment surgery (female to male).

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This is, I would argue, a transitive state in that I have neither made a firm commitment to my identity as a woman nor see that gender identity as necessarily continuous throughout my lifetime (although it may very well be, but I cannot promise that it will). I would not for a moment classify myself as transsexual; as Jacob Hale points out, this is an important distinction for nontranssexual researchers to make.7 It is vital to distinguish between the two categories to respect the specificity of the transsexual experience and transsexual communities: “Every application of the term transgender to me is an attempt to mask what I’ve done as such co-opts my life, denies my experience, [and] violates my very soul. I changed my sex. . . . I am not transgender.” 8 Although I respect the importance of acknowledging the differences between transsexual and transgender and accept that transsexual is not reducible to transgender, I do believe that the state of indecision about gender identity (characterized by questions such as, Am I really a woman and do I really want to be a man?) provides a certain type of qualification to investigate the topic of gender transitivity as it is dealt with in the institution of western medicine. Hence, this is the subject-position from which I am investigating this particular topic. As well as noting the distinctions between transsexual and transgender, it is important to acknowledge that an autonomous adult’s decision regarding gender reassignment is vastly different from the decision regarding an intersex infant or gender disordered child. The discourse surrounding intersex issues and gender identity disorders in children, however, still relates to the state of gender transitivity. In short, the medical discourse used in relation to intersex conditions and gender identity disorder in childhood have connections and ramifications beyond the immediate conditions themselves—extending into the realm of the treatment and management of all types of conditions relating to gender identity within the institution of medicine. Transgender: Inhabiting the Transitive State and Persisting with a Flaw

As I have noted above, my use of the term transgender relies strongly upon the theories of Halberstam, as well as Butler’s concept of intelligible gender. Intelligible genders are defined by Butler as “those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice and desire.” The naturalized connections that Butler illuminates between sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire (for example male = man = heterosexual practice = heterosexual desire) rely upon the broader concepts of binary genders and binary sexualities. Having an unintelligible identity, inhabiting a transitory state somewhere between man/woman, not making a commit-

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ment to one’s gender identity, is not just a working against the usual binaries, but living outside of it altogether. Identities such as these, where gender does not follow from sex, as well as those in which the practices of desire do not follow from either sex or gender, are, according to Butler, “prohibited and produced by the very laws that seek to establish casual or expressive lines of connection among biological sex, culturally constructed genders, and the ‘expression’ or ‘effect’ of both in the manifestation of sexual desire through sexual practice.” 9 I would not be the first person to argue that medical institutions have at times been one of the forces behind the prohibition and production of unintelligible genders. Western medical institutions, of course, played a significant role in prohibiting homosexuality and classifying such behavior as deviant. Exactly how medical institutions help prohibit and produce unintelligible genders in the postmodern era of health care, where homosexuality is (officially) depathologized, is currently being explored by a range of theorists and activists. Many have argued that the treatment and management of gender identity disorders in childhood especially reinforces the hegemony of intelligible gender.10 Regardless of the type of body that exhibits gender transitivity (adult, child, infant, transsexual, and so forth), the gender transitive body poses a formidable challenge to Western medicine. The image of the healed body is the body that has arrived (from sickness to health), not the body that is halfway, not the “turbulent” body, not the body that is in-between.11 The transgendered body—imperfect, persisting with a flaw—has historically not been looked upon positively in medical discourse. For example, passing for transsexuals has been constructed as a form of gender perfection—imperfection is assumed, whereas persistence with a flaw is discouraged: “The biological male patients are encouraged to grow their own hair, however thin and fine it may be. This is still preferable to wearing wigs that are obviously artificial and draw the attention of the casual observer to look more closely and note other indicators of masculinity, for example, large hands, thick wrists or neck, square shoulders and so on. They are encouraged to wear little jewelry, which only attracts attention to their hands and wrists and to try more flattering colors and a simple style of dress that makes them less noticeable.” 12 Transgender, as the basis for new kinds of political and theoretical organization and thought, challenges the matrix of intelligible gender, as it operates in medicine, in two significant ways. First, it allows respite from the pressure upon us all to “do” our gender right.13 Butler argues that expressions of gender create gender identity rather than gender identity producing expressions of gender. The alliance between gender identity and health (i.e., some gender identities require treatment or surveillance) produces and reiterates the mindset of

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medicalization that makes any resistance appear illogical—because health is always unquestionably good. Challenging the role of medicine, in relation to gender identities, frees up the constraints of medicalization. The second way in which transgender challenges the matrix of intelligible gender is that the spaces between mutually exclusive gender categories have historically been limited by their confinement by and within medicolegal institutions and discourse. Yet transgender is not merely, as Collier Cole and Walter J. Meyer once defined it, the “non-surgical option.” 14 In fact, transgender is a resistance and an alternative to medicine’s authority over gender identity—disordered or otherwise. Hence, transgender is not simply deciding not to have gender reassignment (as the nonsurgical definition would suggest), nor is it everything other than gender reassignment. Rather, the understanding of transgender as a “deciding not to decide” refers to a resistance to and/or challenging of medicine’s understanding of the decision in relation to gender identity. The term transgender may or may not include the category transsexual. The importance is that belonging to one category or another is not defined by “symptoms,” but by social and political values and allegiances. Transgender and the Liminal

Language, meaning and interpretation are vitally important, and it is appropriate to consider more closely how certain terms, central to the concept of the boundaries, binaries, and the third space, are defined and how they then relate to the issues at hand in this particular chapter. The third space has been put forward as a way of framing the liminal: 15 Liminal: of or pertaining to the limen or threshold.16 Threshold: the entrance to a house or building; any place or point of entering or beginning.17

I like this definition of the threshold as “the entrance to a house or a building” because it ties into this concept of deciding not to decide: Decide: to determine or settle (a question, controversy, struggle etc) by giving victory to one side.18 Settle: to take up residence in (a country, place, house).19

Hence, the definition of the threshold as “the entrance to a house or a building” is doubly apt in this chapter—the third space is a way of framing the liminal/ threshold and also the space that provides an alternative to the binaries that

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have traditionally informed medicine’s approach to sex, gender, and the relationship between them. Existing, perhaps even flourishing, on the threshold is the individual whose gender identity is not settled. They may have ambiguous genitalia; they may be asking why they were not allowed to keep their genitalia ambiguous; they may be questioning the relationship/s between biological sex, gender, sexual practice; they may be resisting the medical definition of what it means to be a “man” or what it means to be a “woman”—they have not “taken up residence” in intelligible gender. The decision as an act that gives victory to one side ties in comfortably with the traditional Western cultural approach to gender—an approach that medical institutions also generally rely upon—that there is no in-between boy and girl, man and woman, male and female. These categories are mutually exclusive. Victory must be given to one side. The politics of transgender grew from recognition that there are, so to speak, more than two sides and that victory does not necessarily lie in one of only two locations. One of the strongest foundations for transgender politics and theory grew from a concerted effort to question the way in which the category “transsexual” has been defined and dealt with in medical discourse. In a modernist medical context, there is a clear distinction between the transsexual and the nontranssexual. The transsexual is in the “wrong” body and desires, more than anything else, to be in the “right” one. The nontranssexual is, by default, in the “right” body and, although they might experience conflict over the relationship between their gender identity and biological sex (gender identity disorder does not necessarily lead to gender reassignment/transsexuality) is not a “true” transsexual. The development of transgender politics has bought this concept of the “true” transsexual into question. For example, Kate Bornstein—who states that neither the identity male nor the identity female is “really worth all the trouble”—asserts that her decision to have her penis removed was not because she had a pathological hatred of it: “I never hated my penis; I hated that it made me a man—in my own eyes, and in the eyes of others.” 20 The increasing proliferation of stories similar to Bornstein’s illustrates how the boundary between the “true” transsexual, desperate to escape the “wrong” body and the nontranssexual in the “right” body, has become more difficult to locate.21 The reconsideration of the category transsexual has brought all other medicalized gender identity categories into question—including intersex and gender identity disorder. Stories such as Bornstein’s exemplify the need for a theory and a politics which speaks for and provides a space for a new way of doing, understanding, and challenging traditional concepts of sex and gender, concepts that dominate medicine’s approach to “the decision.”

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It is, of course, not coincidental that the term transgender has emerged in the postmodern era. The person who “settled” and “made a commitment” suited the needs of the modernist capitalist system well. Settlement and commitment were virtues in an economic system that craved a mass of diligent, consistent workers/bodies. The postmodern era, the era of globalization, is gradually bringing the “drifter” to the fore. Transnational companies benefit from the concept of a global village in which national boundaries become less and less significant (this coexists, of course, with heightened xenophobia and the emergence of extreme nationalist movements, such as those led by Jorge Heider, Pim Fortuyn, Pia Kjaersgaard, and Pauline Hanson) as they seek to make maximum profits from minimally paid workers.22 As Halberstam has pointed out, a flexible economy requires flexible bodies — and flexibly gendered bodies are perhaps no exception.23 This is not to say that transgender politics and theory are merely blindly serving the needs of the capitalist economy. Rather, it is to point out that the postmodern era, the era of globalization, has helped to pave the way for a transgendered aesthetic. There is another significant development, related directly to health care, in the postmodern era that has contributed to the development of transgender theory and politics. Arthur Frank summarizes the conflict between modernist and postmodernist approaches to health and illness as follows: “In modernist thought people are well or sick. Sickness and wellness shift definitively as to which is foreground and which is background at any given moment. In the remission society the foreground and background of sickness and health constantly shade into each other.” 24 The questions that emerge from the process Frank describes are not only what is healthy gender and what is ill gender, but also how will medicine deal with these constantly shifting categories? In relation to gender reassignment, for example, a definitive line between wellness and sickness coincides with a binary division of nontranssexual/transsexual. This binary division has clearly informed the gatekeeper approach of medicine toward gender reassignment where only certain patients are “true” transsexuals, while others are certainly not—thereby determining who has access to hormones, surgery, and so forth and who does not. Yet, as Richard Carroll points out, “Years of clinical observation and research have suggested that there are varying presentations of gender dysphoria and that no one of the many forms of transgendered experience can be identified as true transsexualism.” 25 How then does medicine decide who requires gender reassignment and who does not if there is no “true” transsexual? Is there an almost-true transsexual, a not-quite-true transsexual? These conundrums that postmodernism have opened up in medicine in relation to transsexuality are an example of how the

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division between wellness and sickness has shifted, and is shifting. Not taking up residence is then not only a political stance, but perhaps also an inevitable one. Deciding about Intersex Babies in Australia

In the following section, I will be discussing one example of the treatment of intersex issues in the Australian context. These were raised in a public lecture given by an Australian endocrinologist. I will interrogate and extrapolate some of the issues raised in that lecture using a number of different perspectives. Intersex issues have had relatively high exposure in the Australian media during the past several years. The popular television series The Secret Life of Us has explored some of the potential issues that arise when an intersex baby is born. One of the main characters in the series, Alex, a physician, consoled the parents of a baby who appears male but is in fact biologically female. The Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) radio and television and the Nine Network have also all featured programs concerning intersex issues.26 Moreover, there are a number of support groups in Australia for intersex people and their families, such as the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group (AISSG Australia). Australian interest in intersex issues was further strengthened via significant publicity surrounding the 2002 International Foundation of Androgynous Studies Conference in Perth (the organization is committed to “furthering the rights of androgynous people to be treated in a holistic and humanitarian way”).27 This was the first time the foundation’s conference was held outside the United States. This conference coincided with Professor Milton Diamond’s public lecture series at a number of Australian universities. Diamond, who was professor of anatomy and reproductive biology at the University of Hawai‘i and director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society, has written extensively on the management and treatment of intersex conditions. Intersex Surgery versus Postponing the Decision

In a public lecture on international health and intersex conditions given by Australian endocrinologist Garry Warne, at the University of Melbourne in 2002, the following observation was made: “The latter option — to defer genital surgery— has been strongly advocated by some patient advocacy groups in Western countries including Australia. These groups are comprised of adults who had surgery when they were infants or children and who report a bad outcome in terms of sexual identity, sexual experiences and general self-esteem. They argue that they would prefer to have a choice in the matter of their gender and type of surgery.” 28 This comment introduces the conflict between the social and the

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medical, as well as the controversy surrounding the decision-making process as they relate specifically to intersex conditions. My aim here is not to critique Warne himself (a highly respected practitioner working in the area of intersex condition), but to isolate some of the issues he raised during this lecture and discuss what implications these have in relation to the concept of gender transitivity as a whole.29 Of all the areas in medicine where a decision regarding gender identity is deemed relevant, the management and treatment of intersex babies is perhaps the most controversial and, judging by the amount of attention in the media, the most visible. The controversy relates mainly to the practice of surgically altering the genitalia of intersex infants in order to make it appear less atypical, more “normal.” Warne cited the following justifications for conducting surgery on infants: Most doctors feel strongly that it is unreasonable to allow children to grow up with ambiguous genitalia for the following reasons. First, the parents need to be able to see the child as either a boy or a girl; there is no third sex. Secondly, the children are more likely to suffer discrimination and abuse if it becomes known that they have ambiguous genitalia. Thirdly, there are medical benefits from early surgery in some cases, such as the prevention of recurrent urinary infections. And finally, there are a number of published long-term studies and these show that while there are problems for the adults raised as either males or females the outcome can be very good.30

It is significant to note that Cheryl Chase, the former executive director of perhaps the largest intersex advocacy group in the world, the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), agrees with Warne — that intersex infants need to be seen as either a boy or a girl. The ISNA’s official policy is that babies born with ambiguous genitalia should have an unambiguous gender identity but, in contrast to Warne, that surgery should not be conducted unless there are solid medical grounds, such as a life-threatening condition: “This is the only position that prevents irreversible physical damage to the intersex person’s body, that respects the person’s agency regarding his/her own flesh and that recognizes genital sensation and erotic functioning to be at least as important as reproductive capacity.” 31 There are a number of different stances in the intersex community relating to the concept of unambiguous gender identity. For example, Chris Somers, an intersex person living in Perth, identifies as an androgyne, “which is neither male nor female but a complex mixture of all.” 32 Somers’s acceptance of an identity that is neither male nor female suggests that gender identity does not nec-

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essarily need to be unambiguous and, perhaps more significantly, poses a challenge to mainstream medical discourse (as reflected in Warne’s lecture) that there is no third sex. The contrasting and contested views of Warne and Chase/ISNA reflect two well-established positions within the literature regarding intersex conditions. The first being that the appearance of one’s genitalia plays a role in establishing, either to oneself or to others, a stable, consistent gender identity (this is presumably the basis of Warne’s argument). The second view in contrast is that genital appearance does not contribute significantly to gender identity (presumably Chase’s and the ISNA’s stance). This debate regarding the significance of genitalia in establishing gender identity is most prominent in the contrasting views of two high-profile medical experts in the field—the aforementioned Professor Diamond and the well-known Dr. John Money, one of the cofounders of Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in the 1960s. Diamond has argued that establishing one’s identity as a boy or a girl in the first six years of life is not greatly influenced by the appearance of one’s genitals.33 Money’s view is most often discussed in reference to the famous John/ Joan case popularized in John Colapinto’s book, As Nature Made Him —the case of the male baby who was bought up as a girl after an accident during circumcision.34 David Reimer, the real person behind the John/Joan pseudonym, was a patient of Money’s throughout his childhood, during which time Money encouraged Reimer to consent to further genital surgery to, in Money’s words, give Reimer “a baby hole.” 35 Even though Reimer was not intersex, the disturbing aspects of his story have lent significant support to the claim that intersex infants, regardless of the appearance of their genitalia (and subject to the absence of any life-threatening conditions), should not be operated upon and that the parents and doctors involved should wait until the child is able to give consent for the operation. As Warne noted, however, some sections of the medical establishment are wary of adopting this “wait-and-see” approach.36 In his lecture, Warne attributed calls from advocacy groups for a halt to surgical intervention to intersex people’s dissatisfaction with the poor medical technology that has been used in the past to alter ambiguous genitalia surgically. Yet this fails to account for Chase’s emphasis on the importance of an intersex person’s agency. Hence, it may not necessarily be the outcome that the intersex person is unhappy with but the fact that the surgery was conducted without their consent and without an urgent medical reason. If we return to Butler’s concept of intelligible gender—“genders that in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice and desire”—we can perhaps see another underlying

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reason why the institution of medicine would resist the ISNA’s approach. As stated previously, medical institutions play a role in maintaining and reiterating the concept of intelligible gender. It is clear that different opinions exist within medical institutions, but the collective, mainstream approach of medical institutions has traditionally been to support the model of intelligible gender— reflected in Warne’s lecture. The child who is living with ambiguous genitalia but an unambiguous gender identity disrupts the coherence and continuity between biological sex and gender. The boy is a boy despite the appearance of his genitalia, chromosomal makeup, and the usual characteristics that constitute biological sex, and similarly for the girl. Gender has taken precedence over sex as the deciding factor of identity— going against the model of intelligible gender whereby sex determines gender. More significantly, the child inhabits a transitive state, disrupting the coherent, continuous, and normative development from boy to man or girl to woman: “Gender assignment (of the intersex infant) has to be provisional, subject to revision by the intersex child as he or she matures.” 37 Hence, the child may decide to keep the gender identity he or she has been assigned or adopt another. Their gender identity, prior to that decision, is unfinished and potentially transitory and therefore disruptive to the model of intelligible gender. We can see then that moving away from the focus on the meaning and significance of genitalia allows us to consider the other possible processes at work in this conflict. Redefining the meaning of being born intersex (intersex as a valid identity rather than simply a condition that needs to be treated) is a political act. Marginalizing the politicized nature of intersex advocacy groups by suggesting that intersex peoples’ dissatisfaction emerges solely from dissatisfaction with their body/ies could perhaps be seen as an attempt by medical institutions to avoid the affects of politicization. Politicization has the potential to undermine the authority of the institution of medicine as successful medicalization requires that “medical authorities exercise the highest level of control over medical knowledge and treatments [and] are seen as the only, or the most legitimate authorities having the appropriate authoritative knowledge and control over the means and personnel to apply that knowledge to the medically defined ‘problem.’” 38 It is not difficult to see that some sectors of the medical establishment might be resisting the introduction of the policies suggested by the ISNA because it diminishes the control and authority of the medical establishment as a whole. It is also interesting to consider the effects of the prospect of the postponed decision — the deciding not to decide — and how this situates the child in the eyes of the medical establishment. Deciding not to decide challenges the place of gen-

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der identity in medicine because it disputes the alignment between finished gender as health and unfinished gender as illness. This prompts first the question, which is already being widely asked, Why does the surgery need to be conducted, as well as poses a subsequent question, Who decides when gender identity needs to coincide with sex? It is problematic to rely upon the justification that gender identity always needs to coincide with sex simply because it is widely expected that it should, especially when similar justifications in the medical establishment (such as, it is irrelevant whether homosexuality is ethical; it matters only that such people are “suffering”) have historically played a role in pathologizing already oppressed groups. “I might have a sex change, I might not! ”

In the preceding section I focused primarily on the relationship between sex and gender (genitalia and gender identity). In this section, I focus on the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality. The topic of children and sexuality is especially controversial. My emphasis, however, is not on sexuality as it is most commonly understood —“active” sexuality. Rather, the focus is on institutionalized heterosexuality, defined by Adrienne Rich as a normalizing process that maintains and reiterates heterosexuality as the fundamental basis of societal organization.39 During formal psychological testing, Toni was asked directly if she were a boy or a girl. Toni replied, “A girl,” and also correctly answered the counter question, “Are you a boy?” When asked if she would grow up to be a mommy or a daddy, she replied, ‘I don’t know! I don’t know, I might have a sex change, I might not.’” 40

This account refers to the case of a six-year-old North American girl, Toni (a pseudonym), who had become “quite outspoken in her desire to be a boy” and, as a consequence, had been referred to a therapist for assessment. Toni’s desire to be a boy was manifest by her decision to masculinize her name and write it as “Tony” in class and aspects of her behavior (including her exclamation “Oh, my balls!” when hit in the stomach at school). Finally, and most notably, she expressed great interest in and knowledge of gender reassignment. The medical literature regarding childhood gender identity disorder focuses on prevention. Children such as Toni/Tony, who display comprehensive crossgender behavior and have dysphoric fantasies, are seen to be at risk of social ostracism: “These kids are getting a lot of flak from their peers and that causes [them] a lot of stress.” 41 Second, such children are seen to be “at risk” of devel-

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oping a transsexual or homosexual orientation in adulthood—this is based upon evidence that shows both transsexuals and homosexuals more likely to report having engaged in cross-gender behavior during childhood than their heterosexual counterparts.42 Gender identity disorders in childhood, like intersex conditions, operate in a site of tension between the social and the medical. Practitioners who write about gender identity disorder, such as Kenneth Zucker, recognize this tension. Discomfort with this issue emerges especially when considering the possibility that those treating a gender identity disorder in the child, to prevent the “development of a homosexual orientation,” are implicitly pathologizing homosexuality: “the primary goal of avoiding adult homosexuality is considerably more problematic, especially if this is attempted for religious rather than clinical reasons.”43 Institutionalized Heterosexuality and Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood

The medical literature that deals with gender identity disorder in childhood does consistently recognize the underlying influence of homophobia in potentially playing a role in the management of the condition but does not recognize the overarching influence of institutionalized heterosexuality. Rather, Western medicine’s approach to gender identity disorder in children relies on an understanding of gender identity as separate from sexuality. In line with the dominant Western understanding of childhood sexuality, medical practitioners such as Zucker and his colleagues see childhood sexuality as dormant or developing.44 In a research project conducted in a British primary school, however, Emma Renold provided a clear example of the way in which institutionalized heterosexuality operates—even in the primary school setting. Renold points out that children as young as six establish their gender identity via heterosexual symbolism such as dating, dumping, and going out. It is possible to assume, as Renold suggests therefore, that children, especially those in the later years of primary school, who have nonnormative gender identities are not only prone to social ostracism because of their gender identity but also because of the pervasive influence of compulsory heterosexuality: “Girls who resisted hyper-feminine discourses but who did not engage in heterosexual practices or who were not positioned as heterosexually desirable were denigrated and rendered non-girls, signified by insults such as ‘weirdos’ and even ‘boys.’” 45 From Renold’s findings, therefore, we could say that active sexuality may lie dormant in children but institutionalised heterosexuality still affects the way they operate in the world and with each other.

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As I noted, a key basis for treating gender identity disorders in children is to prevent the development of transsexuality and/or homosexuality. It seems necessary to point out that historically, in the management of gender identity disorders in adulthood, medicine has been at pains to distinguish between the ego-dystonic homosexual (that is, the man who wants to be a woman because he is internally homophobic) and the “true” transsexual, to determine who is an appropriate candidate for gender reassignment. Yet it would seem that both can lie dormant in a gender-disordered child and, furthermore, according to some practitioners, that the development of transsexuality can somehow be “modified” to homosexuality. The supposed modification of a transsexual orientation to homosexuality is referred to in the work of Zucker and Richard Green. Both attempt to justify one of the biggest flaws in the justifications used to treat gender identity disorders in children: despite the fact that treatment is justified by the claim that gender identity disorder in childhood is a precursor to transsexuality, the research so far has shown that very few of the children diagnosed with gender identity disorder become transsexuals. The vast majority, in adolescence and adulthood, eventually come to identify as homosexual.46 Zucker and Green credit the kind of therapy they provide as having had an effect upon this outcome, so it would seem that the potential transsexuality was redirected/terminated by the therapy to homosexuality.47 This theory of redirected/terminated transsexuality seems to rely upon an unsophisticated understanding of the relationship between gender identity and sexuality—that “redirecting” one can lead to the “development” of another. More worrying is the kind of hierarchy of Otherness that this type of literature relies upon—homosexuality is always preferable to transsexuality.48 The supposed increased social acceptability of homosexuality is used by these practitioners to emphasize the (pathological) status of nonnormative gender identities. Granted, nonnormative sexualities may be more socially acceptable than nonnormative gender identities; however, the social stigma of homosexuality was also used as a justification for the “treatment” of homosexuality in medicine, prior to depathologization in 1973. It is clear now, in light of the politicization of sexuality, via the gay rights movement, that the justifications medicine used to treat homosexuality inherently masked a form of social control. We now return to the case of Toni/Tony, who is refusing to “settle” by keeping gender reassignment as an option for the future open. On the surface, Toni/ Tony’s knowledge of gender reassignment is problematic because it makes a practitioner’s job all the more difficult: “With the advent of television talk shows . . . male and female transsexuals parade regularly before the television cameras

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to be witnessed by children at home after school. . . . Formerly I would tell gender disgruntled youngsters that they could not change gender, so they might as well find the best way of being the gender to which they were born. Now children know they ‘can get an operation.’” 49 As stated previously, outside influences such as the ISNA pose a threat to the control and authority that medical authorities have over medical knowledge and treatment. In the quotation given above, we can see another example of the discourse that pervades medical literature regarding the threat of the outside influence. The outside influence of the television talk show poses a threat to the control and authority that doctors have in these types of consultations because, if children know they “can get an operation,” they can challenge the doctor’s assertion that gender is fixed and inflexible. This remark conceals a broader issue at the heart of the medical institution’s approach to the prospect of gender transitivity. Gender reassignment, in light of the physical risks involved, is obviously not a viable option for children. Providing children with the opportunity to consider that as a future possibility, however, does not seem to be unreasonable, in the same way that the ISNA has argued that providing an intersex infant with the possibility to choose their gender identity when they are ready to do so is also a reasonable option. Of course, allowing a child to keep open that option challenges the major justification given for treating gender identity disorder in children—to avoid the development of transsexuality. And, once again, the decision not to decide is fundamentally disruptive to the binaristic sex/gender system on which Western medicine relies. Toni/Tony is inhabiting a transitive state that destabilizes the foundations of intelligible gender. Toni/Tony exists somewhere between the “naturalized” progression of girl-cum-woman not only because she is resisting the inevitability of that progression (“I might have a sex change, I might not”), but also because the progression of her gender identity may very well be girl-cum-transgendered. A child’s knowledge of gender reassignment is presented as inherently problematic within the context of the management of gender identity disorders in childhood not only because it makes the physician’s job difficult, but also, I would argue, because it disrupts these naturalized progressions. Consideration of gender reassignment destabilizes the naturalized progression of girl-cumwoman and boy-cum-man. Gender reassignment, when it is represented as an option for the individual desperate to escape their body, reiterates the relationship between normative sex and gender because it suggests that gender inevitably follows sex and that any disruption to that relationship can only be profoundly distressing. Gender reassignment, when it is represented as the

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opportunity to shape one’s own gender identity is, however, considerably more problematic. Conclusion

My aim in this chapter was to compare the concept of gender transitivity, as a refusal of perfection and a willingness to inhabit a transitive state, to the management and treatment of gender identity disorders and intersex conditions. I have addressed two specific instances in medical discourse where the prospect of inhabiting a gender transitive state is considered: the child who grows up with ambiguous genitalia but an unambiguous gender identity and the child who decides to keep their mind open in relation to the future prospect of gender reassignment. On both occasions, the viability of inhabiting a gender transitive state is looked upon as a potential source of social ostracism for the child that thereby supposedly gives the green light for medical intervention. Yet this fails to recognize the role that the medical institution itself plays in reinforcing and reiterating the model of intelligible gender. Although medicine may occasionally represent itself as only doing what society requires, the history of medicine reveals that social norms are embedded in not only the treatment that medicine adopts, but also the conditions that are viewed as requiring treatment. Medicine’s view of the viability of inhabiting a gender-transitive state is clearly informed by the historical status of the transsexual in medicine as the marginalized, tragic victim, as this description from a 1985 publication illustrates: Their [transsexuals’] social contacts are almost always tenuous and their school adjustment is poor. . . . They look for sexual or romantic partners among erotically “normal” individuals, but are usually unable to form such relationships. . . . Their behavior makes it difficult, as they leave puberty, to make a satisfactory work adjustment. . . . And so they plough their lonely and unhappy rum path through life. . . . Many accept their unhappy fate and suffer it; some go to great lengths to achieve a change in their physical appearance by self-mutilating operations, seek hard-to-find medical help, or find it all too much and resort to suicide.50

In modernist medical discourse, transsexuality occupies an unusual space. The individual is diagnosed as transsexual in order that they can be ridded of that status—the goal of the “passing” described in my introduction is not only make the men appear to be unquestionably women, but also make them to appear to

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be unquestionably nontranssexual. The politicization of categories such as transsexual via the transgender movement requires that medicine revisit their assumptions about transsexuality and transsexuals to consider more carefully the institutional approach to all medicalized gender conditions. It is clear that in any instance where a decision needs to be made regarding gender identity—should I have gender reassignment, should my child grow up with ambiguous genitalia, and so forth—there are extreme pressures upon the individual, the individual’s family and friends, as well the physicians involved. It is also clear that in the vast majority of cases on the microinstitutional level “patients” are not simply being forced into making the decision the physicians think is right/moral/acceptable. It would be unrealistic to imagine that a range of views does not exist within medical institutions as to what can be defined as right/moral/acceptable. It is unrealistic and extremely problematic also to position “patients” as the victims and physicians as the aggressors: “It is a tried and trusted sociological truism, established in studies ranging from Goffman to Grozier, that even people at the foot of hierarchies of authority have certain strategic counters to play.” 51 Toni/Tony is surely the exemplar of the person with a strategic counter to play. At six years of age and with the combined pressure of Dr. Green, her parents, her teachers, and her peers, she makes a decision that for Green and for society at large causes significant anxiety: Toni/Tony decides not to make a decision regarding her/his gender identity. As I have made clear throughout the article also, there is a pattern of reinforcement and reiteration of the intelligible gender model in mainstream medical discourse. Despite the fact that a range of views may exist within the medical institution, the views that prevail are those that support the model of intelligible gender. It is difficult then to accept at face value the claim that any decision encouraged by the medical institution is solely emerging from a concern for the patient. It also seems not only timely but also necessary to question the role medicine should play in making those decisions; however, “outside influences,” including research such as I have documented in this chapter, are seen as disruptive to the physician’s goal, as this passage by Money with respect to gender identity disorders in childhood outlines: “Doctrinal dispute exerts a heavy toll on those who serve and on those whom they serve, who are, in the present instance, children and adolescents with disordered gender identity. Confronted with doctrinal dispute the professional caregiver becomes an adherent either of a particular faction or no faction at all. Either way he or she encounters a void where there be a theoretical consensus.” 52 These outside influences (advocacy groups, popular culture, and so forth) are seen as disruptive because they challenge the control and authority that medicine as an institution holds but also

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because they challenge the model of intelligible gender. The most threatening stance to take in regards to intelligible gender is to decide not to decide, to willingly inhabit a transitive state and refuse perfection. It is understandable therefore that the institution of medicine would resist and even refuse to acknowledge the fact that this is a political stance, rather than a signal of pathology. This tension between medicine and outside influences also highlights the broader issue of the tensions between modern and postmodern health care. The questions that arise from this particular exploration therefore are not only: who should decide about gender identity, but also who should decide who is ill and who should decide what illness means? In those areas where the social and the medical collide, such as those contested sites I have explored, questions are fueled by the history of medicine’s role in reiterating social norms and the passion and intensity of a whole new politics—the politics of transgender. Acknowledgments

My appreciation goes to Dr. Maryanne Dever and Dr. Rachel Fensham, for their contributions to the development of this chapter.

Notes 1. Judith Halberstam discussed her ideas regarding the meaning of the term “transgender” in a paper given at Monash University’s Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, on March 28, 2002, “Under the Knife: Representing the Transgender Body in Contemporary Art.” 2. The “human constructor” quote is from Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 8. Although Butler’s theory of performativity has been interpreted as a form of gender construction (Butler has been at pains to point out that the theory of performativity does not imply that gender is a construction per se — that is, that one can pick and choose a gender), rather, in an interview with More, Butler stated, “For me the performative theory of gender was not about putting on a masquerade that hides a reality, or that is derived from a higher reality, but it’s actually about a way of inhabiting norms that alter our sense of what is real and liveable.” See Kate More, “Never Mind the Bollocks: Judith Butler on Transexuality. An Interview by Kate More,” in Kate More and Stephen Whittle, eds., Reclaiming Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the Fin de Siècle (London: Cassell, 1999), p. 297. 3. The very notion that a transitive gender identity represents a disorder illustrates the dependence of gender identity on the existence of the ordered binaries male and female, man and woman. 4. For discussions on the treatment of gender identity disorder in childhood,

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see Sharon Minter, “Diagnosis and Treatment of Gender Identity Disorder in Children,” in Matthew Rottneck, ed., Sissies and Tomboys: Gender Non-conformity and Homosexual Childhood (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 9–33; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Social Text, Vol. 29 (1990): 18–27; and Leah Cohen Schaefer, Connie Christine Wheeler, and Walter Futterweit, “Gender Identity Disorders (Transsexualism),” in Glen O. Gabbard, ed., Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders, Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1995), pp. 2015–2048. 5. Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” p. 24 6. “Boy or Girl,” Health Report, presented by Rae Fry, ABC Radio National, February 25, 2002. 7. See Jacob Hale, Suggested Rules for Non-transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism or Trans____ (1997), http://sandystone.com/hale .rules.html [accessed March 7, 2002]. Hale encourages an interrogation of one’s own position when writing about transsexuality: “Interrogate your own subject position; the ways in which you have power that we [transsexuals] don’t.” One aspect of this power could be, for those transgendered people who don’t seek surgical reassignment, the transgendered person’s ability to decide upon one’s own identity rather than having to prove that identity to some formidable institution, in comparison to those transsexuals who seek gender reassignment. 8. M. D. O’Hartigan, in Pat Califia, Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997), p. 261. 9. Both quotes are from Butler, Gender Trouble, 17. 10. See, for example, Phyllis Burke, Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female (New York: Doubleday, 1996); and Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay.” 11. This is another term Halberstam used in her 2002 paper to describe the category transgender as “turbulent gender.” 12. Betty Steiner, “The Management of Patients with Gender Disorders,” in Betty W. Steiner, ed., Gender Dysphoria: Development, Research, and Management (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), p. 332. 13. I work from the assumption that gender is a doing not a being — a theory that Butler has developed. 14. Collier Cole and Walter J. Meyer, “Transgender Behaviour and DSM IV,” in Dallas Denny, ed., Current Concepts in Transgender Identity (New York: Garland, 1998), p. 227. 15. See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge: 1994). 16. The Macquarie Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Macquarie University: Macquarie Library). 17. Macquarie Dictionary.

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18. Macquarie Dictionary. 19. Macquarie Dictionary. 20. Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 47, 234. 21. See, for example, Riki Wilchins, Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender (New York: Firebrand Books, 1997); and Califia, Sex Changes. 22. A concept explored jointly among participants at the NOISE Summer School 2002, Diasphoric and Mediated Cultures: Gender, Power, Representation, at Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands, August 19–31. 23. This is not to say either that flexibly gendered bodies have suddenly become widely acceptable in all facets of society. As this chapter outlines, this is certainly not the case. Just as the challenge to national boundaries has bought about heightened nationalistic fervor, it could perhaps be argued that challenges to sex/gender boundaries in the era of the drifter have created a similar fervor— reflected, for example, in the heightened visibility of those supporting surgery on intersex infants. 24. Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 9. 25. Richard A. Carroll, “Outcomes of Treatment for Gender Dysphoria,” Journal of Sex Education and Therapy, Vol. 24, no. 3 (1999): 129. 26. The Secret Life of Us episode was “Expect the Unexpected,” prod. John Edwards and Amanda Higgs, Network Ten Television Australia, 2002. The other intersex programs were “Boy or Girl,” presented by Fry; “Sex between the Ears More Important than Sex between the Legs?” in All in the Mind, presented by Natasha Mitchell, ABC Radio National, November 3, 2002; “Intersex,” in Catalyst, prod. Steve Salgo, ABC Television, April 25, 2002; and “A Crime against Nature: Sexual Reassignment,” 60 Minutes Australia, prod. Julian Cress, Nine Network Australia, June 25, 2000. 27. International Foundation for Androgynous Studies (2002), http://www.ifas .org.au [accessed March 17, 2003]. 28. Warne presented his views on intersex surgery at a public lecture entitled “Ethical Challenges in International Health and Gender Assignment,” at Queens College, University of Melbourne, May 1, 2002. 29. I do not want to overlook the significant inroads Warne has made in this field. He has been instrumental in setting up support groups for intersex families in Australia and, as such, is highly respected within those communities. He has also gone to considerable effort to change some of the most problematic aspects of intersex treatment, such as concealing from children their status as intersex. 30. Warne, “Ethical Challenges,” emphasis added. 31. Cheryl Chase, “Hermaphrodites with Attitude: Mapping the Emergence of

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Intersex Political Activism,” in Robert J. Corber and Stephen Valocchi, eds., Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 37. The policies of the ISNA can be found on the ISNA web page Intersex Society of North America (2003), http://www.isna.org [accessed March 17, 2003]. 32. Chris Somers spoke on Rae Fry’s Health Report program, 2002. 33. Milton Diamond’s 1998 article “Paediatric Management of Ambiguous and Traumatized Genitalia” can be found at http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/online_artcls/ intersex/management.html [accessed October 15, 2002]. Diamond also discussed his ideas regarding the relationship between genitalia and gender identity in “Sex and Gender: Same or Different?” presented at Sydney University Lidcombe Campus, October 15, 2002. 34. There can be little doubt reading Colapinto’s book (As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl [New York: HarperCollins, 2000]) that David Reimer should have been bought up as a boy regardless of the condition of his genitalia. It is interesting, however, to postulate about why the case received so much attention in the realm of popular culture. It could be argued that the case had a particular resonance because Reimer’s admirable fight against feminization symbolizes the strength and tenacity of masculinity and or boyhood/manhood in an era where masculinity is said to be in crisis. Sadly, Reimer died in 2004. 35. The “baby hole” reference is from Colapinto, As Nature Made Him, p. 95. 36. Warne, “Ethical Challenges.” 37. Diamond, “Sex and Gender.” 38. Kathryn Pauly Morgan, “Contested Bodies, Contested Knowledges: Women, Health, and the Politics of Medicalization,” in Susan Sherwin, ed., The Politics of Women’s Health: Exploring Agency and Autonomy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), p. 85. 39. Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” in Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, eds., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 227–254. 40. Zucker, in Minter, “Diagnosis and Treatment of Gender Identity Disorder in Children,” p. 26. 41. Meyer-Bahlburg, in Minter, “Diagnosis and Treatment of Gender Identity Disorder in Children,” p. 18. 42. See Kenneth Zucker, “Cross Gender Identified Children,” in Steiner, ed., Gender Dysphoria, pp. 76–77. 43. Kenneth Zucker, “Treatment of Gender Identity Disorders in Children,” in Minter, “Diagnosis and Treatment of Gender Identity Disorder in Children,” p. 18, and Betty W. Steiner, eds., Clinical Management of Gender Identity Disorders in Children and Adults (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1990), p. 30.

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44. Sigmund Freud discusses the idea that childhood sexuality is dormant or developing On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 45–48. 45. Emma Renold, “‘Coming Out’: Gender, (Hetero)sexuality and the Primary School,” Gender and Education, Vol. 12, no. 3 (2000): 317–318. 46. John Money and A. J. Russo, “Homosexual Outcomes of Discordant Gender Identity/Role: Longitudinal Follow-up,” Journal of Paediatric Psychology, Vol. 4 (1979): 29–41; Richard Green, “Gender Identity in Childhood and Later Sexual Orientation: Follow-up of 78 Males,” American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 142, no. 3 (1985): 339–341; and Green, The Sissy Boy Syndrome and the Development of Homosexuality (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987). 47. Richard Green, “Gender Identity Disorders in Children,” in Glen O. Gabbard, ed., Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders, Vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1995), p. 2013; Zucker, “Treatment of Gender Identity,” p. 39. 48. I explored this hierarchy of Otherness in more detail in a paper entitled “Utilising Artificial Boundaries: Homosexual, Transsexual, Transgender within Medical Institutions,” presented at the Fifth Australian Homosexual Histories Conference, Newcastle University, October 29, 2002. 49. Green, pp. 2090–2010. 50. John Hoenig, “Etiology of Transsexualism,” in Steiner, Gender Dysphoria, p. 34. 51. David Silverman, Communication and Medical Practice: Social Relations in the Clinic (London: Sage, 1987), p. 31. 52. John Money, “The Concept of Gender Identity Disorder in Childhood and Adolescence after 39 Years,” Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, Vol. 20, no. 3 (1994): 68.

C HAPTE R 4

Non-Anglo and Non-Aboriginal Australian Multiculturalism, the Third Side of the Black / White Divide

Erez Cohen

Sometimes I live in the Square like a brother’s Magpie spirit with the drinking bodies of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. I fight against the society that forgets, which wants to establish a white system where the culture is just an official paper within an unborn multicultural society. —Juan Garrido, Twenty Years on the Rollcall of the Marginalised

On June 14, 2002, an invitation appeared in the Spanish Herald, one of several Australian ethnic newspapers in Spanish, calling on readers to come and celebrate, El Inti Raymi “Fiesta del sol y del Inca” (Spanish Herald, June 14, 2002). How does a pre-Hispanic–indigenous ritual, that even in Peru itself is celebrated mainly in Cuzco, end up being celebrated in Sydney? Who are the audiences of such a ritual? What kinds of cultural motives lie behind such an event and in what ways, taking into account the migratory movement and the Australian context, is the celebration of the “Festival of the Sun” in Sydney different from the cultural meanings that this same festival has when it is celebrated “back home”? In an anthropological sense, the answers to these questions may demonstrate, once again, the complex way in which movements of people and cultures transform our familiar localities and create strange cultural encounters and exciting new spaces. 66

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This chapter, however, does not explore the anthropological particularities of such migratory movements and celebrations. Rather, it looks at the ways in which such claims or identification with indigeneity by “migrants,” who are by definition nonindigenous Australians, challenge the important but taken for granted division between the (multicultural) national “we” and the “Indigenous Other.” 1 In particular, I look at the experiences of Latin American migrants and refugees in Adelaide who, like other migrant groups in Australia (but obviously in relation to their own particular colonial history) often find themselves in a “contradictory colonial location.” 2 Multiculturalism and “Indigeneity” in Australia

What are the relations between multiculturalism as an official state policy and the current debate regarding indigeneity and Aboriginality in Australia? Aboriginality, despite ongoing attempts to include it or co-opt it into the national (multicultural) imagery, seems to resist and stand apart from multiculturalism. At the same time multiculturalism, despite ongoing attempts to describe it as a policy for all Australians, is largely seen and understood as a policy that deals with migration, tolerance, and cultural diversity but leaves aside the “indigenous” question. It is well documented that Aboriginal people themselves reject the multicultural imagery and are opposed to their inclusion as another “ethnic group” within the harmonious model of the nation.3 Instead, and quite rightly from the colonized point of view, they prefer a bicultural model in which the Aboriginal people are recognized as the owners of the land and are acknowledged as the first Australians.4 In contrast, therefore, to the nation’s Anglo/migrant divide that multiculturalism assumes to resolve by promoting a friendly cultural exchange, Aboriginality stands as a referent to the binarism of Australian society. John Docker’s criticism of the opponents of official multiculturalism, or what he identified as the multicultural postcolonial discourse, illustrates this point. The postcolonial discourse, as Docker explains, depicts official multiculturalism as a policy that mystifies the white/nonwhite (or “migrant”) power relations within a supposedly tolerant Australian society. As such, it defines the “migrant” cultures as marginalized in relation to the dominant white Anglo-Celtic “Australian society.” Such views, according to Docker, create a false binarism that ignores the “real” dichotomy within Australian society. “For Aboriginal people migrants are another set of invaders, not brothers and sisters on the margins, nor the fellow oppressed and the dispossessed. . . . Migrants in Australia are migrants, they are not Indigenous people, and indeed in relation to Aboriginal dispossession and claims to sovereignty Australia is not a ‘post-colonial’ society at all.” 5 Similarly,

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in the current political debate around migration and the harsh treatment of asylum seekers (known in Australia as “boat people”), the dispossession of the Aboriginal peoples by previous “boat people” is often mentioned in criticizing the paranoid nationalism that depicts these refugees as a dangerous threat to the nation.6 Such positioning is partly a result of a gulf between academics who study racism, migration, and ethnic relations in Australia and those who study Aboriginality and the black/white divide. Yet this division also exposes tensions that are evident in many other colonial settings and settler societies in which there are indigenous populations and those who settled in the same land and often destroyed and devastated the native peoples.7 It is in this sense that the indigenous and their sovereignty claims (land rights, roots, or spiritual relations to a particular land) are always the antithesis of the settler, the diasporic, and the migrant. This is a distinction that is also evident in the contrast between the celebratory postmodernist hybridity, creolization, and fluidity and the political discourse that promotes the “indigenous” race and culture as localized, distinctive, and essentially different from those of the nonindigenous settlers. From a postmodernist perspective, claims to nonhybrid racial “identities” can be perceived at best as “strategic” or “tactical” and at worst as a passé formation that attests to earlier and regressive phases of identity.8 Although I can understand and relate to the political and moral ground of such a distinction within the Australian context, I question the way in which such views not only point toward, but also rather elegantly create, a binarism according to which the migrants (Anglo and non-Anglo alike) are lumped together as nonindigenous. It is a binarism that refuses the migrants any possibility of relating to the “imaginary ‘we’ of the colonised.” 9 Here I think it is important to challenge not only the way by which official multiculturalism attempts to include or appropriate Aboriginality into the harmonious model of the nation (or reduce the Aboriginal “problem” to the level of management and control of “Otherness”), but also to think about the ways by which multiculturalism and Aboriginality are divided into two separate debates. There is no apparent reason why multicultural imageries cannot be useful for indigenous struggles for land rights and resistance. In Guatemala, as Diane Nelson shows, Mayan activists are evoking the language of ethnic and cultural rights and frame their political struggle in a call for the construction of a multicultural and multilingual society.10 The reason the separation between the indigenous struggle and multiculturalism prevails in Australia is mainly because terms such as “migrant,” “ethnic,” and even the “multicultural” have come to signify the “Otherness” of

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those Australians who are neither British nor Aboriginal. The distinction between the indigenous/nonindigenous Australians that is actively promoted in advancing Aboriginal “firstness” means that Australians who are of neither British descent nor Aboriginal descent are often left out of the debate. “Ethnics” are lumped together as the “multicultural communities” or as “the third side of the triangle.” 11 A clear example of such exclusion is found in the reconciliation process. Reconciliation is predominantly constructed around notions of “shame” and “guilt” that are addressed in relation to the nation’s past and future. A critical look at this rhetoric reveals that it is often imagining an audience that is white and English-speaking.12 Paradoxically, it is exactly such a binary division that helps to redefine Australia as a “white nation.” Discussions about “our guilt” or about “our denial” as a nation assume a collective “we” that is different from the “ethnics” and at the same time, and again quite paradoxically, further excludes and marginalizes the Aboriginal people themselves. As Ghassan Hage argues in criticizing the push for a national apology, Indigenous people do not relate to and cannot appropriate “Australian history,” even in its morally and empirically corrected version, because what is posited as Australian history is simply not history from their perspective. In this sense, they have their own history—or, more exactly, their own pool of histories, with its own agreements and disagreements— to appropriate memory from. This does not mean that they cannot share anything with other people living in Australia, but it does mean that what they share cannot be taken for granted at all.13

Yet, as in the case of other such neat social binaries, the black/white divide, as Lynette Russell’s work illustrates, is much more complex than it first appears.14 Furthermore, if we take seriously the Australian multicultural context, we begin to see how relations to Aboriginality and the indigenous political struggle are part of complex colonial and postcolonial histories that are “Australian,” even if they relate to other lands, other nation-states, and other cultures that are neither Anglo-Celtic nor Aboriginal. In that sense, following Hage’s argument, “Australian history” should include the personal and collective histories of the different migrant groups and their understanding of Australia. The Latin American migrants’ and refugees’ affiliations with indigeneity that I will now move to explore show such complexity and, as I argue, provide a way in which the debate about “indigeneity” and “multiculturalism” in Australia can be extended and brought together.

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“No somos indios”: Latin American Affiliations with Indigeneity in Australia

“No somos indios” 15 (“We are not Indians”) is a statement that Latin American migrants and refugees in Adelaide often made when defining their ethnonational identity in their countries of origins, and in contrast to the way “los Australianos” imagine them to be.16 This somehow contradictory framework influences the different affiliations with indigeneity that Latin American migrants and refugees evoke. Such affiliations are evident in various cultural and political settings in which Latin Americans as individuals or as members of organized groups express solidarity with the struggles of indigenous peoples in Latin America and with those of local Aboriginal activists in Australia. Other such affiliations were evoked when, as members of a “migrant community,” indigeneity (from the migrants’ nations of origin) became a marker of “culture” that is exhibited within various multicultural settings. The apparent contradiction within the statement “no somos indios” and affiliations with indigeneity disappears once we realize that the statement “no somos indios” is already in itself an engagement with indigeneity. It relates to particular notions of otherness that need to be understood in relation to complex histories, particular social positions of indigeneity and “identity” in Latin America and in Australia. The epigraph of this chapter is an example to the first type of such an affiliation. It is a part of a very personal poem written by Juan Garrido, a Chilean political refugee who came to Adelaide during the late 1980s. Garrido published this particular poem in his autobiographical bilingual selection of poems in a book entitled Twenty Years on the Rollcall of the Marginalised. A short prologue to the book explains the particular context in which the poems were written. It presents the author as a political activist and a committed communist who, like many other Chileans, was arrested and tortured by the military regime in Chile. “I, The Poem, confess my passion of hope” expresses Garrido’s political and religious views, and it is loaded with references to liberation theology. As the section above indicates, the poem is also a testimony to the author’s understanding of indigeneity as a form of social struggle. The political struggle for liberation is a struggle against a white society that forgets, but it is also a struggle for a multicultural society that is yet to be born. Garrido ends “I, The Poem,” which is also the last in his book, with I believe in Jesus, Zapata’s Indigenous people, and Allende’s Andes cordillera. I believe in people in struggle.

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I believe the Indigenous people are the spirit of the passion for freedom. They plant in us the seed of freedom to re-open our identity against the eternal sin of this society. Amen.17

It is interesting to note that the poem, which evokes the author’s own “Latin American” background, does not take on an indigenous identity. Instead, it speaks of solidarity with the indigenous peoples who the author has positioned as the subjects of a global struggle for liberation. The “indigenous peoples” are constructed politically, and within the structure of the poem, as a symbolic type, an expression of the desire and possibility for freedom and redemption. The eternal sin is not only the actual dispossession of the indigenous populations, but also refers to social injustices in general. Furthermore, to anyone who is familiar with liberation theology, it is clear that the position of the generalized or global “indigenous subject,” in relation to an alternative identity, indicates that the sin is modernity itself—and in particular colonialism and Western capitalism—that has robbed “our” freedom just as it has destroyed the indigenous peoples. From my own personal acquaintance with Juan Garrido and his work, I know that it is not only a particular political and theological agenda that makes him identify with the Aboriginal case, but also Garrido’s own marginalization and his life experiences as a victim and survivor of barbaric oppression that fuels his “identity,” his hope, and his political struggle. Solidarity with the indigenous struggle was also evoked in other contexts. In Adelaide, for example, it was common to open Latin American “cultural nights,” solidarity events, and political demonstrations (mainly those organized by various left-wing political organizations and activists), with the symbolic statement that acknowledged the traditional land of the Kaurna—the indigenous people and language of the Adelaide Plains of South Australia. At the same time, some of the migratory and diasporic events that were conducted locally in relation to current political and social struggles in Latin America often involved Aboriginal performers. The commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Che Guevara, organized by the Australian Cuba Friendship Society and the Australian Progressive Unions, included Latin American performers alongside Aborigines and native Canadian dancers. Another example was a series of protests that were organized after the dramatic arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in London. Local Chilean political refugees, many of them victims of the regime, held a number of demonstrations in support of the extradition of Pinochet to Spain. These demonstrations took place on the steps of the South Australian

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Parliament House and involved speeches by various political activists, the shouting of slogans against Pinochet, and a commemoration for the Chilean “disappeared” and the political prisoners still held in Chile. Aboriginal performers, as an act of solidarity, were also invited to contribute to these events that were presented as a call for truth and justice in Chile. A visit from Francisco Caquilpan, a Chilean Mapuche delegate, who came to Adelaide as part of an international campaign to pressure the Chilean government to stop the building of six hydroelectric dams on the Biobío River, further demonstrates this point. These dams, some of which are already built, will eventually flood a large part of a traditional Pehuenches land area. The Pehuenches are a subgroup of the larger Mapuche Indian population in the south of Chile.18 The visit was organized by local Chilean political and solidarity groups in Adelaide in association with Aboriginal activists and a local church that practices liberation theology and supports similar social struggles in Latin America and in Australia. In a public lecture given by the Mapuche delegate at a local Aboriginal center, a strong link(age) was made between the political struggle for selfdetermination and indigenous land rights in Chile and the political struggle for Aboriginal land rights in Australia. In Melbourne, there is a Chilean political and solidarity organization called the Chilean Popular and Indigenous Network that focuses on indigenous rights in Chile and in Latin America, and promotes indigenous groups’ struggles for land rights and the fight against global capitalism and neoliberalism. The Chilean Popular and Indigenous Network’s main political activity is directed toward Latin America, and yet, as its newsletter explains, the organization’s political struggle is inclusive of the Koori—the Australian name for Aboriginal peoples from southeastern Australia—and other indigenous communities’ struggles for land rights and against racism and discrimination in Australia. There are, of course, other types of affiliations with Latin Americans that do not directly involve aspects of indigeneity. One such example was a meeting in the mid-1980s between Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of May Square) and Aboriginal groups in Melbourne and Sydney.19 Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo is an apolitical group of Argentinean women who work for the disclosure of the truth about the “Dirty War” (1976–1983) in Argentina. The Argentinean grandmothers, in their call for truth and justice, established an organizational body that is searching, with relative success, for the several hundred abducted children of the estimated 30,000 Argentineans arrested and “disappeared” by the military junta during the years of the “Dirty War.” Large numbers of the abducted children were “given” to the perpetrators of these crimes and to other

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families close to the military junta. The Grandmothers of May Square were invited to Australia by Aboriginal groups who, as part of the search for what is now known as the “stolen generation,” were interested in hearing more about the grandmothers’ search and their plans, at that time, to establish a blood bank and DNA testing facilities for identifying the children of the disappeared. As in the case of the Mapuche delegate, local Latin American migrant groups assisted with and took part in this particular meeting. Political affiliations with the Aboriginal struggle in Australia are not surprising. After all, Latin Americans come from societies and histories in which, as in Australia, the indigenous presence works as a constant reminder of colonialism, dispossession, and human rights abuses. Furthermore, current political unrest and various armed struggles across Latin America have directly involved the indigenous populations who are fighting for land rights, the recognition of their cultural rights and justice in relation to the crimes committed against their people in the past and present. It is in this context that Latin Americans in Adelaide —and, in particular, Chilean political refugees who belong to and are identified with the political left—read Aboriginal history and the Aboriginal struggle as being similar to their own histories and experiences of indigeneity and resistance back home.20 Yet it is important to stress that despite reference to a mestizo ancestry and having some Indian blood, most of these Latin American migrants and refugees fall short of defining themselves as indigenous. Indigeneity “Here” and “There”

There are, of course, multiple historical, cultural, and political reasons for the relation to indigeneity that have much to do with the particular contexts in which indigeneity is struggled, spoken about, constructed, or ignored within different countries in Latin America. In the Australian context, Aboriginality is one of many issues that migrants need to come to terms with in deciphering Australian forms of “otherness,” power relations, and cultural and political history. The most obvious way to “make sense” of—and contextualize—such new settings is by translating previous experiences, histories, and a particular sense of “identity” as similar to those which migrants encounter, construct, and interpret in Australia. A classic example of such a hermeneutic process is found in an Australian book written in Spanish and titled Inmigrante Feliz en Afortunado País (A happy migrant in the lucky country). Inmigrante Feliz is a satirical book that consists of short anecdotes and a humorous critique of the life conditions of Latin American immigrants in Australia. The author uses the pseudonym “Sarna” (Spanish

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for scabies) as a metaphor for the itchy reaction readers should have to this sort of cynical humor and critique. Many of the short stories target particular “Australian” oddities that are constructed around the phenomenological tensions that exist between life here and life there. The author’s understanding of Australian racism and the treatment of the indigenous population is an example of a migratory construction of reality that helps define the “locality” in relation to “our indigenous” and “our racism” back home: When the English arrived to what today is called Australia, not only did they not mix with the natives, as the Spanish did when they slept with our Indian ancestors, but instead they decimated them by conducting the “black war.” Those who managed to escape the genocide lost their lands. Given the spiritual relations Aborigines have with their land, this was like killing them alive. For our natives in the New World, as for the Aborigines in this New-ism, the destructiveness of the contact was a result of the meeting between a society that lived closely with nature, and an invading society that regarded land as a source of wealth. A society living in perfect harmony with a particular spiritual world to a brutal society, materialistic and despiritualised. A society that had communal forms of property, especially in regard to land, to a society ruled by aggressive individual egoism.21

In relation to racism in Australia, the author describes the horrendous treatment of indigenous peoples in Latin America and writes that Latin Americans “cannot cast the first stone” because they themselves are guilty of racism. This is evident and particularly sad because such racism is expressed in the ways by which many Latin Americans tend to negate their own indigenous descent: The worst aspect [of our racism] is that we are all mestizos, and yet as a result of racist and classicist cultural influence many of us tend to renounce our Indian ancestry, instead of being proud of belonging to the primitives of the New World.22

When I showed Paulina, a Chilean political refugee who lives in Adelaide, the text above, she got really upset. Although I read it as a form of affiliation with the indigenous peoples in Australia and as acknowledgement of their suffering and struggle against a brutal oppression by the British colonizers, Paulina felt that by criticizing the British, the author was actually legitimizing the Spaniards and in fact was undermining the indigenous suffering by celebrating the

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mestizaje. “It is as if the author feels that the Spaniards were somehow ‘better’ in the way they treated the Indians, but this is not true,” she told me. “These views,” she said, are based on ignorance of the real history of colonization in Latin America. The Spanish conquistadors also committed genocide, they also raped the women, killed babies and even had dogs trained to eat the flesh of the “indios.” The ignorance regarding these facts is because we have never tried to listen to the stories of the people from the First Nations, if we just learn to listen we would hear, and if we hear we can begin to understand what really happened.

Such an interpretation is part of Paulina’s self-identification with the “Indians,” in a way that shapes, among many other aspects of her life, her migratory experience and her understanding of Chile and Australia: I have always been attracted to cultures other than Chilean . . . as I have been all my life psychologically part of the “Indian” culture . . . although I never had the opportunity to live as an “Indian” I always felt “Indian” even in Chile, even as far as I remember, this is the case . . . so my metamorphosis really started very early on in the piece . . . when I came here my most important relationships were with Aboriginal people, I think this is a factor that must also be acknowledged . . . I don’t look at “Australia” through the “white Australian” eyes; I have been provided with the other history, the one most people are ignorant of, so when I talk about this land I am referring a lot to the Indigenous sense of being Australian.

How should we understand such a claim of indigeneity? Is it a “New Age” construction of the indigenous as a form of spiritualism, or is such a claim, taking into account the history of Latin America and the personal history of Paulina, a way of reclaiming a voice and an “identity”? For Paulina, identification with the indigenous, as the statement above indicates, is a way of challenging the official narrative of the “nation” both in Chile and in Australia. At the same time, she is careful not to appropriate the indigenous voice by emphasizing her mestizo ancestry and by making a distinction between her “feeling” of being an “Indian” and actual “Indian” culture and “identity.” I am the product of the conquest. . . . I should have been a Mapuche woman, living in Mapuche land and under Mapuche lore. . . . I am a mixed-race person instead, brought up in a country with a tremendous inferiority complex

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towards Europe and in particular the U.S. I can’t say I am Mapuche, because I think this is something that I should earn by being with Mapuche people . . . it is only the Mapuche people who can define me as one more Person from the Land. . . . I can’t take this liberty . . . in my heart I am an “Indian.” I always have been and always will be.

Such a perspective, even when not as clearly articulated, is what has helped Latin American political and solidarity groups frame indigeneity as a form of resistance and struggle. Beryl Langer, who studies refugees from El Salvador in Melbourne, describes how the Salvadoran indigeneity was “called out” by different “identity brokers” and interest groups. Indigeneity, as Langer explains, is one of several other “Salvadoran specificities” that are constructed by different agents that are operating within particular local and global social fields: “Multiculturalism” constructs Salvadorans as the most recent arrivals in a wave of “Latin American immigration” which began in the 1970s, or as adding to some thing called “Hispanic community” whose cultural origins are “Catholic” and “Mediterranean.” The discourse of “indigeneity” favours a construction of Salvadorans as “dispossessed indigenes” whose shared history of European invasion makes for a “natural” bond with Aboriginal Australians. Humanrights activists see Salvadorans as victims/survivors of state terror whose shared history of torture and trauma makes for solidarity with other political refugees from Central and South America. Radical Christians view the “Salvadoran experience” through the discursive frame of liberation theology, while to “left remnant groups” like the International Socialist it is part of a MarxistLeninist history of “armed struggle.” 23

From my own fieldwork experience, this rather neat division, though very illustrative, is not always clear. The same Latin American activists often participate in and promote several, if not all of these discourses at the same time. It is interesting to note that, in contrast to Langer’s findings in Melbourne, in Adelaide, as I mentioned above, it is mainly Chilean political refugees who evoke indigeneity in relation to the political struggle for liberation. Most of the Salvadorans I met regarded such affiliations as “political” (i.e., of the political left), and as such as something they avoided and regarded as divisive to the “community.” “There are no indios left in El Salvador. Just a few old people who can still speak Nahuatl the language of the Aztecs.” This was a typical response made by Salvadorans when I talked to them about their indigenous peoples back home.

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Yolanda, a local Salvadoran refugee, once told me a story about a strange incident in the new country: Shortly after we arrived in Australia we were asked to be part of a research project conducted by the “Ethnic Affairs” or something like that. We were told that this is going to be a long-term study and that every three or four years we will be asked to answer a questionnaire. In one of the questions we were asked to name our ancestors, we could not understand the question. The interpreter that sat with us told us that we should write that our ancestors were the Mayas. She said the Mayas were the ones who lived in and controlled most of Central America and as such it is best to write that we are descended from them. We had never thought of ourselves as Mayas, but we followed her advice and wrote it down anyway. It is now a kind of a family joke, every time we come across such a question we write that we are descendants of the Mayas.

Of course, such “ignorance” is not accidental; it is a direct result of an historical process that aimed, often by very brutal means (for example the notorious Matanza of the Pipiles in 1932 in which 32,000 indigenous peasants were massacred), to annihilate any remnant of an indigenous presence in El Salvador. The difference between the El Salvadoran refugees whom Langer researched in Melbourne and those with whom I worked in Adelaide is probably a result of the social and political divisions within El Salvador. It may very well be a result of the different social structures of the “Latin American communities” in Melbourne and in Adelaide. Yet such differences also indicate that affiliations with indigeneity are always made from within the particular social position of the individuals and groups who evoke it. The differences between Paulina and Yolanda are not merely a result of subjective understandings of indigeneity, but are part of complex social settings in which identification with the “indigenous peoples” is operating as an “identity” and as a political statement. For Paulina, identification with the indigenous is not only part of her sense of “self,” but it is also a political criticism of her country of origin and her life in Australia. Paulina had no difficulty claiming her mestizo ancestry as one that includes Spanish, German, Jewish, and Mapuche “blood.” Yet such a mixed background was, as she acknowledges, somehow suppressed in the social context of her life in Chile. “I grew up in a family which only acknowledges the German and the Spanish background but denies the Mapuche and the Jewish side.” It is this suppressed ancestry that helped her define her affiliation with the Indians and the Aborigines. It is an affiliation that

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gains legitimacy from a particular life history and a personal journey and experience of oppression and torture in Chile. In the case of Yolanda, however, identification with indigenous descent is regarded as a mere label. To be a descendent of the Mayas became a family “joke” because it is something that she, from her own personal history and social positioning in El Salvador and in Australia, cannot really understand or see as relevant. For Yolanda, indigeneity is something of the past that has little to do with the way she defines and sees herself at the present, and this is despite and maybe because of her own mestizo ancestry. Affiliations with indigeneity, whether in a political context or, as I explore later, a more multicultural celebratory exoticism, are highly problematic. Not only did most of these migrants not define themselves as “Indians,” but for some this term carried mainly negative connotations and was seen as something that further marginalized them in relation to other Australians. As one Latin American migrant once bitterly told me, “Australians have no idea where we come from. They tend to think that we are all Indians.” To understand such a contradictory position toward indigeneity it is important to look briefly at the complexity of the “indigenous question” in Latin America itself. Unlike Australia, where Aboriginality operates mainly in a racial context as opposed to whiteness, in Latin America, although a racial element undoubtedly exists, any attempt to claim an indigenous identity faces the supposedly “multicultural” notion of the mestizaje. The mestizaje, as Mario Vargas Llosa argues, “works both ways.” As such it would probably be hard to find many Latin Americans who are “purely” nonindigenous, and likewise to find many “pure Indians,” who no doubt do exist but live in remote areas and are in most cases a very small minority. For Vargas Llosa, the process of the mestizaje is opposing what he regards as the regressive, utopian, and racist claims for retrieving the lost “Indian” identity and culture. The mestizo condition is depicted as modern and civilized in contrast to those intellectuals who Vargas Llosa calls “Indianists,” who in their writing and calls for indigenous rights and identities “deify the course of history.” Although in a different context, such ideas are not that different from the view of Australia’s Prime Minister, John Howard, regarding what he called the “black armband view of history,” in his criticism of those who “rewrite” Australian history in relation to the treatment and destruction of the indigenous populations.24 Despite some obvious differences and particular political histories and complex racial relations in different Latin American countries, it is correct to argue that across Latin America white and mestizo populations regard the term

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“indio” as a derogatory term.25 As Daniel Mato argues, the term “Latin” America itself is very much a Eurocentric terminology that historically, despite its anticolonial context, was aimed at excluding the indigenous populations from the emerging nation-states and the region in general.26 To be labeled an “indio” is often to be victimized, marginalized, and discriminated against in more than one sense. Furthermore, as a result of violent oppression and its often not less violent resistance, such as in Peru and Guatemala for example, the “indios” are often associated with terrorism and are presented by various “experts” as a backward, primitive people who practice ritualized violence.27 As a result of a lengthy political struggle in which transnational indigenous peoples’ organizations have actively challenged their treatment and marginalization within and across nation-states in Latin America, we are now witnessing some encouraging symbolic and political changes. One such interesting example is that of the Zapatistas’ uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and their extensive use of the Internet that has led to a new kind of global networking of their struggle.28 Other examples are the emergence of Mayan activists in Guatemala and the election of Alejandro Toledo as the president of Peru. Toledo is the first elected president of indigenous descent (or a cholo, part Indian and part Latino) who, in a symbolic gesture, celebrated his inauguration by conducting a special Indian blessing ceremony at Machu Picchu. It is clear that, despite the above examples, there is still a long way to go before the complex issues and enormous everyday suffering, discrimination and horrendous poverty endured by large indigenous populations in many Latin American countries are resolved. The presence and the voice of indigenous subalterns is central not only to the collective imaginary of particular nation-states, racial and class structures, and different social groups, but also has a direct effect on the everyday life of indigenous and nonindigenous citizens. It is this loaded history that Latin American migrants bring with them into Australia. Indigeneity within the Multicultural Imaginary

The migratory duality of place, the phenomenological gap, and constant continuing relations here with the life there, means not only that migrants construct the “Australian” context in light of their “original” identity, but also that they reinterpret and redefine their original “home” and “identity” in relation to their social positioning as individuals and as members of a collectivity in Australia. It is in such a context that indigeneity is evoked in relation to the definition of Latin American migrants as members of a distinctive “ethnic/migrant community.” These other types of affiliations have more to do with the particu-

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lar migratory experience in light of the national and ideological contexts in Australia than with a sense of indigeneity as solidarity or as part of political struggle in Latin America. To be recognized and visible as a specific “ethnic community,” Latin Americans implicitly and explicitly perform their distinctive “culture” and represent their “community” and “traditions” by emphasizing the exotic indigenous imagery of Latin America. An example of such complexities emerged during a Latin American cultural exhibition held at the South Australian State Library during 1998. The exhibition “Expressions of Latin America” was organized jointly by the State Library and the “Federation of Spanish Speaking Communities,” a multicultural ethnic organization that aims to represent the diverse groups of Latin Americans living in Adelaide. The exhibition aspired to portray Latin American cultures and present artworks produced by Latin American artists living in Adelaide. As part of the three-month exhibition, the State Library also held weekly storytelling sessions for schoolchildren and an event titled “Earth, Wind, and Fire”— a “cultural evening” of poetry readings and Latin American music. For the local Latin American artists, the exhibition was presented as an opportunity to express “their pride in creating a new place for their culture and works in multicultural South Australia.” The panel text at the entrance to the exhibition promoted this imagery of “cultural enrichment” and multiculturalism: “This exhibition reflects the cultural wealth, the thought, the feelings and the soul of South Australian artists from Latin American countries. They have brought with them to South Australia their vibrant culture heritage and creative skills, and in the process, enriched this community.” 29 The exhibition displayed two main kinds of objects as “cultural expressions” of Latin America. The first were representations of the “original” cultures in Latin America. This was achieved by displaying various “culturally purposeful objects” from there, such as traditional costumes, maps, musical instruments, indigenous artifacts as well as images of landscapes, traditional dancing, literature, and poetry.30 Continuously played soundtracks of music from various countries and cultural traditions across Latin America (indigenous, folkloric, and nueva canción, but not salsa, merengue, or bolero), added another dimension to the “Latin American” feel of the exhibition. The second type of objects were various forms of artwork produced by local Latin American artists. These included artistic works, such as paintings, photography, poetry, tapestry, and pottery. Some of these works evoked Latin America in their subject matter and style. There was, for example, a series of paintings that depicted the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, an arpillera (tapestry) that was woven in 1992 by a group of Latin American women in Adelaide in commemoration of the 500 years of Spanish colonization, and a bust

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of the famous Chilean artist Pablo Neruda, whose poetry and death symbolize the struggle against the dictatorship in his country. Other works evoked Latin America in a very different way. A young Salvadoran artist presented her work titled “A Day at the Market,” a series of close-up photographs depicting her own screaming and anguished expressions as part of her personal experience and memory of the civil war in El Salvador. And yet other artworks in the exhibition did not evoke in their style or subject matter any direct reference to Latin America but were simply included because Latin American migrants had produced them. At the opening night of the exhibition, I asked one of the organizers and a community leader in what ways he believed such an exhibition could help the “community.” I was quite surprised when he answered that the exhibition would show the “Australians” “que no somos indios”—“that we are not Indians.” What he meant was that the exhibition would demonstrate that Latin Americans are people of sophisticated cultures— artistic, musical, literate, and so on. To be represented in a sort of museum setting at the State Library was seen by him as an important recognition and acknowledgment of the presence of Latin Americans living in Adelaide. “Not to be an Indian,” however, meant that the representation was believed by the speaker to depict Latin Americans as “civilized” people of high cultural and artistic value who are unlike the image of the “barbarians” or the “uncivilized” and “culture-less” indios. The speaker made a distinction between the image of Latin America as part of the Third World (and therefore the view of Latin Americans as people from developing countries, less-modern, backward people, if not mere primitives) and the “high” cultural achievements that he believed the exhibition demonstrated. The statement “que no somos indios” struck me at the time as ironic because the exhibition openly celebrated the indigenous cultures of Latin America. In a way, through the choices made in selecting the objects and the forms of display, the exhibition actually encouraged the visitors to see the Latin American migrants as indigenous. Such representations and interpretations were related to the Western context in which the indigenous people are romanticized as “noble savages” (spiritual, closer to nature), a romanticism that prevails in some of the political discourse that evokes the indigenous in the name of the resistance and survival of “disappearing” cultures.31 Some of the remarks in the exhibition’s visitors’ book reveal such interpretations: Interesting and moving display. Keep up the good work. Indigenous cultures mustn’t be lost.

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This is one of many visits. The vibration of the Indigenous cultures is felt here as well as the vibrations of the organizers of this exhibition and the people portrayed. Thanks a Million. A sign of hope and inspiration in these dark times. An expression of the strength vibrancy and faith of Indigenous people everywhere.

One of the interesting remarks in this context was made by a Maori visitor who expressed a kinship affiliation and common heritage with the indigenous people of Latin America: “I am a Maori from N.Z. and we’re related in some way because our land our home is where you are from but we left South America before you were discovered by the Spanish. Great work brothers and sisters.” Notwithstanding the multicultural rhetoric of tolerance and the encouragement of migrants to “retain” and express their original cultural identity, it is important to note that such difference is often a product of the social construction of the migrants as “people of culture.” The assumed “otherness” of the migrants is what makes them culturally visible while their “visibility” works to reinforce the invisibility of the dominant culture. In a sense, “[T]he more power one has, the less culture one enjoys, and the more culture one has, the less power one wields.” 32 Cultural expressions of the migrants’ Otherness are based upon a set of power relations that creates zones of “cultural visibility” that exist in contrast to zones of “cultural invisibility.” 33 It is always “they” who have culture and “we” who do not. It is in this context that the Latin American migrants are depicted as colorful people, indigenous and exotic. For the organizers of the exhibition, the cultural visibility of their “community” is a strategic imperative for gaining entry into the multicultural realm and for constructing a sense of pride and “community.” I do not wish to argue that the affiliations Latin American migrants create with indigeneity are somehow “inauthentic.” Far from it. Rather, what I criticize is the “cultural logic” of such exhibitions that constructs the “ethnic/migrant community” as an enclave of cultural difference. Conclusion

One of the ways in which the political and theoretical debate regarding “multiculturalism” and Aboriginality can be sharpened is by studying indigeneity in Australia and elsewhere, as something that cuts through particular localized “identities.” Despite the image of the indigenous as peoples who are rooted in a particular place, many indigenous people are on the move and even if they are not physically moving they are often part of global and transnational organ-

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izations that create complex networks, provide political support, and enable an exchange of ideas and strategies. The social relationships and political activities of left-wing Latin American refugees and Aborigines testify that the category of the “migrant,” as the “nonAnglo” and nonindigenous Australian is less solid and exclusive than the way it is often presented. Other frameworks, such as cultural exhibitions, in which Latin American migrants and refugees represent affiliation with their indigenous backgrounds, are also very significant. Yet such expressions are rarely being noticed. In a multicultural Australia, it is important to scrutinize not only the indigenous, but also to look closely at the complexity of the nonindigenous Australians. There is a need to be more sensitive to the different ways by which migrant communities and individuals understand and relate to notions of indigeneity. We need to look at the different contexts in which indigeneity is expressed instead of simply restating the important, but often simplistic, binarism between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians. Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Latin American migrants and refugees in Adelaide who allowed me to become part of their lives and accepted me in a truly warm and loving way, considering the circumstances of my inquisitive presence. I hope that what I have written neither offends nor undermines the respect and cariño that I have for them.

Notes This is a revised version of an early paper, published in 2003 as Erez Cohen, “Multiculturalism, Latin Americans and indigeneity in Australia,” Australian Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 14, no. 1 (2003): 39–52.

Epigraph: Juan Garrido, Twenty Years on the Rollcall of the Marginalised (Adelaide: Federal Printing House, 1996), p. 54. 1. Ghassan Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Annandale, New South Wales: Pluto Press, 2003), p. 90. 2. Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, 96. 3. Ellie Vasta, “Dialectics of Domination: Racism and Multiculturalism,” in E. Vasta and Stephen Castles, eds., The Teeth Are Smiling: The Persistence of Racism in Multicultural Australia (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996), pp. 46–69. 4. Barry Morris, “The Politics of Identity: From Aborigines to the First Australians,” in Jeremy Beckett, ed., Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988), pp. 63–86.

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5. John Docker, “Rethinking Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism in the Fin de Siècle,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 9, no. 3 (1995): 409–442. 6. Nehul Bhuta and Georgiana Costello, “Global Apartheid: Controlling Immigration in a Global Village,” Arena Magazine, Vol. 54 (August 2001): 31–35. 7. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 25. 8. Nicholas Thomas, “Cold Fusion,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 98, no. 1 (1998): 9–16. 9. Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 96. 10. Diane M. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 153. 11. Peter Read, “Pain, Yes; Racism, No: The Responses of non-British Australians to Indigenous Land Rights,” in Geoffrey Gray and Christine Winter, eds., The Resurgence of Racism: Howard, Hanson and the Race Debate (Melbourne: Monash Publications in History, 1997), pp. 87–95. 12. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “The State of Shame: Australian Multiculturalism and the Crisis of Indigenous Citizenship,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, no. 2 (1998): 575–611. 13. Hage, Against Paranoid Nationalism, p. 91. 14. These issues have been explored by Lynette Russell in “The Instrument Brings On Voices: Life Story Narratives and Family History,” Meanjin, Vol. 3 (2001): 145–152, and A Little Bird Told Me: Family Secrets, Necessary Lies (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 2002). 15. The term indio is a racist term in many Latin American countries. Therefore, the statement “we are not Indians” should be read as “we are not primitive backward people” or, in its more “positive” meaning, “we are people of culture.” 16. The majority of these migrants and refugees are Chileans and El Salvadorans, but there are also smaller groups of Latin Americans from other counties such as Peru, Uruguay, and Colombia. Most Latin Americans arrived in Australia during the 1970s and 1980s as refugees or under the Humanitarian Program, as well as on family reunion visas. 17. Garrido, Twenty Years on the Rollcall. 18. Aleta Brown, “When Push Comes to Shove on the Biobío,” World Rivers Review, Vol. 13, no. 4 (1998): 5, 11. 19. I thank Rafaela Lopez, a researcher in the project “Hispanics in Victoria since Federation,” for providing me with this information. 20. Beryl Langer, “Globalisation and the Myth of Ethnic Community: Salvadoran Refugees in Multicultural States,” in D. Bennett, ed., Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 163–177, esp. p. 173.

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21. Belarmino Sarna, Inmigrante Feliz en Afortunado País: Impresiones Ficticias de Un Machista-Inconformista (Canberra: National Library of Australia), pp. 202–203. 22. Sarna, Inmigrante Feliz en Afortunado País, p. 205. 23. Langer, “Globalisation and the Myth of Ethnic Community.” 24. Mario Vargas Llosa, “Question of Conquest and Culture,” The Tenth Anniversary John Bonython Lecture. Occasional Papers 47 (Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies, 1993). See esp. pp. 7–8. 25. The category indio should not always be interpreted as a reference to indigenous populations and in different countries in Latin America may have a different meaning. For example, in the Dominican Republic, the concept indio refers to skin color and not to an Indian race. Dominicans who define themselves and are regarded by others as indios are those who have brown skin. See Ninna Nyberg Sørensen, “There Are No Indians in the Dominican Republic: The Cultural Construction of Dominican identities,” in Karen Fog Olwig and Kirsten Hastrup, eds., Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 292–310. 26. Daniel Mato, “On Global and Local Agents and the Social Making of Transnational Identities and Related Agendas in ‘Latin’ America,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Vol. 4, no. 2 (1997): 167–212, esp. p. 175. 27. Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, no. 2 (1989): 205–225. 28. Mato, “On Global and Local Agents.” 29. L. Sweeney, “Expressions of Latin America,” Extra: The Quarterly Newsletter of the State Library of South Australia (April–June, 1998). 30. Michael Baxandall, “Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects,” in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), pp. 33–41. 31. Lissa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, no. 1 (1992): 24–44. 32. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989). Rosaldo (p. 202) talks about such practices in relation to anthropology and the way by which the closer the anthropological subjects were to “us” the “less” culture they are assumed to have. It is in such a context that official multiculturalism adopts anthropological jargon including classic definitions of the term culture itself. 33. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, p. 198.

C HAPTE R 5

Cultural Calculus Cultural Translation and the Politics of Indigenous Cultural Property

Stephen Pritchard

This chapter is an examination of an intersection between the theorization of “culture” and “the cultural” in social and cultural theory and legal, anthropological, and philosophical representations of indigenous cultural property. One of cultural theory’s most influential and controversial insights concerns the claim that the meaning of “sense” of culture or cultural identity always implies and depends on at least one other culture or cultural identity; identities, like cultures, are defined in terms of their conceived differential relation to others.1 This apparent dependence on other cultures as a point of differentiation, along with the often unquestioned Eurocentric basis for such differentiation, poses a number of significant problems for the definition and protection of indigenous cultural property. A common point between many interpretations of these concerns in the form of a problematization of “notions” of culture or identity and the legislative or legal recognition of indigenous culture is the failure to theorize the politics of representation adequately. Here, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has observed, it is useful to consider the way in which “representation” is best understood as having two interrelated senses: “as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and . . . as ‘re-presentation’, as in art and philosophy.” 2 Keen to reveal the politics of the conditions under which representation becomes possible, she insists that we not conflate the two senses and yet consider how “re-presentation,” in the sense of depiction, definition, or characterization, can fix or delimit what counts as “representative,” as well as the way representation always already implies and posits a representor or a “speaking on behalf of.” At the very least, this prompts us to consider what and who is framing the non-Western as “authentic,” “autonomous,” or “representative” and so 86

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alerts us to the fact that, as Jacques Derrida has observed, “the very project of attempting to fix the context of utterances, [meanings or identities] . . . cannot be apolitical or politically neutral . . . and [is] never a purely theoretical gesture.” 3 In the context of indigenous cultures, cultural theory’s approach to the meaning of culture and “the cultural” has been articulated as both a historical observation concerning the construction of indigenous cultures from the point of their differentiation from nonindigenous ones and a theoretical point concerning the construction of identity and culture in general. Although these insights have not directly challenged the notion of cultural property, in some cases, most notably where “culture” is taken as marked by intercultural exchange, they have translated into an argument that undermines the idea of “culture” or “the cultural” as something autonomous, discrete, or self-contained. An emphasis on the destructive effects of colonialism has meant that exchange, influence, and adaptation have tended to be interpreted as loss. Consider, for example, Simon During’s description of “contact”: Postcolonial identity politics tend towards paradox and irresolution because, with the coming of Europeans, the narratives, signifiers and practices available to articulate the needs and wants of the colonised are at once inscribed within Eurocentric modernity. Thus the moment of the arrival opens out in a scene of forgetting and misrecognition.4

These dramatic implications of European contact stem from a simple historical fact, as articulated by David Hollinsworth: [E]ven before the invasion of 1788, the category “Aborigine” was a social construction of the colonising power. There is no evidence of a universalistic category equivalent to “Aborigines” in pre-contact traditional times.5

Although this may be true, as a matter of historical fact, the effect of construing the relation between European and indigenous cultures as a primary point of reference subsumes indigenous innovation and adaptation after “contact” within the tide of Europeanization, as if there could be no identity, or agency, from then on that was not in some way compromised. This also has the effect of undermining the legitimacy and authority of “traditional” practices, where the “marks” of colonization are detectable. This has clear implications for selfdetermination. As Nicholas Thomas has argued, this tendency to view colonization as a one-way process, with Europeans as the active agents who bring the indigenous, as passive victims, into modernity, marginalizes those who

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[m]ust negotiate identities in urban contexts, with non-traditional social relations, institutions, jobs and . . . is [therefore] inappropriate in so far as it is strongly associated with the past, rather than the contemporary circumstances within which they, like everyone else, have to operate.6

Such a view seems to place far too great an emphasis on a division derived from “contact,” between the (“pure”) precolonial and the (“impure”) colonial. As Thomas notes, although the idea that identities are articulated relationally “must be true as a universal proposition,” It is evidently not true that indigenous peoples, or any others, need constantly to express their identities in relation to colonizers rather than each other, or in relation to other indigenous peoples or non-indigenous peoples other than the colonizers.7

Indeed, criticism of the alleged essentialist tendencies of representations of indigenous cultures and cultural identities led Andrew Lattas to argue that the critique of essentialism “has come to operate recently as a ‘truth effect’ in Aboriginal Studies; it has become a common way by which white intellectuals can morally authorize themselves despite coming from varied political positions.” 8 Similarly, although it may be that cultural theory’s problematization of the objectivity of cultural categories is theoretically correct, insofar as it brings into question the manner in which “objectivity” is constructed, this can also undermine the basis for the definition and protection of rights and cultural property. Culture, while including a “world of ‘real,’ tangible objects and things,” is taken to be principally a discursive complex or system not able to be thought of as “real” or “objective” independently of those to whom “culture” belongs. Subjects’ status as members of a culture, like any relation of belonging, already presupposes a position from which they are recognized as such. Thus, from one perspective, culture is taken to constitute and give a perspective or orientation to “a world” of things, actions, relations, and meanings, providing an expression and reflection of that perspective, whereas from another perspective it is taken to be objectively verifiable and definable. The problem, of course, is that the position from which cultures tend to be “objectively” judged, verified, and defined is typically derived from an assumed “neutral,” but ultimately Eurocentric, perspective.9 Part of the problem with debates concerning the determination of indigeneity relates to the enormous scope of the term indigenous. Usage ranges from the

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most trivial stylistic designations to the attribution of authorship and cultural identity; from voluntary affiliation to the most robust and rigid fixities of history and the human sciences; from not only recent inventions to histories, beliefs, and traditions that precede colonization, but also those disciplines that seek to understand and characterize them. In terms of recognition in nonindigenous contexts, this incorporates art history and theory, anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, history, and the human sciences and, in law and legislation, copyright and intellectual property, heritage, and native title. The representation of indigenous cultures as forms or types of culture, like the translation of terms between cultures, requires an assumed common ground, shared context, or set of concepts. If one considers the history of relations between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples in Australia, it is relatively clear that this is not something that has been fairly negotiated and therefore has a clear cultural politics: the possibility of translation implies a commonality, and yet, in the colonial context, it has tended to result in the reduction of one (language, term, perspective, and so forth) to the other. Moreover, to restrict debate about culture and cultural property to the relationship of one to another in this way passes over the question of the basis of “relationality”; difference is reduced to plurality. To shift the emphasis away from matters of legality, or difference in relation to other cultures, as is tended to be assumed in legal, historical, ethnological, and anthropological representations of culture, to a form of cultural translation would highlight the way “culture,” “cultural production,” and claims concerning cultural property can take the form of cultural and political negotiations. To twist the words of Homi Bhabha to describe the objectives of this inquiry, and to underline the cultural politics of representation in general, this describes a revision of the question of cultural property from a postcolonial perspective: “to move the location of cultural difference away from the space of [cultural or legal] . . . plurality to the borderline negotiations of cultural translation.” 10 Representing Ownership

In the most uncontroversial and clear-cut, individuals or groups own certain properties. A dispute about who owns property or properties would therefore be resolved by establishing who is the rightful owner. In cross-cultural contexts, as I have suggested, how ownership is established or understood may differ greatly, as might notions of what constitutes property and rights. In many claims concerned with the distinction between indigenous and nonindigenous cultures, for example, it is not simply a matter of clarifying the relationship between sub-

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ject and object, owner and property, because both are often conceived of in relation to the other and in ways that may differ culturally. Intercultural politics can also inform and shape cultural production and the articulation of claims. Where indigenous customs, beliefs, and cultural property have depended on nonindigenous recognition, as is the case with the current system set up for the registration and protection of cultural property, land, and native title rights in Australia, these issues tie together matters of representation, understood in the sense of “speaking on behalf of,” a form of depiction or characterization, and matters of political and legal rights and entitlements.11 Thus, the risks of representation are linked to the way in which the “figuration” of indigenous cultures or cultural forms, beliefs, and practices within so-called authoritative discourses like anthropology and law not only make recognition of these things possible, but also are instrumental to such power knowledge and the condition of the possibility for continued colonial dominance. If one takes the example of the context of contemporary indigenous art, for example, the question of cultural property can be seen as a site of contestation with respect to the attribution of the adjectives “indigenous” to an assumed general class of things, forms, or practices: “property,” “culture,” “art,” or “artistry.” From a certain perspective, “indigenous” is taken as a particular “form” or “type” of culture, art, property, or artistry in general. Yet, from another, this could be taken to be a rearticulation or translation of these things from that particular perspective. Arguably, the history of the colonization of Australia is a narrative in which one system or vocabulary of property, ownership, and rights displaces and effaces others. The nonindigenous assertion of ownership and rights over what is and was indigenous secured colonial interests through the assumption of the authority of imported notions and concepts. As Maureen Tehan has observed, historically ownership is a “prima facie ultimate power” carrying the “right to use, control, enjoy and exclude others”: “The power of ownership is central to what is or is not said to be property and, further, allows dominant groups to influence the determination of what is or is not property; . . . women, and colonized peoples . . . [for example] have historically been denied property rights.” 12 The historical point of displacement does not, however, mark a definitive or absolute cultural division: indigenous and nonindigenous cultures are not only coeval, but also, in certain contexts, are mutually entangled. Contemporary realities are often more complex and multifarious than cultural definitions would suggest. Indeed, even if, as many have argued, identity is conceived of relationally by reference to others or constituted by reference to a differential system of relations, and cultural identity could be best understood as always involving

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more than one culture, this does not mean that culture is reducible to such factors. Still, it is worth reinforcing the point made earlier concerning the establishment of “relation,” because the issue of “relation” and “definition” is central to the possibility of making claims across or between cultures. In fact, as I have already suggested, the basis for any such “relationality” is itself a politically contested matter. If one views the determination of the relationship between subjects and their properties, between one culture and another, as not only “empirical” or “descriptive,” but also political and performative, then so too is the process of translation, comparison, or differentiation of one culture’s conceptualization of property interests in terms of another. Delineation and differentiation would thus appear to be a condition of the possibility of cultural definition and identification, but also derived from a notion of culture-in-general, an assumed shared or common ground or context. As Ludwig Wittgenstein has observed, there can be no argumentation, no difference in opinion or perspective, without an agreement or shared assumption at a more fundamental level.13 The assumption of “agreement” or “translatability,” though offering the possibility of the definition and protection of cultural property, also makes imperialist incorporation and appropriation possible. This brings us back to a politics of representation in the many meanings of the term, because the issue here is not simply a matter of establishing which depiction, characterization, or definition is most “truthful,” but also includes the manner in which such representation is determined by and determines what counts as representation in the sense of “speaking on behalf of,” an instance or example, delegate or spokesperson. Consider, for example, a dispute that arose between the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council (TALC) and the archaeology department at La Trobe University when a member of the department sought to renew permits for the possession of cultural artifacts removed from sites in Tasmania. On July 24, 1995, the dispute was heard in the federal court in Melbourne and Justice Olney found that “the four permits issued to Professor Allen had expired, the earliest on 31 May 1991 and the most recent on 30 January 1993.” 14 On August 3, 1995, the then minister for National Parks and Wildlife, John Cleary, asked the federal court to return all artifacts to the senior cultural heritage officer and they were subsequently returned to Tasmania. One of the central issues raised by the case was whether this “cultural heritage” was the common property of “humankind,” and therefore able to be claimed for scientific interest and value, or whether it was the “cultural heritage” of the Tasmanian Palawas. Setting aside the obvious problem that it was

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assumed that the property in the relics is vested in the crown or that the minister had the right to determine the question of the control of materials, the case highlights questions about the relationship between how culture is represented, who represents it, and what implications this has for what can be claimed by whom. Arguing against the suggestion that the Palawas’ claim had priority to his own, Professor Allen argued that he had “a legitimate claim on this material in the same way as the Tasmanian Aborigines have a legitimate claim on this material. How ownership can devolve down one group of people who have a political view about this material doesn’t strike me as logical.” 15 This perspective was articulated in a more extreme form in the South Australian context by Professor Gough, who asserted that there would be exceedingly high odds against “any present-day Aborigines . . . having close genetic affinity with the people who inhabited their regions 20,000 years earlier.” 16 By representing Australian indigenous culture as belonging to the “history of humanity,” the archaeologists make a claim to some form of ownership, just as their representation of indigenous claims in terms of genetics provides them with a way of undermining and ridiculing indigenous ownership. By representing indigenous culture as one culture among many, as part of the history of humanity, indigenous history and cultural property is incorporated and assimilated into a generalized field of objects and things, defined in nonindigenous terms. The matter is, therefore, not simply one that can be resolved by establishing the proper or truthful relation between objects and subjects, because who and what these are can be constructed differently from each perspective. The idea that one could establish what is “proper” or “true” in this context is entirely reliant on the assumption of a forum, space, or vocabulary in terms of which the relationship can be articulated. The problem is that, in legal and political contexts, the measure of truth, legitimacy, and authority is often predetermined from a nonindigenous perspective. If “truth” is given in its representation rather than as that what is re-presented, as many cultural theorists will now hold, then the constitution of “the true” can reflect a particular cultural orientation to the world. Culture and Cultures

In The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford made the following assertion: “Intervening in an interconnected world, one is always, to varying degrees . . . ‘inauthentic’: caught between cultures, implicated in others.” 17 “Identity,” he concludes, “is conjunctural, not essential.” 18 Although this can be understood in terms of the changing historical and geopolitical conditions in which cultures

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are increasingly exposed to and shaped by others, it also carries a deeper theoretical insight not reducible to any specific historical or political conditions. The problem, of course, is that a problematization of “authenticity” or discrete, definable cultural boundaries is often taken to undermine indigenous cultural authority or legitimacy. If translatability is a condition for the possibility of legal and legislative recognition and protection, it is the “difficult” “in-between” cases that challenge the legitimacy and politicize these conditions. Where indigenous cultural production articulates and engages with indigenous/nonindigenous differences, through the specification of the “properties” of culture or its boundaries, scope, or context, it can be seen to go beyond descriptive, referential representation and take the form of a performative political claim or assertion. The idea that political assertion or creative self-conscious presentation is somehow less real, objective, or legitimate, in this context, seems based on a delimitation or precomprehension of “the cultural.” It is important to note that what is taken to be a conceptual or historical issue concerning how it is that we come to understand or articulate culture and the cultural need not be seen to correspond to that to which these terms refer. In situations that give rise to the articulation of culture or the cultural, groups make use of the vocabularies that are available, despite the fact that they are often imposed and foreign. Indeed, in a book published nine years after The Predicament of Culture, we find in Clifford the suggestion that, although the vocabulary used to articulate cultural identity or cultural boundaries is marked by this conceptual problematic, one might distinguish between the particular form of its articulation and what it refers to: “‘minority’ and ‘tribal’ articulations of a discrete culture and history respond to histories of exclusion and silencing.” 19 From a theoretical perspective, although the representation of differences between “indigenous” and “nonindigenous” or the negotiation of the two may be taken for granted in some contexts, one can question the basis for this differentiation insofar as it assumes a generalized foundation on which such distinctions are often made. This is not to say that such differentiations cannot or should not be made, but instead highlights some of the implications of this assumption; this “grounding” is not simply descriptive or referential, but can also be performative and political. In this way, from a certain perspective, “inbetween” cases draw upon these differentiations, from another they bring them into question. The “in-between” can be interpreted as a position that undermines the legitimacy of binary positions, “indigenous,” “nonindigenous,” “authentic,” “nonauthentic,” but from another perspective it can be seen as an opening up and problematization of the system of identification and definition. Moving from the descriptive to the performative, the “in-between” marks a dif-

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ficult site of struggle and negotiation. As Bhabha argues, “Hybrid hyphenations emphasize the incommensurable elements—the stubborn chunks—as the basis of cultural identifications. What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently, ‘opening out,’ remaking boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference.” 20 Computing, Internet, and televisual technologies have had a significant effect on the conditions of the production, reproduction, circulation, and consumption of cultural imagery. These developments have had a significant impact on the uses and misuses of indigenous cultural property. The development of these technologies have not only made particular and specific local traditions more available and accessible, but have also played into and fueled an economy based on notions of specific, authentic, situatedness and rarity. In fact, in the context of indigenous cultural objects and properties, attempts to clearly delineate between “real” cultural objects and mere appropriations have tended to follow and draw upon the logic that governs the trade and traffic of “exoticism”; the “realness” of objects is often equivalent to their “authenticity,” a notion often defined in relation to cultural difference from what is considered nonindigenous. This again highlights a point that is worth repeating: the definition of cultures in terms of each other may depend on the assumption of a common notion, ground, context, or set of concepts, but this offers the possibility of both imperialist incorporation and protection. Systems like authentication marks are perhaps most clearly shaped by this dependence on “authenticity.” As Stephen Gray has argued, whereas the use of the label of authenticity in Australia is clearly a useful tool for educating consumers—and allowing indigenous cultural producers, rather than others, to receive their just deserves from the sale of indigenous cultural produce—it is also symbolic of “how far Aboriginal art has become commodified.” 21 Although the right to respond to market interest and profit from indigenous produce must surely be the right of indigenous peoples, the particular manner in which “value,” “authenticity,” and “legitimacy” are constructed points to some of the complexities that underlie questions of cultural property. Subjects and Objects

As Michael Ryan has noted, “The concept of the subject in liberal social theory, the basis for all rights claims, is inseparable from the institution of property.” 22 Rights, Ryan claims, are forms of properties of the subject of rights, yet subjects, as subjects of rights, are subjects insofar as they are subjected to a system or regime that bestows upon them such properties. As Ryan observes, “By

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catachresis . . . rights come into being as the claim to ownership . . . [and yet] the catachresis is reversible; property . . . is constructed upon the metaphor of the person or subject.” 23 By extension, we could understand this to mean that a particular identity is typically understood to be such-and-such identity insofar as it possesses certain attributes or properties. Identity is established in terms of properties. Such properties, as properties of such-and-such, however, are dependent on this identity. Each is defined in terms of the other; both presuppose a preconceived understanding or sense of a proper system of relations or belonging. A realist approach would take this relationship to be objective and real, whereas a social constructivist approach would take the relationship to be socially and historically constructed. The problem with the first approach is that it takes the relationship between culture and the cultural to be something that can be verified, described, and known and in doing so tends to overlook the way in which verification, description, and knowledge are, in a certain way, both cultural and expressive of a particular cultural positionality. Indeed, as I have suggested above, those discourses principally concerned with establishing cultural definitions, knowledge, and truth are significant in determining and shaping the ways in which culture is “re-presented” and “re-cognized.” The problem with the latter approach is that it tends to characterize this relationship of “belonging” or “properness” as historically and culturally contingent. I will return to this problem soon, but it is worth noting how this proposition begins by first assuming something like a form of generalizable conditions for identity and culture. The question Ryan’s point prompts is thus, if the subject or a specific identity is tied to (“its”) property and property to this subject or identity and if, therefore, neither one can stand logically or conceptually before the other, how might we think of the relationship between a proper name, like “Aborigine” or “indigenous,” and “its” alleged object(s), understood as indigenous property or cultural objects, in a manner that does not subject both to Western notions of the subject, identity, culture, and property? This point is not merely a conceptual one, as I have suggested above, but also concerns practical issues tying the definition and control of cultural objects and knowledge to questions about self-determination. Just as the representation of “indigenous culture” as a form or type of culture both submits it to an often unquestioned and imperialist notion of culture in general, the positioning of indigenous cultural objects, practices, and beliefs as cultural property makes it both amenable to appropriation as well as protection. Here we find two of the most significant competing approaches to cultural property and heritage: the

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first views culture as something that is definable, describable, and therefore policeable; the second prefers the emphasis on the dynamic, creative, transformative, and adaptive aspects of culture. Paul Gilroy recently offered a critique of the first approach in the following terms: [T]he historical obligation to conserve culture produces a different conservativism: readily racialized, nationalized and now gene biologized under the brittle shells of protective, know-nothing ethnicity. . . . Culture is now analysed as property rather than process.24

Similarly, Arjun Appadurai expresses his unease with the word “culture” and an attachment to the adjectival form of the word “cultural,” providing the following justification: Much of the problem with the noun form has to do with the implication that culture is some kind of object, thing, or substance, whether physical or metaphysical. This substantialization seems to bring culture back into the discursive space of race, the very idea it was originally designed to combat . . . cultural the adjective [on the other hand] moves into the realm of differences, contrasts, and comparisons.25

In the context of the issue of cultural property, however, one might well argue that the use of “cultural” as an adjective is not less dependent upon some presumed fixity. The presumption of a system or method by which one would determine this relationship as proper leads to a similar uncritical objectification; in this context differentiation and sameness go hand in hand, because there can be no differentiation, contrast, or comparison with an assumed common language, vocabulary, or system of identification. Just as intercultural argumentation presupposes a common language or discourse, the notion of cultural mobility, fluidity, and creativity itself presupposes something like a general notion of culture. One must question, at times, the purpose and reason behind the postulation of the notion of a culture in general to which each individual or particular culture is at least conceptually related, for not only does this seem to set up an unquestioned notion of “the cultural,” it also seems to play into Western capitalist interests insofar as it also establishes the possibility of abstraction, appropriation, transportability, and mobility across cultures. The idea of different cultures as differing forms of culture sets up the groundwork for a kind of cultural interchangeability, exchange, or

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equivalence. As historical examples have shown, often this notion of culture in general is an abstraction of a cultural particular, a form of Western culture. Often, it would seem, in haste to explain the way certain cultural objects are attributable to cultures, there is a failure to take the time to note the way these objects not only “belong” to culture, are instances of it, and, in some ways, create, produce, and rearticulate it. The cultural is not only shaped and determined by the context or parameters in which it is cognized, produced, and circulated, but is also, importantly, that which defines and determines the context or parameters of cognition, production, and reception. This interface between what is or has been recognized and what will or can be is not only a political issue between cultures, as a matter of establishing who determines such matters; it is also a cultural matter, belonging to, articulating, producing, or maintaining what is understood as “culture.” This could include responding to demands imposed on individuals or groups regarding the way in which culture and cultural property are recognized. The conceptual movement from Ryan’s point about the interconnectedness of the notion of subject and property, and about the particular historical condition of their emergence, to the more general point about the relationship between the definition of cultural identity and cultural property may appear a “sleight of hand.” Ryan’s description, however, is particularly apt for capturing the paradoxical position in which many indigenous peoples find themselves with respect to the legal and political recognition of their rights and properties. A particularly interesting aspect of the notion of indigeneity in this context relates to the fact of its “firstness,” “properness,” or “in-placeness” at home. The name itself is given to name a diverse group of peoples, the meaning of the term: “existing,” “growing,” “belonging to,” “native.” In the context of law, and what we might call systems of colonial representation in general, the “before” of before the law carries with it a related paradox: indigenous rights, as they are recognized in Australian law, are derived from nonindigenous tradition. Even the overturning of the doctrine of terra nullius in Mabo did not change this fact. As Stewart Motha observes of native title, [I]t is clear that the Aboriginal relationship to land, whether called “native title” or not, was recognized by the common law because it was made to conform with Western categories.26

In the area of the recognition of indigenous cultural property and heritage, Tehan notes similar problems:

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Arguably, the Mabo decision has had a negative impact on the limited heritage protection that does exist, since it demonstrated that the common law is unable to recognize interests in land which are different to, or not derived from, its own concepts of property and which do not meet the stringent test for the survival of native title.27

There is no doubt that this notion of indigenous rights being before and after the law, just like the notion of indigenous as “belonging,” but only belonging in terms that are not themselves indigenous, carries a strange resonance in the context of the recognition and definition of indigenous culture and cultural property insofar as European-derived names, concepts, and categories have overwritten and effaced indigenous ones. Here the question of who names, defines, and authorizes is inseparably tied to questions of self-determination. In this context, two issues of great importance arise: Who defines the relationship as “belonging” or “proper”? And to what extent is such a definition compatible with the continued survival, growth, and development of culture? The later recognition of Australian indigenous society, culture, and rights, for example, recalls a scene of colonial naming that overwrites and effaces indigenous laws, languages, and cultures by reducing them to terms already accepted by Anglo-Australian law. Making a similar observation of Kant’s description of the human and the temporality (the “after” and “before”) of the colonial subject, Spivak notes this paradoxical position: I have indeed thought of who will come after the subject, if we set to work, in the name of who came before, so to speak. Here the simple answer . . . [is] the Aboriginal [and yet] . . . [p]aradoxically, Kant bestowed upon them an absurd national identity [Neuhollander the bizarre before-after position that temporally marks the subject before colonialism by naming it after Europe].28

Legal and legislative protection and recognition of Australian indigenous rights and cultural property requires both translatability into the terms of law and relatively clear definitions of what constitutes “indigeneity” in whichever context it is being used. The problems with current copyright, heritage, and intellectual property law and legislation are well documented. Terri Janke’s Our Culture: Our Future, for example, outlines the problems associated with notions of authorship, ownership and originality, the duration of copyright protection, and the process by which heritage is registered and recognized. But, beyond the limits resulting from specific legislative and legal mechanisms and the attempts to accommo-

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date indigenous interests within a general system, many of the key terms are themselves restrictive and constraining. Our Culture: Our Future describes indigenous intellectual and cultural property rights as “Indigenous Australians rights to their heritage . . . [otherwise] known as Indigenous Heritage Rights.” 29 Two problems stem from this relating to the possibility of translating indigenous interests into nonindigenous concepts or terms: establishing the “indigenousness” of heritage and, in a related way, that heritage has tended to be interpreted as something that is already recognized as belonging to an individual or group. The problem I point to here relates to the tension between the use of “heritage” to apply to a diverse range of objects and things, its rearticulation as something other than or distinct from nonindigenous heritage, and the tendency for such uses to be constrained and shaped by those nonindigenous conceptions of the term, what Spivak has referred to as the weight of preexisting language, “the burden of paleonymy.” 30 Indeed, this meaning can be understood by reference to the related cluster of words “inherit,” “heredity.” These words suggest some of the ways in which properties or traditions handed down from ancestors can take on a predetermined, biological, or backward-looking tendency. It also begs the question, because it often appears taken for granted that heritage is already recognized as belonging to some culture, who or what confers such recognition. In a similar way, tradition tends to take on a specific meaning in relation to indigenous culture. Despite the meaning that is often attributed to it, the term “tradition” need not imply “unchanging.” As Raymond Williams points out, “tradition” originally meant “to hand over or deliver.” 31 The term acquires its derogatory sense, as “unchanging,” only when it is placed in opposition to notions of “the modern” or innovative. It is hard not to see how the translation of tradition, as something potentially active and dynamic to something static and unchanging, corresponds to a common temporal-cultural construction of Aboriginality. Such a construction invariably locates the meaning of “Aboriginality” in terms of some notion of precontact authenticity; any change occurring after European contact, and particularly change associated with contact, is interpreted in terms of a loss of authenticity. As Elizabeth Povinelli argues, “Indigenous modifies ‘customary law,’ ‘ancient tradition,’ and ‘traditional culture,’ among others, by referring to a social practice and space that predates the settler state.” 32 In no way should this be interpreted as an argument against the notion of the significance or legitimacy of “the traditional.” Instead, it alerts us to the problems concerning the manner in which it has been interpreted and determined in nonindigenous forums and contexts. It is clear that history, tradition, and objectivity have considerable importance and significance. Although it would

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seem relatively easy to define truth and falsity in relation to the requirements imposed by legislation and legal criteria, it is more difficult to say what truth and falsity are in relation to the criteria itself. For example, the Aboriginal Heritage Act (1988) defines Aboriginal tradition as “traditions, observances, customs or beliefs of the people who inhabited Australia before European colonization and includes traditions, observances, customs and beliefs that have evolved or developed from that tradition since European colonisation,” 33 whereas the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Act (1989) defines an Aboriginal person as “a person of the Aboriginal race of Australia.” 34 In both cases, it is taken for granted that it is known or can be determined what is meant by “the people who inhabited Australia before European colonization” or “the Aboriginal race,” while ultimately leaving the judgments, or even the method of determination and verification, of such matters out of the hands of indigenous peoples. This is not to say that these definitions cannot or should not be made, but instead highlights the way this definitional issue is simultaneously a political one tied to self-determination. If indigenous claims are recognizable within a legal or legislative context to the extent that they are translatable into the terms of “the law,” the problem is not merely one concerning representation (i.e., partial or nonrepresentative representation), but also concerning the relationship between representability and authority. Who, for example, decides what does and does not count as “tradition” and whether absence within Anglo-Australian documentation constitutes nonexistence. This point is not simply about the way in which the law operates, but rather it illustrates the way in which “the law” constitutes and founds itself in relation to others by establishing or founding a relation between others, through the performative, constructive, and creative power of its apparently constative, descriptive pronouncements and definitions. Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the contribution made to my work by the staff and students of the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies.

Notes 1. See, for example, Werner Hamacher’s essay, “One 2 Many Multiculturalisms,” in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), where the author asserts, “No culture . . . is complete, fulfilled, or consistent if it does not compare itself with other

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cultures, identities, and ideals, if it does not set itself off from them, set itself above them, or exclude them from itself ” (p. 291). 2. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 275. 3. Jacques Derrida, Limited inc (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 132. 4. Simon During, “Waiting for the Post,” Ariel, Vol. 20, no. 4 (1989): 764. 5. David Hollinsworth, “Discourses on Aboriginality and the Politics of Identity in Urban Australia,” Oceania, Vol. 63 (1992): 138. 6. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 196. 7. Nicholas Thomas, In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 13. 8. Andrew Lattas, “Essentialism, Memory, and Resistance: Aboriginality and the Politics of Authenticity,” Oceania, Vol. 63 (1993): 240. 9. I am thinking here of the interpretation of history in the Members of the Yorta Yorta Aboriginal Community v State of Victoria (2001), http://www.ipsofactoj.com/ international/2003/Part05/int2003(5)-015.htm [accessed June 19, 2003]. 10. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 223. 11. For an account of these different forms or types of representation see Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 12. Maureen Tehan, “To Be or Not To Be (Property): Anglo-Australian Law and the Search for Protection of Indigenous Cultural Heritage,” University of Tasmania Law Review, Vol. 15, no. 2 (1996): 269. 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). 14. Mark Harris, “Scientific and Cultural Vandalism,” Alternative Law Journal, Vol. 21, no. 1 (1996): 29. 15. Quoted in Harris, “Scientific and Cultural Vandalism,” p. 31. 16. Quoted in Tim Murray, “Aboriginal (Pre)history and Australian Archaeology,” in Bain Attwood and John Arnold, eds., Power, Knowledge and Aborigines (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1992), pp. 13–14. 17. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 11. 18. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, p. 11. 19. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 213–214.

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20. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 219. 21. Stephen Gray, “X-Ray Wallabies and Mickey Mouse,” Overland, Vol. 158 (2000): 124. 22. Michael Ryan, Politics and Culture: Working Hypotheses for a Post-revolutionary Society (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 151. 23. Ryan, Politics and Culture, p. 151. 24. Paul Gilroy, “Joined-up Politics and Postcolonial Melancholia,” in Scott Lash and Michael Featherstone, eds., Recognition and Difference (London: Sage, 2002), p. 163. 25. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 5. 26. Stewart Motha, “Mabo: Recognition of Difference,” Griffith Law Review, Vol. 7, no. 1 (1998): 82. 27. Tehan, “To Be or Not To Be (Property),” p. 268. 28. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 27–32. 29. Terri Janke, Our Culture, Our Future: Proposals for Recognition and Protection of Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1997), p. 19. 30. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993). 31. Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Flamingo Press, 1976), p. 318. 32. Elizabeth Povinelli, “Settler Modernity and the Quest for an Indigenous Tradition,” Public Culture (1999): 28. 33. Aboriginal Heritage Act (1988), sect. 3, http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/ sa/consol_act/aha1988164/ [accessed June 18, 2003]. 34. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Act (1989), sect. 4, http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/aatsica1989478/ [accessed June 19, 2003].

C HAPTE R 6

“. . . different lives in different places”* A Space for Multiple White Identities through Aboriginal Rock Music

Liz Reed

Some preambling thoughts: I write this as a “white, middle-class, academic woman,” each category being problematic to me. So as not to clutter the text, I have placed quotation marks around those five words, whereas I really should have placed them around each word separately, in my awareness of the constructedness of each of them. As I begin my task, I am reminded of what seemed to me to be an odd footnote by Lawrence Grossberg in 1996, in which he apparently thought he could consign his “white middle class man” subject position safely to the status of footnote (albeit footnote number 1) of his chapter in a collection on cultural identity.1 Grossberg—whom I admire tremendously for his extensive work that has inspired me to think in a variety of ways about rock music—sought to locate his minimal acknowledgment of his subject position by “plead[ing]” that his purpose in this contribution was to provide “more powerful theoretical tools” to assist in opening up “more effective forms and sites of struggle.” 2 I highlight Grossberg here, because his intervention, as framed, took me somewhat by surprise with its apparently genuine innocence and absence of appreciation of the depth of his embeddedness, as “white middle class man,” in all that he was seeking to analyze, as well as within the possibilities he hoped he was facilitating. What Grossberg was forgetting is that there is, effectively, no way out for “whiteys like us,” a phrase I adapt from an Australian documentary made in 1999 on one middle-class, predominantly white Sydney suburb’s attempts to enact “reconciliation” at their local level.3 What these people were seeking from “reconciliation” was, among other things, a means by which their 103

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“whiteness” could remain undisturbed, where they could bypass the continuing privilege that this confers upon them. What was not discussed until the end of the “reconciliation” process was that, at the very least, until a treaty or series of treaties or other form of formal enactment of “consent of the natives” as determined by Aboriginal nations and peoples in Australia, legitimacy can only begin to occur, and similarly “reconciliation.” Captain Cook’s failure to obtain such “consent,” despite his instructions from the British Colonial Office, remains the foundation of the myriad legacies that indigenous Australians and white Australians do not exactly “share,” but increasingly— at least at the personal rather than the state level — many seek to find a space within which to negotiate an array of understandings and relationships. In this chapter, I will explore the possibilities of Aboriginal rock music opening a space in which nonindigenous listeners can become a part of the production of meanings from the lyrical and performative discourses that such music offers. In presenting my arguments, I am not intending to suggest that this is or should be the primary purpose of such music, but simply to point to what might be some possibilities. In doing so, I am aware that the binary position of “white” is something that cannot be erased. Nor am I suggesting that the privileging of indigenous oral histories and cultural continuities that rock performance among other things offer, be displaced by what some might (mis)read as my pleading, like Grossberg, for a role. My use of rock music for this exploration arises from a lifetime of enthusiastic engagement with rock from the moment I heard Elvis Presley’s just-released “Jailhouse Rock” on the radio and instinctively felt rock’s liberatory potential. Probing the Boundaries

I begin this chapter with an anecdote told somewhat incredulously by a student. The setting that prompted it was a seminar on “contemporary” “Aboriginal” “art” in one of Australia’s major universities in which there were local “Australian” and several “international” students from various universities in the United States. We can see already from my use of quotation marks that a number of problematic categories or constructs were present to provide the framework for this anecdote.4 Following some extensive discussion of a particular piece of art, one of the U.S. students — in blithe ignorance of her own “burden” and with absolute certainty in her innocent position — offered the observation that it was easy for international students such as herself to analyze and discuss such art, whereas for the Australian students it was impossibly complicated by the “burden” they carried with them because of the colonial past. This led, needless to say, to a lively discussion of what this “burden” meant to the various

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Australian students, as well as to what I gather was a rather satisfying corrective instruction in the history of the colonizers’ relationships with Native Americans. This, unsurprisingly, left the visiting student somewhat aghast, but nevertheless unwilling to let go of the certainty of her original contribution to the discussion about her unblemished position from which to analyze Australian Aboriginal art. This anecdote serves a number of purposes, for not only does it reveal some of the ways in which nonindigenous people continue to define ourselves and others, and the pasts from which we like to think we have emerged, but also reveals the problematic subject positions of nonindigenous students who, aware of their implicatedness in their history, also wish to go beyond simplistic binaries, indeed beyond binaries at all. Some present in the seminar room that day believed that part of the route toward “beyond binaries” lay in being able to critique Aboriginal contemporary art as art freely—that is, beyond and yet including the historical resonances and other creative dimensions that the pieces being discussed conveyed. In my own undergraduate classes, many nonindigenous students struggle with the idea that some friendships have existed cross-culturally since colonization. Their responses vary but are mostly at the edges of either not being able to go beyond the fixed reality of what they neatly describe as the “inequalities” that must have been inherent in these relationships, citing power locations arising from class, as well as race, and arguing that, even if such friendships were often gendered ones, such power relationships remained unavoidable. They are, for the most part, reluctant to look beyond these boundaries and also do not seem ready to allow such nuanced relationships into their loosely defined “good/bad” version of the colonization of Australia. Indeed, they seem to need that dichotomy to ensure that they continue to place themselves within the implicated space they know they inhabit. It is as if their duty to do this would be destabilized by allowing such things as cross-cultural friendships to be a part of their heritage. At the other edge of students’ responses, I register a deepening of their eye contact with me, often a sucking in of the cheeks and a pursing of the lips that I read as an extreme act of concentration on simply trying to get their minds around what I have just lobbed into their fields of situatedness in relation to “studying” “Australian indigenous studies.” I try to help, suggesting ways that Marcia Langton’s writings on “intersubjectivity” offer theoretical tools for exploring “some satisfactory way of comprehending the other.” 5 This works for some, but others remain troubled—more by the idea of friendships than the colonial contexts that I am citing for them. Although the gap between Aboriginal and white people who experienced such friendships was always expressive of the reality of one

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being the colonized and the other the colonizer, students grapple with the idea that these relationships were one of many that were mutually negotiated “across the frontier.” Racialized Boundaries Interrogated

Marcia Langton 6 and Mudrooroo have reminded us that the colonizers in Australia made the Aborigines “one mob,” 7 and Bain Attwood has written of the transition from lower case to uppercase Aborigines 8 as a part of the colonizing process, as well as the responses of Aborigines that included engaging in “making themselves.” 9 The binary construction of the other in the various imperial settings in which this took place was reenacted and reinscribed in multiple layers of identity constructions. Thus, colonizers’ boundaries were being drawn between “savages” and “noble savages” even before their arrival, upon which evidence of these binaries was soon to be proclaimed. The subsequent struggles between the European definers for dominance of “their” identification of “the natives” were early indications of ways in which Aborigines were to become the site of white peoples’ ego maneuvering. Similarly, in gendered discourses of the sexualized frontier and the often furtive and frequently violent transactions that took place there, Aboriginal women were placed either within the “victim” or “prostitute” paradigms created by male and female humanitarians, as well as those white men who justified their (dis)possession of Aboriginal women’s bodies. For now, the situation has been reached as Mudrooroo further observes, where, “for better or worse, everyone is bound up in a system of personal, social and political relationships, and these now cannot be avoided.” Expressive of the perhaps impossible task of disentangling these relationships, the term “indigenous” is the current word used by both Aborigines and whites ranging from government and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) nomenclature to artists, musicians, journalists, and so forth.10 It appears to be, as Mudrooroo has suggested, the latest term adopted “in order to give a common term to Us Mob,” and he has said that he will use it “until the time comes when we have our own word for Us Mob.” 11 The word “indigenous” also provides the latest version of nonindigenous naming and imagining the other. It seems to have gradually crept into being, with no apparent announcement as the new, preferred term. As such, it seems to have gained currency among nonindigenous users, perhaps because it offered the possibility of avoiding what has become acknowledged as the problematic “Aborigine/al” word. “Indigenous” thus erases “Aborigine/al,” and in the process, some no doubt hope, it erases “the past.” So, too, am I entangled in the linguistic devices that homogenize, organize, terror-

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ize, and otherwise affect the people they describe and define. I continue to be implicated in the histories that have created these devices, aware (like my students) that I remain, at the most fundamental level, “of the colonizers.” Australian indigenous academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson has brought theories of “whiteness” into the Australian academy, and it is possible that her intervention is having a more rapid and successful impact on undergraduates who encounter it than it is having on some academics who teach about “race.” Indeed, for many students her writings seem to be liberating texts, articulating their subject position for the first time. For them, her writings have provided the first encounter with the fact that they have a subject position, as their “education” up until then has reflected the power of whiteness whereby they have been centered as the norm around which a vast array of others have been woven. For a minority of students, her writings prove too much altogether, forcing them into some kind of liminal almost Hanson space from which they cry that they cannot help having been born white. As Moreton-Robinson has elaborated, “whiteness” has remained at the centre of nonindigenous people’s worldview, as normative and unraced, and therefore seemingly benign. “Whiteness” in contemporary settings has enabled white people to continue to construct “race” and identities as other, and by extension to see — and indeed to teach— that racism as a practice happens by definition to the other, because of the “raced” identity that only the other has.12 Recognizing that “whiteness” is not only “raced,” but therefore also must constitute an identity, has the potential to place nonindigenous people in a site of intersubjective dialogue with the other who has hitherto been regarded as the only one with an identity. As an identity, then, this enables white people to fully comprehend what bell hooks means when she writes about “black people watch[ing] white people with a critical ‘ethnographic’ gaze.” 13 I argue that, by speaking across racial(ized) boundaries, Aboriginal rock music(ians) perform similar interrogations of “whiteness” and offer ways that listeners might (re)consider their identity and therefore power locations within the national space. Alice Springs–based group NoKTuRNL has sought to destabilize one of the most enduring stereotypes of Aborigines, by directly addressing the audience with the lines “We don’t live on a diet of beer,” adding, “You let us in your home and your [sic] takin’ a risk.” 14 This song has been performed on video that was screened as part of an interview on Special Broadcasting Service television’s ICAM program in 1999. The chorus of this song, “We’re not afraid of you,” was sung to images of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis wearing “land rights for whites” tee-shirts, juxtaposed with Eureka and Aboriginal flags, as well as images of Pauline Hanson. The song challenges “whiteness” directly

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with the lines “we are your black people you can’t replace us,” confronting contemporary neoassimilationist desires and also resonating with the memory of massacres that were among the devices that sought directly to “replace” Aborigines. As I discuss below, audience responses to music are open to interpretation, and, like any other piece of music, this song has the potential for a superficial reading, making it possible to dismiss its sounds and lyrics because, for example, they might sound “angry”— itself a word that is often used by white people when confronted by Aborigines speaking for themselves. Read carefully though, it becomes clear that NoKTuRNL has produced a textured dialogue that reaches across boundaries. Singing of how they “don’t fear other races and other cultures from different places,” because “we can all live together and see If we trust one another enough to let be,” NoKTuRNL are opening a space for whiteness to be decentered, and for “different lives in different places” to be actuated.15 As hooks has suggested, a critical examination “of whiteness as terror in the black imagination, deconstructing it, . . . both name[s] racism’s impact and help[s] to break its hold.” Engaging in such a process, which I argue Aboriginal rock music holds out the possibility for, nonindigenous listeners encounter the potential, as hooks frames it, to “decolonize our minds and our imaginations.” 16 Dialogues across Boundaries

The Arnhem Land artist George Milpurrurru has been quoted as saying, “[T]oday we paint for ceremony and we paint bark paintings to sell. We can share our religious paintings, because that is what bark paintings are, with balanda (white people) and perhaps they will learn something about us from our painting paintings.” 17 Deborah Bird Rose, an anthropologist, has written of the lessons she has received from her Yarralin teacher Hobbles Danaiyarri, whom she met in 1980 in Yarralin in the Northern Territory — in particular, the “saga of Captain Cook.” As Rose has demonstrated, the saga of Captain Cook provides the “most succinct summation” of colonization and its effects upon the Yarralin people.18 As an account of European actions that, in its full version, “constitutes the core of an Aboriginal history of the region,” Rose has noted that the Captain Cook saga is “ongoing because the relationships it describes and analyses are ongoing too.” 19 The narrative form adopted by Hobbles Danaiyarri (who spoke five languages fluently) was usually Aboriginal-English for nonindigenous audiences and Kriol for Aboriginal audiences.20 It is clear, then, this was a text with specific codes that related to the social contexts in which it was reproduced. The ideological functions of the text were to convey “many implicit assumptions about Aboriginal moral law,” with the contrast between it and European law being the major purpose.21 Embedded in the saga was the implicit nature of

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Aboriginal law, whereas European law was made explicit in the construction and narrating of it. In effect, the Yarralin saga of Captain Cook, in which what Rose has identified as “moral principles . . . [that are] universally applicable [and] universally recognizable” was engaging in an intertextual dialogue with European law, on the basis of the belief that Europeans “do have a moral sense.” 22 For Aboriginal people, Captain Cook’s law has no morality, and it is thus necessary for Aboriginal people “who know the truth about” this law, to educate Europeans about it.23 Embedded in this task is the acknowledgement that the descendants of the colonizers are not likely to leave; thus, to create “a moral Australia,” they will have to give up Captain Cook’s law and embrace the moral code that Aboriginal law offers in its place.24 As the Warumpi Band song that contains the opening phrase of the title of this chapter suggests, Europeans— if they are willing to learn to behave morally in relation to the people and the land that they have inhabited since colonization— might, as Rose describes it in relation to Yarralin law, “reinstate freedom and autonomy for all Australians through what might be called a multi-cultural system of autonomous and interrelated parts.” 25 My contention is that Aboriginal rock music operates within similar textual frames as the Captain Cook sagas, in that it seeks to engage with nonindigenous audiences in a dialogue that offers educative and redemptive paradigms for people around Australia who live “different lives in different places.” As has been noted in relation to other locations—where it seems to me that the colonial past remains less explored in the United States than in the Australian context— rap and hip-hop music “create[s] a form of interracial dialogue” whereby “new languages and a form of multiculturalism” are created.26 That rock music is commercialized and commodified is almost a mundane observation, and in the Australian context rock is dominated by global commercial interests. The other side of this domination is that some Aboriginal rock musicians are able to reach an international audience, and, as Simon Frith has argued, in spite of “social conditioning and commercial manipulation,” people respond to music because they like it.27 But listeners are doing more than simply responding to their enjoyment, as Frith also argues; the music “defines a space without boundaries . . . [and is] a cultural form best able to cross borders . . . classes, races and nations.” 28 There is a danger that an emphasis on the commodification of music disempowers listeners, casting them as “cultural dopes [who are] a passive, helpless mass incapable of discrimination and thus at the economic, cultural, and political mercy of the barons of the industry.” 29 By implication, performers may also be constructed as “cultural dopes” who are unaware of their participation in global industries. Similarly, indigenous musicians seeking to engage with a musical

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audience on a global scale should not be denied this exercise of agency on their part, as perhaps best exemplified by Yo¯thu Yindi’s commercial Filthy Lucre remix of “Treaty.” Interviewed on SBS television on July 25, 1999, lead singer Mandawuy Yunupingu expressed the wish for the “world community” to know about Aboriginal people and to support their struggle for rights.30 Thus, Yo¯thu Yindi can be regarded as a local example of how indigenous peoples worldwide have embraced the arts “to enunciate vital issues such as social justice through the use of a mélange of entertainment, education and empowerment tactics.” 31 History Singing across Boundaries

Interrogating cultural essentialism that accompanied “identity politics,” Frith has argued that such specific identities and experiential differences that accompany “race” and “gender,” for example, tend to become “less convincing in the everyday practice of music making and listening” when the audience effectively crosses identity boundaries. This is not only because, as listeners we love all kinds of sounds and rhythms, but also because, as Frith has observed, “we live in an age of plunder in which musics made in one place for one reason can be immediately appropriated in another place for quite another reason.” That is, music might be created by those who originated it, but “as experience it has a life of its own.” 32 Thus, Frith has suggested, “[A]nti-essentialism is a necessary part of musical experience,” and this is particularly so because the various forms of popular music “have originated at the social margins.” 33 Within Australia, “Aboriginal music” has been the subject of nonindigenous interest since the concept first came into being in 1899, when an anthropologist made a recording of it.34 The social margins from which contemporary Australian Aboriginal music sprang was country and western music, which has been preeminent in giving Aboriginal people a voice, enabling them to tell “black stories in a way that white as well as black could understand.” Aboriginal country music has been credited with having “opened the door for all Aboriginal endeavour in popular culture to follow.” 35 Equally importantly, though, it is evident that country music’s articulation and performance of Aboriginal “stories” may have been where intersubjective dialogues were first enacted between indigenous and nonindigenous performers and audiences. The first Aboriginal rock groups to “penetrate popular Australian consciousness” were No Fixed Address and Us Mob, both of which emerged shortly after Bob Marley’s 1979 tour of Australia, which inspired their reggae-influenced style and political edge. During this sold-out tour of Australia, Japan, and Aotearoa–New Zealand, Marley revealed in a radio interview that he knew little about Australia beyond “the Aborigines,” convicts, and cricket.36 The profound reso-

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nance of his music that united people around “the shared ritual of dance” and its themes of protest against injustices and redemption 37 was shortly afterward to inspire a range of Aboriginal reggae artists in the following decade, combining “an internationalist black consciousness [and] distinctive signs of Aboriginality” such as the appearance of the Aboriginal flag or colors in performances.38 As I have argued elsewhere,39 any consideration of the evolution of Aboriginal rock music and the vast diversity of musical and performance styles that this somewhat misleading generic title encompasses 40 should not deny the perceptions of contemporary performers themselves regarding the degree to which, if at all, they wish to acknowledge the influences of other musical genres upon their work. If anything, these perceptions should be privileged. Within the musical relationships that are largely place-based around Alice Springs as a site of Aboriginal performative discourses, Pitjantjatjara musician Frank Yamma, has located rap/hip-hop/heavy metal group NoKTuRNL as a part of a “second generation” of Aboriginal bands. Such groups, he suggests, have grown up with heavy metal and rap, but are a “bit younger and angrier” than musical “elders” such as Yo¯thu Yindi, Kev Carmody, Archie Roach, and Ruby Hunter.41 Thus, NoKTuRNL can be seen to be staking out their own musical and discursive ground and extending rock music’s possibilities as a site of identity (re)formation and resistance, adding to what might be termed an international phenomenon of indigenous performers using musical forms such as rock/rap/ hip-hop/thrash to articulate a range of sounds, signs, meanings, and identities. The inclusion of rap, hip-hop, and heavy metal in the development of their own distinctive sounds, it can be argued, indicates that NoKTuRNL inhabit the “discursive space” that has been provided by earlier Aboriginal rock groups such as No Fixed Address, who with their identification with the sounds, and equally importantly, with the “style” 42 of reggae, were engaging in a subversion of the dominant social, political, and musical paradigms. By adopting and adapting the international sounds from the margins in similar ways that earlier groups responded to the possibilities that reggae presented, as well as using visual performative devices such as music videos, NoKTuRNL and other contemporary Aboriginal rock groups are initiating dialogues across cultural and identity borders as well as national borders. As a musical style that had its origins in African histories, hip-hop has also been noted as immediately engaging in “a reciprocal self-renewing dialogue in communities characterized by upheaval and change.” 43 The adoption and adaptation of hip-hop by groups such as NoKTuRNL foster an engagement with other indigenous groups and listeners, in a similar manner that country and western music has done, as well as enabling alliances to be made across a range of identity formations. The “subaltern sen-

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sitivities” that hip-hop conveys as a global “cultural formation with extraordinary political implications” also importantly suggests a site of solidarity between Australian indigenous and other subaltern groups around the world. Similarly, the incorporation of rap within their musical style connects NoKTuRNL to other global subaltern practices whereby rap in the 1990s was argued to be, among other things, preserving the message of earlier “rights” movements and “thus help[ing] inspire new waves of opposition and dissent.” 44 Grossberg has suggested that “diaspora” is no longer a signifier of displacement across the globe, “but of political struggles to define the local . . . as a distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement.” 45 Within the internal Aboriginal diaspora of Australia, there are hundreds of Aboriginal rock groups and individual performers across the country, many singing solely in their local languages, others singing solely in English, as well as others who sing in combinations of languages. It has been argued that the very existence of Aboriginal rock groups has influenced white performers to write about indigenous matters. For their part, Aboriginal performers have noted that by being employed as support groups to non-Aboriginal groups at gigs has enabled them avoid “problems with venue managers,” who historically have sought to exclude them.46 Rock has provided the site for particularly compelling political alliances between indigenous and nonindigenous groups in the face of overt racism and police harassment, as was perhaps best captured on the 1981 semifictional film Wrong Side of the Road, featuring No Fixed Address and Us Mob.47 Also present in this film were powerfully subtle themes of Aboriginal kinship relationships in an “urban” setting such as Adelaide, continuing “welfare” surveillance of Aboriginal family life, and the quest of one of the band members to locate the mother from whom he was removed as a baby. As Rose has examined in relation to her own development of an ethical relationship with members of the Mak Mak Marrranunggu clan in the area of the Finniss River, arising from her being employed as an anthropologist for a land rights matter, such encounters present potential for developing new social relationships. These, she observes, are brought into being “in the gap” that remains between colonizer and colonized; they have to be made active — i.e., “they cannot be brought into being unless people work towards each other.” 48 As Rose has observed, the possibilities for such intersubjectivities at the known, personal level contrast with the likely impossibilities for them at the level of the nation, and it is the knowledge that “we are situated irremediably and precariously within the gaps, fragments and disasters of our lives that [enables us] to turn toward each other.” 49 Participation, as listeners (whether as part of the crowd at a pub gig, a member of the audience at festivals, or in the personal space of

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home and the CD player or radio) to Aboriginal rock performance enables understandings of what Rose has called “the fragments and disasters” and ways of responding to them and to our own relationship to them. Grossberg has noted that those who listen to rock music “differ radically among themselves although they may listen to the same music.” 50 When interviewed about their music, many singers will claim that their lyrics were not intended to convey any of the meanings cited by the interviewer, that they are just words. (Bob Dylan is perhaps the most extreme example of this, having consistently rejected “meanings” ascribed and refusing to offer any insights into his own intentions.51 ) Singing the Past, Imagining the Future

In the remaining discussion of this chapter, I build upon Grossberg’s conceptualization of rock as providing “strategies of empowerment by and empower[ment of ] particular audiences in particular contexts,” in which what he terms “affective alliances” are opened up between performers and audiences. In doing so I am mindful of Grossberg’s caution to maintain awareness of the “constraints and limits operating on the articulation of rock to politics,” lest we otherwise fall into the “naïvely romantic view” that rock is by definition an oppositional formation.52 Chris Gibson has examined the ways that Aboriginal peoples and organizations have sought to extend the meanings and possibilities of concepts such as “self-determination” at various institutional as well as local levels. He has suggested that what he terms “popular music” has offered a more effective means of communication with “mainstream” society than formal political engagement allows, arguing that music thus “continues to be crucial in promoting acceptance for strategies of self-determination.” 53 As Gibson has suggested, Aboriginal music assists in the deconstruction of essentialized constructions of indigenous identities and also helps shape understandings of geopolitical space, offering participative, as well as textual, means of “empowerment.” 54 He has also pointed to what he calls the “mainstream success” of groups such as Yo¯thu Yindi, Christine Anu, Tiddas, and others, which has inserted “a wide variety of places, names, languages . . . and predicaments into Australian popular culture.” 55 This is particularly important, in light of the continuing occupation of the margins of nonindigenous radio stations and other media outlets, which only seems to change at the time of formal events such as the 2000 Olympics or when particular groups’ new releases are being promoted by radio stations such as Triple J. Thus, as Gibson has highlighted, the establishment of a range of indigenous musical and media outlets since the 1970s, ostensibly under the formal government pol-

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icy of “self-determination” 56 —but, more significantly, I would argue, in response to indigenous peoples’ continuing demands for what they have meant by that term — has been of particular creative and autonomous significance. The ATSIC-originated, CAAMA-produced CD Our Home, Our Land, initially commissioned as a single about native title and land rights, but which grew into a CD that included nonindigenous as well as indigenous performers, is a contemporary example of a longer-standing collaborative creative and arguably political practice.57 In spite of the relatively low commercial success of this CD, it nonetheless remains an important moment in the history of indigenous rock music in Australia and the ways in which Grossberg’s “affective alliances” continue to be forged. It is interesting to note that Our Home, Our Land was commissioned and produced prior to the Howard federal government’s amendments to the Labor government’s 1993 native title legislation, which through placing severe limitations and controls upon the manner and conditions in which “native title” could be applied for, was made overtly a legislative mechanism whereby white control and power was reasserted. In spite of what often impressionistically appears to be the swamping of indigenous rock music by the constant stream of new (and often overseas) releases, indigenous and community radio stations, CD purchases, and pub and especially the by now regular and established festivals have become a part of the musical landscape in Australia. Sydney’s annual “Survival” festival that occurs on Invasion Day, January 26 (initially at La Perouse, then for a few years at Bondi, but now back at La Perouse) remains one of the most important performative and political sites. At such “live” events, indigenous and nonindigenous performers and their audiences can be seen to be — among other things— engaging in intersubjective dialogues about their respective histories, loves and sadnesses, and aims for the future. I hesitate to use the term “reconciliation” here, regarding it as a problematic construct in its official, institutional uses by the various federal and state governments throughout the 1990s, and also as a term that enables many “ordinary” people to sidestep the fundamental unresolved questions that revolve around nonindigenous peoples’ (like me) continuing illegal occupation of the continent. Discussions of Warumpi Band’s “Blackfella Whitefella” song that has provided my title’s opening phrase have tended to be located at the “reconciliation” level,58 whereas I argue that both lyrics and performance, where lead singer George Djilaynga/Rurrambu uses his body to exhort his indigenous and nonindigenous audience to “stand up and be counted,” 59 [are] taking the possibilities beyond “reconciliation.” It is worth noting here that the binary terms “indigenous” and “nonindigenous” inherently mask the diversities within them, and

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it is possible to read “Blackfella Whitefella” as signifying this with its emphasis on “doesn’t matter what your colour” or name or religion, taking the listeners beyond these binaries, to an appreciation of the urgency of the song’s articulated task of salvation. If I had to nominate a single moment that encapsulated what I have been arguing about Aboriginal rock music in this chapter, however, this would be the 1989 Building Bridges double cassette tape and its extended discussion of the individual tracks’ lyrics, as well as the overall project’s aims. Arising from that most contested of moments in Australia’s history, the 1988 Bicentenary, Building Bridges reflected what was an “overwhelming” response by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal groups and performers “to donate their time and talent to repairing the damage of the past.” 60 The recording was inspired by the Building Bridges concert held at Bondi Pavilion two days before Invasion Day 1988, with Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett as co-compere also being instrumental in the idea of the project taking shape.61 The practical aims of the project were to raise funds for the National Coalition of Aboriginal Organisations (NCAO), which would be used “for peaceful projects aimed at enabling the NCAO to represent the Aboriginal peoples in consultation with Australian governments in pursuit of a just settlement,” as well as to promote “understanding and harmony to relations” between indigenous and nonindigenous people.62 The twenty-seven tracks were strategically arranged, it seems, side 1 beginning with Paul Kelly’s “Special Treatment,” inspired by a visit to the Kimberleys. In this song Kelly sang back to white discourses of “special treatment” for Aboriginal people, elaborating the realities of “special treatment” received by Aborigines since colonization, beginning with the line “grandfather walked this land in chains” and taking up themes that included child removal, unpaid labor, and sexual abuse of Aboriginal women by white men.63 The concluding track of side 4 was No Fixed Address’ anthemic “We Have Survived,” with its chorus that I quote in full: We have survived the white man’s world And the horror and the torment of it all We have survived the white man’s world And you know you can’t change that.64

Some of the tracks on this compilation were sung in both the local language and English, such as Areyonga Desert Tigers’ “Wama Wanti,” which exhorted men to “leave the grog” and “come back home.” 65 This song simultaneously addressed indigenous listeners and nonindigenous listeners in ways that sig-

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naled a range of possible meanings, not the least conveying insights into ways that indigenous people were seeking to confront “the grog.” Other songs were elegiac in tone, such as Coloured Stone’s “Dancing in the Moonlight,” celebrating the beauty of the moonlight and stars, and Joe Geia’s “Yil-Lull,” which evoked . . . the black And the people of this land . . . the red And the blood that’s been shed And now I’m singing for the gold And a new year young and old.66

INXS’ “Original Sin,” which had topped the charts in Australia in 1984 but was banned from parts of the United States because “it infringed on the moral boundaries of traditional racial segregation,” 67 had thus gained a particular international resonance by the time of the Building Bridges recording, whereas Yo¯thu Yindi, with songs like their “Gudurrku,” was reaching international as well as local audiences with their articulations of “place” in their land.68 Other songs performed what might be termed “history narratives,” such as the Swamp Jockeys’ “Strychnine,” beginning with the chorus lines Somebody put strychnine in the bottle Somebody bought strychnine that day Somebody put strychnine in the bottle And somebody died that day (murder!) 69

Conclusion

As a major collaborative project, Building Bridges occurred at a time when, as the sleeve notes and lyrics of the songs included on the cassettes indicated, many indigenous and nonindigenous people were coming together. This was not to celebrate the 1988 Bicentenary but to try to find ways of negotiating and mediating understandings of the simple reality (that had become reduced to a slogan) that “White Australia Has a Black History.” 70 As a highly contested moment, these attempts to meet “in the gaps” between colonizers and colonized were among the causes of anxiety of those nonindigenous members of the population who saw only cause for celebration in the two centuries of their occupation. These conservative discourses were accompanied by a vague nod in the

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direction of what were later to be articulated by Prime Minister John Howard as “shortcomings” in his 1996 lecture in honor of the memory of Sir Robert Menzies and can be seen as attempts to contain the acknowledged legacies of colonization.71 Writing this chapter fifteen years after the Bicentenary, I am aware of how much and how little has changed. The High Court’s 1992 Mabo decision has buried the legal doctrine of terra nullius, but the idea remains in the minds — and more likely the fantasies — of many conservatives in Australia. The 1987–1988 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC) exposed the extent and intensity of the racial/ist dimensions of the overwhelming incarceration rates of indigenous people in Australia and made 339 recommendations aimed at redressing this. Present-day statistics, however, indicate the problem has worsened rather than improved. “Native title” has been legislated, twice, as a means whereby the white nation can be seen to be pretending to provide a mechanism for Aborigines to (re)gain access to their lands, and attempts are being made to deny the historical realities of colonization since 1788, contained both in Aboriginal oral histories and written, primary texts. The list could go on and on, the only optimistic aspect of which would be the reminder that Aboriginal peoples continue to “resist,” exercising their agency in a range of subtle and overt ways, as they have done since 1788. At the other end of the binary, many (but not the majority) of nonindigenous people continue to seek ways of providing support to these struggles, trying also to avoid patronizing habits of the past, that is, of controlling the discourses and actions. For them, the task is not any easier than it has been in the past, but they have some advantages that earlier generations may not have had. These include the access to written texts by a range of indigenous writers, including poets, novelists, historians, anthropologists, filmmakers, and songwriters. Although I do not argue that it has primacy above any of these, I have suggested that Aboriginal rock music has been (and will continue to be) a particularly powerful and resonating means of reaching across “the gap” and engaging in a range of formal (such as collaborative music making) and informal (between individual listeners and performers) intersubjective explorations and dialogues. It is within these dialogues that the possibilities for mutual understandings and change may lie. Acknowledgments

Thanks to the anonymous referees and to all those rock musicians who have interpreted life at the boundaries and beyond.

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Notes * Quoted from Warumpi Band’s George Djilaynga and Neil Murray, “Blackfella Whitefella,” on CAAMA Music’s Too Much Humbug (1996). 1. Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), p. 105. 2. Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies,” p. 105. 3. Rachel Landers, Whiteys Like Us, prod. Tom Zubrycki, Ronin Films (1999). 4. For the sake of avoiding cluttering this chapter with quotation marks, I will only use them the first time I introduce a construct that requires such interrogation. 5. Marcia Langton, Well I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television (Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 1993), p. 35. 6. Langton, Well I Heard It on the Radio, p. 32. 7. Mudrooroo, Us Mob: History, Culture, Struggle: An Introduction to Indigenous Australia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1995), p. 2. 8. Bain Attwood, “Making History: Imagining Aborigines and Australia,” in Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths, eds., Prehistory to Politics: John Mulvaney, the Humanities and the Public Intellectual (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1997). On pp. 113–114 especially, Attwood has highlighted what he regards as “the conceptual error of conflating aborigines and Aborigines,” arguing that this process requires historical inquiry that is yet to be undertaken. 9. Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), esp. chap. 6. 10. And Torres Strait Islander. I acknowledge that this chapter relates to Aboriginal texts and discourses and does not draw on those from the Torres Strait. 11. Mudrooroo, Us Mob, pp. 6–7. 12. See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Duggaibah, or ‘Place of Whiteness’: Australian Feminists and Race,” in Belinda McKay, ed., Unmasking Whiteness: Race Relations and Reconciliation (St. Lucia: The Queensland Studies Centre, Griffith University, Nathan, 2000), for a discussion of the place of whiteness in academic feminist pedagogy. For a more extended discussion of whiteness, see Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2000). 13. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), p. 167. 14. Craig Tilmouth and Damien Armstrong, Tura itchye (No Fear), NoKTuRNL self-titled CD (ca. 2000); no further details provided. 15. Like many Aboriginal groups, as discussed elsewhere in this paper, NoK-

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TuRNL consisted at the time of three indigenous and one nonindigenous male singers. 16. hooks, Black Looks, p. 178. 17. Quoted in Mudrooroo, Us Mob, p. 172. 18. Deborah Bird Rose, “The Saga of Captain Cook,” in Bain Attwood and Fiona Magowan, eds., Telling Stories: Indigenous History and Memory in Australia and New Zealand (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2001), p. 62. 19. Rose, “Saga of Captain Cook,” p. 62. 20. Rose, “Saga of Captain Cook,” p. 62. 21. Rose, “Saga of Captain Cook,” pp. 70–71 (Rose’s emphasis). 22. Rose, “Saga of Captain Cook,” p. 72 (Rose’s emphasis). 23. Rose, “Saga of Captain Cook,” p. 77. 24. Rose, “Saga of Captain Cook,” p. 77. 25. Rose, “Saga of Captain Cook,” p. 78. 26. Brian Longhurst, Popular Music and Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 155. 27. Simon Frith, “Music and Identity,” in S. Hall and P. Du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996), p. 120. 28. Frith, “Music and Identity,” p. 125. 29. John Fiske, Television Culture (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 309, quoted in Longhurst, Popular Music and Society, p. 21. 30. In this interview, he also cited the benefits from collaboration with Irish musicians who have “common areas of shared oppression” by the English, and his interest in developing further links there. SBS, “One Blood,” July 25, 1999. Yunupingu has also cited positive collaborations with German singer Peter Maffay, who he invited to Australia, “took him out bush . . . to my place in Arnhem Land,” arising from which he decided to “re-record all my favourite songs with a European edge,” Jo Roberts, “Singing in Harmony,” Age EG, January 28, 2000, p. 6. 31. Karl Neuenfeldt, “The Essentialistic, the Exotic, the Equivocal and the Absurd,” Perfect Beat, Vol. 2, no. 1 (July 1994): 89. 32. Frith, “Music and Identity,” p. 109. 33. Frith, “Music and Identity,” p. 122. 34. John Castles, “Tjungaringanyi: Aboriginal Rock (1971–92),” in Hayward, ed., Sound Alliances, p. 11. 35. Clinton Walker, Buried Country: The Story of Aboriginal Country Music (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 13. 36. Wailers News Update, Vol. 2, no. 4 (April 2002), http://www.wailers.co.uk/ update0204html [accessed November 17, 2004]. 37. Stephen King and Richard J. Jensen, “Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’: The

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Rhetoric of Reggae and Rastafari,” Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 29, no. 3 (winter 1995): 17–37. 38. Chris Lawe Davies, “Aboriginal Rock Music: Space and Place,” in Tony Bennett, Simon Frith, John Shepherd, and Araeme Turner, eds., Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies, Institutions (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 254. 39. Liz Reed, “Stompem Ground: A Site of Resistance,” Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues, Vol. 4, no. 1 (March 2001): 14–26. 40. It is not my purpose in this chapter to engage in an extended musicological analysis of this term. I am therefore following Grossberg’s definition of rock as encompassing “the entire range of postwar ‘youth’-oriented, technologically and economically mediated, musical practices and styles,” “Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care? On ‘the State of Rock,’” in Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose, eds., Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 41. 41. G. Burchall, “Free Speech in Song,” The Age (Living Arts section), March 20, 1998, p. 20. 42. Lawe Davies, “Aboriginal Rock Music,” pp. 253–254. 43. George Lipsitz, “Diasporic Noise: History, Hip Hop, and the Post-colonial Politics of Sound,” in C. Lee Harrington and Denise D. Bielby, eds., Popular Culture: Production and Consumption (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001), p. 191. 44. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 105. 45. Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies,” p. 92. 46. Rosie Ryan, quoted in Marcus Breen, Our Place Our Music (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1989), p. 142. 47. Wrong Side of the Road, prod. Ned Lander and Graeme Isaac (Sydney: Inma Productions, 1983), videocassette. The film won the Jury Prize, Australian Film Awards, 1981, and was nominated for Best Film and Best Original Music Score. 48. Deborah Bird Rose, Linda Ford, and Nancy Daiyi, “The Way We Are (Working in Flux),” in Emma Greenwood, Klaus Neumann, and Andrew Sartori, eds., Work in Flux (University of Melbourne History Department, 1995), p. 13. 49. Rose, Ford, and Daiyi, “The Way We Are,” pp. 13–14. 50. Quoted in Allan F. Moore, Rock: The Primary Text. Developing a Musicology of Rock (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), p. 6. 51. Q Magazine, commemorative edition, Bob Dylan: Maximum Bob, December 2000. 52. Lawrence Grossberg, Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 31, 90. 53. Chris Gibson, “‘We Sing Our Home, We Dance Our Land’: Indigenous Self-

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Determination and Contemporary Politics in Australian Popular Music,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 16 (1998): 164–165. 54. Gibson, “We Sing Our Home,” p. 166. 55. Gibson, “We Sing Our Home,” p. 172. (The uninterrogated use of the term “mainstream” is a source of some concern to me here.) 56. Gibson, “We Sing Our Home,” p. 169. 57. Our Home, Our Land, CAAMA, 1995. 58. See, for example, Gibson, “We Sing Our Home,” and Karl Neuenfeldt and Kathleen Oien, “‘Our Home, Our Land . . . Something to Sing About’: An Indigenous Music Recording as Identity Narrative,” Aboriginal History, Vol. 24 (2000): 27–38. 59. Djilayna and Murray, “Blackfella Whitefella.” 60. Various artists, Building Bridges, CBS Inc. and 1988 Building Bridges, copyright 1989. Cover notes written by Gary Foley. 61. Cover notes, Building Bridges. 62. Cover notes, Building Bridges. 63. Paul Kelly, “Special Treatment.” Building Bridges, CBS Inc. and 1988 Building Bridges, 1989. 64. No Fixed Address, “We Have Survived,” written by Bart Willoughby, Building Bridges. 65. Areyonga Desert Tigers, “Wama Wanti,” translated by Linda Rive, Imparja CAAMA Language Unit, 1988. 66. Joe Geia, “Yil-Lull,” Building Bridges. 67. Cover notes, Building Bridges. 68. Yo¯thu Yindi, “Gudurrku,” which is the Yolngu word for brolga. This song was taken from their first album, Homeland Movement, Mushroom Records, 1989. 69. Swamp Jockeys, “Strychnine,” Building Bridges. 70. The subtitle to the Building Bridges cover notes. Interestingly, and given the occasion, perhaps inevitably, the visual representation on this cover was exemplary of Australian color binaries, with two very black children and one very white one. 71. The 1996 Sir Robert Menzies Lecture, “The Liberal Tradition: The Beliefs and Values Which Guide the Federal Government,” at http://avoca.vicnet.au/ ~victorp/liberals/nsw/howard2.html [accessed January 8, 2004].

C HAPTE R 7

Indigenous Rights and the Mutability of Cultures Tradition, Change, and the Politics of Recognition

Bruno David

On June 3, 1992, after many years of government contestation, Eddie Koiki Mabo, David Passi, and James Rice finally won their case for commonwealth recognition of the indigenous ownership of traditional lands in the High Court of Australia. This landmark decision overturned the legal doctrine of terra nullius, for more than two centuries erroneously avowing that no one possessed land in Australia prior to Lieutenant James Cook’s declaration of possession for the British Crown in 1770. Since the High Court decision in Mabo vs. Queensland (No. 2) (1992), and the subsequent Native Title Act of 1993, the recognition of indigeneity in Australia now signals a legislative recognition of certain indigenous property rights by the state, traditional rights that, as the Mabo case recognized, have existed since prior to British sovereignty. Despite recognition by members of the High Court that indigenous cultures can change without extinguishing native title rights, however, to this day there remains a public, political, and judicial tension in Australia over what constitute acceptable criteria for the recognition of indigenous property rights. This tension revolves around the notion that indigenous rights should be measured by the presence or absence of “traditional” cultural practices, giving rise to a twofold division between “traditional” indigenous peoples with ancestral rights and “modern” indigenous peoples without such rights. In 1992, the year of the Mabo decision, geographers Stephen Davis and Victor Prescott wrote in their book Aboriginal Frontiers and Boundaries in Australia that “primary rights in territories accorded to Aboriginal groups by the ancestral beings are contingent upon the Aboriginal custodians continuing to care for the territory by singing the songs and performing the ceremonies associated with the territory as well as by caring for the sacred objects and places.” 1 122

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To legitimize claims to land, they argued, indigenous peoples in Australia would need to demonstrate an immutability of cultural practice in continued ceremonial relations with the land. Yet in time, “Traditional knowledge that allows territories to be precisely defined will continue to be lost. Fewer traditional ceremonies will be performed, songs will no longer by [sic] sung in some communities, ritual paraphernalia will be destroyed or stolen, and old men will die before passing information to the next generation. Already more than 75% of the senior Aboriginal custodians who have been our main source of traditional boundary information are now deceased.” 2 Davis and Prescott’s impossible scenario for the longevity of indigenous rights to lands and waters in a world of culture change is a crisis of authenticity. The legal courts in Australia appear to have followed a different course, explicitly rejecting a “frozen-in-time” approach to the determination of native title (see, for example, Yorta Yorta vs. State of Victoria [2001]). Yet, in both practice and theory, that difference may be more apparent than real. Although in the Australian legal system cultural change is permissible in the recognition of indigenous property rights, the baseline criteria for recognition remains that indigenous peoples need to have retained a degree of continuity through their laws and customs, which many have interpreted as meaning through their pre-British sovereignty laws and customs. This is despite the fact that Aboriginal peoples and Islanders have been undergoing cultural change through international contact and influence with nonindigenous peoples for millennia: among different Aboriginal and Islander nations, between Aboriginal peoples and Islanders and Melanesians in northeastern Australia, between Aboriginal and various Indonesian peoples (such as Macassans) in north-central and northwestern Australia, and between Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders and Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and possibly Chinese sailors in northern Australia. This crisis of recognition identifies Aboriginality and Islander being in terms not of social recognition by indigenous communities themselves, nor in terms of ancestry, but in terms of closure to international influence and essential cultural fixity. This binary opposition between, on the one hand, an Aboriginal and Islander being with legitimate claims to land and water and, on the other, the “modern” Aborigine or Islander who has forgone his or her indigenous rights by virtue of cultural dynamism in the face of novel influences, is the theme I explore in this essay by reference to the existence of an indigeneity that escapes such binarisms. Here I explore the Australian archeological record to document the mutability of indigenous cultures prior to the advent of Europeans, often in the face of international contacts. Recognizing the fluidity of cultural practice and of cultural being within a context of international influence is recognizing Aboriginality and

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Islander being outside the traditional binary framework of presence or absence of encapsulated, stereotypical cultural traits that essentially evolve only internally. In its stead, long-term indigenous rights and indigeneity come to us today not as the impossible presence of a culturally isolated past, nor in a clone of past laws and customs, but as territorial continuity through descent, community recognition, and social dynamism, as has been the case “since time immemorial.” The public, political, and judicial recognition of being or not being of the cultural past have deep implications for the everyday life of indigenous peoples in Australia, including property rights; rights to hunt, gather and keep bush foods with weapons other than spears, boomerangs, digging sticks, traps, and clubs; and rights to share and trade within and between communities. Such considerations confront us with duties of compliance to indigenous rights in a politics of recognition. I conclude with a consideration of the appropriateness of recognizing indigeneity through the binarism of being or not being of the cultural past in light of Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the “third space.” A People with a Past, a People with a History, a People with a Presence

Science tells us that the ancestors of today’s Aboriginal people first arrived on the continent some time before 40,000 years ago; some researchers suggest the first landings took place from Southeast Asia between 60,000 and 53,000 years ago.3 Every major habitat on the Australian mainland was occupied or used by at least 25,000 years ago, and probably much earlier.

Demography In the Cape York Peninsula region of northeastern Australia, archeologists have excavated and radiocarbon dated thirty-three caves and rock shelters. Aboriginal people occupied most of these sites after 5,500 years ago, and through time the number of occupied sites continued to increase. Such archeological trends could have been caused by increases in the overall number of sites occupied at any one time, shifts in the spatial distribution of occupation sites, or residential displacements becoming more frequent after approximately 5,500 years ago. In any case, expansions into new residential locations and increasing intensities of regional land use are implicated. These patterns are likely to have been caused by general rises in population numbers and densities across southeast Cape York. The implication is that (1) more people were moving across the landscape, creating and using more sites in the process and/or (2) settlement systems changed as more or less stable populations moved residence more frequently. These increases in intensities of regional occupation indicate sociode-

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mographic transformations—population numbers and/or residential structures were changing.

International Relations It is a common assumption that Australia remained isolated from the rest of the world until sporadic visitation and eventual settlement by Europeans during the latter half of the second millennium of the common era. Yet this is very much an erroneous assumption. Torres Strait has long been a gateway between Australia, Melanesia, and South-East Asia, and there are a number of cultural changes in Aboriginal Australia and Torres Strait Islander societies that cannot easily be explained without reference to international relations. For one, the dingo could not have originated within Australia, because there are no traces of its evolutionary antecedents prior to sometime between 4,500 and 3,000 years ago—it must have arrived during this time, signaling also the arrival of distant seafarers from southern Asia, Indonesia, or New Guinea. During this general period, and possibly slightly earlier, blade production— new stone tool technologies akin to those practiced in parts of Indonesia at that time—also first begin to be practiced in north-central and northwestern Australia, eventually spreading across much of the continent. Such cultural changes within Australia were probably initially spawned by overseas influences. The biological evidence itself suggests that the “evolution” of Aboriginal life—to use a term favored by the judges presiding in legal determinations to whether change in Aboriginal and Islander society extinguished native title—was not immune to these international connections. Joseph Birdsell’s extensive study of the distribution of physical characteristics across Aboriginal Australia shows a series of traits indicative of new, incoming genes sometime before the arrival of Europeans.4 For example, the blood group data unmistakably marks Australia not as an antipodean isolate, but as long-standing in an interconnected world. Birdsell writes, The other allele of the ABO blood group locus found in Australia is the alien gene B. Its distribution is limited to portions of the northern coastline. . . . The B gene has been introduced into the continent by two different peoples at different times. In the northeastern portion of Australia it was introduced by Papuans from the Torres Strait Islands who made periodic trips down the coast of Cape York Peninsula. In historic times they are known to have traveled as far down the east coast as the Pascoe River, a distance of 140 miles from the tip. On the west side of the Cape, the Papuan voyagers reached the Pennefather River, a distance of about 80 miles below the tip. Cultural traits can be traced

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about twice as far to the south on both coasts. The antiquity of these Papuan travels is not known but involves several millennia. From Broome on the west coast, around the northern coastline, and well into the Gulf of Carpentaria, voyages by Malays seeking beche-de-mer were annual occurrences. Their voyages on the southeast monsoon winds to Australia commenced several hundred years prior to British settlement of the north. 5

Bryce Barker 6 and Mike Rowland 7 have similarly noted the presence of Melanesian maritime technology (e.g., outrigger canoes, harpoons) as far south as the Cumberland group of islands off the central Queensland coast (1,300 kilometers south of the Papuan coast). Here outrigger canoes ultimately from Melanesia likely revolutionized cultural lifeways among indigenous peoples, facilitating interisland travel and access to distant offshore islands. Barker has shown through direct and indirect archeological evidence that intensive and specialized turtle and dugong hunting began about 3,000 years ago in the Whitsunday Islands, part of a radically new cultural practice made possible by the adoption of foreign practices and ideologies that penetrated into and transformed many if not all aspects of indigenous life (including ceremonies, stories, and attitudes towards the sea).8 Barker and Lara Lamb (personal communication, 2002) have also suggested that as a result of enhanced access to offshore islands made possible by outrigger canoes and other novel marine technologies, new resident populations became established on some islands, and the onset of long-distance seafaring technology enabled increased political control over individual islands such as South Molle Island.9 With this came an increased ability to impose conditions of access to the stone quarries found on the islands. These political transformations involved an increasing formalization of island territories and an increasing ability of Aboriginal landowners to monopolize raw materials as trade currency. These radical cultural transformations emerged sometime between 6,900 and 3,000 years ago, almost certainly a result of new watercraft technologies brought about by incoming overseas seafarers. They indicate that the course of evolution of indigenous society within Australia has not in the past taken place in isolation of external influences, and that those foreign influences at times radically transformed indigenous culture. Further instances of such processes can be found in other parts of Australia; a few more examples should suffice to illustrate the point. Nicholas Evans and Rhys Jones 10 have thus reported cultural changes in stone tool technologies, large-scale ceremonial gatherings, plant food technologies, increasing exploitation of marginal environments, and the arrival of the dingo in much of Australia

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after 5,000 to 4,000 years ago (see below), revolutionary cultural transformations that they source to the arrival of a new language family (called Pama-Nyungan) from overseas— probably initially into the southwest portion of the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia — and which then spread over seven-eighths of the continent. The new languages truncated indigenous linguistic practices, replacing previous (non–Pama-Nyungan) languages and critically affecting kinship networks and religious expressions through chains of connections between nations across much of Australia. Like Birdsell’s biological and Rowland’s, Barker’s, and Lamb’s central Queensland coast evidence, the linguistic material makes clear the arrival of new influences from overseas prior to the earliest contacts with Europeans, reaching deep into other realms of daily life in the process. Bruno David, Joe Crouch, and Ugo Zoppi have recently argued that, in western Torres Strait, Syrinx shell arrangements and their associated religious ceremonies may have emerged as an indigenous response to seventeenth-century European (mainly Spanish) seafaring along and across the Strait.11 The earliest sites appear in the archeological record contemporaneously with the first recorded Spanish mariners, Captains Don Diego de Prado y Tovar and Luis Vaez de Torres in 1606.12 By the late nineteenth century, these shell arrangements had become core expressions of religious practice and worldviews (including male initiation and community commemorations; see, for example, Haddon 1935). That these innovations in ritual practice followed the advent of European seafarers positions indigenous societies in Australia not as cultural isolates but as subject and responsive to situations of social contact. And, of course, there were the Macassans. No one knows exactly how long Macassan bêche-de-mer fishers have been coming to northern Australia for, but written records are known from as far back as 1754, and there are ambiguous Javanese hints of links with Australia dating to the early 1600s.13 The archeological record has also been investigated, but much work still remains to be done. Secure archeological evidence of Macassans in northern Australia date back to the 1700s, but there are radiocarbon dates indicating that they may have come as early as the 1300s.14 Largely on the basis of early nineteenth-century firsthand accounts, including Matthew Flinders’ 1803 observations of a fleet of praus (Macassan fishing boats) off northern Australia, John Mulvaney and Jan Kamminga have estimated that “the total [number of Macassans] on the coast that year cannot have been fewer than 1500 men.” 15 It comes as no surprise to learn then that the annual Macassan fleets had major impacts on northern Australian Aboriginal society long before British sovereignty. Examples of these impacts include dugout canoes, fishhooks, language change, trade and other economic relations, stories, ritual, clan designs, social organization, ceremonial

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song cycles, and food habits (e.g., introduction of tamarind from Indonesia). Aboriginal people even went back to Sulawesi with the Macassan sailors, so that “in the 1860s there was an Aboriginal community marooned in Macassar.” 16 As Mulvaney and Kamminga conclude, It is now realized that its [Macassan] impact upon coastal Arnhem Land society was profound. In addition to such material contributions as the dugout canoe and sail and metal implements, which probably enable a more successful exploitation of the environment, the influence was more pervading. Macassarese words were adopted into coastal Aboriginal vocabularies. Local placenames still bear witness to this linguistic borrowing, and in the nineteenth century it resulted in a lingua franca around the coast. Socially, the repercussions varied from the wearing of the now-characteristic Arnhem Land Van Dyke beard to the adoption of the Malayan smoking pipe. Artistically, the influence on eastern Arnhem Land bark painting motifs was profound. . . . But there are many further examples drawn from ceremonial song cycles and rituals which prove the integration of the two cultures, despite their evident antagonism during everyday transactions.17

This expanded view of Australian history as accommodating incoming traits, and of indigenous society transforming, long before British sovereignty—including language disjunctions, pervading ceremonial and subsistence practices, and genetic influences (and possibly intermarriage) with outside populations—alerts us to the fact that civic, legal, and political notions of “customary laws and customs” and cultural dynamism today must be able to account for social continuity, custom, and tradition not in terms of isolated “indigenous” cultural practices or clones of ancestral practices, but as responding also to external influences. Such responses can sometimes lead peoples—purposely or not—to transform cultural practice radically in light of the new influences. Within Australia, the social anthropological and archeological literature abounds with examples of social and cultural change in one territorial group influencing neighboring and more distant Aboriginal and Islander nations. Space does not allow me to discuss the vast number of documented examples; I cite but a few here. In the mid-1930s, W. E. H. Stanner documented the adoption of new but socially pervasive cultural practices among the Murinbata of Port Keats.18 Among the newly adopted cultural practices were subincision, ceremonies, and their associated Dreaming stories, bullroarers, and the eight-class system, a system of kinship affiliation that transformed social relations within and between communities, enabling new kinds of social links to be made

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between geographically and biologically distant populations.19 The common and widespread recognition of the eight-class system allowed people who had never heard of each other to immediately position themselves in relation to others by reference to their skin (class) names, thereby determining appropriate behavioral rules and guiding social practice. This novel method of socially connecting with distant peoples, rendering strangers recognizable kin and altering normative behavior, was a revolutionary new approach to kinship that came into being with the adoption of a shared eight-class system of kin recognition originating in foreign lands. In northwestern Northern Territory — among the Wardaman and neighboring groups — this new means of kin reckoning also only came into being during the early- to mid-1900s, a result of the truncation of indigenous kin practices by new, incoming traits from neighboring land-owning groups from the south. Along similar lines, Sylvie Poirier has documented the recent creation and diffusion of new Dreaming rituals and dances among the Warlpiri of central Australia, a process of change that she argues testifies to a cultural dynamism that reveals intrinsic qualities of openness and flexibility.20 Mulvaney has also reviewed the evidence for change in a specific Dreaming performance, documenting the rapid spread of new Molonga rituals across Australia between 1893 and 1918.21 Walter E. Roth first documented the ritual in northwestern Queensland in 1893.22 Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen then documented it at Alice Springs in 1901.23 Molonga ceremonies were subsequently documented by Daisy Bates along the Nullarbor Plain in 1918.24 In only twenty-five years, the ritual had spread across dozens of Aboriginal nations over a distance of more than 1,600 kilometers, stretching from near Australia’s northern to its southern coastlines.25 Social change is implied here; transformations in the way worldviews were expressed and performed in ritual. These transformations did not come about as a result of the closure of cultural practices to external influences. Rather, the Molonga ceremonies were, first, themselves a response to Europeans, and, second, spread between Aboriginal nations as a result of international influences. In both these ways, Aboriginal society and culture changed radically in the face of external contact. Howard Morphy has also written of the inherent dynamism of Aboriginal worldviews from an anthropological perspective, noting that it is an “accommodation of change and process that has enabled Aboriginal religion to maintain its relevance in a rapidly changing world.” 26 In a similar vein, Ronald Berndt and Catherine Berndt have written of ethnographic Dreaming stories and the events they portray as continuously unfolding through the course of history: “They were all in the process of ‘becoming,’ being transformed.” 27 Aboriginal cultural

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practices as we have come to know them from ethnography and from indigenous voices are just the most recent set of transformations, and much like the transformative qualities of laws and customs of pre-European times, these cultural practices continue to change through time, sometimes with and sometimes without external influences. Together, the archeological and social anthropological evidence indicates that indigenous life in its varied dimensions was significantly affected by incoming peoples from overseas prior to the advent of Europeans. It also indicates that within Australia, indigenous peoples have long responded to new cultural influences originating from foreign nations by radically altering their own customs.

Land Use and Mobility There are various ways in which archeologists have investigated patterns of land use during that period before the arrival of the British. There are in particular clear signs of increasing intensities of land use right across the continent during the last 3,200 years. This evidence comes from evidence of increased landscape burning —what one archeologist 28 called “firestick farming”— and in two- to sixfold increases in rates of sedimentation and two- to threefold increases in deposition rates of cultural materials within occupation sites.29 In some regions there are also clear-cut cases of changing attitudes to the environment. In western Victoria, for example, large numbers of earth mounds began to be built after about 3,000 years ago, enabling greater use of the riverine plains, especially during times of flood.30 Similarly, research by Harry Lourandos at Toolondo and elsewhere in western Victoria has revealed likely late Holocene water channels constructed to divert water flow from swamps to a maze of fishtrapping installations.31 Lourandos concluded that the drainage of swampy ground through the construction of large artificial channels heralds new methods of managing and dwelling in a previously little-used environment — wetlands — and an amplification of fishing that took advantage of the seasonal migratory runs of eels (Anguilla australis occidentalis).32 Nineteenth-century records show how the earth mounds found near these water channels and fishing installations enabled the penetration of Aboriginal settlements into the wetlands.33 Most recently, Heather Builth showed that the construction of eel ponds and the emergence of an indigenous commercial aquacultural farming economy among the Gunditjmara of southwestern Victoria, where large catches of eels were processed and stored for later use, trade, and to fund ceremonial aggregations, emerged only during the last few thousand years, signaling an intensification of regional land use and radical shifts in approaches to land, water, resource, and social relations.34

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Elsewhere, Sue O’Connor argued that offshore islands in northern Australia largely began to be occupied after 3,000 years ago,35 an observation that John Beaton had previously suggested indicated a late-Holocene onset of sturdy seafaring canoes.36 At Princess Charlotte Bay in northeastern Australia, mounded middens consisting almost entirely of a single species of shell, Anadara granosa — a cockle found in mangrove beds nearby — are restricted to the last 1,900– 1,500 years.37 The mounds signal the onset of new, centralized consumption bases across the bay and the beginnings of intensive exploitation of mangrove swamps. Mounds at Princess Charlotte Bay are at once evidence of novel foraging practices, disposal patterns, site selection, and foci of social activity. The systematic exploitation of mangrove beds, especially A. granosa, implies the beginnings of a new, specialized, and focused subsistence strategy 1,900–1,500 years ago. Other archeological manifestations of changing intensities of site and regional land use before the period of European contact are abundant, particularly as evidenced in increasing densities of cultural materials within individual sites after 4,500–3,600 years ago (typically a doubling to tripling), reaching their peaks around 1,700–1,600 years ago.38 These documented increases in deposition rates relate to how people interacted with their surroundings—they relate to patterns of site and regional land use. The fact that increases in deposition rates of stone artifacts, charcoal, food remains, and ochre occurred simultaneously within most sites indicates that occupational transformations were both widespread and concerned many aspects of life. Elsewhere, Peter Veth 39 has presented evidence for widespread site and regional “abandonment” and mobility in the Western Desert prior to the period of European influence.40 These shifts in regional mobility and patterns of land use occurred at “varying geographic levels of residence, locality, region[, and] territory and can cover periods of time lasting from a “season” through to a generation.” 41 During such periods of “abandonment” people nevertheless maintained connections with places, in stories, art and the social recognition of territory. As Veth asks, “if temporary ‘abandonment’ of country in the past — for a myriad of reasons — did not break down the social institutions for maintenance of connection, then why should it do so in the contemporary context?” 42

Technology Technology can be approached from a variety of angles. In its most encompassing dimensions, technology is how we do things, how we create the world we know through a series of regulated operative steps. In many parts of Australia stone tools begin to change radically at various times after 4,000 years ago.

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Among the new artifactual conventions we find the beginnings of a new range of types, including backed artifacts (small stone flakes with usually a single steeply blunted edge, likely to allow hafting on a wooden handle such as a spear barb), adzes that were fitted to the end of wooden handles and spear-throwers in the arid and semiarid zone, fishhooks along the eastern Australian coast, and apparently harpoons and outrigger canoes whose technology was influenced by Melanesian seafarers in northeastern Australia. Systematic changes in tool technologies have been documented on a number of fronts in northeastern Australia, including the selection of raw materials, artifact sizes, and the appearance of blade-based technologies, particularly during the last 2,400 years. These cultural innovations are but a small subset of a pantheon of changes across Australia that involved a revolution in stone tool technologies in central-northern Australia with the onset of systematic blade and point manufacture. These new tools became important currency that helped fuel and negotiate long-distance trade, ceremonies, and international protocols between nations. The geographic spread of these practices indicates that these new cultural traits influenced normative behavior in neighboring indigenous nations through culture contact.

Food Habits The things we eat are not simply items of food. They are, in the words of Nicholas Thomas, “entangled objects”: [S]ocially constructed in the ways that they are fitted into routine, everyday practices and ways of life.43 Culture is embedded and disembedded throughout the life of the object.44

Changes in customary food habits thus implicate changes not limited to culinary practices, but also in the way they are embedded in other aspects of culture. The major evidence for long-term dietary change prior to British sovereignty in Australia comes from plant foods. In Australia generally, few stone tools are directly related to food processing, and because plant remains do not always preserve well in archeological sites, it is the better surviving stone processing tools that archeologists have targeted for research. Of these, an important and well-defined temporal trend has emerged. Demonstrated food processing stone artifacts are almost always limited to seed-grinding stones, which have never been found in reliable archeological contexts more than 3,000 years old (and likely limited to the last 1,400 years in the arid zone). The implication is

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that major changes in diet breadths have taken place late in Aboriginal history, changes that saw the exploitation of new staple plant foods available in vast quantities in many parts of northeastern Australia. The ramifications of such a change are not exclusively “economic” or demographic, but imply also changes in the way people interacted with and symbolized their immediate surroundings, transforming grasslands to harvestable fields, previously unused stone outcrops into sources of stone that could be worked into economically valuable (and tradable) grinding stones. These changes imply transformations as to how people visualized and signified their surroundings. They had bearing on the scheduling of everyday life and seasonal cycles. In that seasonality is involved, the emergence of systematic seed grinding entails new temporal relations between people and between people and the land. Seasonality of ripeness affected the location of social groups, including residential units and the timing of gatherings. Seed availability—geographic distributions and seasonality—impinged upon residential patterns and even demographic trends; it affected where people lived and the numbers of people that could be supported in particular regions, and even the fertility of women as a result of changing patterns of mobility and weaning, which anthropologists have shown to be interrelated. Alliance patterns and power relations attuned to resource structures were influenced. Kinship relations were affected, for grinding stones were shared and/or passed down matrilineally during ethnographic times, affecting food preparation and relationships between hearth groups. In that territorial rights were marked or emphasized by matrilineally demarcated grinding stones, relations between people and place were affected by seed grinding. By marking places with heavy grinding stones, territorial hegemony and rights to place were enhanced and politically engineered. Also affected was an ability to support large congregations, during ethnographic times critical to the performance of sacred Dreaming rituals. During such rituals initiations were performed, marriages were arranged and disputes were settled. Seeds impacted on trade relations, in that seed foods enabled large gatherings to take place, and valuable milling stones, whose natural availability were in many regions restricted, were traded. Ecologically, seed grinding also enabled people to inhabit otherwise inhospitable places where staple resources were limited or where ecological risk was high; seed grinding was a significant risk-minimizing strategy in an otherwise poor or highly unpredictable limiting environment. As a highly gendered task, seed grinding signaled the presence of particular gender (power) relations. And not least, in the labor of seed food production, as in its consumption and in the new behavioral possibilities that it created, sentiments were shaped, a dimension rarely glanced at

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in traditional archeological discourse yet critical to the construction of social being and identity.45 The commencement of systematic seed grinding after around 3,000 years ago, and its restriction to the last 1,400 years or so in many places, indicate radical changes in food habits and their associated social entanglements. There is an implication here for both a conceptualization of the landscape and for the use and management (labor) of the land—both instances of shifting relations between people and between people and their environments. Aboriginal cultures changed radically over the last three millennia—and especially during the last—across the entirety of arid and semiarid Australia, where seed grinding was most important during the period of European contact.

Art There are few places in Australia where we understand well the antiquity of the rock art found on rock walls and pavements. Yet in those regions where it has been studied in detail, the character of the art inevitably changes during the late Holocene—that is, at various times during the last 3,500 years. In Cape York Peninsula, relatively widespread engraving (and possibly painting) conventions—mostly abstract and animal track designs—gave way to regionalized paintings of animal and human shapes, particularly during the last 2,000 years. The new conventions vary considerably from region to region, a characteristic not evident for earlier times. In Wardaman country of the Victoria River region in the Northern Territory, the rock art conventions that were practiced as part of the ethnographically documented Dreaming worldview have been mostly dated to the past 1,400 years.46 In western Arnhem Land the famous X-ray paintings first began to be painted sometime during the last few thousand years (there is debate whether this began 6,000 or 3,000 years ago). Some of these paintings are well known today across Australia and overseas through the imagery carried by the mass media. Yet evidently these material manifestations of what we have come to know as quintessential representations of a timeless Aboriginal culture have a limited and measurable history, evidence for the mutability of Aboriginal cultural practice both internally and between indigenous nations (artistic conventions in one area influenced those of neighboring nations). Examples of changing artistic conventions across Australia are easy to find: in Sydney they have been documented by Josephine McDonald; in Arnhem Land by Eric Brandl, Darrel Lewis, George Chaloupka, Ivan Haskovec, Erle Nelson and his team, Paul Taçon, and Christopher Chippindale; in the Kimberleys by Bert Roberts and his colleagues and Alan Watchman and his colleagues; at

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Chillagoe and the Mitchell-Palmer regions by me; in the Koolburra Plateau by Josephine Flood; at Laura by Lesley Maynard, Andrée Rosenfeld and colleagues, Noelene Cole and colleagues, and Mike Morwood.47

Territoriality During ethnographic times, the marking of places with rock art across Australia signaled territoriality. The ability to mark the land, such as in the creation of rock art or the placement of grinding stones as more or less fixed installations on the ground, was subject to clan affiliation and territorial recognition by communities in general. In marking place with symbols, rock art writes the landscape with socially, culturally, and politically ordered symbolism. Land becomes a canvas of cultural expression, cultural experience, and knowledge. By marking places with social symbols, rock art enables people to write, read, and, through time, negotiate the land’s cultural meaningfulness.48 There were social rules to marking the land, and those rules signaled territorial affiliations. In this way, rock art played a role in the definition of territory and identity. The emergence of geographically shorter-spaced artistic conventions after 3,600 years ago in northeastern Australia, most marked after 1,900 years ago, implicates social fragmentation and an increasingly localized social inscription of place. Darrel Lewis has also documented similar processes of increasing regionalism of place marking from the Kimberleys to Arnhem Land across the Victoria River catchment area, after about 2,000 years ago.49 In these regions territories became increasingly marked through symbols prior to the arrival of Europeans. The new, shorter-spaced artistic conventions differentiated the indigenous landscape into networks of separate territorial spaces. The emerging rock art conventions created new structures of territorial difference and deference. The late-Holocene antiquity of visual symbols implies a late-Holocene antiquity for the graphic presencing of the ethnographically known territorial landscape. The fact that symbols associated with the ethnographic territorial landscape cannot be traced further back in time implies an epochal reworking of territorial divisions at various times in the past, particularly during the last 2,000 years. Similarly, the beginnings of systematic seed grinding in the Australian arid and semiarid zone during the past 3,000 years—and mostly during the past 1,400 years—signal changes in processes of territoriality. Connections with plants are, in the words of Ross Hynes and Athol Chase, “the outcome of strategies which include not only physical resource exploitation, but as well systems of locality and territoriality that recognize ties between particular individuals and

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groups and particular home environments,” such as in the marking of the landscape with the heavy tools necessary to process the grass seeds.50 The placement of milling stones at a site was an act of place-marking, a process that Annette Hamilton suggested influenced social and territorial organization.51 By marking places with grinding stones that were more or less fixed as furniture in the landscape, territorial hegemony and rights to place were enhanced: heavy grinding stones were placed in particular parts of the landscape by individuals with appropriate territorial affiliations to those places and, in turn, those grinding stones confirmed and helped maintain the recognition of territory. In that systematic seed grinding and the use of grinding stones were unknown before about 3,000 years ago—and probably 1,400 years ago in much of arid Australia—the material means by which territory was recognized changed.

Ritual Perhaps even more telling of cultural dynamism and radical social changes that transformed the character of indigenous customs during the pre-European contact period are the results of Mike Smith’s archeological investigations in the arid core of Australia.52 Here can be found the only archeological excavations of ethnographically documented ceremonial sites ever undertaken in Aboriginal Australia. Nicolas Peterson, an anthropologist, has noted that understanding Aboriginal relationships to place across all of Australia during the early ethnographic period requires consideration of totemic classification.53 Totems relate people to places through the ancestors and creative events of the Dreaming, and totemic affiliations are celebrated in ritual performances. Totems, he argues— as Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen had implied before him—were in the first instance attached to localities. Because people were conceived in place, born in place, and died in place, they were from birth affiliated with socially recognized territorial spaces.54 In central Australia, the Arrernte recognize their clan totems. Patriclans are of primary importance, although totemic affiliations attained via other means are also recognized. Totemic membership during the early European contact period required formal celebration and ritual maintenance. During these rituals, the creative events of the Dreaming were commemorated. Nicolas Peterson, Joel Bonnemaison, and Bernard Moizo have noted that ritual also bears a territorial imperative.55 Through ritual we celebrate the social construction of meaning. To trace the antiquity of ethnographically known Dreaming rituals is thus larger than the ritual itself. It is a mapping of ontology, in the sense that it concerns the way people perceive their own reality. Rituals give a sense of place; they give

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meaning to the world we live in. The ritual cycles in Aboriginal Australia are a celebration and social reproduction of the emplacement of people as totemic beings. Because rituals involve particular kinds of activities, they leave behind recognizable material traces that can be investigated archeologically. In a series of four excavations covering four different totemic sites in Arrernte country, archeologist Mike Smith thus found evidence of some 3,600 years of Aboriginal occupation.56 In each case, however, the material remains implied an antiquity of less than 1,400 to 600 years for the ritual congregations. Cultural practices here were demonstrated by Smith to have radically changed through the course of history—the archeological record shows a late emergence of the Dreaming rituals documented ethnographically. The archeology here indicates pervasive transformations of Aboriginal culture about 1,000 years before the arrival of the British.

Worldview Archeological research by definition concerns material traces of past social and cultural activities. And behavior engages material objects, so that the way we live in the world leaves a material track that is a sign of our attitude toward the world. By investigating the history of material remains in this way, it is possible to investigate the history of the sacred, of spiritscapes, and of worldviews themselves. It allows us also to research whether ethnographically documented perceptions of the world have a deep antiquity or whether they can be shown to have emerged more recently through the course of history. That is, it enables us to assess the degree to which Aboriginal and Islander customs changed during that period before British annexation. Few such research endeavors have been attempted anywhere in the world. I have already touched on Mike Smith’s work on the history of Arrernte rituals in the centre of Australia, and on the evidence for their dynamism. Another example is the archeology of a sacred mountain in northern Queensland—Ngarrabullgan (Mount Mulligan) —where the local Djungan Aboriginal community recently avoided the mountain because of the presence of dangerous spirits.57 Following detailed archeological excavations at sixteen caves and rock shelters on and near the mountain, and at a further ten excavated and radiocarbon-dated sites some 50 to 200 kilometers away, however, it was shown that in the past the mountain was not always avoided. Those sites less than one kilometer from the mountain—including those on top of the mountain—were systematically abandoned by 650 years ago, whereas those sites away from the mountain con-

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tinued to be used until the arrival of Europeans toward the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The archeological record indicates that a shift took place around 650 years ago in the way people identified with Ngarrabullgan. The fact that the mountain was abandoned around 650 years ago indicates that the dangerous Dreaming beings that recently and today reside on the mountain probably only began then. Ngarrabullgan alerts us to the fact that not only did customary Aboriginal uses of places profoundly change through time prior to the period of European influence, but so did perceptions of their surroundings. Discussion

The pre-European past saw widespread cultural change across the whole of Australia. Some changes occurred in some places, others elsewhere, and some innovations spread quickly between Aboriginal or Islander nations across the continent. Some of these innovations originated within Australia, whereas others came from overseas by international seafarers. Some innovations individually had profound effects on indigenous customs, and the sum of cultural transformations penetrated all aspects of cultural life, including systems of land use, demography, international relations, language, kinship, technology, transport, art, land use, food-processing procedures, territoriality, rituals, and even worldviews. It even affected the genetic constitution of indigenous Australia. “The truth is,” concluded Mulvaney and Kamminga, two of Australia’s most senior archeologists, “that visits to prehistoric Australia did have repercussions for the Aborigines living there, and sometimes this alien influence was profound.” 58 It is inadequate and meaningless to say, therefore, that Aboriginal peoples and Islanders today, along with their indigenous property rights, must be defined through the simplistic binary presence or absence of “traditional” cultural practices essentially of the pre–British sovereignty past. Public opinion and recent legal rulings have nevertheless given little due credit to such dynamism in Aboriginal and Islander culture, and little appreciation of the implications of historical processes for the recognition of indigenous rights in the face of culture change following the arrival of Europeans. Rather, as has been made abundantly evident in a series of recent federal and High Court rulings, the influence of new (European) objects and practices on Aboriginal culture has been explicitly identified as factual evidence for the truncation — as replacement — of Aboriginal culture, and therefore the cessation of indigenous rights to place, because of neither the onset of legislation superseding prior laws nor a cessation of indigenous recognition of land ownership, but simply by the fact of radical change and culture contact itself. In Australia, the

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legislators of the Native Title Act (1993) saw it necessary to define native title under section 223(1) as the communal, group or individual rights and interests of Aboriginal peoples or Torres Strait Islanders in relation to land or waters, where: (a) the rights and interests are possessed under the traditional laws acknowledged, and the traditional customs observed, by the Aboriginal peoples or Torres Strait Islanders; and (b) the Aboriginal peoples or Torres Strait Islanders, by those laws and customs, have a connection with the land or waters; and (c) the rights and interests are recognised by the common law of Australia.

Of these three criteria by which claimants are required to abide for a successful determination of native title, one key notion has remained a major source of debate and dissent not only between claimants and defendants (almost always involving the state), but also between the presiding judges themselves. Thus, in the courts a most-debated issue under native title consideration has been whether indigenous peoples today retain land and water rights and interests “possessed under the traditional laws acknowledged, and the traditional customs observed, by the Aboriginal peoples or Torres Strait Islanders.” That is, what is the relationship between “the rights and interests . . . recognised by the common law of Australia” and pre–British sovereignty laws and customs? Central to public and legal debate, as well as to the failure or success of various federal and High Court determinations, have been definitions of “traditional laws” and “traditional customs.” Federal and High Court opinion on this issue have essentially fallen into two camps: those that deem that the character of indigenous culture today must not have significantly deviated from customs practiced during the period immediately preceding British sovereignty and those that recognize change within indigenous society and culture as a natural part of social process that does not of itself erode the authenticity of indigenous rights and interests in contemporary Australian law. These opposing views have been repeated in different judgments, and often also in dissenting judgments within single legal cases (e.g., Yorta Yorta vs. Victoria [1998]; Yorta Yorta vs. Victoria [2001]). It is common within such legal rulings for individual judges to argue in considerable detail that cultural change is in theory permissible in the survival of native title in common law. Nevertheless, present laws and customs must be shown to have been “handed down from generation to generation” (Yorta Yorta vs. Victoria [2001], FCA 45, par. 127). Although change is theoretically permissible for the survival of native title under the Native Title Act, innovation outside

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local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traditions — that is, innovation due to novel, external influences — has rarely been recognized as acceptable in federal and High Court rulings. In such formulations, indigenous society and culture are presumed essentially closed, historically unable to be influenced by transformative external influences. And yet, as I have tried to show in this chapter, such a view does not adequately represent the historical facts: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies have long been affected by international influences, at times radically. All innovation is a “breaking with the past,” and there is no such thing as the “evolution” of indigenous society independent of external contacts and influences, sometimes with profound cultural outcomes. There are many ways indigenous peoples can react or adapt to new circumstances, and as shown here these societies have for thousands of years been affected by cultures from outside Australia and other indigenous cultures and nations within Australia. In short, indigenous nations were and are not closed social systems. A key for the recognition of indigenous property rights, as recognized by indigenous laws and customs, is not the immutability of cultures in the face of foreign influences, but the recognition by indigenous peoples of who owns the land by virtue of ancestral ties. Simply put, the community recognition of property rights is a customary recognition of those rights if the principles of community recognition come from ancestral roots and continue to be recognised by the indigenous community. Conclusion

Central to all federal and High Court judgments concerning native title to date has been the question of whether indigenous rights can be shown to exist “under the traditional laws acknowledged, and the traditional customs observed,” where customary rights are usually interpreted as relating to indigenous social, cultural, political, and judicial processes essentially closed to international influences and processes. This judicial positioning of the rights of indigeneity defined as an opposition between being or not being of a cultural past essentially unaffected by incoming cultural practices is more than a crisis of recognition; it lies at the core of how indigenous peoples have been positioned in Australian property law, civic life, and political will. This positioning in relation to being or not being of the cultural past—the “traditional” cloned into the present without major changes to individual indigenous groups brought about by external culture contact—is an unusual stance, in that the cultural practices of hundreds of Aboriginal and Islander nations have always been influenced by nonindigenous peoples through processes such as trade, warfare, marriages, international congregations, and other forms of social interaction.

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There is already within Australian law an implicit legislative recognition of the political distinctiveness of Aboriginal and Islander nations in the concept of communal and group rights and in the recognition of indigenous connections with geographically delimited lands and waters regulated by regionally specific indigenous laws and customs. In that cultural innovations have been passed on between some nations—for example, the spread of changes in stone tool types (such as backed artifacts in southern Australia and seed grinding stones in arid and semiarid zones) and technologies (such as systematic point and blade production in north-central Australia) across nations during the past 3,000 years— is factual evidence of the radical mutability of Aboriginal and Islander cultures through processes of international influence prior to the advent of Europeans. The same goes for the spread of cultural practices from overseas to Australian nations, such as linguistic and ceremonial influences from Macassans during the past few hundred years at least.59 The silencing or denial of authentic or full indigeneity with indigenous rights to place by virtue of international (British) influence isolates Aboriginal people and Islanders in a politics of a past that never happened. This failure to recognize Aboriginal or Islander being as social being in a world in which people legitimately interact with those around them forces Aboriginal people and Islanders into what Homi Bhabha calls a third space. Indigenous peoples are not the people perceived and defined by Australian law and public opinion—they are not and have never been incapable of being radically influenced by outsiders without losing their indigeneity and their ancestral rights to place. Yet, at the same time, nor are they not the indigenous people addressed by Australian law and public opinion. Homi Bhabha has written that between being and the uttered representation is a space of ambivalence: “The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one nor the other.” 60 Representation is an institutional strategy for situating the subject in an objective reality. But, in doing so, the institutional strategy leaves its mark on the subject as a new subject, not as a true being, but as a (institutional) truth of being. This silencing of the salient being is an act of sociality subject to society’s power relations; it is an act of replacement with the institutional being and the emergence of a third space that is and yet that is not. The third space is a conjuring, in that to conjure is to call; but it is also a sleight of hand, a magic trick. That notions of indigeneity today are based on nineteenth- or early twentieth-century ethnography conjure an image of what it means to be Aboriginal or Islander is more than a construction of identity; it is a sleight of hand that silences Aboriginal and Islander personhood in the present, forever defining not how it is for someone to be, but how it is to be a colonial construction. For if the third space emerges from a colo-

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nial construction of what it is to be, being emerges as an essential state defined, at the expense of its presence as a situated (Bhabha’s “hybrid”) state forever flowing from an emergent historical state to its present becoming. The civic, political, and judicial construction of an indigeneity essentially locked into ancestral states incapable of radically transforming culturally without losing its indigeneity, following Bhabha’s notion of the third space, is thus an act — or rather, a motion— of institutional replacement that leaves Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders “neither One nor the Other, but something else besides,” peoples with futures whose “past is not originary, where the present is not simply transitory. It is, if I may stretch a point, an interstitial future, that emerges between the claims of the past and the needs of the present.” 61 And if the intermediacy of the present locates culture as a movement beyond — following Emmanuel Levinas, as a transcendence toward alterity — it is transcendence itself that locates subjectivity beyond the third space, that identifies what it means to be.62 The character of Aboriginal and Islander being outside its judicial and public recognition as radically immutable in the face of external contact — and the character of Aboriginal and Islander presence not as a projected past, but as a transcendent state — identifies the third space as a problem of representation. It also identifies it as a space of resistance to the inappropriate recognition of being. Forcing Aboriginal people and Islanders to chose between identifying as being or not being essentially immutable in the face of external contact silences transcendence and being and drives Aboriginal people and Islanders to live outside the space of an inappropriate and invalid binarism. It positions Aboriginal people and Islanders such as to question their political and judicial representation in an act of resistance, and such resistances not only will not go away, but cannot go away in the face of the invalid yet politically and judicially powerful binarism from which they emerge. Like the once-prevalent notion of terra nullius in Australian law, judgments of fact (notions that indigenous culture[s] in Australia can only change by the course of its “natural evolution,” without radical external influence) can be shown to be judgments of fiction — that is, they are not judgments of fact at all, but of interpretation. The answer to that problem is simple, if politically and judicially courageous (yet more simple than the present formulation): a public recognition of indigenous rights and interests unframed by the immutable “traditional,” as long as indigenous ancestry and community recognition of indigeneity are retained. Acknowledgments

Warm thanks to Bryce Barker, Melissa Castan, Lara Lamb, Marcia Langton, Anne McCasland-Pexton, Ian McNiven, and Mike Rowland for comments.

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Notes 1. S. L. Davis and J. R. V. Prescott, Aboriginal Frontiers and Boundaries in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992), p. 134. 2. Davis and Prescott, Aboriginal Frontiers, p. 142. 3. The archeological ages presented in this essay have been calibrated into calendar years from the original radiocarbon determinations. The calibrations were undertaken with Calib 4.4. M. Stuiver and P. J. Reimer, “Extended 14C Database and Revised CALIB Radiocarbon Calibration Program,” Radiocarbon, Vol. 35 (1993): 215–230; and R. G. Roberts, R. Jones, and M. Smith, “Thermoluminescence Dating of a 50,000Year-Old Human Occupation Site in Northern Australia,” Nature, Vol. 345 (1990): 153–156. 4. J. Birdsell, Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal Australia: A Gradient Analysis of Clines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 5. Birdsell, Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal Australia, p. 43. 6. B. Barker, “‘The Sea People’: Maritime Hunter-Gatherers on the Tropical Coast: A Late Holocene Maritime Specialization in the Whitsunday Islands, Central Queensland Coast.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Queensland, 1995; B. Barker, “Maritime Hunter-Gatherers on the Tropical Coast: A Social Model for Change,” in S. Ulm and I. Lilley, eds., Australian Archaeology ’95: Proceedings of the 1995 Australian Archaeological Association Annual Conference. Tempus 6 (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996), pp. 31–43. 7. M. J. Rowland, “The Distribution of Aboriginal Watercraft on the East Coast of Queensland: Implications for Culture Contact,” Australian Aboriginal Studies, Vol. 2 (1987): 38–45. 8. Barker, “Maritime Hunter-Gatherers.” 9. Barker, “Maritime Hunter-Gatherers.” 10. N. Evans and R. Jones, “The Cradle of the Pama-Nyungans: Archaeological and Linguistic Speculations,” in P. McConvell and N. Evans, eds., Archaeology and Linguistics: Aboriginal Australia in Global Perspective (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 385–417. 11. B. David, J. Crouch, and U. Zoppi, “Historicizing the Spiritual: Bu Shell Arrangements on Badu Island, Torres Strait,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Vol. 15 (2005): 71–91. 12. H. N. Stevens and G. F. Barwick, eds., New Light on the Discovery of Australia (London: Hakluyt Society, 1930). 13. For a review, see D. J. Mulvaney and J. Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1999), pp. 407–424. 14. See, for example, C. C. Macknight, “Macassans and Aborigines,” Oceania,

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Vol. 42 (1972): 281–321, and also The Voyage to Maregé: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976), and “Macassans and the Aboriginal Past,” Archaeology in Oceania, Vol. 21 (1986): 69–75; and S. Mitchell, “Culture Contact and Indigenous Economies on the Coburg Peninsula, Northwestern Arnhem Land.” Ph.D. thesis, Northern Territory University, 1994. 15. J. Mulvaney and J. Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia (New York: Longitude Books, 1999), p. 412. 16. Mulvaney and Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, p. 412. 17. Mulvaney and Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, pp. 417–418. 18. W. E. H. Stanner, “Murinbata Kinship and Totemism,” Oceania, Vol. 7 (1936): 186–216. 19. See also W. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion: Oceania Monograph 36 (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 1989). 20. S. Poirier, “‘Nomadic’ Rituals: Networks of Ritual Exchange between Women of the Australian Western Desert,” Man, Vol. 27 (1993): 757–776. 21. D. J. Mulvaney, “‘The Chain of Connection’: The Material Evidence,” in N. Peterson, ed., Tribes and Boundaries in Australia (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1975), pp. 72–94. 22. W. E. Roth, Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1897). 23. B. Spencer and F. Gillen, Across Australia (London: Macmillan, 1912). 24. D. Bates, “Great Aboriginal Trade Route,” Australasian, November 2, 1930, p. 4. 25. Mulvaney, “‘The Chain of Connection,’” pp. 90–92. 26. H. Morphy, Aboriginal Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), p. 42. 27. R. M. Berndt and C. H. Berndt, The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1989), p. 408. 28. R. Jones, “Fire-Stick Farming,” Australian Natural History, Vol. 16 (1969): 224–228. 29. B. David, Landscapes, Rock-Art and the Dreaming: An Archaeology of Preunderstanding (London: Leicester University Press, 2002). 30. P. J. F. Coutts, “Victoria Archaeological Survey Activities Report, 1979–80,” Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey, Vol. 13 (1982): 1–28; B. Downey and D. Frankel, “Radiocarbon and Thermoluminescence Dating of a Central Murray Mound,” Artefact, Vol. 15 (1992): 31–35; E. Williams, Complex Hunter-Gatherers: A Late Holocene Example from Temperate Australia (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1988). 31. H. Lourandos, “Forces of Change: Aboriginal Technology and Population in Southwestern Victoria.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney, 1980. Also H. Lourandos,

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“Change or Stability? Hydraulics, Hunter-Gatherers and Population in Temperate Australia,” World Archaeology, Vol. 11 (1980): 245–266, “Intensification: A Late Pleistocene-Holocene Archaeological Sequence from Southwestern Victoria,” Archaeology in Oceania, Vol. 18 (1983): 81–94, and A Continent of Hunter-Gatherers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 32. Lourandos, Forces of Change. 33. Coutts, “Victorian Archaeological Survey”; Williams, Complex HunterGatherers. 34. H. Builth, “The Archaeology and Socioeconomy of the Gunditjmara: A Landscape Analysis from Southwest Victoria, Australia.” Ph.D. thesis, Flinders University, 2002. 35. S. O’Connor, “The Timing and Nature of Prehistoric Island Use in Northern Australia,” Archaeology in Oceania, Vol. 27 (1992): 49–60. 36. J. Beaton, “Evidence for a Coastal Occupation Time-Lag at Princess Charlotte Bay (North Queensland) and Implications for Coastal Colonisation and Population Growth Theories for Aboriginal Australia,” Archaeology in Oceania, Vol. 20 (1985): 1–20. 37. Beaton, “Evidence for a Coastal Occupation.” 38. David, Landscapes, Rock-Art and the Dreaming. 39. For example, P. Veth, “‘Abandonment’ or Maintenance of Country? A critical Examination of Mobility Patterns and Implications for Native Title,” Land, Tights, Laws: Issues of Native Title, Vol. 2, issues paper 22 (Canberra: Native Title Research Unit, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 2003). 40. See also R. Tonkinson and M. Tonkinson, “‘Knowing’ and ‘Being’ in Place in the Western Desert,” in A. Anderson, I. Lilley, and S. O’Connor, eds., Histories of Old Ages: Essays in Honour of Rhys Jones (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2001), pp. 133–140. 41. R. Tonkinson and M. Tonkinson, “‘Knowing’ and ‘Being,’” p. 1. 42. R. Tonkinson and M. Tonkinson, “‘Knowing’ and ‘Being,’” p. 1. 43. A. N. Thomas, Entangled Objects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 44. T. Dant, Material Culture in the Social World (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), p. 14. 45. See David, Landscapes, Rock-Art and the Dreaming, for archeological and social anthropological details. 46. David, Landscapes, Rock-Art and the Dreaming. 47. For example, E. Brandl, Australian Aboriginal Paintings in Western and Central Arnhem Land (Canberra: AIAS, 1973); G. Chaloupka, From Palaeoart to Casual Paintings: The Chronological Sequence of Arnhem Land Plateau Rock Art (Darwin:

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Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences Monograph Series 1, 1984), and Journey in Time: The World’s Longest Continuing Art Tradition (Chatswood: Reed, 1993); C. Chippindale and P. Taçon, “Two Old Painted Panels from Kakadu: Variation and Sequence in Arnhem Land Rock Art,” in J. Steinbring, A. Watchman, P. Faulstich, and P. Taçon, eds., Time and Space: Dating and Spatial Considerations in Rock Art Research. Occasional Aura Publication 8 (Melbourne: Australian Rock Art Research Association, 1993), pp. 32–56; N. Cole, A. Watchman, and M. Morwood, “Chronology of Laura Rock Art,” in M. Morwood and D. Hobbs, eds., Quinkan Prehistory: The Archaeology of Aboriginal Art in SE Cape York Peninsula, Australia. Tempus 3 (St. Lucia: Anthropology Museum, University of Queensland, 1995), pp. 147–159; David, Landscapes, Rock-Art and the Dreaming; J. Flood, “Rock Art of the Koolburra Plateau, North Queensland,” Rock Art Research, Vol. 4 (1987): 91–126; I. Haskovec, “Mt. Gilruth Revisited,” Archaeology in Oceania, Vol. 27 (1992): 61–74; D. Lewis, The Rock Paintings of Arnhem Land, Australia: Social, Ecological and Material Culture in the PostGlacial Period. BAR International Series 415 (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1988); L. Maynard, “An Archaeological Approach to the Study of Australian Rock Art.” M.A. thesis, University of Sydney, 1976; J. McDonald, “Dreamtime Superhighway: An Analysis of Sydney Basin Rock Art and Prehistoric Information Exchange.” Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, 1994; M. J. Morwood and D. R. Hobbs, eds., Quinkan Prehistory: The Archaeology of Aboriginal Art in SE Cape York Peninsula, Australia. Tempus 3 (St. Lucia: Anthropology Museum, University of Queensland, 1995); D. E. Nelson, The Beeswax Art of Northern Australia. CD-Rom (Burnaby: Simon Fraser University, 2000); R. G. Robert, G. L. Walsh, A. S. Murray, J. M. Olley, R. Jones, M. J. Morwood, C. Tuniz, E. Lawson, M. K. Macphail, D. Bowdery, and I. D. Naumann, “Luminescence Dating of Rock Art and Past Environments Using Mud-Wasp Nests in Northern Australia,” Nature, Vol. 387 (1997): 696–699; A. Rosenfeld, D. Horton, and J. Winter, Early Man in North Queensland. Terra Australis 6 (Canberra: Department of Prehistory, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1981); P. Taçon, “From Rainbow Snakes to ‘X-Ray’ Fish: The Nature of the Recent Rock Painting Tradition in Western Arnhem Land, Australia.” Ph.D. thesis, Australian National University, 1989; A. Watchman, G. L. Walsh, M. J. Moorwood, and C. Tuniz, “AMS Radiocarbon Age Estimates for Early Rock Paintings in the Kimberley, NW Australia: Preliminary Results,” Rock Art Research, Vol. 14, no. 1 (1997): 18–25. 48. B. David, I. J. McNiven, J. Flood, and V. Attenbrow, “Of Lightning Brothers and White Cockatoos: Dating the Antiquity of Signifying Systems in the Northern Territory, Australia,” Antiquity, Vol. 68 (1994): 241–251; R. Layton, Australian Rock Art: A New Synthesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); D. Lewis and D. B. Rose, The Shape of the Dreaming: The Cultural Significance of Victoria River Rock

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Art (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1987); F. Merlan, “The Interpretive Framework of Wardaman Rock Art: A Preliminary Report,” Australian Aboriginal Studies, Vol. 2 (1989): 14–24; H. Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); D. Mowaljarlai and J. Malnic, Yorro Yorro (Broome: Magabala Books, 1993); D. B. Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); P. Taçon, “Socialising Landscape: The Long-Term Implications of Signs, Symbols and Marks on the Land,” Archaeology in Oceania, Vol. 29 (1994): 117–129; L. Taylor, Seeing the Inside: Bark Painting in Western Arnhem Land (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 49. Lewis, The Rock Paintings of Arnhem Land. 50. R. A. Hynes and A. Chase, “Plants, Sites and Domiculture: Aboriginal Influence upon Plant Communities in Cape York Peninsula,” Archaeology in Oceania, Vol. 17 (1982): 38–50, esp. p. 38. 51. A. Hamilton, “Dual Social Systems: Technology, Labour and Women’s Secret Rites in the Eastern Western Desert of Australia,” Oceania, Vol. 51 (1980): 4–19. 52. For example, M. A. Smith, “The Pattern and Timing of Prehistoric Settlement in Central Australia,” Ph.D. thesis, University of New England, 1988, and “Prehistory and Human Ecology in Central Australia: An Archaeological Perspective,” in S. R. Morton and D. J. Mulvaney, eds., Exploring Central Australia: Society, the Environment and the 1894 Horn Expedition (Chipping Norton: Surrey Beatty and Sons, 1996), pp. 61–73. 53. N. Peterson, “Totemism Yesterday: Sentiment and Local Organization among the Australian Aborigines,” Man, Vol. 7 (1972): 12–32. 54. For example, B. Spencer and F. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London: Macmillan, 1899). 55. Peterson, “Totemism Yesterday”; J. Bonnemaison, “Le territoire, nouveau paradigme de la géographie humaine?” in J. Bonnemaison, L. Cambrézy, and L. Quinty-Bourgeois, eds., Actes du colloque: le territoire, lien our frontière? CD-Rom (Paris: ORSTOM, 1995), pp. 103–133; B. Moizo, “Rôles et usages contemporains d’un objet culturel aborigène: le Churinga,” in D. Guillaud, M. Seysset, and A. Walter, eds., Le voyage inachevé (Paris: ORSTOM, 1998), pp. 669–674. 56. For example, Smith, “The Pattern and Timing of Prehistoric Settlement.” 57. For details, see F. Richards, “Customs and Language of the Western Hodgkinson Aboriginals,” Memoirs of the Queensland Museum, Vol. 8, no. 3 (1926): 249–265. 58. Mulvaney and Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, p. 410. 59. For details of how Macassans affected Aboriginal cultures, see R. M. Berndt and C. H. Berndt, Arnhem Land: Its History, Its People (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1954); Macknight, “Macassans and Aborigines”; Macknight, “Macassans and the

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Aboriginal Past”; Morphy, Ancestral Connections; Mulvaney and Kamminga, Prehistory of Australia, pp. 410–421; D. F. Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1949); and W. L. Warner, A Black Civilization (New York: Harper & Row, 1937), pp. 453–468. 60. H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 36. 61. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 219. 62. E. Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (London: Athlone Press, 1999).

C HAPTE R 8

Beyond Orality and Literacy Textuality, Modernity, and Representation in Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley

Michele Grossman

Since the 1980s, a particular challenge for many indigenous authors of collaborative life-writing has been how to manage their own textual agency so that this is not reduced either to mere “presence,” or else marshaled as “evidence” in the service of a nonindigenous collaborator’s theoretical or professional agenda. A parallel challenge for the nonindigenous editors of such texts has been how to manage the realities of their role in ways that do not mimic strategies of disavowal regarding indigenous textual agency and authority. Such strategies have historically been deployed in ways that diminish or deny the role of indigenous authors in the production of their texts as texts. Sometimes this has occurred by writing them out of the work altogether, as occurred with the 1930 publication of David Unaipon’s collected Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines under the name of William Ramsay Smith.1 In other cases, nonindigenous editors have been at pains to insist on the stark demarcation between their role as creators of written text versus the indigenous author’s contribution as oral “storyteller” or narrator, a feature of more recent works such as Jack Bohemia and Bill McGregor’s Nyibayarri: Kimberley Tracker.2 In a number of collaborative works of indigenous life-writing, the historical and theoretical entanglements between orality and literacy—or, as one editor terms it, the spheres of “talk” and “text”—constantly underwrite both the limits and the possibilities that such works encounter as part of the broader project of contemporary cross-cultural representation.3 Extremely influential in this field in Australia has been Paddy Roe and Stephen Muecke’s collaboration in Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley, a work that significantly influ149

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enced cross-cultural approaches to this genre after its publication in 1983.4 In this chapter, I revisit Gularabulu to examine some early efforts to manage the relationship between talk and text in such works and to consider some subsequent critical responses to these efforts. The textual conventions of representing orally produced life-stories are indebted in many ways to the legacies of anthropological and ethnographic approaches to indigenous oral narrative more broadly. Nevertheless, many of these texts self-consciously attempt to disarticulate themselves, with varying degrees of success, from the classical paradigms by which indigenous oral narratives were traditionally represented in written form. A brief reprise of those paradigms may be helpful here. The dualism that characterizes structuralist/functionalist anthropological thought 5 extends, and to a significant extent is premised upon, the classic anthropological opposition of “orality” and “literacy,” as this has been both evinced and critiqued by social anthropologists and humanities scholars including Jack Goody, Ruth Finnegan, and Walter Ong.6 A range of contemporary critics, even those alert to the ethnocentric biases displayed by much social-scientific theorizing about non-Western cultures, have also embraced the notion that the advent of writing and literacy played a major role in distinguishing between modern civilizations and premodern societies. Anthony Giddens writes, There are two main historical transitions [into modernity] in which there is a “leap forward.” One is the emergence of the first civilizations—Greece, Rome, traditional China—they organized space and time differently from oral cultures, cultures without writing. The more or less universal association of civilization with writing isn’t fortuitous. With the advent of writing, information can be stored over time, and goods too; new systems of power are generated through these. In the case of modernity, these traits are more inclusive and farreaching than in any previous civilization.7

Bill Ashcroft points out that colonial tropes of the “native” were often expressed in terms of the divide between orality and literacy, so that “for imperialism, the idea of literacy and education, even where these were imposed on already-literate societies, represented a defining separation between the civilized and the barbarous nature,” and suggestively links this to nineteenth-century discourses on childhood, maturation and “development.” 8 And Benedict Anderson draws attention to the importance of literacy in developing what he calls the “print-languages” of the modern nation-state, the building block of civil and governmental frameworks of modernity, which were discursively opposed throughout the

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eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to constructs of the “primitive” or lessadvanced “tribe,” “horde,” “clan,” and “nomad.” 9 Social-anthropological and liberal humanist perspectives on the relationship between orality and literacy have thus tended to locate orality along a progressivist axis, as an early phase of sociocultural development that, once confronted by technologies of alphabetic writing, inevitably yields to the efficacy of literacybased communication and cognition. As Walter Ong puts it, Without writing, human consciousness cannot achieve its fuller potentials, cannot produce other beautiful and powerful creations. In this sense, orality needs to produce and is destined to produce writing. . . . There is hardly an oral culture or a predominantly oral culture left in the world today that is not somehow aware of the vast complex of powers forever inaccessible without literacy. This awareness is agony for persons rooted in primary orality, who know very well that moving into the exciting world of literacy means leaving behind much that is exciting and deeply loved in the earlier oral world. We have to die to continue living.10

Writing is represented as succeeding orality in time and superseding it as the primary currency of social and cultural organization, particularly in the context of expanding nation-state and imperial formations. As the quotation from Ong above suggests, those aspects of oral culture that remain or persist in societies where literacy has assumed dominance are seen as “residue,” remnants of a prior, premodern order of knowledge and communication. Likewise, the peoples or communities who use primarily oral modes of communication to make social identities meaningful are similarly constructed as culturally marginal in relation to modernity’s well-documented self-identification with literacy and textuality. Within this framework, the oral is invariably figured as sadly but inevitably doomed to extinction by writing: “We have to die to continue living.” 11 Yet the existence and durability of “strong” forms of lived orality for many contemporary indigenous peoples, even after lengthy periods of exposure to and immersion in literate structures of thought and expression (as is the case in Australia) is a direct challenge to how Western thinking has foundered in its efforts to reconceptualize the binary relationship between orality and literacy beyond the legacies of modernity and imperialism. In an effort to address these limitations and redress some of their more detrimental political consequences, indigenous orality has more recently come to assume in the hands of some critics what one might call the status of the secular sacred; that is, it has been taken up and deployed as a critical signifier of the Aboriginal “real,” as my discussion

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below of Mudrooroo’s perspectives on indigeneity and orality will suggest. Yet generalizations that seek to locate all forms of “authentic” Aboriginal cultural expression as originating in or linked to oral cultures and knowledges are equally misguided and misguiding. Although such generalizations are sometimes made in an effort to encourage and validate the “repossession” of precolonial indigenous life-ways, it ignores the crucial role of literacy and textuality for Aboriginal people in various political and historical struggles around indigenous identity, representation, power, and pedagogy, as well as its more conventional deployment by indigenous writers as a medium of expressive power and cultural engagement. The impulse to ignore or diminish this unevenly distributed but culturally and politically crucial dimension of Aboriginal culture and identity in fact works to dispossess indigenous people once again from critical features of their own historical experience, including those in the domain of language, as Ian Anderson has recently argued.12 Aboriginal English takes a variety of forms across Australia. Not all forms of Aboriginal English are, as was once assumed, a dialect of standard English. Linguists working throughout the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated that some variants of Aboriginal English— in particular, the Kriols in parts of Queensland, the Kimberleys, Arnhem Land, and the Torres Strait Islands— are now spoken as “first languages” by indigenous people. They are languages in their own right, with distinct linguistic structures, grammars, and vocabularies.13 Since invasion, transcultural traffic, and the attendant anxieties and resistances this has provoked within settler culture, has not occurred merely at the level of bodies or sex; hybridity has been a phenomenon at the level of language and culture as much as at those of sexuality and economy, with potent transformative effects on both sides of the colonial frontier. The necessity of establishing a lingua franca between “blacks” and “whites” during the early stages of invasion/settlement proved similarly useful for indigenous people at a later stage as a means of communication between Aboriginal people from disparate language groups and regions across the continent. As Muecke observes, “Aboriginal English is a vital communicative link between Aboriginal speakers of different language backgrounds.” 14 In this regard, Aboriginal English and Kriol languages pose challenges to the apparently axiomatic divisions that are often made between orality and literacy in the Australian cultural context. The repressive rhetoric that locates indigenous peoples and cultures in various formations of “pastness” has traditionally been shored up in educational and literary contexts by the strength of the split posited between orality and literacy, a split most pronounced, as I have already suggested, when it is encountered as part of the logic of modernity’s distinction between “the imperial cen-

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tre and the illiterate, barbarous, childlike races of empire.” 15 An early contemporary instance of cross-cultural text-making that attempted to rethink this divide in a serious and theoretically provocative way was Paddy Roe and Muecke’s Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley, first published in 1983. Gularabulu served as advance notice for a number of emerging cultural shifts that produced a new kind of indigenous life-writing in the period immediately following the Australian Bicentenary, in 1988. It remains something of a quiet watershed. The main body of Gulurabulu consists of a collection of oral narratives told to Muecke, an Australian linguist and cultural studies academic, by the late Roe, a West Kimberley man from Roebuck Plains Station, north of Broome. The narratives are divided into “trustori,” true stories; “bugaregara,” stories from the dreaming; and “devil stori,” stories about spirits.16 The stories are transcribed, edited, introduced, and contextualized by Muecke, who is very much present throughout the text. In historical terms, Gularabulu did three things. First, it challenged the orality–literacy binary by arguing that recent cultural theory makes it possible to see indigenous talk as a form of text, largely by drawing on the poststructuralist notion that verbal performance is a “kind of writing in the Derridean sense of ‘inscription,’ that is, making traces.” 17 Second, it demonstrated that codes of writing and representation are not only more but also less productive of social meaning and cultural value, in certain contexts, than standard perspectives have conceded: as Muecke notes in Textual Spaces, “the way in which [traditional Aboriginal] oral texts are produced has nothing much to do with the way in which books are produced,” and their rich cultural and social functions can be transformed but may also be diminished when translated into written genres that occlude a range of cultural and aesthetic meanings available only through performance “in the original setting.” 18 Third, it raised serious questions about whether a distinction can be maintained between indigenous authorial control over stories and indigenous authorial control over texts. Gularabulu energetically resists generic classification as either “literary” or “ethnographic.” Writing in Textual Spaces a decade after Gularabulu was published, Muecke remarks, The ethnographic text, however well-written, is supposed to function as a reflection of the real — a language used transparently to tell us about the real. . . . On the other hand, if one does what I did [in Gularabulu] and produces a written text which is more like performed speech—narratives as they are told —then one runs the risk of being told that the texts represent only a trivial or

superficial account of all that store of traditional knowledge which historically precedes such production.

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One way to wriggle out of this dilemma is to say that neither sort of book will be adequate to the real: that as long as one emphasizes performance, one will miss out on factual detail and interpretation; and as long as one does ethnography, one will miss out on the linguistic aspects of performance.19

There are nevertheless some tensions in Muecke’s comments about narrative and representational strategies concerned with the production of the “real” in Gularabulu. Although he asserts in Textual Spaces that his editorial method has produced “a written text which is more like performed speech — narratives as they are told,” 20 he acknowledges in the introduction to Gularabulu itself that “narratives as they are told” never survive intact and unaltered once they are carried across into print; 21 as Mary Louise Pratt points out, most contemporary ethnographic theory has for some time now abandoned the idea that the “real” can be textually represented in ways “unfiltered through our own values and interpretive schema.” 22 Muecke makes justifiable claims for the innovation of his technique in textualizing Roe’s talk, with particular emphasis on the way in which the representation of both corporeal and social aspects of narrative production — “breath” pauses, interlocutory interjections, narratorial hesitations, and repetitions— strengthen the integrity of oral narrative on its own terms and distance the text from conventional modalities of writing and reading. But although Muecke clearly understands the implications of his editorial power over how Roe’s stories are presented, as evinced in the carefully detailed, theoretically speculative discussion that characterizes his editorial presence within the text, he also underestimates the extent to which the very presence of this approach aligns Gularabulu with ethnographic spectacle rather than literary strategies of representation. Muecke views his own role in relation to Paddy Roe’s narrative production as that of an “informed scribe.” It is clear, however, that the role involves more than simply transcribing Roe’s “talk” onto the page: the task also involves making judgments about how to represent Roe’s stories in textual form so that “they will be effective in relation to a broad readership — both Aboriginal and nonAboriginal.” 23 Muecke’s use of “scribe” to de-scribe what he is doing seems to me to strategically minimize the nature and degree of his editorial interventions in the text, perhaps to shift (for ethically sound reasons) emphasis toward Roe’s agency in and control over his stories within the work. But it is clear that Muecke’s role extends well beyond that of a mere “scribe,” if we understand scribal activities to involve merely a mechanistic or instrumental form of transcription or copying. Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her germinal work on the development and impact of printing in early modern Europe, quotes from the Francis-

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can Saint Bonaventura’s efforts in the thirteenth century to classify types of scriptorial activity: A man [sic] might write the words of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called a “scribe” (scriptor). Another writes the words of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a “compiler” (compilator). Another writes both others’ words and his own, but with others’ work in principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a “commentator”. . . . Another writes both his own work and others’ but with his own work in principal place adding others’ for the purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an “author” (auctor).24

Muecke’s role in Gularabulu, in Bonaventurian terms, is more than that of a “scribe”; it comes closest to what Bonaventura calls a “commentator,” a function which, given its explicative dimension, moves beyond that of what is today called “mediation” and which may be characterized as a form of cultural brokerage. Yet to define Muecke’s editorial involvement in Gularabulu as a commentator risks locating this kind of editorial praxis as ethnographic rather than scribal and consequently unsettles his efforts to distance himself from ethnographic ways of textualizing indigenous talk. He writes, I do not see it as part of my brief to back up this work with any sort of ethnographic description of the region, language or traditional society as a whole. I do not want to accumulate all this material for posterity—as valuable and as interesting as it may be—because I have a theoretical problem that I cannot yet see my way around. This problem is that I see my work as being concerned with the production (and distribution) of texts, not just the process of recording “material” or pretextual “contents.” My work is, therefore, on the medium of communication, which in the case of Paddy Roe is a kind of literary Aboriginal English.25

Muecke acknowledges in the introduction to Gularabulu, however, that, regardless of the critical or authorial intentions that govern such work, “the translation from speech to writing, especially writing considered suitable for public consumption, involves editing which is massive in its proportions and implications.” 26 The “massive” nature and impact of editing and translation is thus by turns avowed and disowned by Muecke at various stages in his critical writing about the process of making Gularabulu as a text. Committed to ensuring that his edi-

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torial interventions have done justice to the distinctive features of Roe’s narrations, including characteristics of Roe’s Aboriginal English, which would most likely have been sanitized or excised from earlier publications of indigenous narrative, Muecke is highly self-reflexive about the implications and effects of his editorial methods in general. He interrogates a range of assumptions about indigenous and nonindigenous investments in orality, particularly in relation to those constructs of Aboriginality that have sought to erase or debase the differences demonstrated by Aboriginal cultural expression in relation to Western literacy-based norms; however, he never really interrogates his own relationship to literacy, or where this sits in the broader scheme of the power relations inscribed in the practices of nonindigenous editors working on Aboriginal words and texts, a topic fraught with anxiety for both indigenous and nonindigenous textual collaborators in this genre. Muecke observes that the interactions between orality and literacy in indigenous-authored texts pose grave problems for an unreflexive, static culture of the book: “The way in which [indigenous] oral texts are produced has nothing much to do with the way in which books are produced, which is according to the politics of the inscription of traditional modes of Aboriginal performance.” 27 In his 1990 work Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature, the black Australian critic Mudrooroo (then Mudrooroo Narogin) considers precisely this kind of intervention in the “politics of the inscription” of Aboriginal ways of telling.28 Mudrooroo explores the conflicting desires that Gularabulu throws up for him: to read the text and absorb its method of transcribing talk into text is to experience Roe’s storytelling as “fragmented,” a sense that disappears, however, when Mudrooroo listens to the tape recording and finds that “Paddy Roe emerges as an accomplished storyteller.” 29 Implicit here is the fear that the representation of Roe’s narratives in written form diminishes or disables the power and status of both the stories and Roe himself, and Jackie Huggins was to express similar fears when she first collaborated with her mother on Auntie Rita, published in 1994: “After getting many of Rita’s memories on tape, I began, through naivety, to translate my mother’s voice, trying to do it justice while knowing that this book would have a predominantly white audience. . . . Although Rita speaks a standard English, her voice often got lost amid my own as I attempted to ‘protect’ her from non-Aboriginal critics. Black writers grapple with this all the time.” 30 Mudrooroo compares Muecke’s editorial method in Gularabulu favorably with that of Hugh Edwards, who published some of the same stories as told by Butcher Joe Nangan, another Broome man, in 1976,31 and in so doing “rewrites the whole story” in Standard English.32 Mudrooroo comments pointedly, “After

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Hugh Edwards is through with the oral text of Joe Nangan, there is not much left of Joe Nangan’s style. . . . This means there is little Aboriginality in the discourse, and any sense of Aboriginality is found only in the place names, illustrations and the few Aboriginal words allowed to remain in the text.” 33 Mudrooroo here and elsewhere in his critique renders oral communication synonymous with Aboriginal discourse and aligns writing with assimilationist ideology, noting that “Aborigines shaped by assimilation . . . believed that their legends should . . . be in Standard English. Aboriginal English was to be edited out; oral storytelling was to be encased in the strait jacket of written Standard English, and Aboriginal stories and legends were to be standardized to take their place among the folktale collections of other cultures whose oral literature had suffered the same fate.” 34 Muecke’s work in Gularabulu is generally well regarded by Mudrooroo because, in contrast to textual strategies adopted by earlier editors, anthropologists, and linguists, it neither sanitizes Paddy Roe’s verbal performance nor explains it away by locating it within premodern modes of Aboriginal cultural production.35 He criticizes Muecke, however, for “barricad[ing]” Roe’s oral narratives between “slabs” of Muecke’s own writing and editorial apparatus in Gularabulu, so that “Paddy Roe is reduced to language, or discourse as heard through the ears of a European.” 36 Despite his qualified concessions to Muecke’s intention to refrain from what Mudrooroo calls “tampering” with the oral nature of Roe’s narratives, Mudrooroo remains wary and critical in general of the history of relations between nonindigenous editors and indigenous authors.37 He argues that history has largely been one of distortion, appropriation, exploitation of Aboriginal voices and Aboriginal knowledges 38 and critiques extensively the politics of production of works developed in collaboration with, or based substantially on, oral narratives generated by Aboriginal authors where the role of the Aboriginal author was reduced to that of “an informant who may get a mention in a footnote. His or her name rarely appears on the title page as the author.” 39 Despite the ways in which Mudrooroo polemically oversimplifies both the history and the implications of editorial practices and relations in this sphere, his main argument remains trenchant in a number of respects. Insofar as Mudrooroo’s analysis promotes one kind of Aboriginal textual sovereignty, I support this without reservation. There are problems, however, with his insistence that Aboriginal textuality must embrace oral forms in order to be legitimated as a politically acceptable instance of Aboriginal subjectivity and agency. In the end, Mudrooroo’s arguments about orality and literacy favor a construction of the Aboriginal “real” that is unsustainably one-dimensional in orientation, and that

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disenfranchises Aboriginal discursive modes that are not located somewhere along a recuperative traditionalist spectrum. Moreover, a highly homogenized version of “the Aboriginal” is produced, which performs its own kind of sanitizing of indigenous textuality (and identity) by purging it of the complexities and contradictions that have characterized this domain from first contact to the present. Such privileging of indigenous orality as an exclusivist marker of authenticity enacts a troubling form of cultural stasis. Further resistance to the equation of “Aboriginal” with “traditional” is mounted by Ken Gelder and Jane Jacobs in their discussion of Gularabulu in Uncanny Australia.40 For Gelder and Jacobs, Gularabulu’s positioning of the relations between language and place in Aboriginal culture means that when Aboriginal people become modern or are touched by modernity . . . such an event can only be described [by Muecke] in terms of loss — in particular, the loss of a mode of authorisation which relied on the security of that bond between language and place.41

The problem with this arrangement, they continue, is that it produces an association between authority and tradition that disenfranchises modern Aboriginal people; modernity itself is seen only negatively. Much of Muecke’s work, as we have noted, is with an older Aboriginal man, Paddy Roe; and it is mostly directed toward saying how Roe’s authority is constituted in language.42

They go on to argue that Muecke’s position forecloses on the capacity for rupture and dispossession to produce new kinds of Aboriginal empowerment: Aboriginal dispossession is a reality, certainly; but . . . there is no need to equate dispossession so completely with disempowerment. Indeed, new forms of Aboriginal authority may come into being through the very structures of dispossession—precisely because the relations between language and place are now [as a consequence of modernity] so unbounded.43

Aside from the dubious political cachet of their claims regarding dispossession and power, such a reading consistently underestimates the ways in which the “modern” and the “traditional” are compelled to mutually interrogate each other by virtue of the fact that Paddy Roe’s orality is itself constitutive of Aboriginal modernity in the present, not merely a remnant of the so-called premodern. It is

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precisely the challenge to and collapsing of these deeply held distinctions that makes Gularabulu and also Reading the Country such provocative and confronting texts. Taken together, both Mudrooroo’s criticism (that Gularabulu is not “traditional” or “authentic” enough) and Gelder and Jacobs’s contention (that Muecke’s work with Roe is too heavily invested in traditionalist assumptions and valuations) speak directly to the larger, often polarized discourses that surround texts in which Aboriginal and European discursive modes intersect with and complicate one another. These binarized views reveal the extent to which such debates are still unhelpfully cast, as a much earlier period in the history of the book would have it, as contests between the “ancients” and the “moderns.” Muecke’s editorial presence in Gularabulu accomplishes two things: it manages the transposition of Paddy Roe’s spoken words to the printed page in ways that make them more accessible for white readers, and it explicates and makes transparent Muecke’s own editorial praxis. Muecke’s editorial voice is informed, though not overwhelmed, by his interest in reforming and transforming a collaborative economy of indigenous cultural representation. This has some interesting consequences. On the one hand, it promotes an awareness of the text as processual, something made rather than born. There is no possibility of apprehending Roe’s narratives as “natural,” in part because the organization and design of the text does not naturalize them within familiar generic categories. This is important, because the refusal to “naturalize” Roe’s narratives textually within the conventions of either literary or ethnographic discourse involves a concomitant refusal to represent Aboriginal speech-ways as artlessly “natural” or naïve, long a signal trope in colonial racist rhetoric. On the other hand, however, Muecke’s editorial voice raises questions about the extent to which the problems of authenticity and authority in Gularabulu —both Aboriginal and textual— are subordinated to the practical imperatives of translating Roe’s narrative for both nonindigenous readers and indigenous readers outside the West Kimberley. The introduction to Gularabulu is not collaboratively written or staged, nor are the notes, guide to Aboriginal English, notes on transcription, or pronunciation guide. In the biographical notes that conclude the book, however, there are two entries under Paddy Roe’s name, one authored by Roe the other by Muecke: Paddy Roe Well in Roebuck Plains Station, I s’pose — sheep station, eh? — (Stephen: Yeah) — old sheep station —

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well where I born— I born in sheep station— old sheep station used to be old sheep station— but it’s finished now, but the springs is still there — but them springs they’re my tjila — my spirit — you know — then I come out then — (Laugh) — baby, you know — (Krim Benterrak: Mm) — but that’s my spirit — an’ I been, running around Paddy Roe was born just before the First World War in about 1912. He grew up on Roebuck Plains Station, near Broome in the north-west of Western Australia. He worked for many years as a drover and a windmill repairer throughout the Kimberley region. He is patriarch of a large family and has been a widower for many years. He has a good deal of knowledge of his traditional society and maintains a position of power as a kind of ombudsman negotiating between governmental agencies and the Aboriginal communities of the Broome region.44

There are some striking features about this double, auto/biographical entry. Biographical notes are about particular ways of staging identity. As textual conventions in autobiographical works, for example, they are the authorized versions of authorial self-representation, inviting the reader to engage with the author of a work as a public figure, whatever intimacies or revelations may have been proffered or negotiated within the autobiographical text itself. In publishing terms, they involve what one might call the “marketable” identity of the author or creator of a work, as opposed to the more complex, contradictory, or flawed performance of identity within the text itself if the author features simultaneously as the object and subject of the narration. In this regard, one might also say that biographical notes are liminal representations, occupying a border space in the economy of a text: they are “inside” the text artifactually and representationally, but “outside” its narratorial context and thus function simultaneously as “content” in and “context” for a work. The staging of identity performed by the biographical notes for Gularabulu, however, achieves some uncommonly particularized effects. Roe’s biographical note is not a univocal performance: we read Roe’s orally composed account of

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his origins, and then we read Muecke’s “translation” and amplification of that account. Roe’s version of events is initiated as a response to an (implied) question, presumably asked by Muecke —“Well in Roebuck Plains Station, I s’pose” suggests a question along the lines of “Where were you born?” Muecke appears parenthetically in this account as the narratee, as he does at various points throughout the narratives of Gularabulu. The transcription of this fragment of Roe’s narrative of origins demonstrates features associated with both oral and literate composition, though it is those features that appear more “oral” that strike a (literate) reader first, particularly the deployment of repetition and copiousness. But there is no difficulty in following the general line of what Roe has to say: he was born on Roebuck Plains Station, which used to be a sheep station but is now defunct; in that same location, springs that predated the station still survive, and Roe is connected to these through his tjila, or spirit; this link was established at the moment he was born (“I come out then”) and has persisted ever since (“but that’s my spirit — an’ I been, running around”). There is both poignancy and pointedness in Roe’s emphasis that while the built environment into which he was born—Roebuck Plains Station—has not survived, the springs have. Because Roe aligns himself cosmologically with these springs, the implication is that he, both like and because of the springs, has outlasted what colonization built over the land and the people of the region. Muecke restages this autobiographical performance in the accompanying note that appears below Roe’s account. In effect, he not only restates what Roe has said (as I have done above), but transforms, amplifies, and adds to it. The additional information provided in Muecke’s second take on Roe’s bio-note is highly interesting. It introduces the elements of history (“just before the First World War”), time (“about 1912”), geography (“near Broome in the north-west of Western Australia”), labor (“worked . . . as a drover and . . . windmill repairer”), and family (“patriarch of a large family and . . . a widower for many years”). In effect, this text repositions Roe’s autobiographical statement in terms that are meaningful as the axes of Western subject formation under modernity: history, time, geography, labor, and family. Roe’s self-identifying statement is translated by Muecke across the borderlands of language — from “Aboriginal English” to “Standard English”— and genre, from autobiographical fragment to amplified biographical statement. The effect of this is to produce two Paddy Roes in the form of auto/biographical notes; one authored and authorized by Roe, the other authored by Muecke and perhaps authorized by Roe as well as Muecke. In a sense, this replicates, in miniature form, aspects of the larger design and impact of Gularabulu as a whole; the reader confronts similar tensions between the “oral” Paddy and

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the “textual” Paddy at a number of key points throughout the work. But something else is happening here too. Muecke’s biographical restatement of Roe is a very closely worded repetition of his introduction of Roe at the beginning of Gularabulu. Here are side-by-side statements from the introduction and the biographical note: Introduction Paddy Roe was born on Roebuck Plains Station, near Broome, just before the First World War. He was brought up there and learnt all the skills of working sheep and cattle stations. As a drover he traveled quite widely in the Kimberleys. These days he spends most of his time in Broome and on a small property in a locality to the north of Broome called Coconut Wells. A widower of many years, he is the patriarch of a large family, and in addition maintains a position of power as a kind of ombudsman negotiating between governmental agencies and the Aboriginal communities of Broome and its environs. By chance, initially, and later by hard work, he retains a good deal of knowledge of his traditional society. (Gularabulu, pp. i–ii)

Biographical Note Paddy Roe was born just before the First World War in about 1912. He grew up on Roebuck Plains Station, near Broome in the north-west of Western Australia. He worked for many years as a drover and a windmill repairer throughout the Kimberley region. He is patriarch of a large family and has been a widower for many years. He has a good deal of knowledge of his traditional society and maintains a position of power as a kind of ombudsman negotiating between governmental agencies and the Aboriginal communities of the Broome region. (Gularabulu, p. 97)

The two versions are virtually identical to one another, with slightly less information delivered more economically in the biographical note. What are we meant to make of this iteration? What purpose does it serve at the conclusion of the book, in view of the fact that the same material appears in the introduction? In other words, why do we need Muecke’s version of Roe’s biography in the notes section at all? Part of the answer to these questions, I would argue, lies in the relationship between Roe’s fragment and Muecke’s statement. The appearance of the two Paddys in the biographical notes section presents a doubling of Roe, but it also reflects a differentiation, or disarticulation, of two representational regimes. It

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draws attention to the differences in techniques of representation and what Foucault calls “technologies of the self ” that are marshaled by oral composition and written text; it undoes any complacency about how we might apprehend the “real” Paddy Roe beyond the boundaries of the stories he tells; and it emphasizes the tensions between self-representation and representation by others that informs many strands of the text’s theoretical inquiry.45 On one level, the two Paddys in the biographical notes speak to each other from within markedly different economies of representation, each informing and balancing the other, each reminding the other that other articulations, and thus other versions of “Paddy,” are available via different discursive paradigms. But they also have the capacity, at least in an inchoate sense, to negate each other, canceling out the authorizing function that ordinarily inheres in the act of self-representation. What I am suggesting is that the meaning of these double notes is located in the tension between the two, the simultaneously collusive and agonistic relations they establish in relation to identity, power, orality, and writing and the challenges they consequently mount to formations of the unitary subject. This is a generous reading. A less generous interpretation might point to the way in which the presentation of the two Paddys sets up other kinds of relational dynamics, chiefly those that involve contrasts between plenitude and lack, surplus and deficit. Another way of responding to the third question I raised— why is Muecke’s note necessary at all?—is to look at the way in which this second note appears to compensate for the “lack” or “deficit” of the first. Viewed from this angle, the rejigging of Roe’s self-authored statement functions to provide the “missing” information that Roe has failed to provide but that most readers would regard as the bare minimum necessary to satisfy their generic expectations. The rhetorical impact is to suggest that Aboriginal self-articulation is somehow incomplete; it requires amplification and closure by nonindigenous intervention (metonymically represented here by standard English as well as by the formal characteristics of third-person narration) to “finish” the task by locking Roe’s dialogically induced act of self-authorship into both a fixed point in time (via Muecke’s chronology) and a fixed place in space (via its final position in the note). Finally, and perhaps most seriously, Muecke’s note makes available a reading in which the authority of Roe as author of his own identity— on his own terms of disclosure, revelation, and style, if you like — is disrupted; Roe speaks, and Muecke then “writes over” that speech, not precisely deauthorizing Roe’s version, but compelling the reader to attend to its differences from generic convention by providing a far more predictable and regulatory summary biography on Roe’s behalf. I do not believe Muecke intended to produce any of the effects generated by

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this second reading; other aspects of how Gularabulu was conceived, designed, and produced reflect the deeply ethical stance of Muecke’s engagement with both Roe and with the complexities of textual representation that a work like this entails. But I also think that to a certain extent, this second, less-generous interpretation is inescapable if one looks at issues of power and representation from the vantage point of final impact rather than intention or genesis. I say this in part because of the asymmetry between the biographical note for Paddy Roe and that for Muecke himself. For Muecke, there is only one note, not two, and that note is monologic, not dialogic. It too conforms, mostly, to the conventions of the genre; it relates, in the third person, where Muecke was born, and where he has been brought up, educated, and worked. It provides a brief summary of Muecke’s other publications in the area of Aboriginal writing and representation and concludes with information about where Muecke lives and works at the time of publication. What concerns me about this is the uneven relationship between the notes. The second, ungenerous analysis I offer of Paddy Roe’s double biographical note would be far less easy to sustain had the same stratagem been used in Muecke’s case. Why not, for instance, have two biographical notes for Muecke as well, one autobiographical (even if cast in the fictive voice of third-person narration), and one genuinely biographical and produced by Roe? Why double only Roe, and not Muecke? Why complicate and disrupt identity formations of the Aboriginal subject alone, and not the white subject? And why not reverse the order of things with respect to the oral and the written, so that we have Roe inquiring of Muecke, in conversation, where Muecke was born and what he did then, a conversational fragment that is then transposed onto the page, as in the case of Roe’s statements? In many respects, it is the asymmetry between the two authorial notes that suggests that the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal modes of representation is a form of unfinished cross-cultural business. Muecke’s own biographical note is, in one sense, “unfinished” in comparison to Roe’s, because it fails to incorporate the voice or presence of the other author of this collaborative work. A plausible intention of including Roe’s autobiographical fragment in the first note was to unsettle the ease with which we register and digest these liminal moments of self-representation via formats like autobiographical notes. If this is the case, then the authorial edifice has been shaken up a little, and the house of writing and literacy along with it, since Roe’s statement, which is oral, is positioned as equally legitimate, and equally (if not more) compelling, than the written statement that follows. But the version of “Stephen Muecke” con-

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tained in the biographical note on page 98 of Gularabulu remains settled and solid; there is no attempt to produce a tremor in the grounds of his own articulation or liminal textual presence. In those sections of Gularabulu comprised of Roe’s stories, Roe is the narrator and Muecke the narratee, the one to whom the stories are told. Yet the reader is in some sense a double narratee, for she is told some stories about Roe’s life by Roe himself, but a good deal of other stories about Roe by Muecke. And all of the stories about the making of Gularabulu, and the motives and intentions behind this making, are enunciated exclusively by Muecke. This uneven pattern of enunciation—the telling of stories by Aboriginal authors, and the telling of stories about those stories by non-Aboriginal editors and collaborators—is one that characterizes a great many of the texts that have been published in the genres of indigenous life-story, oral history, life-writing, and memoir. The effort to untangle how this happens can be made by moving outside the text, and seeking the accounts and perspectives of its makers if they are willing or available to provide the kind of commentary on its conditions of production that would illuminate the problematic. In the absence of this, however, the methodological issue remains one of how to assess such entanglements without indulging in speculative fictions or fantasies about what might or might not be “there.” What matters is precisely that we cannot be certain, because the structures of cultural brokerage that govern the formats in which such work is published can leave us with little evidence about the conditions and grounds of textual production other than the words and statements of the brokers themselves. More broadly, as my discussion of Gularabulu’s biographical notes suggests, the representational regimes that propose orality and literacy as binary oppositions have been left intact at one level even as they have been dismantled at another by the unresolved editorial stratagems employed not only in this work, but also in a range of subsequent collaborative texts in this genre. That this should be so speaks directly to the contrary impulses that continue to surround an anxious settler culture’s responses to indigenous textuality, modernity, and representation. In focusing throughout my discussion primarily on what Muecke has done in Gularabulu as its editor, rather than on what Roe has done as one of its authors, I have not in any way wanted to diminish or detract from the significance of Roe’s role in the text nor to minimize the agency that Roe demonstrates, and is entitled to have acknowledged, at the level of making and sustaining the narratives that comprise the body of Gularabulu. But part of the problematic of textual collaboration that I explore here is that I have in Gularabulu, analytically speaking, much less “Paddy Roe” to work with than I do

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“Stephen Muecke,” for, despite the fact that Paddy Roe’s stories make up the greater quantity of Gularabulu, it is Muecke, rather than Roe, who speaks explicitly within the text to the politics and conditions of its conceptualization, assembly, structure, and impact. Muecke’s editorial presence in Gularabulu brokers a relationship between Roe’s stories and the readers who encounter them; a reader does not have the same access to Roe as she does to Muecke, primarily because the kinds of statements that provide that access — reflective, analytical, retrospective, self-interrogatory— to Roe are made not directly by Roe but filtered through Muecke’s words and perspectives. The editorial praxis of Gularabulu ultimately brokers not only the cultural relations between reader and text, but also those between speech and writing in the context of indigenous modernities. The creation, development, editing, and publication of Gularabulu engaged with some intriguing issues about the ways in which classical ethnographic approaches to textualizing the talk of indigenous narratives have been revised, reinforced, and resisted by both indigenous authors and their nonindigenous editors and collaborators. The cultural history and discursive organization of this book continues to raise key questions about the historical and cultural conditions of production governing collaborative indigenous-nonindigenous textuality. Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Richard Nile and Emma Costantino, of the Journal of Australian Studies and the Australian Public Intellectual Network, which first published an earlier version of this essay, for allowing it to appear as a chapter in this volume.

Notes A slightly different version of this chapter with the same title has appeared in Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 81 (2004): 133–147. 1. William Ramsay Smith, Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals (London: George G. Harrap, 1930). The restored text of Unaipon’s work has recently been published as David Unaipon, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, edited and introduced by Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker (Carlton South: Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Press, 2001). See esp. the discussion of the appropriation of Unaipon’s work of 1924–1925 by Ramsay Smith in Muecke and Shoemaker’s introduction to Unaipon, “Repatriating the Story,” pp. xi–xliii.

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2. Jack Bohemia and Bill McGregor, Nyibayarri: Kimberley Tracker (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1995), esp. pp. viii–ix; see also Michele Grossman, “Bad Aboriginal Writing: Editing, Aboriginality, Textuality,” Meanjin, Vol. 60, no. 3 (2001): 152–165, esp. 158–161. 3. See Margaret Somerville, “Life (Hi)story Writing: The Relationship between Talk and Text,” Hecate, Vol. 17, no. 1 (1991): 95–109. 4. Paddy Roe, Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley, Stephen Muecke, ed. (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1983). 5. For a neat summary of this tendency in the work of Levi-Strauss, for example, see Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 7. 6. I am thinking here particularly of Goody; Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982); and Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). 7. Anthony Giddens and Christopher Pierson, Conversations with Anthony Giddens: Making Sense of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 99. 8. Bill Ashcroft, On Postcolonial Futures: Transformations of Colonial Culture (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 39. 9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), p. 76 and more generally pp. 67–82. 10. Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 15. 11. Ong, Orality and Literacy. 12. See Ian Anderson, “The Aboriginal Critique of Colonial Knowing,” in Michele Grossman, ed., Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2003), pp. 17–18. 13. Stephen Muecke, Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies (Kensington: New South Wales University Press, 1992), p. 147. 14. Roe, Gularabulu, p. iv. 15. Ashcroft, On Postcolonial Futures, p. 39. 16. Muecke glosses this in the following way: “Paddy Roe distinguishes between three types of story: trustori (true stories), bugaregara (stories from the dreaming) and devil stori (stories about devils, spirits, etc.). Trustori and devil stori are only produced as spoken narrative, while the bugaregara (the ‘law’) may also refer to traditional songs, ceremonials, and rituals of which there is a great variety. Bugaregara stories are sometimes called myths; they are about supernatural beings who created landmarks, stars, rocks, and rivers and gave mankind language and laws for conduct.

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Trustori is the equivalent of our word ‘legend’—the characters of these stories are human and can be located in time and space, within the memory of the narrator. The heroes of these stories can also perform fantastic acts. Devil stori may be about quite recent events as well as distant ones. Here something inexplicable or anomalous happens which can only be explained by the presence of some spirit being.” In Roe, Gularabulu, p. vii. 17. Muecke, Textual Spaces, p. 41. 18. Muecke, Textual Spaces, pp. 42–43 and 53–54. 19. Muecke, Textual Spaces, p. 42. 20. Muecke, Textual Spaces, p. 42. 21. See Muecke, “Introduction,” in Roe, Gularabulu, pp. iii–iv. 22. Mary Louise Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 27. 23. Muecke, Textual Spaces, p. 41. 24. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 85. 25. Muecke, Textual Spaces, p. 41. 26. Roe, Gularabulu, p. v. 27. Muecke, Textual Spaces, pp. 42–43. 28. Mudrooroo (Narogin), Writing from the Fringe: A Study of Modern Aboriginal Literature (South Yarra: Hyland House, 1990). 29. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 108. 30. Rita Huggins and Jackie Huggins, Auntie Rita (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994), p. 3. 31. Joe Nangan and Hugh Edwards, Joe Nangan’s Dreaming (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1976). 32. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 108. 33. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, pp. 110–11. 34. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 110. 35. See Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, chap. 11, “Disguising the Fringe,” pp. 143–154. 36. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 151. 37. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 151. 38. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, pp. 143–144. 39. Mudrooroo, Writing from the Fringe, p. 144. 40. Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1998).

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41. Gelder and Jacobs, Uncanny Australia, p. 50. 42. Gelder and Jacobs, Uncanny Australia, p. 50. 43. Gelder and Jacobs, Uncanny Australia, p. 51. 44. Roe, Gularabulu, p. 97. 45. See Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton, eds. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).

C HAPTE R 9

Rom and the Academy Repositioned Binary Models in Yolŋu Intellectual Traditions and their Application to Wider Intercultural Dialogues

Aaron Corn and Neparrŋa Gumbula

One could be forgiven for assuming that intellectual institutions were formally introduced to Australia when the University of Sydney, Australia’s oldest university, was established in 1850 to promote the benefits of a liberal education among the growing populace of what was then the British Colony of New South Wales.1 Most likely, it would not have occurred to the vast majority of colonial Sydney’s residents of that time that the indigenous peoples who had originally populated the lands on which Sydney was built might have intellectual traditions of their own as well as people among them with advanced training in canonical knowledge and responsibilities for its appropriate transmission to others.2 The institutionalized suppression of indigenous knowledge systems was a key strategy of the colonial project within Australia. The dispersal of indigenous peoples from their lands, discouraging them from speaking their own languages, prohibiting them from practicing their own religions, and the separation of individuals from their families were favored tactics among government and missionary authorities for the greater part of nineteenth and twentieth centuries in most parts of Australia precisely because they had the effect of distancing indigenous peoples from their hereditary properties and preexisting lifestyles, both physically and conceptually.3 Even though gradual legislative reforms to the institutionalized maltreatment and exploitation of indigenous Australians were introduced throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, the legacy of colonialism remains an

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integral facet of the Australian character and informs the distorted frames of reference that color most nonindigenous engagements with indigenous cultures. Marcia Langton explains that, although contemporary Australians are high consumers of ideas about indigenous peoples, very few actually know an indigenous person.4 She further argues that the Australian experience of indigenous cultures is most commonly a textual or visual one but, above all, one that is distant, and that colonialist notions of the primitive have consequently remained the dominant framework through which others (mis)understand indigenous cultural practices and artifacts.5 Despite significant efforts within the past four decades by Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu through the Northern Land Council, Mandawuy Yunupiŋu through Yo¯thu Yindi, Gätjil Djerrkura through the Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Commission, Rrurrambu Burarrwaŋa through the Warumpi Band, Djakapurra Munyarryun through Bangarra Dance Theatre, and numerous others, that an indigenous people such as the Yolŋu of northeast Arnhem Land continue to observe their cultural, linguistic, religious, and legal traditions would be news to most Australians. They would be even more surprised to discover that the Yolŋu body of knowledge on which these individuals draw in public expression of their shared cultural identity is highly sophisticated, cogent, and durable, is maintained and regulated by councils of learned elders who are formally admitted to positions of social, political, and religious responsibility in Yolŋu society, and certainly predates the establishment of any Australian university. This chapter explores the sociocultural, religious, legal, and political dimensions of Yolŋu intellectual traditions with specific reference to a diagram created by Neparrŋa Gumbula in 2002 during the planning phase of the Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre, where he is now manager.6 This diagram is essentially a primer for understanding Yolŋu knowledge structures that, through its design, demonstrates and theorizes the universalizing interrelationships between ancestry, sociality, ownership, leadership, and law that characterize so classically the Yolŋu worldview. Classical binarisms in Yolŋu sociality and thought are manifest in Gumbula’s primer with the interrelationships between people and properties of the Dhuwa and Yirritja patrimoieties, the physical and metaphysical planes of reality, and the public and restricted domains of discourse and knowledge, each explicit in its design. The application of binary models drawn from Yolŋu knowledge structures by Yolŋu leaders in theorizing contemporary issues such as bicultural education in Yolŋu schools and cross-cultural relations between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians will also be discussed.

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In considering such issues, we, as scholars and authors, must acknowledge the intercultural nature of our own discourse and its specific relevance to the arguments presented in this chapter. Corn (born Gold Coast, 1971) is an (ethno)musicologist who, because of his interest in Yolŋu knowledge systems and their expression in both traditional and new performance contexts, has also worked to develop applied skills and theoretical knowledge in fields as diverse as anthropology, linguistics, cultural studies, performance studies, and acoustics. The centrality of liturgical song to the codification, execution, and transmission of Yolŋu social, religious, and legal ideals essentially necessitates that one must have an interdisciplinary working knowledge of Yolŋu sociality, language, religion, and law before meaningful engagement with Yolŋu canons of knowledge and their hereditary owners can take place.7 Gumbula (born Miliŋinbi, 1954) is a learned Yolŋu elder whose ascent to leadership in his own society in 1996 required him to have a consummate knowledge of his hereditary canons of names, songs, dances, and designs as demonstrated through a command of oratory and ceremonial leadership. Nevertheless, he was also chosen by his father—the prolific Yolŋu leader, Djäwa Dhäwirrŋu (1905–1983)—to be raised as an adept bilingual and bicultural operator from a very young age. Gumbula became a member of one of the earliest popular bands in Arnhem Land, Soft Sands (established Galiwin’ku, 1970), in 1971. He was a constable in the Northern Territory Police Service at Galiwin’ku from 1989–1996 and, after meeting Corn at Galiwin’ku in 1997, took an active role in the supervision of his doctoral thesis on the creative practice of popular bands in contemporary Arnhem Land.8 The dialogue and intellectual rapport that has developed between us since then is by its very nature bicultural but, also, biintellectual. Because no credible academic study of Yolŋu culture can be completed without some degree of engagement with Yolŋu intellectual discourses, it is important to acknowledge that Yolŋu intellectual traditions do not stem from the Europeanist institution of the academy in which contemporary universities have their roots and are an entirely independent, though parallel, intellectual institution. This chapter will therefore argue that the Yolŋu knowledge system described and theorized herein can and should be understood by others through Yolŋu frames of reference, and is as cogent and as durable as disciplines of the academy. Ultimately, we will also contend that self-consciously biintellectualist discourses such as ours present a compelling way forward for indigenous peoples seeking broader support and new sustenance for the continuation of their living traditions and for others who seek well-informed and duly authorized information about them.

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Who Are the Yolŋu? This land was never given up. This land was never bought and sold.9

The Yolŋu (literally, “person,” “human”) are the indigenous inhabitants and hereditary owners of northeast Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory. There are approximately 7,000 Yolŋu Australians, whose homelands, as shown in Figure 1, extend from the Gove Peninsula in the northeast, west to Cape Stuart, and southeast to the Walker River. The six major towns that they populate within this area are Miliŋinbi, Yirrkala, Galiwin’ku, Ramanginiŋ, which were each established as Methodist missions in 1923, 1934, 1942, and 1973, respectively, and Gapuwiyak and Gunyaŋara, which became satellite outstations of Galiwin’ku and Yirrkala respectively in the 1980s. Yolŋu society is an expansive network of more than sixty patrifilial groups that are generically known as mala (literally, “group”) and whose agnatic members each share hereditary ownership in discrete physical estates— known generically as wäŋa ( literally, “place,” “home[land],” “country”) — which comprise tracts of land, bodies of water and their natural resources. Seven mutually unintelligible Australian languages, known collectively as Yolŋu-Matha (literally, “people’s tongues”), are spoken among the members of these mala (patrigroups).

Figure 1. Yolŋu homelands and towns within the Arnhem Land Aboriginal Land Trust.

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That each mala speaks its own patrilect or matha (literally, “tongue”) with its own discrete lexicon of hereditary and sacred yäku (names), however, is a most important component of patrifilial identification in northeast Arnhem Land that holds binding legal ramifications for individual claims of ownership in wäŋa and other hereditary properties. As Nancy Williams explains, “[N]ames comprise a category of a land-owning group’s most important non-corporeal property and all names, including personal names, refer in some direct or indirect way to land. The importance of names lies in their relation to land: the group’s most important real property. . . . To indicate that something possesses a name is tantamount to asserting that it is owned.” 10 The Yolŋu have inhabited northeast Arnhem Land for countless millennia. They possess names for and maintain intimate knowledge of places far out at sea that are known to have been above sea level some 10,000 years ago.11 For centuries prior to unsolicited intervention by the state government of South Australia in 1906, they held extensive trading relationships with Asian seafarers known to them as the Maŋgatharra (Macassans), who made annual voyages to Australia’s north coast from the port of Macassar (now Ujung Pandang) on Sulawesi, which are recorded in hereditary canons of liturgical song, dance, and design that have survived to the present day.12 Moreover, there is now new evidence to suggest that the Bayini, of whom contemporary Yolŋu still sing, were Chinese seafarers who landed in Arnhem Land while circumnavigating the globe from 1421 to 1423.13 Michael Cooke records that, before the establishment of the first permanent missionary presence in northeast Arnhem Land at Miliŋinbi in 1923, the Yolŋu had already held an extensive knowledge of their Asian neighbors to the north for some 500 years and were aware of Dutch colonization in Indonesia.14 This information had been absorbed into Yolŋu canons of hereditary knowledge without displacing the intrinsic and durable logic of Yolŋu intellectual discourses.15 Yolŋu intellectual traditions also withstood the Northern Territory Administration’s limitation of indigenous people’s freedom of movement and association under the Native Administration Ordinance Act 1940–1964, and the government-sanctioned administrative presence of Methodist missionaries in northeast Arnhem Land throughout this period.16 As contemporary Yolŋu continue to struggle for international recognition for their continuing sovereignty over their hereditary estates, they remain observant of their continuing rights and responsibilities as direct descendants of the waŋarr (ancestral progenitors) who originally shaped, named, and populated northeast Arnhem Land and remain sentient and ever present in its lands and waters.17 By the very nature of this birthright, all Yolŋu are owners or wäŋa-

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wataŋu (literally, “country-holders”) in the wäŋa of their mala, and rom-wataŋu (literally, “law-holders”) in their hereditary canons of yäku, manikay (songs), buŋgul (dances), and miny’tji (designs), which are collectively known as madayin (sacra) — a word that also describes awe-inspiring beauty— and, in their publicly knowable forms, codify deeper restricted bodies of esoteric and legal knowledge.18 Even though knowledge at its deepest and most restricted level is held only by those who have been formally admitted to leadership within Yolŋu society, it is nonetheless each individual’s responsibility to follow and be accomplished in the precedents for rom ( literally, “law,” “culture,” “correct practice,” “the way”) established by waŋarr, including a full and consummate knowledge of their hereditary madayin so that they too may one day be fit to take on leadership roles. As discussed in the following passage, it is these highly significant interrelationships between ancestry, sociality, ownership, leadership, and law that are presented and theorised in Gumbula’s primer for Yolŋu rom. A Primer for Yolŋu Rom The planting of the Union Jack never changed our law at all.19

The diagram shown in Figure 2 was created by Gumbula at Galiwin’ku with acrylic paints on canvas on July 16, 2002, to demonstrate how ownership and other rights to physical and intellectual properties, the ancestral and familial relationships through which they are transmitted, and individual access to different strata of canonical intellectual property as well as their formal expression through ceremonial performance are universalized through Yolŋu intellectual traditions. It was originally conceived and used as a means of explaining and theorizing how, in accordance with Yolŋu law, the Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre should acknowledge and protect the intellectual property of different mala and regulate individuals’ access to their archived materials which remains a focus of Gumbula’s current research with DeLargy Healy.20 It has also, however, been used successfully in our presentations and teaching in Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney to illustrate Yolŋu social, legal, and religious concepts that have traditionally proven difficult for newcomers to understand. This is not the only sense in which Gumbula’s diagram is a primer for Yolŋu rom. Its formal layout presents an abstracted egocentric projection of conventional interrelationships between ancestry, sociality, ownership, leadership, and law in Yolŋu intellectual discourse that draws on the hereditary designs of no particular mala yet in which any individual or their mala can be cast as ego.

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Therefore, just as one might explain the banking system without ever telling you how much money is in his personal account, Gumbula designed his primer to allow for discussion of the fullest depth of waŋarr agency in Yolŋu rom without compromising any mala’s confidentiality or intellectual property. As suggested earlier, classical binarisms within Yolŋu sociality and thought are implicit in the design of this primer, and the first to be addressed in this chapter, as illustrated in Figure 3, is the systemic patrifilial division within Yolŋu society and cosmology between Dhuwa and Yirritja. In conventional anthropological terminology, Dhuwa and Yirritja are classified as patrimoieties. In other words, they are described as patrifilial halves of a greater social and cosmological whole.21 That all Yolŋu individuals, the mala into which they are born, the hereditary properties that they own and the waŋarr from whom they trace their lineage are either Dhuwa or Yirritja is reflected in this description. The systemic affinal interdependence of mala that are Dhuwa and those that are Yirritja under Yolŋu law also suggests that these patrimoieties should

Figure 2. A primer for Yolŋu rom by Neparrŋa Gumbula at Galiwin’ku, July 16, 2002.

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be described as halves of a greater social and cosmological whole. In accordance with this legal tradition, individuals take spouses of the opposite patrimoiety thereby ensuring that all offspring are born into the mala and patrimoiety of their bäpa (father), to whom they are gäthu (“child” of a man and his siblings), yet also have a ŋändi (mother), to whom they are waku (“child” of a woman and her siblings), whose mala and moiety are different from theirs. This acknowledged, the term moiety, from the Latin root medius (half ), does not provide us with an entirely cogent description for the ways in which Yolŋu perceive the legal and religious charters that have passed to them from waŋarr, or their shared heritage as Dhuwa or Yirritja beings. Dhuwa and Yirritja mala trace their lineages from entirely discrete groups of waŋarr and, though the hereditary yäku, manikay, buŋgul, and miny’tji of mala of the same moiety are far from identical, they are nonetheless able to deploy these discrete hereditary properties in joint ceremonial performances as an expression of their shared same patrimoiety heritage and law.

Figure 3. Dhuwa and Yirritja.

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Essentially, Yolŋu of the Dhuwa and Yirritja moieties see their systemically different canons of yäku, manikay, buŋgul, and miny’tji as codifications of two separate legal constitutions that are each whole and complete in their own right. In Figure 4, these two constitutions and Dhuwa and Yirritja waŋarr to whom they are respectively attributed are represented by the two fringed boxes either side of the central vertical axis at the top of Gumbula’s primer. Each of these boxes is connected by a central vertical line to a corresponding, yet unadorned, box at the bottom of the primer, which can potentially represent any individual or mala of either moiety as ego. This symmetry along the central horizontal axis illustrates another classical binarism that exists within Yolŋu thought between the physical and metaphysical planes of reality, and the representational significance of two central vertical lines that connect them in Gumbula’s primer are threefold. They represent within each moiety and, more specifically, within each mala the direct patrilineage or yarrata (literally, “string,” “line”) of contemporary Yolŋu from their waŋarr and the authority that Yolŋu

Figure 4. The metaphysical and physical planes of reality.

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have always possessed over their wäŋa and madayin by virtue of those lineages as well as the liminal hereditary waters through which human birrimbirr (souls) migrate from the metaphysical waŋarr plane of existence to inform the lives of Yolŋu here in the physical world before returning home following their deaths. As described by Turner, Existence as a whole, then, is rather like a rubber band passing through a waterfall . . . stretched to its limit and then rotated from one side . . . through to the other. Each of us comes across to “this side” at birth, is formally embodied, lives, dies and then returns to a fixed position on the “other side.” Both “sides,” then, exist side-by-side in mirrored image. . . . The purpose of life on “this side” . . . is not only to realise the nature of the “other side” while you are here, but also to bring life on “this side” into mirrored concert with it.22

The biconstitutionalism of Yolŋu legal traditions can be further understood through exegesis of the six oblongs which, along the bottom of Gumbula’s primer, flank each of the two central boxes that, together, represent a hypothetical ego mala of either patrimoiety. Just as Yolŋu trace their hereditary ownership of wäŋa and madayin from waŋarr through a direct yarrata, rights to the physical and intellectual properties of other mala are derived through uterine lines of descent. The cross-patrimoiety relationship between waku and ŋändi, which is also expressed as yo¯thu–yindi (child–mother; literally, “child–big,” “baby–large”), is the foundation of all uterine relationships in Yolŋu society as well as the complementary rights in the wäŋa and madayin of other mala that flow through them. It is also the foundation of legal interrelationships between mala of the opposite patrimoiety. As explained by Howard Morphy, Waku are obligated to work for their mother’s clan [mala] to compensate their mother’s clan for producing their father’s wives. This is a continuation of their father’s obligation, manifested in bride service and the continuous payment of gifts, to his mother’s brother and wife’s brother throughout his life. . . . As waku, they are children of clan members [that is, their mother’s agnates] yet they belong to a clan of the opposite moiety. As a group, they are thus in the ideal structural position to be caretakers of the clan’s sacra and to arbitrate any internal disputes within the ŋändipulu [mother-group] since [as they are of the opposite moiety] they are competitors neither for land nor women.23

Individuals cannot hold full ownership rights in the wäŋa and madayin of their mother’s mala but are taught to interpret their significance by her and her

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walkur (literally, “agnates”). Waku are therefore raised to know how the madayin of their ŋändipulu should be executed, and those who are formally admitted to leadership within Yolŋu society are, by law, required to ensure the correctness, consistency, and legality of all ceremonial acts by their mother’s mala. They must also be consulted in and assent to all major decisions taken by their ŋändipulu concerning its members, and its physical and intellectual properties. This cooperative and interdependent relationship between the two patrimoieties or, in other words, between holders of Dhuwa law and holders of Yirritja law is how biconstitutionalism works as a fundamental legal principle in Yolŋu society. Each patrimoiety has its own legal constitution that it must faithfully uphold but is also charged with the responsibility of ensuring that their counterparts of the opposite patrimoiety are following rom in their execution of their madayin, and in their responsibilities to wäŋa, gurrutu (kin, kinship) and waŋarr as well. The prolific Yolŋu leader and retired minister of the Uniting Church, Djiniyini Gondarra, states that the yo¯thu–yindi relationship, and the systemic interdependence between Dhuwa and Yirritja that it maintains, enshrines the separation of legal powers in Yolŋu society.24 As reflected in the unifying symmetry of Gumbula’s primer along its central vertical axis, one side always watches what the other does to ensure that its actions are legal and to assist in the mediation of disputes when they arise. Figure 5 illustrates how, from the perspective of ego, the two central boxes at the bottom of Gumbula’s primer represent the wäŋa-wataŋu and rom-wataŋu of a hypothetical mala of each patrimoiety, and how they are each immediately flanked by an oblong that represents their respective waku or ŋändi-wataŋu (mother-holders). Numbered from 0 to 4 in this figure, these relationships extend outward in direct matrilineal descent from (0) the hypothetical ego mala of each moiety, past (1) their respective ŋändi-wataŋu, to (2) their märi-wataŋu (mother’s mother-holders), (3) their waku-wataŋu (mother’s mother’s motherholders), and (4) their yapa-wataŋu (sister-holders, mother’s mother’s mother’s mother-holders). Beyond these, the two outermost oblongs on each side represent (5) the momu-wataŋu (father’s mother-holders) and (6) the milmara-wataŋu (fraternal wife’s mother-holders, betrothal-holders) of (0) the hypothetical Dhuwa and Yirritja ego mala. These uterine relationships (1–6) are the weft of Yolŋu social fabric and the specific complementary rights incumbent with each of them, in addition to those of (0) full ownership through yarrata, are summarized in Table 1. They cut across the Dhuwa and Yirritja patrimoieties, and bring different mala together as gurrutu in legally binding relationships of mutual obligation and responsibil-

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ity. Individuals will ideally stand in each of these uterine relationships with members of other mala and will similarly have relatives who inversely stand in those same relationships to them and their own mala. Moreover, because the nomenclature for gurrutu is applied recurrently at every fourth generation away from ego in such a way that one’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother is a yapa (sister) while one’s son’s son’s son’s son is a wäwa (brother), everyone in Yolŋu society is related in these ways, no matter how distantly, through this universalizing system. The collections of the Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre remain the hereditary property of (0) the mala who own them, and accessible to their current . . . , yet Gumbula’s primer demonstrates how, in accordance with Yolŋu law, local community access to its archived materials extends both to patrifilial walkur and to those who hold complementary rights in them through (1–6), the uterine lines of descent described in Table 1.

Figure 5. Complementary rights to a mala’s (patrigroup’s) property through uterine

relationships.

Table 1. Complementary rights in a mala’s (patrigroup’s) hereditary property through uterine lines of descent and associated obligations no. relationship to (0) 0

ŋarra (self ), rom-wataŋu, wäŋa-wataŋu

rights and obligations to (0)

patrimoiety

. Full ownership inherited from waŋarr

Own

through yarrata

. Will perform alongside one’s walkur (agnates) in ceremonies

1

waku, ŋändi-wataŋu

. Standing access to their ŋändi’s wäŋa . Rights to knowledge and authorized execution

Other

of their ŋändi’s madayin

. Senior waku must assent to major decisions

2

taken by their ŋändipulu, assist in arbitrating its disputes and, as djuŋgayi (scrutineers), ensure the correctness, consistency, and legality of its ceremonial actions . Expressed as the yo¯thu–yindi relationship gutharra (“children” of a . Standing access to their märi’s wäŋa woman and her siblings’ . Rights to knowledge and authorized execution “daughter”), märi-wataŋu of their märi’s madayin . Senior gutharra must assent to major decisions taken by their märipulu

Own

. May possess common madayin with their

märipulu and may be invited to participate in joint ceremonial performances with them . Obliged to djäga (care for) their märipulu

. Most likely to succeed the hereditary property of their märipulu should it have no male heirs by virtue of being the next closest descendants of the same moiety

3

ŋändi and ŋapipi

(“daughter and son” of a woman and her siblings’ “daughter’s daughter”), waku-wataŋu

. An inversion of the yo¯thu–yindi relationship . Must accord their waku standing access to

Other

their wäŋa

. Must accord their waku rights to knowledge and authorized execution of their madayin

. Must seek approval from their senior waku for major decisions within their own mala and ensure that they are present to scrutinize the correctness, consistency, and legality of their ceremonial actions

4

yapa and wäwa, yapa-wataŋu

. An avoidance relationship denoting deep

Own

respect and deference . A relationship of equal social standing between mala

. May possess common madayin with their yapapulu and may be invited to participate in joint ceremonial performances with them Continued on next page

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rights and obligations to (0)

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patrimoiety

. Approval must sought when entering one’s yapa’s wäŋa

. Yapapulu do not normally share knowledge and will only execute each others’ madayin following legal consensus at the most senior level

5

gaminyarr (“child” of a woman and her siblings’ “son”), momu-wataŋu

. Will travel with their bäpa to his ŋändi’s wäŋa . Will know of their momu’s madayin and her

Other

matrilineage through their bäpa

. Will perform authorized executions of their momu’s madayin with their bäpa

6

gurruŋ (“husband” of woman and her siblings’ “daughter” and his siblings), milmara-wataŋu

. An avoidance relationship denoting deep

Own

respect and deference . A male’s betrothal to a daughter of his mukul rumaru (fraternal wife’s mother) will be arranged by her husband . Will have gäthu to whom their mukul rumaru is märi

. Will travel to their mukul rumaru’s wäŋa with their galay (fraternal wives) and gäthu

. Will know of their mukul rumaru’s madayin and her matrilineage through their galay Sources. Nancy Williams, The Yolŋu and Their Land: A System of Land Tenure and the Fight for Its Recognition (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1986), pp. 66–70; Ian Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 62–100; Michael Cooke, ed., Aboriginal Languages in Contemporary Contexts: Yolŋu-Matha at Galiwin’ku (Batchelor: Batchelor College, 1996), pp. 65–85; Don Williams, Exploring Aboriginal Kinship (Canberra: Curriculum Development Centre, 1981).

Following the interdependence of the Dhuwa and Yirritja patrimoieties (Figure 3) and the physical and metaphysical planes of reality (Figure 4), the final classical binarism of Yolŋu thought expressed in Gumbula’s primer is that between the public and restricted domains of Yolŋu discourse and knowledge. Like the physical and metaphysical planes of reality (Figure 4), this new binarism is represented by symmetry in the primer along its central horizontal axis; however, as shown in Figure 6, within this global symmetry, Gumbula more accurately presents the different strata of knowledge and discourse within Yolŋu intellectual traditions as a tripartite, rather than a bipartite, system. The most accessible domain of Yolŋu knowledge and discourse is garma (public), which, as shown in Figure 6, fills the bottom half of Gumbula’s primer. It encompasses all discourse and knowledge that can be expressed in garma contexts yet is bound by the same rules for hereditary access and execution rights

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as those described in Table 1, hence Gumbula’s representation of them as positions 0–6 within the garma domain. Garma classes of madayin include manikay and buŋgul series as well as figurative miny’tji on their subjects and, as explained by Keen, the garma ceremonial contexts in which they are formally deployed include boyhood initiations, extensive funeral and postfuneral purification rites, diplomatic missions to other mala and the resolution of inter-mala disputes.25 Garma ceremonies and their associated madayin are represented in Gumbula’s primer (Figure 6) by the oval ceremony ground within the garma domain and are performed by individuals with hereditary rights do to so of all ages. The top half of Gumbula’s primer (Figure 6) illustrates the dhuni’ (perirestricted; literally, “shelter”) and ŋärra’ (restricted) domains of discourse and knowledge. They encompass discourse and knowledge that is closely controlled by Yolŋu leaders as well as ŋärra’ classes of song, dance and design. Gondarra

Figure 6. The garma (public), dhuni’ (perirestricted), and ŋärra’ (restricted) domains of Yolŋu

knowledge and discourse.

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describes the ŋärra’ ceremony as “a very important legal . . . chamber” in which law is seriously discussed and binding legal decisions are made.26 In Gumbula’s primer (Figure 6), ŋärra’ ceremonies are located with the waŋarr, who constituted them in the two fringed boxes within the topmost ŋärra’ domain. Gondarra also explains that plans for legal decisions to be made in ŋärra’ ceremonies are open to discussion beforehand in the dhuni’ context of the riyawarra ground which, in Gumbula’s primer (Figure 6), is represented by the oval within the dhuni’ domain.27 While initiated men withdraw to perform the ŋärra’ ceremony in seclusion, their female and uninitiated male counterparts wait at the riyawarra ground and, following its completion, are invited to join in a final purificatory act called wana-lupthun (literally, “arm-wash”) in which all in attendance signal their assent to the legally binding decisions that are proposed by walking together into the water.28 Dhuni’ classes of song, dance, and design are deployed throughout this process. As explained earlier, individuals must follow and be accomplished in the precedents for rom established by their waŋarr, including a full and consummate knowledge of their hereditary madayin, before their elders will formally admit them to roles of social and ceremonial leadership. Once leaders, they are known as the liya-ŋärra’mirr(i) (learned, wise; literally, “restricted knowledge possessing”), although male liya-ŋärra’mirr(i) leaders are also known as djirrikaymirr or gunbur’mirr if Dhuwa and dalkarramirri if Yirritja, each meaning “powerful,” because of their specific roles in performing sung invocations of yäku with male choruses in garma ceremonial contexts. As shown in Figure 7, there are corresponding liya-ŋärra’mirr(i) leaders for each of the mala in positions 0–6 in Gumbula’s primer whose relationships to each other are the same as those explained in Table 1. Their location along the central horizontal axis of this diagram, between the garma and the dhuni’ and ŋärra’ domains of discourse and knowledge, reflects their structural position in Yolŋu society, those responsible for leading ceremonies, negotiating legally binding decisions, ensuring the correctness, consistency, and legality of ceremonial acts by others, and arbitrating disputes. Their authority, as illustrated by the two central vertical lines (Figure 7), flows directly from waŋarr and through the ŋärra’, riyawarra, and garma ceremony grounds to the general public. Exploration of the structures and interrelationships expressed in Gumbula’s primer became a central focus of our collaborative teaching with Marcia Langton in the Australian Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Melbourne. It has been particularly important for students who, since 2001, have attended the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture while enrolled in the under-

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graduate subject, entitled Garma Fieldwork, to have a sophisticated framework for understanding their experiences in northeast Arnhem Land, the discourses of Yolŋu elders through the festival and in its key symposia, and, above all, the invaluable gift that Yolŋu extend to others when they choose to share with them their knowledge of madayin and demonstrations of rom.29 The Garma Festival of Traditional Culture is, in itself, an event where Yolŋu leaders bring people from different walks of life together to engage with them in garma discourse and to witness daily performances of their manikay and buŋgul series under the auspices of the Yo¯thu Yindi Foundation.30 Yolŋu leaders, however, have also addressed aspects of the dhuni’ and ŋärra’ domains of discourse and knowledge for the more limited audiences of the festival’s themed annual symposia, which, thus far, have included resource management in 1999, health and education in 2000, law in 2001, music and the environment in 2002, art and culture in 2003, livelihoods and leadership in 2004, and tourism in 2005.

Figure 7. The liya-ŋärra’mirr(i) (learned, wise) leadership.

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For example, the ŋärra’ Legal Forum in 2001 facilitated deep discussion and debate between leading legal professionals, Yolŋu elders, and politicians about the nature of Yolŋu legal systems and their relationship to those of the Commonwealth of Australia, while, in 2003, implications stemming from the commercialization of dhuni’ and ŋärra’ classes of miny’tji over recent decades were explored at the Dhuni’ Indigenous Arts and Culture Forum.31 Throughout their history of contact with Euro-Australians and, in particular, mission and government authorities, Yolŋu leaders have frequently pursued these kinds of opportunities to explain the waŋarr underpinnings of their law, way of life, and sovereignty as a people over northeast Arnhem Land despite the inherent difficulties faced by others in comprehending the concepts addressed in Gumbula’s primer.32 The Two Streams Now two rivers run their course, separated for so long.33

As Yolŋu leaders have come to terms with their occupation by the Commonwealth of Australia in recent decades, binary models drawn from their hereditary intellectual traditions have been adapted to promote ideals of equity and balance in contemporary relations between Yolŋu and Balanda (Euro-Australians) or, more generally, between indigenous and other Australians. For example, the popular band led by Mandawuy Yunupiŋu, Yo¯thu Yindi, is named after the fundamental child–mother relationship through which balance, interdependence, mutual respect, and social order between mala of the Dhuwa and Yirritja patrimoieties is maintained, and it is this very ideology that lies at the heart of his broader social project for the Yo¯thu Yindi Foundation through the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture. The ideological and pedagogical roots of the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture predate the formation of Yo¯thu Yindi at Yirrkala in 1986 and were originally posited by Yunupiŋu in his third popular song, “Mainstream,” which was composed while he was completing the undergraduate bachelor of arts in education from Deakin University.34 While he had been working as an assistant principal at Shepherdson College in Galiwin’ku, Yunupiŋu had continually been confronted by assumptions of his Balanda colleagues that mainstream classroom schooling in English alone could cater for the educational needs of Yolŋu children so, when confronted by these same assumptions in his own tertiary studies, he rebuked them by composing “Mainstream,” which was submitted for assessment and subsequently awarded a high distinction.35

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Essentially, “Mainstream” contends that the hereditary knowledge codified in madayin by waŋarr and the imperative to follow their precedents for living through rom is the mainstream intellectual discourse through which Yolŋu children have been raised and educated for countless generations. It challenges stillprevalent notions in Australia that only Europeanist academic traditions are factually and pedagogically valid and presented Yunupiŋu’s vision for redressing this imbalance through bicultural schooling initiatives in Yolŋu communities.36 The first verse of “Mainstream” refers to djinkungan (yellow foam), which is produced at a ganma (brackish water) site that marks the boundary between two Yirritja wäŋa: Biranybirany, which is owned by Yunupiŋu’s own mala, the Gumatj, and Dhäliny, which is owned by one of its yapapulu (sister-groups), the Wangurri. The same patrimoiety meeting of fresh and salt waters at this site and the djinkungan that they produce represents the fruitful interaction of two similar yet equal sociopolitical entities that do not assimilate each other and produce something entirely new through their cooperation.37 This verse also makes reference to Yunupiŋu’s five daughters and the ancestral knowledge that has been passed to them through their Gumatj yarrata. The second verse of “Mainstream” draws on madayin subjects incumbent with Yalaŋbara. This is a Dhuwa-patrimoiety wäŋa owned by the Rirratjiŋu mala, which is the ŋändipulu of the five Gumatj daughters to whom Yunupiŋu refers in the first. This yo¯thu–yindi between Yunupiŋu’s daughters and their ŋändi represents the interdependence of different yet equal sociopolitical entities across patrimoieties whose cooperation is essential to the continuation of Yolŋu existence. In the third and final verse of this song, the two models for equitable cooperation between separate sociopolitical entities— a same-partrimoiety one in the first verse and a cross-patrimoiety one between the first and second— are transposed onto the broader arena of cross-cultural relations within Australia to propose a better model for equitable and balanced relationships between indigenous and other Australians.38 Yunupiŋu’s vision of bicultural learning for Yolŋu children quickly became the mainstay of school curricula in northeast Arnhem Land.39 However, his and other Yolŋu calls for more equitable relations between indigenous and other Australians have, for the most part, yet to be realized. Nevertheless, Yunupiŋu’s theorization of ganma as a collaborative conceptual space in which new intercultural dialogues such as those facilitated at the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture and those presented in this chapter can legitimately exist.40 Even so, it is important to recognize that indigenous Australians such as the Yolŋu have far less choice in their biculturalism than their nonindigenous counterparts. For Yolŋu, biculturalism provides necessary skills for accessing public services, for

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engaging in commercial transactions and for taking advantage of contemporary technologies. Engagement with Australia’s dominant Anglophonic culture has become a regular part of Yolŋu life in recent decades, yet, by comparison, relatively few Australians are aware that the Yolŋu even exist. For their continuing sovereignty over their hereditary lands to gain wider-spread international recognition, the continuing challenge for contemporary Yolŋu leaders is to make others want to engage with them in intercultural discourse and to develop the necessary bicultural skills for them to do so. Although it may not be possible for some time to assess just how successful present initiatives such as the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture, Djalu Gurruwiwi’s international master classes through Rripaŋu Yidaki (literally, “Thunder Didjeridu”), the Australian indigenous studies programs at the University of Melbourne, and the Yolŋu studies program at Charles Darwin University will be in this endeavor, their current progress is encouraging.41 Where the Waters Meet I’m dreaming of a brighter day when the waters will be one.42

There is an inverse symmetry in the processes through which Yolŋu and newcomers to Yolŋu thought and society experience and learn about Yolŋu heritage. The Yolŋu-Matha verb, marŋgi, is simultaneously translatable as “to know,” “to be able to,” and “to have rights in” yet, in this particular order, also aptly describe the process through which newcomers experience and learn about Yolŋu social and intellectual institutions. Typically, newcomers will firstly know about artifacts of Yolŋu culture that pique their interest in knowing more yet most will never pursue this interest far enough to consult with Yolŋu leaders directly. As exemplified by Djalu Gurruwiwi’s international body of students for his yidaki (didjeridu) master classes, Yolŋu leaders might also adopt newcomers who do consult them directly and teach them to be able to execute garma classes of their madayin. With time, Yolŋu leaders may even extend them additional rights as adopted walkur. 43 Of course for Yolŋu, the madayin of one’s mala is a birthright extended through one’s yarrata from waŋarr. Yolŋu children will learn to be able to dance in garma ceremonies, paint their hereditary miny’tji, and, if male, play yidaki accompaniments to manikay series from a young age, and will be brought into a greater knowledge of incrementally deeper aspects of their madayin by elders as they progress through life. Whether through birthright or adoption, one expectation that Yolŋu leaders

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have of all who learn from them is that no one is above the law. Though commonly misinterpreted by Balanda as a quaint nicety or an inability to relate to others in new ways, this is implicit in the widespread practice of ensuring that virtually all visitors to Yolŋu communities are adopted into the gurrutu system. As explained by Gondarra, contemporary Yolŋu have little choice but recognize Australian legal jurisdiction in addition to their own so the very least that newcomers seeking serious engagement with Yolŋu intellectual traditions can do is return in kind.44 Europeanist academic engagements with Yolŋu had their beginning in Warner’s ethnographic research at Miliŋinbi from 1927–1929. Since then, the Yolŋu have become one of the most studied peoples in the world, and their struggle to follow rom amid the radical sociopolitical changes that they have faced in the intervening decades has been well documented through the work of ethnographers such as Thomson, Berndt, Dunlop, Morphy, Keen, Williams, Rudder, Tamisari, McIntosh, Magowan, Cooke, Toner, and Corn.45 From their beginning, these engagements could not have taken place without the cooperation of liya-ŋärra’mirr(i) Yolŋu leaders, and their willingness to teach others about their way of life and to cultivate sustained intellectual discourses with visiting academics. These discourses are more than bicultural. They are also biintellectual. They stem from the meeting of Yolŋu intellectual traditions that have existed for countless millennia and relatively recent scholarly attempts to understand them through Europeanist academic inquiry. As acknowledged by Keen, Balanda engagements with Yolŋu holders of knowledge have frequently been inequitable. A Miliŋinbi woman complained to a visitor recently that, whereas Yolŋu were teaching white people about their way of life, the white people were keeping knowledge hidden to themselves . . . like the roots of a tree. They should make the knowledge available to Yolŋu like the tree’s branches.46

Accepting that Yolŋu leaders have been and still are equal, if not leading, partners in research endeavors that draw on their hereditary knowledge, rather than casting them as mere sources of data without the capacity to think and engage with others theoretically, is a necessary part of decolonizing and, indeed, humanizing the academic project so that ownership of research processes and their outcomes can be shared by all contributors. Moreover, studies that draw on hereditary knowledge, no matter how public it might be, raise serious issues of legal propriety for the Yolŋu leaders charged with its maintenance and pro-

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tection. It is therefore imperative that new research projects provide adequately negotiated protections for both their hereditary intellectual property and their confidentiality. Nevertheless, research projects that facilitate the flow of knowledge both ways and render the inner logic and political economy of Balanda social and intellectual institutions amenable to Yolŋu elders in return for understandings of their own can be fulfilling for all stake holders, and are certainly more befitting of the collaborative conceptual space theorized by Yunupiŋu in “Mainstream.” Current projects funded by the Australian Research Council and led by Morphy, Toner, and Christie, which facilitate the digital repatriation of hereditary materials held in museums and archives to Yolŋu communities, exemplify this process and its potential for wider application.47 Yolŋu knowledge can be understood through no single academic discipline. It encompasses elements of geography, ecology, hydrology, meteorology, astronomy, biology, medicine, law, etymology, ontology, genealogy, diplomacy, and aesthetics to name a few. Nevertheless, there are root ideas about ancestry, sociality, ownership, leadership, and law, such as those explored in this chapter, that can assist others to understand Yolŋu intellectual traditions and their innate durability on their own terms and in their own right. Our own biintellectualist discourse began in 1997 while Corn was visiting Arnhem Land to research the music of local popular bands such as Yo¯thu Yindi, and unbeknownst to him at the time, was that the hereditary manikay on which this new repertoire was based and the liturgical yäku found in their lyrics are, in themselves, a metalanguage through which Yolŋu traditionally understand and transmit knowledge about all natural, social, and spiritual phenomena. In other words, searching beyond the assumed boundaries of his own (sub)discipline in (ethno)musicology and extending its possibilities through this process has become a necessary part of understanding Yolŋu music for Corn and one that Gumbula, in his role as a liya-ŋärra’mirr(i) Yolŋu elder, has followed with interest. The increasing willingness of newcomers to become students of Yolŋu elders through programs such as those at Charles Darwin University and the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney or through commercial endeavors such as the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture and Rripaŋu Yidaki stands in stark contrast to their own formative experiences with the Balanda education system. As Yunupiŋu recollects, Looking back now, I can see that the teachers probably saw things differently to me. Many of their demands were quite incomprehensible. They weren’t just

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teaching me “useful things.” They had a theory— an ideology. I see now that it was a curriculum driven by the ideology of assimilation. I marvel at the ways we knew how to resist it. I see now that a lot of what motivated those white teachers was the view that it was only when Yolŋu stopped being Yolŋu that we could be Australians.48

Today, the biintellectualist agenda among Yolŋu elders responds to current socioeconomic pressures for indigenous peoples worldwide to be just like everyone else and to their recognized need for a more stable economic platform for traditional maintenance in the aftermath of the progressive erosion of their traditional economy and trade with neighboring peoples throughout the twentieth century. That newcomers now have multiple avenues for intellectualist engagement with Yolŋu ideas presents the possibility of a quantum leap forward in understanding and intercultural discourse between indigenous and other Australia, and we encourage others to engage in such discourses self-consciously, ethically, and with purpose. Admittedly, our own biintellectualist rapport, our families’ and colleagues’ ensuing friendships, and our relationship through gurrutu as father and son matured over several years, and has not always been purposeful or comfortable. Nonetheless, there is one vital quality that we have always had in common. We are both inveterate and unapologetic boundary crossers. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Gumbula is an adept bicultural operator who became a member of one of the region’s earliest popular bands, Soft Sands, and was a constable in the Northern Territory Police Service while Corn was raised in an agnostic bicultureal family and challenged subdisciplinary boundaries within musicology before seeking work experience in the parallel disciplines of cultural studies, anthropology, indigenous studies, and acoustics. Through personal experience, we have found that it takes great willfulness and courage to live across the kinds of boundaries discussed in this chapter and to accommodate each other’s ways of thinking yet that our shared learning experience and our ability to help others confront received epistemological biases against Yolŋu intellectual traditions have been most rewarding. Acknowledgments

Many thanks to our families and, in particular, our wives, Melinda Sawers and Gawura Ganambarr, whose great care and understanding has made our collaborative work possible. Sincerest thanks also to our wonderful colleagues at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre, Museum Victoria, the University of

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Melbourne, the University of Sydney, and the Yo¯thu Yindi Foundation, whose strong support has also contributed much to making our collaborative efforts possible.

Notes Spellings for Yolŋu-Matha words in this chapter follow the orthographic conventions used by R. David Zorc, Yolŋu-Matha Dictionary, reprint (Batchelor: Batchelor College, 1996), and at Charles Darwin University, CDU Yolŋu Studies (learnline.cdu .edu.au/yolngustudies/index.htm) [accessed February 18, 2005]. 1. The states and territories of contemporary Australia are New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory, and the Australian Capital Territory. Before federating as a commonwealth in 1901, each of the six states was a colony of the British Empire. New South Wales was established earliest with the landing at Sydney of a fleet transporting convicts from Britain in 1788. 2. For a comprehensive introduction to the indigenous peoples of Sydney past and present see Melinda Hinkson, Aboriginal Sydney: A Guide to Important Places of the Past and Present (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2001). 3. For an Australia-wide historical overview of these practices see Ann McGrath, ed., Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995); Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: A Guide to the Findings and Recommendations of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Children from their Families (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1997); and Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, The Struggle for Aboriginal Land Rights: A Documentary History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999). 4. Marcia Langton, “Introduction: Culture Wars,” in Michele Grossman, ed., Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writings by Indigenous Australians (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003), p. 91. 5. Langton, “Introduction,” pp. 82 and 91. 6. Neparrŋa Gumbula, A Primer for Yolŋu Rom (Galiwin’ku: Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre, 2002). 7. Yolŋu leaders draw on their extensive knowledges of hereditary canons of liturgical names, songs, dances, and designs to negotiate the structure and content of each ceremonial performance. In this chapter, the terms canon and canonical— from the ancient Greek word, kano¯n (rule, straight rod)—are used to imply the same meanings as rom (law, culture, correct life practice, the way) in Yolŋu-Matha. Our uses of the terms liturgy and liturgical—from the ancient Greek word, leitourgia

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(public duty)— are similarly intended to convey the binding legality of religious practice in Yolŋu society. 8. Aaron Corn, “Dreamtime Wisdom, Modern Time Vision: Tradition and Innovation in the Popular Band Movement of Arnhem Land, Australia.” PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2002. 9. Yo¯thu Yindi, “Treaty,” on Tribal Voice, Mark Moffat, prod. (Mushroom, D30602, 1991), track 2. 10. Nancy Williams, The Yolŋu and Their Land: A System of Land Tenure and the Fight for Its Recognition (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1986), pp. 42–43. 11. For further information about hereditary Yolŋu knowledge of sites off the coast of northeast Arnhem Land, see Yumbulul Yunupiŋu and Djiniyini Dhamarrandji, “My Island Home: A Marine Protection Strategy for Manbuyŋa ga Rulyapa (Arafura Sea),” in Galarrwuy Yunupiŋu, ed., Our Land is Our Life: Land Rights—Past, Present and Future (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1997), pp. 181–187; and Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre, Saltwater: Yirrkala Bark Paintings of Sea Country (Sydney: Isaacs, 1999). The climatic changes that have reshaped Australia’s coastline, and separated Tasmania and Papua from the mainland over the past 12,000 years, are discussed in David Horton, gen. ed., The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994), p. 201. 12. Historical records of these visitations are the subject of C. C. Macknight, The Voyage to Marege’: Macassan Trepangers in Northern Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976). 13. Charles P. Mountford, Art, Myth and Symbolism, Records of the AmericanAustralian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land 1 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1956), p. 333, records Yolŋu descriptions of the Bayini as being seafarers who visited northeast Arnhem Land long before the Maŋgatharra (Macassans). They are described as being a lighter-skinned people who, unlike the Maŋgatharra (Macassans), brought with them their wives and children and built houses during their stay from local timber and imported bamboo. New evidence presented in Gavin Menzies, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (London: Bantam Books, 2002), pp. 197–214, and 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (www.1421.tv) [accessed September 7, 2005], which draws on historical Chinese and European records, substantiates these claims and further suggests that the term Bayini could be derived from the Hokkien word for “boat,” joon, and mean “boat people.” 14. Michael Cooke, ed., Aboriginal Languages in Contemporary Contexts: YolŋuMatha at Galiwin’ku (Batchelor: Batchelor College, 1996), pp. 1–20. 15. The historical integration of Maŋgatharra (Macassans) themes to hereditary canons of Yolŋu knowledge is also discussed and analyzed extensively by Ronald M.

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Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt, Arnhem Land: Its History and Its People (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1954), p. 22; Peter M. Worsley, “Early Asian Contacts with Australia,” Past and Present, Vol. 7 (1955): 3–4; Donald Thomson, “Early Macassar Visitors to Arnhem Land and their Influence on Its People,” Walkabout, Vol. 23 (1957): 29–31; W. L. Warner, A Black Civilisation: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe, rev. ed. (New York: Harper, 1969), pp. 455–458; John Rudder, “Yolŋu Cosmology: An Unchanging Cosmos Incorporating a Rapidly Changing World,” DPhil. thesis, Australian National University, 1993, pp. 336–337; Ian S. McIntosh, “The Dog and the Myth Maker: Macassans and Aborigines in Northeast Arnhem Land,” Australian Folklore, Vol. 9 (1994): 77–81, and “Islam and Australia’s Aborigines? A Perspective from Northeast Arnhem Land,” Journal of Religious History, Vol. 20, no. 1 (1996): 53–77; Peter G. Toner, “Ideology, Influence and Innovation: The Impact of Macassan Contact on Yolŋu Music,” Perfect Beat, Vol. 5, no. 1 (2000): 22–41; Corn, “Dreamtime Wisdom,” pp. 152–176; and Aaron Corn and Neparrŋa Gumbula, “Djiliwirri Ganha Dhärranhana, Wäŋa Limurruŋgu: The Creative Foundations of a Yolŋu Popular Song,” Australian Music Research, Vol. 7 (2003): 64–65. 16. Northern Territory Administration, Native Administration Ordinance Act 1940–1964. 17. For further discussion and analysis of the contemporary Yolŋu struggle for international recognition of their continuing sovereignty in northeast Arnhem Land, see Williams, The Yolŋu and Their Land; Yunupiŋu, Our Land Is Our Life, pp. 1–17 and 210–227; Djiniyini Gondarra, “Customary Law,” Garma Festival, 2001: ŋärra’ Legal Forum, session 7 (www.garma.telstra.com/pdfs/ngaarra/Ngaarra_session07 .pdf ) [accessed September 7, 2005], pp. 15–20; and Aaron Corn and Neparr ŋa Gumbula, “Now Balanda Say We Lost Our Land in 1788: Challenges to the Recognition of Yolŋu Law in Contemporary Australia,” in Marcia Langton, Maureen Teehan, Lisa Palmer, and Kathryn Shain, eds., Honour among Nations? Treaties and Agreements with Indigenous Peoples (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), pp. iii and 101–114. 18. Williams, The Yolŋu and Their Land, p. 29; Ian Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy in an Aboriginal Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 2; Gondarra, “Customary Law,” p. 19. 19. Yo¯thu Yindi, “Treaty.” 20. Jessica DeLargy Healy, “Do campo ao arquivo digital: Performance, interação e Terra de ‘Arnhem,’ Austrália,” Horizontes Antropologicos, Vol. 10, no. 21 (www.scielo .br/scielo.php?script+sci_arttext&pid+s0104-71832004000100004&lng+en&nrm= iso&tlng=pt) [accessed March 1, 2005]. 21. The term moiety stems from the Latin word, medius (half ). 22. David H. Turner, Afterlife before Genesis, An Introduction: Accessing the Eternal

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through Australian Aboriginal Music, Toronto Studies in Religion 22 (New York: Lang, 1997), p. 30. 23. Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 66–67. 24. Gondarra, “Customary Law,” p. 19. 25. Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy, pp. 139–140. 26. Gondarra, “Customary Law,” p. 19. 27. Gondarra, “Customary Law,” p. 19. 28. Gondarra, “Customary Law,” pp. 16–19. 29. Further information about the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture can be found at Yo¯thu Yindi Foundation, Garma Festival (www.garma.telstra.com) [accessed September 7, 2005]. 30. The Yo¯thu Yindi Foundation was established by Gumatj, Rirratjiŋu, Djapu’, Gälpu, and Wangurri leaders in 1990. 31. Yo¯thu Yindi Foundation, “Previous Forums,” Garma Festival (www.garma.telstra.com/forum1.htm) [accessed September 7, 2005]. 32. For the purposes of this chapter, sovereignty is defined as the right of the duly appointed and recognized leaders of any discrete human society to hold and exercise supreme authority and jurisdiction within their territories and to be recognized by other sovereign states. 33. Yo¯thu Yindi, “Treaty.” 34. Yo¯thu Yindi, “Mainstream” on Homeland Movement, Leszek Karski, prod. (Mushroom, Digszo, 1989), track 1. 35. Mandawuy Yunupiŋu, “Yo¯thu Yindi: Finding Balance,” Race and Class, Vol. 35, no. 4 (1995): 114–120; Mandawuy Yunupiŋu, taped interview with Aaron Corn (Melbourne, March 8); Helen Verran, reply to lecture by Mandawuy Yunupiŋu and Aaron Corn (Gulkula: the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture, August 24). 36. Yunupiŋu with Corn. 37. Yunupiŋu with Corn. For further analysis of ganma as a concept and its creative applications by Yo¯thu Yindi, see Patrick McConvell, “Cultural Domain Separation: Two-Way Street or Blind Alley? Stephen Harris and the Neo-Whorfians on Aboriginal Education,” Australian Aboriginal Studies, Vol. 9, no. 1 (1991): 13–24; Karl Neuenfeldt, “Yo¯thu Yindi and Ganma: The Cultural Transposition of Aboriginal Agenda through Metaphor and Music,” Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 38 (1993): 1–11; and Fiona Magowan, “Traditions of the Mind or the Music-Video: Imagining the Imagination in Yo¯thu Yindi’s ‘Tribal Voice,’” Arena Journal, No. 7 (1996): 99–110. 38. For further analysis of “Mainstream,” see Corn, “Dreamtime Wisdom,” pp. 77–82.

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39. Yunupiŋu; McConvell; Mandawuy Yunupiŋu, interview, Sing Loud Play Strong! First Festival of Aboriginal Rock Music, Jo O’Sullivan, prod. and dir. (Alice Springs: CAAMA Productions, CAAMA V299); Yirrkala Community School Action Group, Towards a Ganma Curriculum in Yolŋu Schools (Yirrkala: Yirrkala Community School, 1988); Michael J. Christie, “Literacy, Genocide and the Media,” Aboriginal Child at School, Vol. 17, no. 5 (1989): 27–32; Stephen Harris, Two Way Aboriginal Schooling: Education and Cultural Survival (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1990); Raymattja Marika, Dayŋawa ŋurruwutthun, and Leon White, “Always Together, Yaka Gäna: Participatory Research at Yirrkala as Part of the Development of a Yolŋu Education,” Convergence, Vol. 25, no. 1 (1989): 23–39. 40. Neuenfeldt, “Yo¯thu Yindi and Ganma,” pp. 6–7. 41. Information about Djalu Gurruwiwi’s family yidaki enterprise can be found at Djalu Gurruwiwi, Rripaŋu Yidaki (www.djalu.com) [accessed September 7, 2005]. 42. Yo¯thu Yindi, “Treaty.” 43. Aaron Corn, “Outside the Hollow Log: The Didjeridu, Globalisation and Socio-Economic Contestation in Arnhem Land,” Rural Society, Vol. 13 (2003): 244–257. 44. Gondarra, “Customary Law,” p. 16. 45. Williams, The Yolŋu and Their Land; Morphy, Ancestral Connections; Rudder, “Yolŋu Cosmology”; Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy; Cooke, Aboriginal Languages; Magowan, “Traditions of the Mind”; McIntosh, “The Dog and the Myth Maker”; Toner, “Ideology, Influence and Innovation”; Corn, “Dreamtime Wisdom”; Donald Thomson, Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land, Nicolas Peterson, ed. (Melbourne, O’Neill, 1983); Ronald M. and Catherine H. Berndt, Arnhem Land: Its History and Its People (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1954); Ian Dunlop, prod. and dir., The Yirrkala Film Project, 22 films, Phillipa Deveson, ed. (Canberra: Film Australia, 1970–1996); Franca Tamisari, “Body, Vision and Movement: In the Footprints of the Ancestors,” Oceania, Vol. 68 (1998): 249–270. 46. Keen, Knowledge and Secrecy, p. 169. 47. Australian Government, Australian Research Council (www.arc.gov.au), September 7, 2005. 48. Yunupiŋu, Our Land Is Our Life, p. 116.

C O NTR I B UTO R S

Lynette Russell holds the chair in Australian Indigenous Studies and is director of the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University. She has published in the areas of Aboriginal archaeology and history, postcolonialism and representations of race. Her authored books are Savage Imaginings (Australian Scholarly Publications), A Little Bird Told Me (Allen & Unwin), and with Ian McNiven, Appropriated Pasts: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonial Culture of Archaeology (AltaMira Press). She edited Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Interactions in Settler Colonies (Manchester University Press) and coedited Constructions of Colonialism: Perspectives on Eliza Fraser’s Shipwreck (Leicester University Press). Erez Cohen is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Media Studies Program at La Trobe University. Originally trained at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Cohen relocated to Australia where he completed a Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide. He has published a number of papers on Latin American refugees and immigrants and the Australian Nation. His current research project examines the relations between media organizations and emergency services during the all-too-frequent large-scale bushfires in Australia. Aaron Corn is an Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at the University of Sydney and affiliated with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He also coordinates university units on Yolŋu culture in collaboration with Yolŋu elders and the Koori Centre. Having worked with elders from Arnhem Land since 1996, his current Australian Research Council Discovery Project, “When the Waters Will Be One,” explores their application of the region’s performance traditions to new intercultural discourses. Aaron has been secretary to the Symposium on Indigenous Performance at the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture in northeast Arnhem Land since its inception

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in 2002, and is a leading research partner in collaborative initiatives to establish a National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia. Bruno David is an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow in the Programme for Australian Indigenous Archaeology, School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University. He has written on social aspects of archaeology, including Landscapes, Rock-art and the Dreaming (Leicester University Press) and Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place (University of Hawai‘i Press). He has led archaeological research in Australia, Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, and the United States. He is currently researching the archeology of village life, oral tradition, and spiritscapes with local community members in Torres Strait. Neparr ŋa Gumbula is a Senior Visiting Fellow, Australian Indigenous Studies Program at the University of Melbourne. Neparrŋa is a liyaŋärra’mirr(i) (learned, wise) leader of the Daygurrgurr Gupapuyŋu Yolŋu. He holds a Visiting Senior Fellowship at the University of Melbourne and, at home in northeast Arnhem Land, is a local councillor and the community liaison and training officer at Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre. Through his long career, both as member of the long-standing local band, Soft Sands, and a constable in the Northern Territory Police Service, Neparrŋa holds a unique perspective on the agency of contemporary Yolŋu leaders that spans the intellectual, the creative, and the judicial. He has been a leading contributor to the Symposium on Indigenous Performance at the Garma Festival of Traditional Culture in northeast Arnhem Land since its inception in 2002 and is a leading research partner in collaborative initiatives to establish a National Recording Project for Indigenous Performance in Australia. Michele Grossman is senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, School of Communication, Culture and Languages, at Victoria University (Melbourne). She holds a Ph.D. in English from Monash University and has published extensively in the area of indigenous writing and critique. Her research interests include the juncture, disjuncture, and tension produced by nonindigenous editing of indigenous writing and the relationships between orality and text. Her most recent publication is the edited volume Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians (Melbourne University Press). Grossman has held visiting or research fellowships at the University of Melbourne and City University of New York.

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Myfanwy Mcdonald is a postgraduate scholar in the Department of Women's Studies and Gender Research, Monash University. Her Ph.D. thesis concerns the interactions between doctors and patients in Australia, in consultations where sex reassignment or an intersex condition is being discussed. While undertaking this research, she has presented at a number of international and national conferences. She was also granted a Monash Research Graduate School Teaching Fellowship in February 2003 and in 2004 she traveled to the Netherlands on a Huygens scholarship to undertake a fourmonth intensive international postgraduate course at Utrecht University. Her research interests include: the politics of Western health care at both a microand macroinstitutional level, narratives of illness and health, critical discourse analysis, the development of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transsexual/intersexual communities, and the relationship between gay and lesbian, queer, and transgender theory and politics. In her next life, she wants to be an ornithologist. Clive Moore has taught at the University of Papua New Guinea in distance education and history and in history at the University of Queensland, where he is now an associate professor. He has long been interested in the history of Melanesia and Australia in the nineteenth century and has published on the Pacific labor trade, Australian colonial and race relations history, and the history of gender and sexuality in Australia. He is author of Happy Isles in Crisis: The Historical Causes for a Failing State in Solomon Islands, 1998–2004 (Asia Pacific Press); New Guinea: Crossing Boundaries and History (University of Hawai‘i Press); Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Queensland’s Gay and Lesbian Culture (University of Queensland Press); and Kanaka: A History of Melanesian Mackay (Institute of PNG Studies and UPNG Press). He is coauthor of 1901: Our Future’s Past (Macmillan), edited The Forgotten People: A History of Australia’s South Sea Islander Community (ABC), and coedited Labour and the South Pacific (James Cook University), A Papua New Guinea Political Chronicle, 1967–1991 (Crawford House), Australian Masculinities (Journal of Australian Studies), and an Australian issue of the Journal of Popular Culture. Stephen Pritchard is a lecturer in the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash University. He has a forthcoming book entitled An Introduction to Multiculturalism (Sage) and has published numerous articles in international journals, including Third Text; Cultural Studies Review; Theory, Culture, & Society; Law and Critique; International Journal of Cultural Studies; and Communal/Plural and Social Semiotics.

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Liz Reed completed her Ph.D. at Monash University and is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies at Monash. Her research interests include colonial race, class, and gender relationships, Aboriginal land rights and commemoration, the politics of Aboriginal rock music, the uses of ‘whiteness theory’ in reconsidering humanitarianism in Australia, and the relationship between history, memory, and commemoration. Her most recent publication is Bigger than Gallipoli: War, History and Memory in Australia (University of Western Australia Press).

INDEX

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, citizenship of, 16 Aboriginal art and “burden” of colonial past, 104–105 commodification, 94 Aboriginal artifacts and tools, 131–132 Aboriginal ceremonial sites, 136 Aboriginal cultural change eight-class system, 128–129 examples, 126–127 influence of Melanesian maritime technology, 126 Molonga ceremonies, 129 Murinbata of Port Keats, 128–129 new Dreaming rituals and dances of Warlpiri, 129 opposing views in legal judgments, 139–140 pre-European international contact, 11, 125–130, 138, 140, 141 raw materials used, 126 and stone tool technologies, 125 various innovations, 138 Aboriginal culture abandoned sites, 137–138 Arrernte totemic sites, 136–137 artifacts, 125 Dreaming rituals, 129–130, 133, 136–137 homogenization of, 15 kinship affiliation, 128–129, 133 modernity viewed negatively, 158 mutability of, 140–142 relations between language and place, 158 suppression by authorities, 170 textual or visual experience for most Australians, 171 totems and affiliation with territorial spaces, 136

traditional ceremonies, 123 See also rock art Aboriginal diaspora, 112 Aboriginal English forms of, 152 Kriols, 152 lingua franca between Aboriginal people from disparate language groups, 152 rewritten in Standard English, 156–157 spoken as first language, 152 See also Aboriginal languages; indigenous authors; life-writing Aboriginal food preparation and Dreaming rituals, 133 grinding stones and evidence of dietary change, 132–134 significance of seed grinding, 133–134 Aboriginal identity discrete and separate, 6 formation of, 5 individual’s acquisition of, 6 “one mob,” 15 in “third space,” 141–142 See also indigeneity Aboriginality binarism of Australian society, 67 fluidity of cultural practice, 123–124 “orality” and “literacy” binary distinctions, 11–12 separation from multiculturalism, 67 traditional and contemporary modes, 11–12 Aboriginal land use patterns abandoned sites and regional mobility, 131, 137–138 changing intensities of use, 131 earth mounds, 130 eel ponds, 130

203

204 “firestick farming,” 130 fish traps, 130 middens, 131 occupation of offshore islands, 131 property rights, 140 Aboriginal languages, 127, 128 See also Aboriginal English Aboriginal law and European law, 108–109 Aboriginal music, 110 See also Aboriginal rock music; Aboriginal rock songs; music Aboriginal people agency exercised by, 117 areas occupied by, 15 arrival of ancestors in Australia, 124 assimilation, 5 binary racial categories of “other,” 6–7, 106 blood groups influenced by Papuans, 125 citizenship of, 16 contact with foreign peoples, 123 cross-cultural relationships, 105–106, 112–113 defined by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Act (1989), 100 enfranchisement, 16 first Australians, 67, 69 Latin Americans’ views on racism against, 74 new forms of authority, 158 “one mob,” 106 political affiliations with Latin Americans, 73 rights of, 16 settlement patterns, 124–125 settler ancestry, 6 shifting identities imposed by colonizers, 5 status as minority racial or ethnic group, 5 traditional custodians, 123 travel to Sulawesi, 128 tribal affiliations, 4 See also indigenous people; reconciliation Aboriginal rock music Building Bridges (1987 cassette tape), 115–116 dialogue and meaning for nonindigenous listeners, 104, 109, 111 early groups, 110 expression of social justice, 110 hip-hop’s subaltern sensitivities, 111–112

index listeners’ response, 109 “mainstream” success of, 113 means of dialogue with “mainstream” society, 113, 117 musical forms varied, 111 No Fixed Address, 110, 111 NoKTuRNL, 10, 107–108, 111–112 Our Home, Our Land (CD), 114 part of global music industry, 109–110 reggae artists, 111 second-generation bands, 111 strategies of empowerment, 113 support groups to non-Aboriginal groups, 112 Us Mob, 110 Yamma, Frank, 111 Yo¯thu Yindi, 110 See also music Aboriginal rock songs “Blackfella Whitefella” (Warumpi Band), 114–115 “Dancing in the Moonlight” (Coloured Stone), 116 “Gudurrku” (Yo¯thu Yindi), 116 “Special Treatment” (Paul Kelly), 115 “Strychnine” (Swamp Jockeys), 116 “Wama Wanti” (Areyonga Desert Tigers), 115–116 “We Have Survived” (No Fixed Address), 115 “Yil-Lull” (Joe Geia), 116 Aboriginal sites, 124 “Aboriginal tradition,” defined by Aboriginal Heritage Act (1988), 100 Aboriginal women, gendered discourse, 106 Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of May Square, Argentinean women’s group), 72–73 Adelaide, Latin American cultural nights in, 71 AIDS and change in parameters of public sex, 37 ambiguous genitalia, 44, 52 ambivalence in gender/sexuality studies, 7 ambivalent genitalia, 9 Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group (AISSG, Australia), 51 androgeny, 52–53 Aranda people, 4 archaeological ages, 143

index archaeological research and excavations, 137–138 Argentina, abductions during “Dirty War,” 72–73 Arnhem Land, 173f1, 174 As Nature Made Him (John Colapinto), 53 Aunty Rita (Jackie Huggins), 156 Australia colony and colonizer, 15 ownership and rights by nonindigenous peoples, 90 states and territories, 193n1 “white nation,” 69 Australian history “black armband” view, 78 collective migrant histories, 69 colonization, 90 indigenous perspective, 69 Australian identity, 4 Australian identity studies, 2 Australian law and recognition of Aboriginal communal and group rights, 141 Australian people and “burden” of colonial past, 104–105 ethnic or locational origins, 4–5 settlers, 4–5 See also Aboriginal people; indigenous people author indigenous author’s role, 149, 156–157, 163, 165–166 problems associated with authorship and ownership, 98 role of, 155 self-representation, 160 See also Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley; literacy; orality; Roe, Paddy Badjitla people, 4 bark paintings, 108 Bayini (Chinese seafarers), 174, 194n13 biintellectual intercultural dialogue, 10–11 binaries meaningless distinction, 13n1 restrictive nature of, 12 binaristic terminology opposition of colonized and colonizing, 2 use in humanities and social sciences, 7

205 biographical notes, 159–165 “Blackfella Whitefella” (Warumpi Band song), 114–115 black/white divide, complexity of, 69 Blue (gay magazine), 34 “boat people,” 68 Brisbane, gay beats in, 24 Broome (Western Australia), 126 bugaregara (stories from the dreaming), 167n16 Building Bridges (1987 cassette tape), 115–116 Burarrwaŋa, Rrurrambu, 171 Campaign (gay magazine), 29 Cape York Peninsula, 124, 125–126, 134 Caquilpan, Francisco, 72 categorization of individuals, restrictive boundaries and edges, 1 Chile colonization and impact on indigenous people, 74–76 Indian culture, 75 indigenous land rights struggle, 72 political activism, 70, 71–72 Chilean Popular and Indigenous Network (Melbourne), 72 Chilean refugees Koori communities involved in political struggle, 72, 76 political activism, 71–72 Chinese seafarers’ (Bayini’s) influence on Arnhem Land, 174 colonial naming, 98 colonization, viewed as one-way process, 87–88 commentator, 155 common law and recognition of interest in land, 98 compiler, 155 congenital adrenal hypoplasia, 45 contact, description of, 87 Cook, Capt. James, saga of, 108–109 Corn, Aaron, 10, 172, 191, 192 court cases about homosexual offenses, 25–28 Cruisingforsex.com, 28 cultural categories, 88 cultural diversity, growth in, 1–2 cultural heritage and ownership of cultural artifacts, 91–92

206 cultural identity, 86, 93, 97 cultural imagery, authenticity, 94 cultural mobility, fluidity, and creativity, 96–97 cultural objects, delineation between “real” and appropriations, 94 cultural property and heritage, 95–96, 97 cultural relationality, 89 culture and “cultural,” 96 definition and determination of context, 97 meaning in context of indigenous cultures, 87 relationship with the cultural, 95 “re-presented” and “re-cognized,” 95 terminology, 96 Cumberland Islands (Queensland), 126 cyberspace, gay use of, 23–24 See also Internet Danaiyarri, Hobbles, 108–109 “Dancing in the Moonlight” (Coloured Stone song), 116 devil stori (stories about devils, spirits), 167n16 Dhäwirrŋu, Djäwa, 172 Dhuwa patrimoiety (Yolŋu society), 176–177 Diamond, Prof. Milton, 51 dingo, 125 Djerrkura, Gätjil, 171 Djungan Aboriginal community, 137 Dominican Republic, 85n25 Dreaming, 129–130 editors power relationship of working on Aboriginal texts, 156 relationship with indigenous authors, 157 role in representation of indigenous lifewriting, 149, 165 Edwards, Hugh, 156–157 El Salvador, 76–77, 78 Eualyhi people, 4 Eurocentric basis for definitions, 86 European colonialism and failure of reconciliation, 2 European contact, implications of, 87 “Expressions of Latin America” exhibition, 80–82

index Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), 16 feminism, second wave, 8 “Fiesta del sol y del Inca” (“Festival of the Sun”), 66 flexibly gendered bodies, 50, 63n23 Galiwin’ku Indigenous Knowledge Centre, 171, 175, 181, 183 Garma Festival of Traditional Culture, 185–187 Garrido, Juan “I, The Poem,” 70–71 Twenty Years on the Rollcall of the Marginalised, 66, 70–71 gay beats access to information, 28 in Brisbane, 24, 25–26 characteristics of, 27 police surveillance and entrapment, 27–28 in Sydney, 25 Tewksbury’s US study, 27 variety of public places, 26–27 gay chat channels, 35–36 Gay Community News (gay magazine), 29 gay magazines, 29, 33, 34 Blue, 34 Campaign, 29 Gay Community News, 29 Gayzette/Stallion, 29 Outrage, 29, 30–32, 34 personal classified advertisements, 29–33 William and John, 29 gay newspapers, 20, 33, 34 Queensland Pride, 29 Sydney Star Observer, 29 gay residential areas, 30 gay rights, 18 gay saunas, 37 gay subculture, 22, 23 Gayzette/Stallion (gay magazine), 29 gender binary paradigm, 21–22 deciding factor of identity, 54 relationship with sex and sexuality, 55, 58–59 and sex as socially constructed categories, 9, 21

index social construct, 8–9 traditional Western approach, 49 gender assignment, 54 gender identity and appearance of genitals, 53 coinciding with sex, 55 establishment by children, 56 and framing the liminal, 49–51 human constructor contradicts biological sex, 44 John/Joan case, 53 pressures on individual and others, 60 traditional Western approach, 49 Gender Identity Clinic (Johns Hopkins University), 53 gender identity disorders, 9, 43 ambivalent genitalia, 9 characteristics of, 44 in childhood and infancy, 44, 55–58 “decisions,” 43–44 difference between adult’s and child’s decisions on, 46 existence in contested sites, 45 gender transitivity concept compared, 59 hegemony of intelligible gender, 47 and identification as homosexual, 57 influence of homophobia, 56 North American literature on, 44 pathologization and implications, 44–45 and prevention of “development of homosexual orientation,” 56 social ostracism, 55–56 transsexuality as justification for treatment, 58 treatment and management, 45 See also intersex conditions gender reassignment, 45–46, 50, 57–59 gender roles, 22 gender studies, ambivalence in, 7 gender transgressions, 22 gender transitivity, challenge to binaries, 43 genitalia, 9, 44, 52, 53 Gondarra, Djiniyini, 180 grinding stones, 132–134, 136 Grossberg, Lawrence, 103 “Gudurrku” (Yo¯thu Yindi song)

207 Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley (Paddy Roe and Stephen Muecke) challenges orality–literacy binary, 157–158 criticism by Mudrooroo, 157 introduction, 162 Muecke’s editorial role, 154–156 Muecke’s stories about making of book, 165 representation of Roe’s Aboriginal English, 156 resists classification as “literary” or “ethnographic,” 153 Roe accomplished storyteller, 156 social meaning and cultural value of writing, 153 types of narrative, 153 written text inadequately represents performed speech, 153–154 Gulf of Carpentaria, 126 Gumbula, Neparrŋa, 172, 191, 192 on binaristic categories of knowledge and identity, 10 primer for Yolŋu rom (diagram), 171, 176f2, 173f3, 178f4 Gunditjmara people, 4 Gurruwiwi, Djalu, 189 Haraway, Donna, on interconnected nature of gender and race, 7–8 health and illness, modernist and postmodernist approaches, 50 health care. See medical institutions Hellfire Clubs, 38 heritage, 98, 99 heterosexuality, institutionalized, 55, 56 homogeneity paradigm, 4 homosexuality acceptance by liberal Christian church, 18 in colonial Australia, 21, 22–23 ego-dystonic, 57 normalizing in private sphere, 18 perceived as social threat, 21 social stigma justification for “treatment,” 57 See also male homosexuals Howard, John, 78, 117 Hughes, Robert, on homosexuality in convict Australia, 23

208 hybrid identity, 4, 14–15 hybridity, 3 identity binarism and dichotomy rejected, 9, 13n1 conjunctural, not essential, 92–93 of migrants, 79–80 permutations of, 1 and properties, 95 as represented by biographical notes, 160–161 Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Department of, 15 immigration policies, 4 “Indianists,” 78 indigeneity binarism of being or not being of the past, 11 continuity through descent, 124 definitions of, 98 differentiations between nonindigenous, 93–94 global and transnational organizations, 82–83 in Latin America, 70–83 mestizaje, 78 See also Aboriginal identity; Aboriginality indigenous scope of term, 88–89 used in nonindigenous naming, 106–107 indigenous art, 11 indigenous authors relationship with nonindigenous editors, 157 role of, 149, 157 See also Roe, Paddy indigenous cultural property, 11 indigenous cultures assumed common ground, 89 authority or legitimacy, 93 belonging to “history of humanity,” 92 as form or type of culture, 95–96 represented as one culture among many, 92 Indigenous Heritage Rights, 99 indigenous knowledge systems, colonial suppression of, 170 “Indigenous Life Stories” (Jennifer Jones), 13n1 indigenous life-writing. See life-writing indigenous people

index coming together with nonindigenous people, 116–117 groups before European contact, 4 oppression of, 71 pressure to be “just like everyone else,” 192 regional terms of ethnic identity, 15 romanticized as “noble savages,” 81 solidarity and struggle for liberation, 71 tensions between settler societies, 68 tribal affiliations, 4–5 See also Aboriginal people indigenous rights “before” or “after” the law, 97–98 derived from nonindigenous tradition, 97 examples, 124 indigenous texts, collaboratively produced, 12 indigenous textuality, editorial strategems, 165 indio, derogatory term, 70, 76, 78–79, 81, 84n15 Inmigrante Feliz en Afortunado País (A Happy Migrant in the Lucky Country), 73–74 institutionalized heterosexuality, 55, 56 intelligible gender, 46–48, 53–54, 60–61 International Foundation of Androgynous Studies Conference (Perth, 2002), 51 Internet advantages of personal advertisements, 35 analysis of male advertisers, 34–35 information on gay cruising areas in Japan, 27–28 photos in gay ads, 35 Pinkboard, 34–35 use by gay men, 20, 23–24, 34–37 intersex conditions, 43, 45 Australian support groups, 51 in childhood and infancy, 4, 51–52, 53, 54–55 “deciding not to decide,” 54–55 difference between adult’s and child’s decisions on, 46 existence in contested sites, 45 gender transitivity concept compared, 59 management and treatment, 45 meaning redefined, 54 media features on, 51 See also gender identity disorders intersex person and respect for own agency, 52, 53

index Intersex Society of North America (ISNA), 52, 54–55 intersex surgery, 45 deferring advocated, 51–52 for infants or children, 51–52, 53 justification, 52 Japan, gay beats in, 27–28 Javanese links with Australia, 127 Klinefelter’s syndrome, 45 Koori, 15 language. See Aboriginal English Latin America colonization of, 75 Eurocentric terminology, 79 indigenous imagery emphasized, 80 Mayan activists (Guatemala), 79 racism against indigenous peoples, 74, 79 Zapatistas’ uprising (Mexico), 79 Latin American immigrants, 10, 76, 84 Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of May Square, Argentinean women’s group), 72–73 ancestry suppressed, 77–78 from Argentina, 72 from Chile, 70–71, 74–76 cultural exhibition (Adelaide, 1998), 80–82 cultural nights, 71 depiction as “civilized” people, 81 from El Salvador, 76 ethno-national identity, 70 identification and political affiliation with Aboriginal people, 72, 75 “No somos indios” (“We are not Indians”), 70, 78, 81 not defined as indigenous, 73 on settler treatment of Aboriginal people, 73–74 viewed as indigenous, 81 Latin American people affiliation with Maori people, 82 “Indianists,” 78 land rights struggle, 73 mestizo ancestry, 74–76, 77 racism against indigenous people, 74–76

209 La Trobe University, 91 lesbian subculture, growth of, 23 lesbians, double penalty for, 39–40 liberation theology, 71 life-stories and textual conventions of representing oral stories, 150 See also literacy; orality life-writing challenge for nonindigenous editors, 149 textual agency of authors, 149 See also Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley liminal, 48–49 literacy differences in representational techniques vs. orality, 151, 153, 163, 165 dualism with orality, 150–153 represented as succeeding orality, 151 represents framework of modernity, 150–151 significance of writing to cultures, 150 Mabo, Eddie Koiki, 122 Mabo vs. Queensland (High Court decision on native title), 97–98, 117, 122 Macassan influence on Arnhem Land society, 127–128, 141, 174 Malay voyagers to northern Australia, 126 male homosexuality Brisbane court case (1876), 26–27 codes and abbreviations, 36 court records and research, 25–28 decriminalization, 18 etiquette in encounters, 27 and hegemonic patriarchal heterosexuality, 19 illegal elements, 19 Internet and chat lines, 33 lacks permanent legitimate space, 19 law reform, 24–25 legislation equating with heterosexuals, 18 and “mateship,” 23 policing of public space, 28 public spaces used as private spaces, 19–20, 24–25 sexual activity, type of, 27 sexual duality of users of third spaces, 27 slang terminology, 25

210 telephone services, 32–33 third spaces and privacy, 23 Townsville court case (1870), 26 virtual space, 34–37 male homosexuals coded names, 36 codes of dress, language, demeanor of, 20 in colonial Australia, 22–23 friendships from Internet contacts, 36–37 importance of physical characteristics, 33 in Japan, 27–28 newspapers and magazines for, 28–29, 33 pseudonyms, 36 public cruising, 28 and public toilets, 27 and “straight” men, 36 Maori, affiliation with indigenous Latin America people, 82 Marley, Bob, 110–111 masculinity, 22, 64n34 material remains, 137 “mateship” and male homosexuality, 23 Mayan activists, 68 medical institutions dealing with shifting categories, 50 describe transsexuals, 59 ISNA threatens control and authority, 58 maintain concept of intelligible gender, 54, 59, 60 range of views on gender identity, 60 response to politicization of intersex advocacy groups, 54 role in prohibiting homosexuality, 46–48 views on intersex infants, 52–54 Melanesian maritime technology, 126 men, not gay identified, 36, 37 See also male homosexuality; male homosexuals “migrant” cultures, marginalization, 67 migrants Aboriginal view of, 67–68 binarism labels as nonindigenous, 68 identity, 79–80 “otherness” and cultural visibility, 82 migratory experience, 10 Minchinton, Mark, Void: Kellerberrin Walking, 13n1

index moiety, 177 Money, Dr. John, 53 Mudrooroo, 15, 106, 156–157 Muecke, Stephen, 12, 153 biographical note, 164 editorial role in Roe’s stories, 154, 159, 166 ethical stance, 164 narratee role, 161 restatement of Roe’s biography, 160, 161 Roe’s biography of Muecke posited, 164–165 multiculturalism, 67–69 Munyarryun, Djakapurra, 171 Murri, 15 music cultural essentialism, 110 meaning of lyrics, 113 “Original Sin” (INXS song), 116 See also Aboriginal rock music names and self-determination, 98 narratives. See orality National Coalition of Aboriginal Organisations (NCAO), 115 nationalism, paranoia of refugee threat, 68 Native Administration Ordinance Act 1940–1964 (Northern Territory), 174 “native,” expresses divide between orality and literacy, 150 native title, 97–98, 114, 117 cultural change does not extinguish, 122–124 definition, 139 definitions of traditional laws and customs disputed, 139 immutable cultural practice required, 123 traditional laws and customs central to judgments, 140 Native Title Act (1993), 122, 139 New Senate (Aboriginal rock band), 10 Ngarrabullgan (Mount Mulligan, N. Queensland), 137–138 No Fixed Address (Aboriginal rock band), 110, 111 NoKTuRNL (Aboriginal rock band), 10, 107–108, 111–112, 118–119n15 nontranssexual, in the “right” body, 49 Noongai, 15

index oral culture doomed to extinction, 151 durability of “strong” forms, 151 generalizations about “authentic” Aboriginal cultural expression, 152 “residue” in a literate culture, 151 orality Aboriginal self-articulation suggested to be incomplete, 163 dualism with literacy, 150–153 located along progressive axis, 151 risks of privileging indigenous, 158 oral narrative changes by textualizing, 154, 156 corporeal and social aspects, 154 editing to translate to writing, 155–156 types of indigenous narrative, 167–168n16 written form diminishes power and status, 156 originality, problems associated with, 98 “Otherness,” 68–69, 73, 82 Our Home, Our Land (CD), 114 Outrage (gay magazine), 29, 30–32, 34 ownership differing notions, 89–90 “prima facie ultimate power,” 90 problems associated with authorship, 98 Palawas (Tasmanian indigenous people), 91–92 Papuan voyagers to Cape York Peninsula, 125–126 Pascoe River (Queensland), 125 Passi, David, 122 Paulina (Chilean political refugee), 74–76, 77 Pehuenches (Chilean Mapuche people), 72 Pennefather River (Queensland), 125 performativity, theory of, 61n2 personal classified advertisements attitude to, 30 benefits of, 33 explicit sexual requests, 31–32 fetishes, 32 increasing numbers, 29 location of advertisers, 30 Pinkboard (gay Internet service), 34–35 Pinochet, Gen. Augusto, 71–72 Pitjantjatjara people, 4

211 policing of public space, 27–28 postcolonial terminology, 14 privacy in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, 23 properties and identity, 95 public spaces control by heterosexual culture, 20 use by homosexual men, 19–20, 23–24 Queensland government policy on HIV education, 37 Queensland Pride (gay newspaper), 29 queerspace, 37–38 race binarism of categories, 6–7 contentious term, 16 social construction, 16 third side of black/ white divide, 10 racism, 74, 107 reactionary nature of binarism, 7 reconciliation failure of, 2 public debate on, 6 “shame” and “guilt” central notions, 69 of whiteness, 103–104 referendum to include Aboriginal people in census, 16 refugees from Latin America Chilean, 71–72, 74–76, 77 countries of origin, 84n16 Salvadoran, 77, 78 Reimer, David, 53, 64n34 relationality, 91 representation, 86–87 of indigenous cultures, 90 politics of, 91 Rice, James, 122 rights, 94–95 rock art changes to, 134 indicate limited and measurable history, 134 late-Holocene antiquity, 135 signal of territoriality, 135 of Victoria River region (Northern Territory), 134 X-ray paintings, 134

index

212 Roe, Paddy, 12, 153 authority constituted in language, 158 authorship role, 163, 165–166 biographical notes, 159–165 narratives not “natural,” 159 narrator role, 165 self-representation and representation by others, 163–163 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC), 117 Russell, Lynette, 6, 13n1 safe sex education, 37 Salvadoran people, 76 scribe, 155 scriptorial activity, 155 The Secret Life of Us, 51 seed grinding, 135 settlement and commitment in modern capitalist system, 50 settler Australians, 4–5 sex relationship with gender and sexuality, 9, 55, 58 social construct, 8–9 sexual dissidents, 38 sexual imbalance during colonial times, 25 sexuality binary opposites, 21–22 and gender as socially constructed categories, 21 relationship with gender and sex, 55 third spaces, 9 two genders but three biological sexes, 22 various forms accepted, 38 See also male homosexuals sexuality studies, ambivalence in, 7 Somers, Chris, 52–53 sovereignty, 196n32 Spanish seafarers in Torres Strait, 127 treatment of Chilean Indians, 75 Spartacus International Gay Guide, 28 “Special Treatment” (Paul Kelly song), 115 “straight” men, 36 “Strychnine” (Swamp Jockeys song), 116

subject and interconnectedness of property, 94–95 “Survival” festival (Sydney), 114 Sydney homosexual subculture, 25 Mardi Gras, 18–19 Sydney Star Observer (gay newspaper), 29 Syrinx shell arrangements, 127 Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council ( TALC), 91 telephone services for gay men, 32–33 terra nullius, doctrine overturned, 97, 117, 122 third sex, 52–53 third space, 3–4, 7, 9, 23, 27, 141–142 threshold, 48–49 Tiddas (Aboriginal rock band), 10 Tiwi people, 4 Toledo, Alejandro, 79 Torres Strait, 125 Torres Strait Island people, 15, 16, 140 tradition definitions and self-determination, 100 meaning in relation to indigenous culture, 99–100 transgender, 43 challenging intelligible gender, 47–48 dependence on binaries, 61n3 difference from transsexual, 46 and liminal, 48–51 persisting with a flaw, 47 transnational companies, 50 transsexual categories politicized, 60 descriptions, 59–60 difference from transgender, 46 and gender reassignment, 57 interrogation of own position, 62n7 medical context and definition, 49 redirected/terminated, 57 “true” and “not true,” 50–51 in the “wrong” body, 49 trustori (true stories), 167n16 truth and relationship between objects and subjects, 92 unintelligible genders, 46–48

index University of Sydney, 170 “unwanted blood,” 6–7 Us Mob (Aboriginal rock band), 110 virtual space as used by gay men, 34–37 “Wama Wanti” (Areyonga Desert Tigers song), 115–116 Warne, Garry, 51–54, 63n29 web cameras, 36 “We Have Survived” (No Fixed Address song), 115 white, as referent to nonnative peoples, 13–14n3 “white, middle-class, academic woman” identity, 103 “white, middle class man” identity, 103 “whiteness,” 107–108 William and John (gay magazine), 29 Windschuttle, Keith, 14n4 Wotjabaluk people, 4 writing. See literacy Wrong Side of the Road (1981 film), 112 Wurundjeri people, 4 Yamma, Frank, 111 Yarralin law, 108–109 “Yil-Lull” (Joe Geia song), 116 Yirritja patrimoiety (Yolŋu society), 176–177 Yolanda (Salvadoran refugee), 77, 78 Yolŋu culture benefits of biculturalism, 188–189 biintellectualist discourses, 172 ceremonial performance, 193n7 cultural heritage of mala, 177 Garma Festival of Traditional Culture, 185–187 legal constitutions for each moiety, 178 liturgical song, 172 maintenance of, 174–175 manikay (songs), 191 names and relation to land, 174 ownership of physical and intellectual properties depicted, 175–176 repatriation of hereditary matrials, 191 Yolŋu homelands, 173, 173f1 Yolŋu intellectual traditions, 10, 171

213 biconstitutionality of legal traditions, 179–180 biintellectual discourses, 190 complementary rights in a mala’s property, 182t1 concerns about hereditary knowledge, 190–191 dhuni’ (perirestricted) domain, 184–185 Dhuni’ Indigenous Arts and Culture Forum, 187 discourse encouraged with nonindigenous society, 189 educational needs of children, 187–188, 191–192 garma (public) domain, 183–184 independent source of, 172 learning by newcomers, 189 liya-ŋärra’mirr(i) (learned, wise) leadership, 186f7 metaphysical waŋarr plane of existence, 179 multidisciplinary, 191 ŋärra’ ceremony, 185 ŋärra’ (restricted) domain, 184–185

ŋärra’ Legal Forum, 187

primer for Yolŋu rom (diagram), 171, 176f2, 173f3, 178f4 sophistication of, 171 Yolŋu languages (Yolŋu-Matha), 173–174, 193n Yolŋu people, 173 knowledge of Asian neighbors, 174 length of occupation of homelands, 174 relations with Balanda (Euro-Australians), 187 responsibilities of, 175 trading relations with Asian seafarers, 174 Yolŋu society binary models, 171 Dhuwa and Yirritja patrimoieties, 173f3, 176–177 documented studies of, 190 kin relationships, 179–183 leadership roles, 185 obligations of patrimoieties, 180–181 obligations of waku (children), 179–180 patrilineage from ancestors, 178–179

index

214 relationships, rights and obligations, 182–183t1 social structure, 173, 185 uterine relationships, 179, 180 yo¯thu–yindi relationship, 179–180 Yorta Yorta people, 4 Yo¯thu Yindi (Aboriginal rock band), 110, 171, 187

Yo¯thu Yindi Foundation, 187, 196n30 Yunupiŋu, Galarrwuy, 171, 191–192 Yunupiŋu, Mandawuy, 110, 119n30, 171, 187 “Mainstream” (song), 187–188 Zapatistas’ uprising (Mexico), 79

Production notes for Russell / Boundary Writing Cover and interior designed by Leslie Fitch with text in Scala and display in Akzidenz Grotesk Composition by Josie Herr Index by Kerry Biram Printing and binding by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group Printed on 60# Sebago Eggshell, 420 ppi